ABSTRACT
The stable coexistence between historiography, testimony, and the factuality of facts has been suddenly put into question through a number of debates among historians, partly provoked by the change of nature of "testimony" and the philosophical reflection brought about by this phenomenon. For lack of a better characterization and on a provisory basis, it will be admitted that it is a change from testimonies serving as documents to testimonies becoming monuments. A document is always instrumentalized, it is always for something else: for a possible biography, for revealing thrashed and maimed existences, for restoring a context, for describing a larger set that would encompass the particular events documented in the document. As long as testimonies were documents and only documents, they were read as if they were either quiet remnants that could help reconstruct the facts or traces of a tragic experience left behind by survivors for future generations.
