This paper, in exploring a period anterior to that studied by DolfOElher in Le Spleen contre l’oubli (Spleen enlisted against forgetting), hypothesises a close complicity between elegy and the writing of history as early as in the 1820s. It bases itself on the idea of a “left-wing melancholia” as developed by Enzo Traverso in a 2016 book of that title. Reading a number of texts by Augustin Thierry, Jules Michelet and Edgar Quint, it analyses the role in history as written by the Romantics of listening to the expression of lament, and then that of the critical perspective suggested by this elegiac writing. Finally, it considers the hybridation of poetry and history, showing that the elegiac register contributes to transforming Romantic history into a poetic history.