This article addresses the manner in which history and literature have recently restructured their relationship through a new genre that has recently emerged through some books. Based on real facts that authors reconstruct – and about which they propose an interpretation – these texts are characterized by a particular attention to a narrative style and the imposing presence of the author as a guarantor of the text’s scientific validity. One can also see that the epistemological sense of this approach differs when a historian, such as Ivan Jablonka, carries it out as opposed to when a novelist, such as Javier Cercas, does. In these two cases that I will discuss here, one sees an effort to evoke emotions on the part of the reader through a writer’s staging as well as his/her own feelings does not have the same implication for history as it does for literature. With such an approach, history risks losing sight of maintaining a critical stance that is, perhaps less empathic but no less useful, and that is one of the specific contributions of history to literature in the first place.