This paper presents an experimental phonetic study of French intonation. It aims at designing a melodic model for a French Text-To-Speech synthesis system. The methodology of intonation research adopted here is in the tradition of a series of studies, for several European languages, developed at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO, Eindhoven, NL). This work is based on a perceptual description of French intonation, where pitch contours are described in terms of simple pitch movements. The problems addressed in the paper are the definition, standardization and syntactic properties of such movements, starting from a corpus of read text. The melodic model for French was defined in 3 stages: 1. F0-contours stylization; 2. pitch movements standardization; 3. study of a grammar of French intonation. At each stage, perceptual tests were performed in order to check the perceptual quality (equality or acceptability) of the synthetic F0 contours. This work was within the framework of the CEC-ESPRIT-POLYGLOT-2104 project.