L’«immenso esperimento» Dalle trincee alla post-verità: Marc Bloch e la nascita delle fake news

The reliability of historical sources and the continuous rewriting of memory is one of the central themes in Marc Bloch's reflection. His experience as a soldier in the First World War allowed him to take note of all its urgency: first of all by making him notice the fragility of individual memory even in the development of his own testimony; second for having let him discover that this extraordinary event had produced a new type of "false news", with extraordinary circulation, survival and impact on the masses. This discovery led him to talk about the war as an "immense experiment". Now that the results of that "experiment" seem to us extraordinarily current, it is appropriate to verify how much of our contemporaneity has been previewed in the exceptional nature of that portion of our past