The contemporary flourishing of press portraits and, more generally, of personal accounts raises the question of the form of narrative that this type of practice mobilizes. Should it be seen as the expression of a polymorphous individualism, or the invention of a specific representation of the individual that is exemplary rather than singular? The Portraits of Grief case illustrates the latter hypothesis: a synecdochic logic is present throughout the narrative, so that the individual is part of a whole, and this reconstructed whole is the objective of a journalism of commemoration, set in a broad movement of national reconstruction.