The relationships between history and literature are regularly debated. Rather than following the proposition of constituting historical writing in a new contemporary literature, we propose to ask ourselves why such a fascination of historians for literature. In which way does literature produce knowledge? Foucault estimated in 1977 that it was since Sade the place of secrecy and our infamy. This force of disturbance and subversion of literature seems to have moved. The knowledge that literature produces (J. Genet, W. G. Sebald, S. Alexievitch, P. Modiano, M. Riboulet in particular) now consists in “making-witness.” It is no longer the place of the unveiling of a hidden social imaginary; literature provides to history the archive of what remains; it inserts sediments of memory.