The realist novel can be understood to bear witness to a changed understanding of history, ushered in with the modern era. This chapter argues that the French realist novel grew out of the historical novel, insofar as it attempted to offer a history of the present. However, a history of the present is challenging if not impossible to write because of the difficulty, and even the impossibility, of achieving a sufficiently distanced vantage point. French realist novels, consequently, aim to represent present reality but indirectly suggest the impossibility of any such representation. The chapter goes on to show that the French realist novels of the 1830s draw attention to the changeable nature of the present, partly because of the unstable social and political contexts of nineteenth-century France, and partly because of a shift in the way that people conceived of present reality. In at least two broad and closely interconnected senses, therefore, the early French realist novel is profoundly historical in its ambitions: it aims to offer a history of the present, however flawed that attempted history necessarily is, and it reveals the historical, or mutable, qualities of the present that it attempts to capture.