UKC

I've looked around quite a bit but can't find any mention of where the French sport grading system came from. Can anybody help me?

Always thought it developed from the alpine rock grades.

These only went up to VI for years, only tentative offerings of VII in the late 60's/70's. Hence Messners book title" the seventh grade".

6a-6c was roughly equivalent to VI- to VI+.

Also they wanted to seperate the system from the old school alpine ethics and initially easier crag routes were still graded  IV,V, V+. Only later did 4a to 5c get used.

 section here https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotation_en_escalade#Cotation_fran%C3%A7aise

Fantastic thanks... Here's a good extract from that that explains the origins of the first scale

In 1894, the Austrian mountaineer Fritz Benesch introduced the first known grading system for rock climbing. The Benesch scale had seven levels of difficulty, with level VII the easiest and level I the most difficult. Soon more difficult climbs were made, which originally were graded level 0 and 00. In 1923, the German mountaineer Willo Welzenbach compressed the scale and turned the order around, so that level 00 became level IV–V. This "Welzenbach scale" was adopted in 1935 by French mountaineers like Lucien Devies, Pierre Allain and Armand Charlet for routes in the Western Alps and finally in 1947 in Chamonix by the Union Internationale des Associations d'Alpinisme. It prevailed internationally and was renamed in 1968 as the UIAA scale. Originally a 6-grade scale, it has been officially open-ended since 1979.

I found this as well

https://www.theuiaa.org/documents/sport/THE-SCALES-OF-DIFFICULTY-IN-CLIMBIN...

extracts ...

In 1967, the already famous Welzenbach Scale officially became the " UIAA Scale"

Towards the end of the 80’s Francois Labande, compiler of numerous guides including those of the Dauphiné, presented the French Scale, parameterized with the UIAA scale, replacing permanently Roman numerals with Arabic numerals and placing the value 6a instead of the VI +. But a few years later it was the same Labande in the guide "Dauphinè vol. II ", to revive the French scale with Roman numerals (V+, VIa, VIb, etc..), but still leaving open the parameterization between VIa and 6a

The American Scale of Difficulty (Tables 1, 1c and 1d) is a decimal system based on the "Sierra Club System", a system introduced in 1937 that was once a variant of the Welzenbach method.

To my knowledge, the UIAA scale was opened after Helmut Kiene and Reinhard Karl openly said before the first ascent of Pumprisse, wilder Kaiser, that the UIAA had to be opened thereafter. They did the first ascent fully trad, Pumprisse (VII), and the route is still considered hard VII. It changed the view of VI+ as the 'border of the humanly possible'. It has to be said that quite a few passages of VII have been climbed in the twentwies to forties by Burger, Schinko, and Rebitsch, and quite possibly a few others.

Just a little off topic concerning the UIAA scale.