The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice

A bomb, an anarchist’s ‘accidental death’, the murder of a police commissar, and the confession of a former member of Lotta Continua led to seven dubious court cases and a tale of political opportunism and dishonesty. Standing in the tradition of Emile Zola’s famous J’accuse polemic against the Dreyfus trial at the end of the nineteenth-century, the historian Carlo Ginzburg draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries to dissect the weaknesses and contradictions of the state’s case in this late-twentieth-century political show-trial and reflects more generally on the similarities and differences between the roles of the historian and the judge.