ABSTRACT
Febvre concluded that the major problem of these novelistic biographies for historians boiled down to a ‘constant, irritating anachronism’ displayed in these works. Authors projected their own feelings, ideas and intellectual and moral prejudices onto their protagonists, like Rameses II and Philip II. They therefore effaced one of historiography’s essential qualities: its embodiment of the historian’s ambition to genuinely and truthfully grasp and transmit history and historical actors based on a connective understanding derived from extensive archival research and presented with narrative audacity. In short, following Febvre, these novelistic biographies gave offence to the intuitive and narrative experience of historians, through which historians are able to produce historical works that contribute to a continuation and critical revision of existing historical knowledge.
