What time scale and where? I can tell you that unless you know exactly where they came from in France it's nearly impossible. There's not the widespread indexing of records that you have with English records although there are some things about and even online - see
If they were Huguenots there are particular avenues to take for that, otherwise it's back to the mainstays: church records and civil records. If you have access to an LDS center you can do a lot of this without having to hire a researcher.
Church records go back generally to the early 1600s, sometimes earlier, sometimes they don't survive that long. It depends on the area. Civil records started in 1792 and are accompanied by ten-year indexes. There are census records - population registers - but they're seldom used. Most haven't been even filmed by the LDS and are only available in the departmental archives, and with very few exceptions they are unindexed. Other records would be available in the departmental archives for that particular area, but I haven't dug into that yet (waiting till I have the chance to go there myself!).
A few things to get you started:
http://www.geneanet.com/ - you can check who else is researching your surname. This is very good for European families, I've made connections on both the French and Belgium sides here.
http://www.geopatronyme.com/ - surname map of France, helps give you an idea how popular/widespread the name is. If you've got 'Martin' this might not be much use, but it shows up my Vendee surnames (like Praud and Elineau) very well.
If you want to find a professional researcher, I'd suggest you try and find someone who specialises in the region - the equivalent of a family history society over there is the 'Cercle Généalogique' (sometimes Cercle de Généalogique etc). Try googling Cercle Généalogique + name of the region to find one - some of them will do research for members and probably they will be able to suggest an appropriate researcher.
Archives won't generally do research for you themselves but they might be able to suggest a researcher also. The main source is the departmental archives for each region of France; if you're looking for other records like army records you might have to deal with more centralised archives but I've not tried digging in that direction yet.