[The historian's competence tested by authority: on an academic debate of the 18th century]

The debate which took place in the 1720s at the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Letters on the possibility or impossibility of understanding the history of the first centuries of Rome is generally interpreted to be less of a debate than an important epistemological clarification. A contextualization which takes into account the political stakes of the debate allows one to understand that the debate was the beginning of a larger process of the autonomisation of the field of historical studies, not only from the perspective of disciplinary divides, but also in relation to monarchal power.