Although one might consider historiography to be a branch of intellectual history, a brief overview of the various approaches to historical research that it encompasses reveals the coexistence of many different viewpoints. In addition to research that can be classified as intellectual history in the strictest sense of the term, the field of historiography includes works covering a wide range of subjects, from the classic history of ideas to that of disciplinary memory as well as other types of contributions with normative, prospective or prescriptive aims. This article seeks to examine that diversity through a case study of the brief polemic that opposed Lucien Febvre and Henri Jassemin in the 1934 publications of the Annales. Looking at both the texts that contributed to the controversy as well as Febvre and Jassemin’s correspondence (some of which has not previously been published), this article establishes the chronology of events. It also demonstrates how it is possible to use the tools of intellectual history to study controversies involving historians and discusses ways of evaluating the appropriation of such events by historiographical discourse, which is sometimes more concerned with keeping a record of the profession and justifying contemporary methodological approaches than charting the veritable social and intellectual history of the discipline. This article concludes with a consideration of the nature and role of historiographical discourse within the broader practice of reflective history.