The thirty six cards the spread uses did not begin as a divination pack. They descend from a boxed race game published in Nuremberg at the very end of the eighteenth century, in which numbered cards carrying simple emblems, a rider, a ship, a house, a tree, were laid out as a track for counters, with an accompanying sheet offering an alternative use of the same images for fortune telling. The emblems and their numbers are the ones the modern deck still uses.
The association with Marie Anne Lenormand, the celebrated Parisian cartomancer, came after her death. Decks using these images were marketed under her name from the 1840s onward, which attached a famous reputation to a pack she had no documented connection with, and the name stuck so firmly that the whole tradition is now called after her.
From there the deck spread through the German speaking lands, Russia and central and eastern Europe, where it became a common household divination pack with its own regional traditions of meaning, passed on in families and in small printed booklets rather than through occult orders. It stayed largely outside the esoteric revival that reshaped the tarot, which is why it carries no correspondences to letters, planets or sefirot. Its arrival in the English speaking world in any numbers is recent, and much of the instruction now available in English has been translated, reconstructed or worked out afresh within the last few decades.