ABSTRACT
The degree of agreement reached about the date of the birth of history as a science is quite high. The period between the two world wars introduced a profound renewal in the concept and methods of history of such intensity that it established the foundations that made it possible to grant this discipline its status as a social science. Chaunu (1972) has graphically pointed out that moment: 'History, unifying (federatrice) human science of our time, was born between 1920 and the beginning of the thirties: it was born out of the anger and misery of the times in the painful atmosphere of a crisis of enormous dimensions and of infinite repercussions' (p. 649).
