Anachronism imposes itself through its uses. Péguy shows that the Dreyfus affair is, for some, an opportunity to invent obsolete intentions: interventions over time which minimize the affair. Likewise, the idea that this affair was prepared. It is a backward creation that we find in the Querelle of the German historians. A completely different use analyzed by Péguy : the comparison of a Petition from the workers of Saint Petersburg addressed to the Tsar, in 1905, and the beginning of Oedipus-Rex. From the resemblance comes an acute sense of topicality. Bergson analyzes the tendency of the mind : mathematical truths detach themselves from their history and appear eternal. This goes for any form of truth. Romanticism operates retroactively, creates its own prefiguration and explanation after the fact. With his late notion of Implexe, Valéry brings to light other forms of pompous anachronism.