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In Les Vérités inavouables de Jean Genet (Seuil 2004), Ivan Jablonka has the ambition of renewing the approach to the famous French writer, showing how much support he derived from the Assistance publique, his supposed fascination for fascism, and the operation by which his exegetes, Sartre in particular, made him out to be an oppressed rebel against the established order. This approach did not totally convince Ludivine Bantigny who points out several obstacles in the interpretation and reasoning. Their disagreement led to a debate that was both contradictory and positive concerning the history of his irregular childhood and the nature of fascism, but also, more generally, on the exercise of biography and relations between history and criticism.