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The success of “globalization” has lately given a new topicality in France to problems concerning “The World” and “Global History”. However, this is less a question of explaining globalization’s long historical process than of enlarging the focus, especially in order to go beyond national compartmentalization. The situation of French historiography is paradoxical since the broad standpoints proposed by F. Braudel or the comparatism extolled by M. Bloch and L. Febvre were, for many reasons, disregarded between 1970 and 2000. These reasons, which we analyze in this paper, are at the same time institutional and political in nature. We shall emphasize the new fruitfulness of transnational approaches, of “entangled” or “connected” history, which highlight, among other things, the phenomenon of situated and properly contextualized circulation.