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Before the 19thcentury and with a few exceptions, history was just a system of references based on classical culture. It was purely a repertoire from which the cultivated man and the moralist would draw quotations and maxims. In teaching, it was an accessory to the classics without structure or method.
A new interest in history was born with the period of Romanticism in the 1820s. It found expression in art and literature (Chateaubriand, Hugo, Lamartine, Dumas, Mérimée, etc.). The cultivated public adhered. Historical publications multiplied all over France, often produced by the local erudite and scholarly associations. Progressively however, a structure emerged. Several important institutions date from this period. Founded during the Restoration, "l'Ecole des Chartes" (1821) dispensed technical learning, trained specialists and developed tools for the science that was now taking shape (palaeography, diplomacy, philology, archaeology). The "agrégation d'histoire" (advanced diploma in history) (1832) offered intellectual prestige, while the "Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes" (1868), a section of which was devoted to "historical and philological sciences", explored new methods of research. Gabriel Monod later founded the Revue historique (1876), which was used as a forum for historians from the methodical school - predominant at the end of the century. History underwent above all a theoretical revolution during this century during which historians gradually refined the science. Hence it became a discipline in its own right basing itself on wider, more accurately identified sources that were analysed using a rigorous critical method. Understood as an ensemble and correlation of known events, history had to be based on proper use of the documents being researched. Langlois and Seignobos summarised these rules in l'Introduction aux études historiques (1898) - a manual for students that became the symbol of discipline at the end of the century.
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