In France, there are no professionals designated as criminologists, and no course of study has been established to train criminologists per se, probably due to the absence of a potential market. Criminology is found more in academic teaching than in professional or administrative practice, but here, too, the discipline finds fragmentary and ancillary representation. Criminology is primarily associated with the teaching of penal law, legal medicine, and psychiatry; however, the subject matter of criminology is taught often in human sciences departments under the topic of 'deviance sociology.' Although criminology is not an autonomous field in administrative and professional practice and has only a marginal status in academic teaching, it is a significant field in contemporary social science research in France. The trend is toward considering the study of penal issues -- crime, the criminal, the social reaction applied to it -- as part of a broader field of study generally called deviance and social control. There is a diversity in the theoretical paradigms used and of searches for new theoretical constructions capable of reaching beyond the limits of the classical theories and the attempts of the last two decades. Extended borrowing is being done, not only from sociology and social psychology, but also from history, economics, linguistics, demography, political science, and ethnology, while there has been less recourse to the psychological approach. Eight notes and 116 bibliographic entries are provided.