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In recent decades, the question of the reality of the historical past has risen to the forefront of analysis, not only in historiography or historical theory but also in literary criticism. This question has been raised in different forms by a tendency that has come to expression in these disciplines to blur the distinction between historical representation and fictional narrative, and casts suspicion on the historian’s claim to uncover a measure of “reality” of the historical past. This article examines Paul Ricœur’s critical response, in different periods of his work, to the challenge raised by historical skepticism. It focuses on how Ricœur, after a period of initial criticism of Heidegger’s philosophy in his works of the 1980s and early 1990s, appropriates in his late work Memory, History and Forgetting, a number of key concepts that Heidegger proposed in Being and Time and reformulates them to buttress his theory of the reality of the historical past. The aim of this article is less to provide an exegesis of Ricœur’s conception of historical understanding, than to critically examine the theory of the “reality” of the historical past that he developed during different periods of his work.