National historiography in Luxembourg started developing from the middle of the 19th century. It could draw on a range of themes developed by early modern historians (who, however, had never expressed a sense of Luxembourg specificity or set the duchy distinctly outside the conglomerate of the Habsburg Low Countries). The starting-point well into the 19th century was provided by the mid-18th-century work of the Jesuit Jean Bertholet (1688–1755), a celebration of monarchic absolutism paired with Catholic moralism. The “Grand Duchy of Luxembourg” created at the Congress of Vienna (1815) under the Dutch Crown had almost no institutional infrastructure for historical research or for history-writing.

This changed in the 1840s. The political and scholarly elite of the Grand Duchy consisted predominantly of Orangists, who had stayed loyal to the House of Orange during the Belgian Revolution. Many of them showed a keen interest in antiquities and the past, which they interpreted so as to justify the rule of Orange as well as the country’s independence from Belgium. Many of them were gathered in the Archeological Society (1844), later renamed the Section Historique de l’Institut royal-grand-ducal, which fostered the collection of antiquities and editions of ancient texts, as done expertly by François-Xavier Würth-Paquet (1801–1885). Medieval topics were particularly popular at the time, especially the 14th-century King John of Bohemia. Made into a national hero and a symbol of Luxembourg’s alleged medieval grandeur, King John was at the centre of (unrealized) plans for several large monuments as well as the subject of Jean Schoetter’s two-volume biography (1865), the first monograph published in Luxembourg by a positivist scholar. Schoetter (1823–1881) taught at the Athenaeum and was also a member of the Archeological Society. His narrative Geschichte des Luxemburger Landes (“History of Luxembourg”), written towards the end of his life, was the first after many decades to return to the primary sources. It was intended for school use after the teaching of history had become compulsory in 1881.

The dynastic change in 1890 from Orange-Nassau to Nassau-Weilburg was an important factor in rendering the monarch more effectively a “national” symbol. The grand-ducal palace was redesigned and extended for the new head of state; its architecture and decoration reflected a conscious effort to link the modern monarchy to the past, and especially the medieval past. The architect in charge, Charles Arendt (1825–1910), had a Romantic interest in medieval architecture, restoring the Romanesque chapel of Vianden Castle and publishing studies on the grand medieval castle of Luxembourg. He collaborated with the artist Michel Engels (1851–1901), who made several patriotic drawings and paintings during his career, again taking up and spreading models earlier developed in historiography. The consulting historian was Nicolas Van Werveke (1851–1926). A disciple of both Würth-Paquet and Schoetter, he later ensured the survival of the conservative-liberal tradition of the Orangists into the 20th century, though he would shift to a more progressive stance later in life, as illustrated by his unfinished cultural history of Luxembourg (1923-24).

Around 1900, conservative Catholics started to play a prominent role, first in history-writing, then in politics. In 1896 pro-clerical intellectuals founded the Society for Luxembourg History, Literature and Art, often referred to by the title of its journal Ons Hémecht (“Our Homeland”), which later developed into Luxembourg’s main history journal. The Catholic historian Arthur Herchen (1850–1931) received enduring fame for his Manuel d’histoire nationale (1918), a comprehensive national master narrative of Luxembourg’s history. Based on little original research, it combined older interpretive strands into a coherent narrative. A staunch defence of the ruling dynasty, the book celebrates Luxembourg’s foundation, independence and grandeur in medieval times, then passes through four centuries of foreign oppression before reaching regained independence and growing glory in the century following 1815. After Herchen’s death, the booklet was extended by the historian Nicolas Margue (1888–1976), who, as Minister of Education, kept it on the school curriculum, where it stayed until 1972. The national master narrative was to dominate representations of the past for most of the 20th century and in different media, such as the enlargement of the Cathedral of Luxembourg or several large-scale national ceremonies (1936, 1939, 1946, 1963).

Nationalist historians in Luxembourg were too small in number and too close ideologically to split into antagonistic schools: both main political streams agreed on their loyalty to the ruling dynasty, the patriotic purpose of history teaching and the glory of “their” medieval past.