Abstract
According to some readings, Michel Foucault has invented a revolutionary way to write history. However, even the historians who have drawn from his work have not accomplished the full transformation of their practice that was required by the foucaldian paradigm. While historiography explores the circumstantial reasons for this limited scope, this article focuses on the epistemological obstacles to a full integration of Foucault’s thought in historical works. It shows that a fully foucaldian history could not belong to the human sciences any more, which means it should give up at once its scientific status, the study of the social, and the reference to reality. The diagnosis that Foucault makes on the human sciences does not indeed spare history, even if he never laid emphasis on this point. He prefers to remove history out of the human sciences, so as to connect it better with archeology and then genealogy. Yet this new alliance deprives history of its own regime of truth, and makes it dependent on a philosophical one.