Historical Regimes and Historiographical Regimes: From the Historical Past to the Past Present

This work takes as a point of departure the well-known Francois Hartog's thesis on historical time and examines how a dominant "regime of historicity" or historical regime becomes the receptacle of a specific historiographical regime. We shall develop the idea that historiography, understood as social practice based upon the representation of time, reflects the dominant historical regime of which is part. To that purpose we suggest two hypotheses: first, the "historical past" must be considered the historiographical regime or time assumption corresponding to modern regime of historicity; and second, is the "History of the Present" what has questioned most the very notion of "historical past" because of its links with a new regime characterized by "presentism".