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The debate over “historical naturalism”, that opposed Albert of Broglie and dom Prosper Guéranger under the Second Empire, marks a turning point in the process, punctuated by more renowned “cases” such as those of Renan, Duchesne or Loisy, where the majority of catholic historians adopted a way of writing history that hardly, if at all, with some nuance, drew upon methodological agnosticism. This forgotten debate, that occurred during a period of intense religious discussion, raised fundamental questions about the action of God in history and the place He is to be given within historians’ history, questions that are not without relevance to the problems that will be heatedly argued a half a century later during the modernist crisis.