History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818-1914

This is a vivid portrait of the French historical profession in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concluding just before the emergence of the famous Annales school of historians. It places the profession in its social, academic, and political context and shows that historians of the period have been unfairly maligned as amateurish and primitive in comparison to their more celebrated successors.

Pim den Boer begins by sketching the contours of French historiography in the nineteen...