  One usually refers the concept of Feynman path integral to the work of
Norbert Wiener on Brownian motion in the early 1920s. This view is not false
and we show in this article that Wiener used the first path integral of the
history of physics to describe the Brownian motion. That said, Wiener, as he
pointed out, was inspired by the work of some French mathematicians,
particularly Gateaux and Levy. Moreover, although Richard Feynman has
independently found this notion, we show that in the course of the 1930s, while
searching a kind of geometrization of quantum mechanics, another French
mathematician, Adolphe Buhl, noticed by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, had
himself been close to forge such a notion. This reminder does not detract from
the remarkable discovery of Feynman, which must undeniably be attributed to
him. We also show, however, that the difficulties of this notion had to wait
many years before being resolved, and it was only recently that the path
integral could be rigorously established from a mathematical point of view.
