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This article analyses the place of literature in a “system of truth,” relating to specific periods, and much more conflictual than what is assumed by the assertion that there would be some “knowledge of literature.” A detour through writings of the seventeenth century – the moment of the institutionalization of literature – provides a better understanding of its historicity, by asking why, how and for what purposes a writing then presents itself as literature. It thus highlights the importance of historiographical actions that make literature a place for writing history, and of a highly conflictual history, wether the history of the origins of Catholicism (Honoré d’Urfé in L’Astrée) or the history of the Fronde ( Vie du Cardinal de Retz). This approach is reinvested in a completely different « system of truth » – our own system of truth –, through the recent example of the Karski case (2009). I try to question what, in this novel, has affected the historians’ procedures for establishing the truth, including the erection of the witness as a sanctuary of historical truth.