Abstract
This article opens with introducing the notion of verbal historical example. Then it compares two historical examples, two centuries apart, about French Revolution. The first one, a verbal example, is at the front of a speech of Robespierre to the Constituent Assembly, in favor of the abolition of the death penalty (30th may 1791). The second one has been extracted from a pamphlet of the extreme left-wing French politician José Bové when he was campaigning for President in 2007. This comparison allows us to see that historical examples can be presented in very different ways: some of them are explicit and clearly defined (Robespierre), others structure implicitly the whole text (Bové). It also allows us to emphasize that verbal examples get maximum efficiency when they can reflect the very conditions of possibility of the utterances where they are inserted.