The French Massif Central (average height 800 m) is the largest pre-Mesozoic, Variscan outcrop in France (80,000 km 2 ). It consists of lower Paleozoic metasediments, poorly dated mica schists, and high-grade gneisses (granitic orthogneisses, mafic, and ultramafic rocks). As part of the southern limb of the European Variscides, it is characterized by large south-vergent thrust nappes and recumbent folds. For a decade, the lineations in metamorphic rocks were systematically and sometimes incorrectly used as kinematic indicators of nappe transport. In the French Massif Central the tectonometamorphic history is long and complex (430–310 Ma), and the lineations are related to different events and different kinds of deformation, including thrusting, folding, detachments, and strike-slip faulting. We attempt to analyze these different lineations in various parts of the Massif Central and relate them to the successive stages of crustal thickening and unroofing of the Variscan crust. In the southern part of the French Massif Central, most of the lineations are transport lineations related to the emplacement of large thrust nappes (350–310 Ma). In the northern and western part, most of the NW-SE–trending lineations are not related to nappes transported to the NW but to detachments during the unroofing and thinning of the thickened crust during the same time span.

The Moine Thrust Belt contains imbricate systems derived from Cambro-Ordovician sediments together with thrust sheets of their Lewisian basement. Correlation of Precambrian structures between these thrust sheets and the adjacent foreland demonstrates displacements >25 km, values confirmed and exceeded by restored cross sections constructed through the imbricated sedimentary cover. The basement-carrying thrust sheets display a wide variety of structural styles even though they have deformed under essentially the same metamorphic pressure and temperature conditions (lower greenschist facies). These include the translation of crystalline basement as sheets with no appreciable internal deformation apart from sparse quartz-epidote-filled fractures and ∼1 m of mylonites and related fault rocks along the basal thrusts. Thrust trajectories can run parallel to the regional, near-horizontal datum (the sub-Cambrian unconformity) even though there are no apparent preexisting surfaces that might have localized slip on these horizons within the basement. In other examples, however, parts of basement thrust trajectories appear to have located preferentially on preexisting faults. These features have been underemphasized in previous studies and can be inferred by the preservation of PrecambrianTorridonian strata beneath the sub-Cambrian unconformity within thrust sheets. Basin faults that controlled deposition and preservation of Torridonian strata may have promoted large-scale folding at the basement-cover interface that is manifest as the large-scale recumbent structures of the southern part of the thrust belt. These different styles are compared and discussed in terms of the propensity of the Lewisian basement to localize deformation at greenschist facies through reactivation and retrogression-enhanced weakening.