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This paper offers a reinterpretation of the relationship, both actual and posthumous, between Gabriel Monod and Jules Michelet, two historians traditionally associated with conflicting traditions and methods. Monod, the founder of La Revue Historique, was also the secondary heir of Michelet’s papers. I use the only known surviving letter, written by Monod to Michelet in 1868, as a connecting thread between the “ghosts” of Monod’s youth, and the various links between the two historians, as they surface in their personal and professional papers. The paper aims to retrieve the coherence of the “total” intellectual project sought by an historian who was, nolens volens, a “general historian.” This sheds light on the double act that ended his career and his life: a (temporary) course at the Collège de France, and the (definitive) bequest of Michelet’s papers to a public institution in 1912.