Abstract
For reasons linked to the republican struggle and its revolutionary origins, the importance of religion in the political and intellectual history of nineteenth-century France has been overshadowed, and the figure of Renan has sunk into oblivion. The scientific longevity of the man who was administrator of the Collège de France and enjoyed widespread recognition at the end of his life cannot be explained without taking into account the essential role played by Renan in the transition from the science of religions to the history of religions, and the place of the latter in the emergence and development of the human sciences in France. We'll show how, starting with language, Renan's history of religion unfolds according to a movement internal to his relationship with religion. In this way, Renan not only played the role of ferryman, bringing German philology and exegesis to France, but also occupied a singular position insofar as his work alone marked the transformation of the science of religions into the history of religions, finding distant heirs in Salomon Reinach and Georges Dumézil.
