The primacy of the masculine gender - a semantic reflection on grammatical gender, synchrony and diachrony

In French, grammatical gender still seems mysterious : it is both a classification tool and a grammatical agreement system, inherent to the noun but possibly variable, arbitrary or motivated, and above all, dual but asymmetrical. Most descriptions and usages of grammatical gender are founded on the phrase : ``the masculine prevails over the feminine'' - the masculine is considered as the true form of the noun, the choice by default and the main inheritor to the Latin neuter. It is precisely this prevailance that we will try to question, both synchronically and diachronically, by focusing on the linguistic mecanisms at play in its construction. We will mainly concentrate on variable ``person denomination'' nouns. This type of noun is indeed crucial in the study of grammatical gender, its origins and its semantico-referential functioning. The following development is based on several French grammatical studies and dictionaries from the XVIth to the XXIst century : we will both discuss the beliefs that surround the masculine gender within the French language, and try to propose a semantic description of the grammatical gender that questions the preconception of a univocal link between the sex of the referent and the gender of its denomination.