This article grounds its analysis in the historical approaches of three well-known French academics: Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), Georges Duby (1919-1996), and Robert Boyer (b. 1943). Fernand Braudel, in his inaugural speech at the Collège de France in 1950, declared that 'History is the daughter of its time'. He defined the work of the historian not as a journey into the past that is closed and outdated, but as a constant coming and going from the past to the present and from the present to the past. This conception of history is known as 'histoireproblème', where a new way of writing history is put forward that asks questions of the past, from the problems of the present. 1