ABSTRACT
Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch never pretended to know all the answers: they emphasized again and again that the historian was more a "searcher" than a propounder of explanations. Struck by the sudden popularity of sociology in the Durkheim manner, Henri Berr argued that this had come about through a default on the part of the historians; in renouncing the task of philosophical synthesis, they had left a void that the sociologists had been eager to fill. For the French—and particularly for French professional historians—the polemical stimulus to exhuming Michelet was rather more pointed. Such criticisms were no news to a man like Febvre: for two generations they had been the staples of French historical scholarship. The conversion of the University of Strasbourg from a German to a French institution had created a unique opportunity for the recruitment de novo of a faculty of distinction.
