Like all testimonies, the texts written by the French volunteers first pose problems of authenticity. According to Paul Ricoeur, the witness makes the basic statement “I was there,” to which he/she adds the two clausulas “Believe me” and (as a kind of challenge) “If you do not believe me, ask someone else” (2000, 206). In other words, as Renaud Dulong submits in extending Ricoeur, to witness an event does not really mean “to be a spectator of that event”; it means “to state that one has seen that event” and to commit oneself to recounting it “as one has seen it” (1998, 12). What Ricoeur and Dulong say about witnessing of course applies to life writing. Authors of memoirs, too, pledge to tell the truth, establishing between themselves and their audience what Philippe Lejeune (1975, 26–7) calls an “autobiographical contract”: They promise that the author, the narrator, and the main character of their narrative is the same “person” who reports “with sincerity,” “to the best of his/her recollection,” what he/she experienced at a certain time and place.

Verifications and guarantees

Given this initial promise, historians, journalists, or merely inquisitive readers are of course entitled to check whether the witness was “really there,” either by “asking someone else” (i.e., other witnesses) or by confronting the content of the testimony with archival research.