Le procès et l’écriture de l’histoire

• Main Author: Jean-Paul Jean
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ENS Éditions 2009-11-01
• Series: Tracés
• Subjects: evidence; experts; generations; trial; truth; witnesses
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/traces/4344

The writing of a nation’s history is not univocal. Trials hold a special position in the way history has been reinterpreted a posteriori. However, the respective methods of historians and judges differ considerably. Based on the Barbie, Touvier and Papon trials, the article highlights a number of disagreements and dissensions between historians and judges : the risk of anachronisms – a logical consequence of the non-applicability of statutory limitations to crimes against humanity ; the difficulty of placing facts into context a long time after they happened ; the place of historians in the trial as they are called as witnesses – which they are not – and actually act as experts – a role they cannot legally hold at the audience ; purely procedural issues like the presentation of evidence and the principles of imputability and of personal responsibility. Finally, the judge’s task is to search and to know the truth with the verdict (etymologically the “truth told”). Judicial truth has its own logic, which differs from scientific or historical truths. Yet with certain landmark trials, magistrates have sometimes adapted the law to reality and even adapted history to the law ; others have gone as far as rewriting history.