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.

Den Boer makes use of statistical, biographical, and methodological analysis and demonstrates comprehensive knowledge of both minor historians and leading scholars, including Charles Seignobos and Charles-Victor Langlois History as a Profession will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in historiography, the history of nineteenth-century France, or the history of education.