The virtual era be that of the generalized mythomanie

The duplicity and imagination of men have no limits - or their credulity. Frédéric Rouvillois, eclectic writer who had already published a "history of politeness" and a positive "history of the snobbery", is given the task of identifying the scams that have marked their time, from antiquity to our days: it was found near one hundred and thirty. Although it is merely present in alphabetical order, which gives her "collection" the look of a happy Kaleidoscope, it draws in his foreword a draft typology.

There, he said, four types of scams. The first is identity theft. His motives may be the ambition, or more often vanity: the "Baroness Staffe", author of a manual on the "rules of the savoir-faire" was an immense success at the end of the 19th century, was a modest bourgeois of the suburbs of Paris. Or even a contagious mythomanie: Charles Naundorff, who claimed until his death in 1845 Louis XVII being rescued from the prison of the Temple still has its supporters - and its Internet Second category, the false: in art, it is the forger Van Meegeren who sells to Goering, in 1943, a Vermeer of its composition. In science, it is the biologist Austrian Paul Kammerer which purports to show in the 1920s, by his experiences on the toads, that acquired characteristics can be passed - revenge of Lamarck on Darwin! -until it was discovered that the famous "copulatory brushes" appeared on the pits were due to injections of ink.

Third variety of deception, the hoax which aims to "deceive to disabuse him." An article published in 2007 by a scientific journal revealed that a certain marine bacterium releases into the atmosphere much more CO2 than human activity. David Thorpe, British researcher at the origin of the information, expects that the press has widely disseminated it before revealing the deception: it was to discredit the climate skeptics, ready to throw on the arguments more suspicious to support their positions. The last category, finally, is the lie accuser, for opprobrium on an individual, group, or a cause. The most perfect example, if we dare say, is "The protocols of the elders of Zion", false to 1901 created to feed the anti-Semitic propaganda, but could also cite the "scientific" theories developed to deny the authenticity of the "diary of Anne Frank", or even the "CIA plot" which would be initially attacks of September 11.

Reading of this catalogue, it is less disturbed by the audacity of impostors by the gullibility of victims - or the general public. Often, deception is successful because it corresponds to the "air time": the Odyssey painful of Omar Bâ, who failed to die to enter clandestinely in France, one of Misha Defonseca, which crossed Europe at the age of seven years to escape the Nazi camps and was saved by wolves - two stories completely invented - were raw because they agreed to the compassionate opinion bent. Another teaching of some recent deception is the power of the Internet in the accelerated dissemination of false news. The Sham of yesterday was artisanal. The virtual era be that of the generalized mythomanie