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“The limit for a historian, like a film director, a narrator and a judge is […] in the non-communicable part of an extreme experience”, Paul Ricœur writes. What of the accounts constructed each day by the news media when, furthermore, the visual presentation is not only that of legal war but of a violence exceeding the legitimate framework of the use of force? As such, the case of the Central African Republic conflict is extremely revealing. With a very real shift in how this conflict was treated: whilst the Central Africans were the victims and the torturers of the media account, little by little it was the French military—who were initially powerless spectators of the ongoing drama—who took on both of these roles.