Specialist societies in general, and more particularly the SPHG (History and Geography Teachers Society), most of which appeared at the beginning of the 20th century, have been regarded as conservative and corporatist groups. This interpretation explains why these societies have been held responsible for the difficulty in reforming the school subjects they were meant to protect. The purpose of this article is to offer a more nuanced version of this interpretation by focusing on history and geography as school subjects during the interwar period. To do so, this article analyses the way this society worked by setting it against its institutional context in order to delimit the actual influence the society has had on the fate of its own disciplinary area (history and geography being considered as one subject in France) and on its representatives in the field – teachers.