A dialogue between disciplines is regularly asked among scholars but in fact very rarely practiced. The paper shows that exist however many bridges between history and literary history. The fecundity of import and export of prospects is nowadays visible in recent scholarship, concerning both objects and methods in the two fields. Historians nevertheless remain shy in front of some sacred literary themes or authors, whereas specialists of literature overlook a lot of important literary materials due to obsolete classifications and an excessive respect of inherited canon. With the example of a central and at the same time despised genre such as boulevard theatre in the nineteenth century, the author tries to demonstrate the new hints given by the combination of the two, historical and literary, prospects. It allows to get rid of the traditional divide between internalism and textualism, on one side, and externalism and contextualism on the other. Thanks to these new possible links and accommodation of historical and literary methods, the two disciplines may be freed from mutual despise or indifference, or, which is worse still, of confusion of genres which defenders of the fusion between fiction and history have proposed, contributing to a scientific regression of the two fields. It may be, on the contrary, proposed a common agenda of research in the direction of both a “cultural history of social” (R. Chartier) and a social history of culture for a period, the XIXth century, when literature was becoming coextensive with society at large.