The dates displayed by the apologetic book Christianity in southern Madagascar do not coincide with the content of the book: twenty-six years of labor (1648-1674) are isolated by the institutional imagination of Lazarist history. The scientific editing of this correspondence provides a pan-optical and costed view of the implications of congregation, as this work forms the real excerpt of the probability created by the Church’s tradition. More than the hostility of the inhabitant, it was the effect of difficulties in communication, diseases, the Church’s compromises with the ritual leaders — in short, the lack of preparation of agerris missionaries for the assistance of the most deprived in France alone — which ruined Madagascar’s first evangelisation. It is also permissible to recognise the cognitive dimension of lazarists’ work: they are among the first producers of knowledge of the other through observation of morals, the creation of a Petit catechism in Malagasy and a Franco-Malgache dictionary that have long been attributed to Governor Flacourt. Galibert Nivoelisoa. Editing of missionary correspondence: lazarists in Madagascar in the 17th century. In: Between memory and history: ordinary writing and emergence of the individual. Acts of the 134th National Congress of Historical and Scientific Societies, ‘famous or obscure: men and women in their territories and history’, Bordeaux, 2009. Paris: CTHS Editions, 2010 pp. 87-97. (Acts of the National Congress of Historical and Scientific Societies, 134-3)