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In the 1720s the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres had heated debates over the trustworthiness of accounts of Rome’s first four centuries of history. Old theological quarrels served as a backdrop to the controversy, which was also fuelled by the transition between a conception of temporality established on tradition and another based on history. The issue at stake was the founding of historical knowledge on a legitimate source of authority and the independence of that source. The current article offers an account of those fierce institutional exchanges based on the study of the manuscript minute book and on the letters that one of the protagonists sent to the Académie.