Writing History in the Third Republic offers new insight to the historiographical output of French historians between 1860 and 1914, a period often referred to as of positivistic historians or the école méthodique. Asserting their independence from Germanic influence by emphasising the French element in their work, historians in the period described their approach as methodical and positivistic and maintained that this was a distinctively French way of studying history. A heightened concern with sources, with facts as basis for all true knowledge, and with truth itself were unifying...