In the critique historique which follows his account of the emergence of the Girondin party in 1791, Louis Blanc, as we have seen (above, p.50), accuses both Michelet and Lamartine of having been biassed in favour of that party. He explains this bias by their natural kinship as ‘artists’ with the artists of the Revolution and hence, following the logic of his text, by their preference for esthetics and appearances over historical realities and the ‘austere duties’ of the historian (II:586).

Blanc's representation of his rivals as latter-day crypto-Girondins illustrates both the agonistic element in the representation of the revolutionary past and the historical links between the dramatis personae of the Revolution and the historians who constitute it as an object of knowledge. Michelet and Lamartine are not merely biassed towards the artistes of the Revolution; the austere (robespierriste) Blanc also implies that, through their distortions of the past, they replay a similarly ‘artistic’ role whose effects he himself is now seeking to counter.

Blanc's representation of his rivals as being more interested in literary effects than in reality and as being, for that reason, partial to one particular faction, also points to the model of the ‘true’ historian – embodied, it is implied, in the writer himself. The true historian is, in a double sense, impartial.