La maschera documentata. Riflessioni su storia e fiction intorno all'Armata dei sonnambuli di Wu Ming

The novel L'Armata dei sonnambuli, by the collective of Italian authors named Wu Ming, is an epic on the Parisian popular classes and their masked avenger, Scaramouche, set in the crucial phase of the Revolution from the Terror to Thermidor. Its narrative and its commercial success both suggest new considerations on the relations between history and fiction. Beyond the analysis of the very functioning of historical fiction and of the specific role of the "Novel of the French Revolution" at its origin and in its evolution, the focus here is not primarily on the classic issue of the status of historical knowledge and the historiographic text - even though this debate is touched on in the article - but it is, rather, on the social function of the discourse on the past and the question of who answers - and how - the demand for history that clearly arises from the reading public.