In the preface to his Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne (1824), Prosper de Barante deplored the ‘artificial dignity’ of French history as it had hitherto been written. The ‘faithful representation of truth’, he claimed, was foreign to eighteenth-century histories; ‘the vivid impression produced on our minds by the spectacle of real events is nowhere to be found in them’ (1838 edn, I:12). Barante's critique of his predecessors was echoed by Augustin Thierry who complained, in his Dix ans d'études historiques (1835), that French history as written until recently had been ‘cold and monotonous’, because ‘false and contrived’ (1851 edn, VI:258).

The nineteenth-century historians’ rejection of their predecessors exemplifies what Michel de Certeau has recently described as historiography's tendency to carve out its own territory in a negative way, by setting itself up as different from the discourses it perceives as fictional or falsifying (1982:19). For it is above all through their rejection of the ‘literary’, artificial, false histories written in the eighteenth century by pseudo-historians that Barante and Thierry credit themselves a contrario with the authority to speak for the ‘real’, to give – as Barante put it – ‘a faithful representation of truth’.