This article presents the main points in the creation of the French TimeBank, a reference corpus annotated according to the ISO-TimeML standard for temporal annotation. A number of improvements were made to the markup language to deal with linguistic phenomena not yet covered by ISO-TimeML, including cross-language modifications and others specific to French. An automatic pre-annotation system was used to speed up the annotation process. A preliminary evaluation of the methodology adopted for this project yields positive results in terms of data quality and annotation time.