For ten years now, the Nota Bene collective, led by Benjamin Brillaud, has been enlightening Internet users on the history of France and the world. Interview with the man who created passions.
When Tech&Co meets Benjamin Brillaud, head of the YouTube channel Nota Bene, which has no fewer than 2.48 million subscribers, we don’t necessarily expect to find someone who continues to have an intact passion for History, ten years after the creation of his channel in August 2014. “It’s an unexpected assessment that I draw today,” he confides, “when I launched Nota Bene, I didn’t expect there to be such a craze, years later.”
When asked what he means by “unexpected”, Benjamin Brillaud speaks of a “positive assessment”: “We have more than 2.4 million people following the channel, and that proves that there were a lot of people who were sufficiently affected by at least one show to generate engagement. I am very proud to have successfully completed this project.”
About forty authors
In the corridors of Japan Expo 2024, where Tech&Co was able to talk with him, he meets fans who talk about the passion for History provoked by his videos: “I meet people who weren’t interested in History, and who tell me that it was my videos that convinced them. It’s a great source of pride.”
But, he specifies, he is not the only one. The Nota Bene project is “about ten people”, and even about forty authors “each year”: “It’s a big team.” The collective adventure did not begin right away, however. Alone at the beginning, Benjamin Brillaud explains that the work required for the videos very quickly “overwhelmed” him. The question arose all the more since History is a “serious” theme, which does not tolerate approximations.
In a second phase, Benjamin Brillaud will work to give credibility to his channel and his message: “There is a responsibility to have. If I first wanted to entertain, the substance must be square. If I start talking nonsense, it can do a lot of damage.”
To do this, the channel has teamed up with academics, historians and archaeologists. Many specialists, who have allowed Nota Bene to approach History from unexpected angles, sometimes playing with the codes to bounce off a game or film release, or even current events in order to shed historical light on it.
“I don’t hold back from making chestnuts, but what I like is to introduce themes to my audience. When I work with historians, I don’t hesitate to ask them to make suggestions,” he explains, “on YouTube, we can afford to do subjects that are sometimes not sexy.”
The Middle Ages, World War II, piracy and Egypt also rub shoulders with the history of knives, expressions and the cleanliness of cities. On average, the videos will be viewed between 250,000 and 1 million times. Sex in the Middle Ages is also one of these unexpected successes with more than 9.4 million views.
Intensification of extremist discourse
“The hardest thing to sell was a renovation of a departmental bridge that linked two villages with a few thousand inhabitants. No one cared, but the department preferred to renovate it rather than destroy it, and that raised the question of what constituted heritage,” reveals Benjamin Brillaud.
The “blockbuster” videos, which are a hit, then serve as a locomotive towards niche subjects: “We can clearly see that these subjects would never make it to prime-time airtime, because there are obvious financial stakes, but on YouTube, we can afford it.”
On the question of neutrality, Benjamin Brillaud explains his point of view, while History has become very political. “There is neutrality and neutrality. Someone who devotes absolute neutrality with a purely objective history, we must be wary of them. The historian’s job is to take a step back and look at a subject by treating it in a dispassionate manner. But the very choice of a subject means that we put a little of ourselves into it.”
The one who claims to be “non-partisan” in his episodes, because they are written by historians, claims an editorial line “which shows the interest in going against the national novel”, and which aims to highlight “a plural History, not that of the powerful.”
“Over the years, we feel that there is an intensification of extremist and conspiratorial discourse, but also in the aggressiveness of the comments,” regrets Benjamin Brillaud. “It even goes as far as death threats, given that History is politicized on all sides.”
For Benjamin Brillaud, the idea is not to engage in activism: “When Eric Zemmour ran his presidential campaign [en expliquant que le maréchal Pétain avait “sauvé des juifs”, ndlr]we took it as an emblematic example of the manipulation of History, so I invited two historians who wrote a book on the subject. They came back to the way in which he manipulates history for electoral purposes.”
Today, Nota Bene is not just a YouTube channel. The brand is used in publications, including books and podcasts, but also on television. However, the TV medium remains a place in which the creator is still hesitant: “There are imperatives on television that are not present on other platforms,” he says.
Ten years later, he now meets fans who have sometimes started studying History to “reconnect” with this theme that they once hated. A consecration for Benjamin Brillaud, now recognized by his peers.
Related News :