Fluvial levees are assets of major importance for protecting human lives and activities. To prevent the risk of failures and to assess their stability, survey campaigns involving geophysical and geotechnical methods are needed. These two types of methods play highly complementary roles and provide information of different natures, uncertainties and spatial distributions. In this work, we first present the function of fluvial levees and describe the associated physical properties that may become pathological and lead to failure mechanisms. Then for each presented investigation method, we introduce : its basic principles, its ability to characterize specific physical properties (or characteristics) of fluvial levees, and then its advantages and drawbacks under specific environmental conditions. It should be emphasized that geophysical and geotechnical methods are placed on an equal footing in order to assist agencies and levee managers in selecting the most relevant ones to assess the condition of their levees and characterize potential weak zones, according to a specific type of pathology and to the environmental constraints. Throughout this review, we introduce a certain amount of literature that is believed to be of potential interest to the research community as well. We also draw attention to some lack of information on the application of specific methods to levee investigation. Finally, we discuss some complementarities of the presented methods and we propose a dedicated comparative table, leading us to suggest new method combinations for levee investigation.