The historiographical literature dedicated to historical epistemology tends to adopt a normative approach. On the contrary, this chapter proposes a description of the uses that have been made of the label “French historical epistemology [épistémologie historique]” (FHE) in the French context in relation to the sociocultural context from which it emerged. This reconstruction brings its canonization process to light. The first section takes the reader inside the field of historical epistemology and provides some preliminary definitions. The second section details how a broad discussion developed around the legacy of positivism in the transitional period between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, resulting in various intellectual tensions that led to the formation of a polarized intellectual space within which FHE developed. I describe the international circulation of ideas that generated the emergence of different intellectual reactions to positivism and how these factors were correlated with the institutionalization dynamics for the philosophy of science in various national contexts. The third section reconstructs the emergence of the label “épistémologie historique” in France and how this term was used from the early twentieth century until the 1970s. The fourth section argues that the success of FHE can be tracked to the French political-cultural climate of the 1970s. This section also analyzes how the “major canon” of this tradition, consisting of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Foucault, emerged. In the last section, I show how the crystallization of this “major canon” gradually obscured the key role played by French mathematical thought, which I therefore propose as a “minor canon” of FHE.