How to remove small capitals when using biblatex with babel in french?

Question

When I use biblatex with authoryear style, everything appears as I want. However, when I add \usepackage[french]{babel}, the citations and references are written is small capitals. Is there a way to remove the small capitals?

MWE below:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[french]{babel}
\usepackage[backend = biber, style = authoryear]{biblatex}
\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{biblio.bib}
@article{abel2018,
  title = {Estimates of {{Global Bilateral Migration Flows}} by {{Gender}} between 1960 and 2015},
  author = {Abel, Guy J.},
  date = {2018-09},
  journaltitle = {International Migration Review},
  shortjournal = {International Migration Review},
  volume = {52},
  pages = {809--852},
  doi = {10.1111/imre.12327},
  url = {http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/imre.12327},
  urldate = {2019-12-14},
  langid = {english},
  number = {3}
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{biblio.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{abel2018} and \parencite{abel2018}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

What I have:

What I would like to have (with accents on "Références"):

The small caps correspond to the typographical tradition in French, as months names do not use an initial capital letter. . — Bernard, Mar 21 '20 at 14:03
Probably related: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/301571/134144 — leandriis, Mar 21 '20 at 14:06
@leandriis the solution in this other post works on overleaf, but it does not when I use it in R markdown. I know this is not a part of the question but maybe you have an idea of why it does not work? The error is: ! Undefined control sequence. l.62 \DefineBibliographyExtras{french}{\restorecommand\mkbibnamefamily} (I put this line in a tex file that I called in YAML). If this is not suited for tex stackexchange, I will ask it on Stackoverflow — bretauv, Mar 21 '20 at 14:14
R markdown probably executes that command too early, i.e. when biblatex isn't loaded yet. (R markdown and biblatex can be a bit tricky: https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/449191/35864) — moewe, Mar 21 '20 at 14:17

moewe · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-21T14:31:59.777

As discussed in https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/301571/134144 and Keep lowercase in biblatex the correct solution to stop biblatex's French language module from typesetting family names in small caps is to add

\DefineBibliographyExtras{french}{\restorecommand\mkbibnamefamily}

in the preamble after biblatex was loaded.

As it turned out in the comments the OP is using R markdown, which loads biblatex semi-automatically. Adding the line above to the preamble apparently generates an error of the form

! Undefined control sequence.
l.62 \DefineBibliographyExtras{french}{\restorecommand\mkbibnamefamily}

which suggests that this preamble code is executed before biblatex is loaded.

In that case

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\AtEndPreamble{\DefineBibliographyExtras{french}{\restorecommand\mkbibnamefamily}}

may help. Those two lines defer the execution of \DefineBibliographyExtras until the end of the preamble, at which point R markdown should have loaded biblatex so that the command is available.

This works in the MWE

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[french]{babel}

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\AtEndPreamble{\DefineBibliographyExtras{french}{\restorecommand\mkbibnamefamily}}

\usepackage[backend = biber, style = authoryear]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}
\cite{sigfridsson} and \parencite{sigfridsson}
\printbibliography
\end{document}

this works both in overleaf and in R markdown, thanks – bretauv Mar 21 '20 at 14:31 — bretauv, Mar 21 '20 at 14:31

How to remove small capitals when using biblatex with babel in french?

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