Abstract
Meinecke and Hazard were wrong to suppose that the historical-mindedness, peculiar to our culture was almost entirely a development from eighteenth-century thought. La Popelinière, writing in 1599, already stated that historiography should describe "what actually happened," but also recognized the inevitable subjectivity of historians. His contemporaries Vignier and Pasquier rejected rhetoric in favor of research. Unhampered by the classicizing of the Italians, these French historians found in the idea of the nation a new perspective from which to judge the past. Freeing themselves from the chronology of the "four empires," they found-as would their nineteenth-century successors-that national history led to universal history.