Historical truth in the age of AI and identity politics: Jean-Frédéric Schaub

A bulwark against derealization

When Olivia Elkaim in the novel The Disappearance of Things Elkaim's narrative exploration of the barely documented existence of Georges Perec's mother is as moving as it is methodologically challenging: where the archive falls silent, imagination takes over. She invents gestures, dialogues, and inner stirrings—not to replace facts, but to restore sensual contours to a woman erased from history. This is the strength of her approach: it resists a second erasure through bureaucratic detachment, transforming the "act of disappearance" into a narrative present that makes grief, tenderness, and historical violence tangible. At the same time, this is where the objection that the historian Jean-Frédéric Schaub would raise lies: every imagined inner perspective carries the risk of retrospective ventriloquism, a projection of contemporary sensibilities onto an irretrievably lost experience. The poetic addition can appear as an act of epistemic justice—or as an aesthetic appropriation of precisely what, in its very absence, should be respected. Elkaim's book moves between rescue and transformation, between ethical urgency and methodological presumption – and it is in this tension that it gains its productive restlessness.

Jean-Frédéric Schaubs Le passé ne s'invente pas (The Past Cannot Be Invented, Albin Michel, 2026) is a passionate yet methodologically rigorous plea for historical scholarship as an indispensable pillar of liberal democracy. In an era that Schaub describes as the “empire of falsehood,” he posits that only history pursued as a science can protect citizens from manipulation, identity mania, and the loss of reality.

Schaub sees historical scholarship threatened on several fronts. The first threat is technological: Generative intelligence is now capable of creating traces of the past that never existed. He vividly illustrates this with the example of Damien Rieu, a far-right politician who disseminated an AI-generated image (via Midjourney) that supposedly depicted Arab slave traders in the 19th century. Here, fiction is no longer presented as art, but rather misused as evidence for an ideological narrative.

The second threat is the instrumentalization of identity. Schaub warns of "conflict entrepreneurs" who use fabricated traditions and manipulated identities to justify aggression. He explicitly mentions Vladimir Putin, whose essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians preceded the 2022 invasion. Here, history becomes a weapon that no longer serves enlightenment but subjugation. He also sees the danger within democratic societies of a "skepticism of convenience" that dismisses scientific expertise as the mere opinion of "knowledgeables" (sachants).

Schaub analyzes works that playfully or achronologically cross the line between historical reality and invention: Laurent Binet's novel Civilizations Schaub presents an alternative history in which the Incas conquer Europe, using this as an example of uchronic narratives. Emmanuel Carrère is mentioned in the context of the blurred "pact" between author and reader, with Schaub emphasizing that Carrère's work The United (The kingdom of God) is not a scientific exegesis. In summary, Schaub's critique is directed against any form of historiography that no longer focuses on the "indisponible" (unavailable) reality of the past, but replaces it with poetic, political, or identity-related inventions.

Interestingly, Schaub cites Patrick Modiano as an example of a writer who respects the boundary with history. Dora Bruder Modiano searches for traces of a Jewish girl deported in 1942. He presents himself as a seeker, exhibiting documents, but where the documents are silent, he adds nothing. He does not fill in Dora's feelings or dreams. It is precisely this avoidance of fictionalization that makes the book, for Schaub, a great work about the past, because it respects the victim's "unavailability."

Using Roberto Bolaño's novel as an example 2666 Schaub demonstrates the limitations of documentary literature. Bolaño describes hundreds of murders of women in Mexico in an almost police-like, dry style. However, the effect on the reader is not rationally enlightening, but rather hypnotic and unbearable. While a journalistic report or a sociological study invites analysis, the literary treatment leads to a "saraband of death" that emotionally overwhelms the reader instead of conveying detached knowledge.

Jean-Frédéric Schaub is a renowned French historian and research director at the EHESS, best known for his profound analyses of the history of political anthropology and the emergence of the modern state. His scholarly work is characterized by an innovative focus on the history of racism and social exclusion in the early modern period, examining the connection between colonial practices and the formation of European identity. An influential intellectual, he combines meticulous archival research with an interdisciplinary approach to critically examine the historical roots of contemporary social hierarchies.

For Schaub, historical scholarship is not merely a language game or a subcategory of fiction. It is a "technology" of truth that insists on the inviolability of the past. For Schaub, the distinction between fact and fiction is not academic hairsplitting, but a matter of survival for democracy. If the past becomes arbitrarily malleable, Schaub argues, the foundation for collective political action collapses.

Schaub's book, set against a different backdrop than during the debates surrounding postmodernism, follows a clear, escalating logic that leads from the diagnosis of a current crisis to the defense of scientific standards. His analysis of the "empire of falsehood" begins with generative AI, deepfakes, and political disinformation (such as Trumpism or Putin's historical revisionism). This is followed by a reflection on the transformation of the historian's profession, in which he demonstrates how the discipline has professionalized itself through philology, statistics, and the study of memory. The third part is dedicated to the politically motivated invocation of the past, followed by a fundamental analysis of its distinction from literature and art. The work culminates in the definition of history as a science whose core is veracity (véracité).

Demarcation of historical science

Schaub draws on various historical positions that fundamentally reject his understanding of the scientific nature of history: He cites Oswald Spengler as someone for whom reality does not exist and nature is merely a function of culture. He refers to Spengler's main work The Decline of the West (The downfall of the eveningSchaub recalls Paul Valéry's harsh judgment from 1931, in which Valéry described history as "poison" for the mind, as it is incapable of grasping real change. He refers to Valéry's Views of today's world.

For Schaub, the distinction between fiction and art is so crucial precisely because literature pursues different goals than science. While literature and art aim to penetrate and imbue the world, acting like a "magician," history, as a science, attempts to grasp and fix the world to the extent that human intelligence allows.

The methodological distinction is made via three essential points:

The reference to the "speaker"Historical scholarship postulates a stable, external reference: the real past. Historians are not free to fill gaps through imagination. They work with "ruins"—material traces of human activity, the fullness of which has been lost and which often present a chaotic picture.

Enduring discontinuity. While literature (especially the 19th-century realist novel) tends to offer smooth, causal narratives, the historian must reveal the gaps in their knowledge. A scholarly report must not be "prettier" than the available sources; it must reflect the roughness and incompleteness of knowledge.

The rejection of "ventriloquism" (ventriloquism). Schaub criticizes attempts to give a voice to the "mute" of history through fictional narratives in order to "repair" past injustices. For him, this is a form of presumption. True "epistemic justice" consists of acknowledging the silence of the archives instead of covering it up with poetic invention.

Schaub's line of argumentation

Schaub argues that historical scholarship plays a crucial role in defending liberal democracy. His central thesis is that the study of the past must be conducted as a science in order to protect democratic institutions. He warns against confusing academic history with artistic evocations or political instrumentalizations of the past.

Chapter 1: The Empire of Falsehood and the Crises of Historical ConsciousnessIn the era of digitalization and generative AI, Schaub sees a danger of derealization, in which traces of the past can be manipulated or fabricated (e.g., through midjourney). He analyzes the phenomenon of "post-truth" not as mere lies, but as a strategy to sow fundamental distrust and uncertainty through "bullshit" (Harry Frankfurt) and a flood of information. For him, historical truthfulness is the only antidote to this erosion of reality.

Chapter 2: What has changed in the profession of historianSchaub describes the evolution of the discipline over the last 50 years. Important impulses came from ethnology (the significance of the actors' language) and philology. He discusses the "linguistic turn," statistical methods for visualizing invisible social processes, and "micro-analysis" (Edoardo Grendi's "exceptionnel normal"). A further focus is on the emergence of the culture of remembrance (Pierre Nora) and ego-history, in which historians reflect on their own positionality.

Chapter 3: Invoking the past strengthens the democratic community. This chapter examines how the state uses the past to create a sense of belonging. Schaub contrasts legitimate democratic celebrations with the instrumentalization of history by autocrats like Putin or populists like Trump. He discusses French “memory laws” (Loi Gayssot, Loi Taubira) and emphasizes that while politics sets the framework for remembrance, scholarship must not dictate what is true.

Chapter 4: Artistic evocation: literature. Here, Schaub examines the close relationship between historiography and literature, since both are written in natural language. He outlines the history of the writer's status (from the "Sacre de l'écrivain" to the autonomization of art) and warns against a "literary bigotry" that ascribes to literature a superior form of knowledge that should not be subject to scientific scrutiny.

Chapter 5: How can fiction incorporate reality? Schaub analyzes genres such as "true crime", autofiction and documentary (e.g. Roberto Bolaño's). 2666He criticizes approaches like Saidiya Hartman's, which seek to "repair" incomplete archives through imagination, as a form of "ventriloquism." He contrasts this with works such as Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder In contrast, he argues that the unavailability of the past is respected precisely by not filling in the gaps with fiction. He concludes with an analysis of uchronic dystopias (Philip K. Dick).

Chapter 6: History as a science. In conclusion, Schaub explains why history must meet scientific standards: it postulates a stable, external referent (what actually happened) that is beyond human whim. He refers to Primo Levi and Bernard Williams to show that the search for objective facts is a bulwark against corruption and terror. Schaub rejects a radical relativism that understands truth only as social consensus.

Schaub's reply to Hayden White

The argumentation of Hayden White (who played a key role in establishing the “Linguistic Turn” in historical science) is a central point of contention for Schaub, even though he often discusses it in the context of more general trends. ¹

On the question of narration and form, White argued that historical accounts are ultimately literary artifacts whose meaning is constructed through the chosen narrative form (plot) and rhetorical tropes. Schaub acknowledges that historians often unconsciously follow literary narrative models and that their works can be analyzed like intrigues. However, he counters that formal elegance often serves to mask the discontinuity of knowledge. Where literature strives for a "smooth" history, Schaub argues that scholarship should expose the gaps and the "roughness" of the archive.

Contrary to White's tendency to view history as a linguistic construct (language game), Schaub emphasizes the "indisposability" of the past. He argues that the past possesses a "rigid structure": events occurred either sequentially or simultaneously—this is not a matter of interpretation, but a fact. Historians do not have a "free hand" to invent the past at will; they are bound to material traces (ruins).

While White's approach blurs the line between fact and fiction, Schaub insists on the difference between the aims of art and science. He approvingly quotes the writer László Krasznahorkai: literature seeks to penetrate and imbue the world as if by "magic," while science seeks to grasp and fix it. For Schaub, veracity (véracité) is an ethical duty of the historian, based on accuracy and sincerity.

Schaub's sharpest rebuttal is political in nature: the political danger of relativism. If one radicalizes White's position and views history merely as one of many possible narratives, one deprives the weak of protection from the arbitrary power of the strong. If there is no objective truth, only the law of the strongest counts. For Schaub, the distinction between what happened and what is said about it is the necessary condition for an emancipatory science and a functioning democracy.

Schaub sees the genre of uchronia (alternate history) as the purest form of the unreal. He analyzes Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle." Dick presents a scenario in which the Axis powers won World War II. For Schaub, Dick's brilliance lies in the inclusion of another book within the novel, which describes yet another version of the war's outcome. This severs any connection to reality; the fiction acknowledges its own unreality. Schaub considers this honest, as it does not pretend to be history but functions as a "dizzying" thought experiment.

In my opinion, Hayden White would not have understood the historical distortions of a Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin as a refutation of his theory, but rather as an intensification of it. Metahistory He demonstrated that history is always shaped narratively: events are selected, weighted, and placed within an interpretive framework—for example, as decline, rebirth, or heroic struggle. When Putin stages the collapse of the Soviet Union as a national humiliation from which Russia heroically rises, or when Trump invokes a lost American greatness that must be reclaimed, they are following precisely such plot structures. For White, the problem lies not in the telling itself, but in the political intention behind it.

At the same time, I am convinced that he would have clearly distinguished between narrative shaping and factual falsification precisely here. The fact that history is organized narratively does not mean that facts are arbitrary. Documents, data, and events resist this. Anyone who denies or invents verifiable facts leaves the realm of legitimate meaning-making and enters that of lies. White's theory would not change as a result; rather, its political relevance would become apparent: precisely because history is always narrated, one must analyze which narrative patterns are chosen, which affects are mobilized, and which power claims are concealed within them.

The “reparative” imagination and fictionalization

Schaub intensively examines approaches that attempt to fill documentary gaps in the archive through literary invention in order to give a voice to marginalized groups:

A central and critically discussed example is the work of literary scholar Saidiya Hartman, specifically the dangers of "reparative" fiction. Hartman attempts to break the silence of the archives regarding enslaved women of the Atlantic crossing through "counterfactual imagination." Schaub categorically rejects this as a method for historical research. He argues that one cannot "lend" these women a voice without once again patronizing them. He contrasts this with the work of Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard, who painstakingly reconstructed the life of the enslaved woman Rosalie through archival research without resorting to fiction. For Schaub, the real trace—however tenuous—is more valuable than the most beautiful invention.

Schaub criticizes Hartman's method of "counterfactual imagination." He cites her essay "Venus in Two Acts" as well as her book "Vies rebelles. Histoires intimes de filles noires en révolte, de radicales queers et de femmes dangereuses" (original: Wayward Lives, Beautiful ExperimentsHe accuses her of using this method to practice a form of "ventriloquism" (ventriloquism) that does not give the victims of history their voice, but rather patronizes them once again.

Schaub cites Ivan Jablonka in connection with the efforts of historians to achieve the status of an "author" and to understand historical scholarship as literature, and in particular Jablonka's work. The history is a contemporary literature: manifest for the social sciences.

Schaub discusses positions that question historical scholarship itself as a European, colonial-influenced construct: Dipesh Chakrabarty, for example, is mentioned as a representative of a school of thought that sees history as a model of knowledge rooted in the Christian-Western tradition, which was imposed on other cultures, especially in Provincialiser l'Europe: the post-colonial period and the difference in history (Provincializing Europe).

Schaub also clearly distances himself from Richard Rorty's conviction that truth is what holds a social community together, citing, among other things, the book *À quoi bon la vérité?* (co-authored with Pascal Engel). Although Schaub notes that Stanley Fish distanced himself from radical relativism in more recent works, he quotes him in the context of "interpretive communities" that arbitrarily negotiate the meaning of texts, for example in Quand lire c'est faire (Is There a Text in This Class?).

The fiction of neutrality in historical science: Imagination against the violence of acts

Let us return once more to Saidiya Hartman: Jean-Frédéric Schaub's defense of historiography as an objective discipline based on material evidence encounters a radically different conception in Hartman's view of what an "archive" actually is and what kind of violence it wields. A response from Hartman's perspective would not reject scientific accuracy, but rather question the premise that the official archive is a neutral referent of reality. For Hartman, the archive of slavery and racial segregation is itself a fiction of power, a "death certificate" and a "grave" that records the lives of the subjugated only at the moment they are violated, sold, or punished. She would describe Schaub's demand to "endure the gaps in knowledge" as a continuation of the original violence: those who merely accept the silence of the archive seal the fate of those who were meant to be erased by that silence.

Hartman's method of "critical fabulation" (critical fabulation in the sense of imaginative narrative speculation) is therefore not a playful embellishment, but from her perspective a necessary act of epistemological justice. She argues that we cannot tell the story of the dispossessed without violating the very records of the archive. A vivid example of this is the figure of Venus, that nameless girl who appears in the archive only as a single line in a trial against the slave captain John Kimber. While Schaub would demand that we stick to the mere statistical recording of her death or the brief judicial mention, Hartman shows in her essay "Venus in Two Acts" that these sources are themselves the product of terror. She uses the subjunctive mood to name the unspeakable: What if Venus and the other girl mentioned in the trial had comforted each other in the darkness of the ship's hold? This narrative does not aim to "repair" the archive, but rather to make the enormity of its gaps visible through the idea of ​​human intimacy amidst the horror.

In her work Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments She elaborates on this counterargument through an analysis of state surveillance apparatuses. Schaub warns against "ventriloquism," but Hartman points out that the voices of Black women in official documents have already been "bellied out" by sociologists, Vice investigative journalists, and police officers. If a file of New York State Reformatory When a young woman like Mattie Jackson is labeled "morally depraved" or "incorrigible," Hartman argues that this is not a "traceutical past" that can be objectively established, but rather a classification by power that masks resistance as pathology. Against Schaub's "separation of orders," she posits "close narration," a style that inextricably interweaves the narrator's voice with the rhythms and visions of the "undisciplined." A concrete example is Mattie's yearning for beauty—her love of cashmere sweaters or gold bracelets, which her employers deemed "cheap socialism" or theft. Hartman reconstructs these actions as "beautiful experiments" in the art of survival, defying state categorization.

Schaub's criticism that imagination once again patronizes the victims would be countered by Hartman with the observation that the historian's neutrality is an illusion, often adopting the perspective of the archivist—that is, the ruler. While Schaub Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder While praising Schaub for not inventing anything, Hartman would point out that the archive of the Shoah and the archive of slavery differ fundamentally in their density and purpose. In an archive designed to define the slave as a mere "commodity," imagination is the only tool for bringing humanity back into the realm of the conceivable. The "epistemic justice" that Schaub quotes, according to Hartman, does not demand the "harsh reality of silence," but rather a practice that understands the "presence of the past" as an unfinished project of freedom.

In conclusion, Hartman would argue that her work is not an escape into fiction, but a technology of truth that deconstructs the violence of "facts." When Schaub claims that history must "fix" the world, Hartman counters that for the oppressed, this fixation often took the form of a shackle or a prison bar. A historiography that rejects radical imagination remains trapped in the logic of those who created the archive. Hartman's "counter-history," on the other hand, is a form of abolitionism that attempts to understand the dead not as ciphers (numbers), but as agents of their own fleeting liberation, even if that liberation consisted only of a moment of dancing in a cabaret or a forbidden whisper in the corridor of a tenement.

What literary studies might offer as a critical response

Schaub's strict separation of orders provokes disagreement from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. A critical response could include, among other things, the following points:

The inevitability of narration: Since the “linguistic turn” (which Schaub discusses but whose radical consequences he rejects), it has been argued that history must always be constructed as a narrative (plot). Critics like Hayden White would object that historians use the same rhetorical tropes (metaphors, synecdoches) as writers. There is no “bare” fact outside of language.

Literature as a mode of knowledge acquisition: Literary scholars could argue that fiction enables a "moral understanding" that goes beyond mere data accumulation. Literature can simulate inner states, moral dilemmas, and the complexity of human experience for which there will never be archival evidence, but which are nevertheless "true" in the sense of a fundamental human experience.

The ethical duty to imagine: One could object to Schaub's critique of Ventriloquism by arguing that the archive itself is a product of power relations. Relying solely on the traces of the victors only cements their rule. Imagination, in this context, could be seen as an act of resistance and an ethical obligation towards the forgotten, in order to at least grant them a place within the realm of thought.

The blurring of the lines between genera: Modern forms such as autofiction or documentary storytelling demonstrate that the boundary between "sincerity" and "accuracy" is often fluid. A writer like Carrère or Modiano uses historical methods to find literary truth; Schaub's strict separation seems almost anachronistic in light of these hybrid texts.

Schaub's argument is, in essence, a defense of reason against the looming erosion of all standards of truth. He would view any ideological premises of "critical fabulation" with the same suspicion as impermissible political instrumentalization. He relies on the inherent power of verifiable facts to protect democracy against the enchantment of myths and lies. Literary studies, on the other hand, would emphasize that ambivalence and poetic freedom possess a power that sensitizes people to the complexity of the world—a task that historical scholarship, with its "ruins," may not be able to fully accomplish.

1. The following should be mentioned: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1973. – The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1987. – The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010. Ed. Robert Doran. – 40th Anniversary Edition: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014.>>>