For Rachèle Bevilacqua, of Editions du Portrait, it was obvious. When it came to publishing in French The Banality of Good, by Enrico Deaglio – a monumental biography, published in mid-January, of the Italian Righteous Giorgio Perlasca, who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Second World War – the publisher called on the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah. Particularly in the support program which, each year, accompanies a work “aimed at transmitting the history and memory of the Shoah and genocides”. The protocol guarantees that works published with the help of the foundation “respect history”, as explained by Gabrielle Rochmann, its deputy general director.
“When a publisher submits a project to us, we ask an expert – most often a historian – to read it and tell us whether it is in line with historical knowledge. Some do it on a voluntary basis, others not. It is by taking his opinion into consideration that we then decide collectively to support the book. » In the case of The Banality of Good, a little more than half of the 4,000 euros paid to the publisher by the Foundation (which contributes 25% to 30% of the overall publication cost) financed the rereading of the work by the historian specializing in Hungary Paul Gradvohl. The rest of the amount contributed to paying for the translation of Nathalie Bauer, also a doctor in history and a specialist in Italy, who also signs the footnotes.
In short, the book has been fact-checked. For several years, this Anglicism, which literally means “fact checking”, is becoming more and more common. In a reference text published in 2004 (The Fact Checker’s Bible, Anchor, not translated), Sarah Harrison Smith, former fact-checker at the American magazine New Yorker (whose practices in this area are praised around the world), defined the fact-checker’s targeted reading as follows: “aim for accuracy”, “research the facts”, “evaluate sources: people, newspapers and magazines, books, the Internet, etc. », “check citations”, “ensure that there are no plagiarized passages”…
In the quality American press, this exercise is based on extensive research, on the rereading of documents consulted by the journalist (copies of university diplomas, books reviewed or confidential documents obtained during the investigation) and, sometimes, on new interviews with the speakers cited, in order to ensure the accuracy of their reported remarks.
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