Against the grain of official history, Histoire d’un crime denounces the coup on December 2nd, 1851. Victor Hugo describes the failure of the resistance to a new Terror about to ruin the Republic and the heritage of the Enlightenment. The writer follows a moral and political necessity of historic truth destined for his contemporaries and the generations to come. A representative of the people and an exile, he will be the universal voice of witnesses and victims. Between singularity and plurality the narration has from now on to invent new strategies in its paradoxical need for objectivity, for captatio benevolentiae and for axiological aim.