This study is devoted to the question of the articulation of narrative and explanatory sequences in the history of the French language from old French to pre-classical French). We consider that there is an intermediate level of structure between the sentence and the text, i.e. the level of macropropositions which in turn form sequences, and will accordingly analyse how these two sequential patterns function from a diachronic perspective. We will examine the interaction between the propositional (microstructure) and macrostructural levels and touch upon the concept of genre as well as the typology of the sequences in question. A diachronic perspective enables us to demonstrate how the styles of sequence articulation, the thematic progression and the textual structures evolve depending on the type of discourse they form part of.