In father’s footsteps or a problematic filiation. Dominique Jamet’s case – There is a phenomenon to be observed in contemporary French literature, namely the renewal of the novel through writing about self and the day-to-day reality in the context of family history. Writers reach into the past, often traumatic and painful, in order to rebuild their own broken identity, scarred by the memory of their parents’ troubled past. This is the case with Dominique Jamet. He returns to history with a capital H (the interwar period, World War Two, the Vichy regime and the subsequent issues of accounting for collaboration), so as to draw the figure of his father, Claude, an “intellectual” turncoat. The questionable filiation is the point of departure for writing two autobiographical texts. Also, it had undoubtedly been an inspiration for Un traître, a novel published in 2008, which is a fictitious reconstruction of the biography of Jacques Vasseur, an infamous French collaborator.