Forgotten during several years and rediscovered by historians of the Annales in the 1930s, Paul Lacombe’s De l’histoire considérée comme science (1894) is now quoted in such books as Antoine Prost’s Douze leçons sur l’histoire and the Sage Handbook of Historical Theory. Lacombe’s work is important from an historical standpoint. Against the focus on single events that prevailed in the late nineteenth century, Lacombe defined scientific history as the identifications of regularities for the purpose of articulating laws. Against the empirical approach practiced during that same period, he also stressed the importance of the hypothesis – of the assumptions that made the selection of the facts possible. Finally, connected to several militant women of the time, Lacombe, sought to do what we would now call “gender history,” that is, to study the distribution of gender roles during specific periods. While anticipating several developments in the theory of history, Lacombe was yet a man of his time. He thus did not foresee that his (and his contemporaries’) contrast between observation-based and document-based science would later be challenged, some philosophers now arguing that chemists and physicists are not more able than historians to “observe” the phenomena that they describe.

Paul Lacombe 的De l'histoire considerée comme science (1894)在几年中被遗忘并在 1930 年代被年鉴历史学家重新发现，现在在诸如 Antoine Prost 的Douze leçons sur l'histoire和Sage Handbook of Historical Theory等书中被引用. 从历史的角度来看，拉科姆的工作很重要。与 19 世纪后期盛行的对单一事件的关注不同，拉科姆将科学史定义为为了阐明规律而对规律的识别。与同期实践的经验方法相反，他还强调了假设的重要性——使选择事实成为可能的假设。最后，与当时的几位激进女性联系在一起，拉科姆试图做我们现在所说的“性别历史”，即研究特定时期性别角色的分布。在预见到历史理论的若干发展的同时，拉科姆仍然是他那个时代的人。