The article begins by evoking the different ways of writing histories of France in the French academic field since the beginning of the 20th century, in order to position the socio-historical approach I have adopted in my own contribution to this vast subject. The article goes on to clarify the three seemingly very simple words in the title (history, popular, France) as each of them can be used in very different meanings. This clarification leads to a definition of “popular history” that is not to be confused with “working-class history”. It is not a question of providing a new contribution to “history from below”, whose model of inequality remains today Howard Zinn’s popular history of the United States. I see “popular” as a power relationship that requires a constant clarification of the relationship between the dominant and the dominated, in a perspective that draws on the dialectic of class struggle developed by Karl Marx, but enriched by the contributions of social scientists over more than a century (notably those of sociologists such as Émile Durkheim, Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu).