The importance of some books cannot be understated: They help place ourselves in the world, ask the right questions, and maintain useful, strategic credulity in the face of brutal empiricism. Sometimes they shed light on those facts, contextualize them, interrogate them, and so hold them up as empty, mendacious, vicious. The Judge and the Historian does this. As well as a concise and persuasive meditation on the convergence and divergence of the roles of its eponymous professionals, the book offers us a path through the tortuous proceedings that led to what the author portrays as a dreadful miscarriage of justice in a modern European state.
Italy has always had a particularly active political Left and in the late '60s and early '70s an extraparliamentary faction that descended into propagandist violence. In the so-called Hot Autumn of 1969, a bomb exploded in the Agricultural Bank in Milan, killing 16 people. An anarchist railway man, Giuseppe Pinelli, was taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli (immortalized in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an Anarchist) fell to his death from the window of the police commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claimed suicide but the Left accused them of murder. In 1972 Calabresi was shot dead in front of his home. The far-left Lotta Continua claimed it was an act of proletarian justice but many think right-wing extremists were involved. After almost 16 years of silence, an ex-militant of Lotta, riven with guilt, gave himself up, claiming responsibility for the murder. Leonardo Marino then implicated the leadership of Lotta in the affair.
Carlo Ginzburg, a noted and respected historian, draws on his work on witchcraft trials in the 16th and 17th centuries to dissect the state's case in this late-20th-century show trial. He has written a provocative and passionate book that casts a detailed look at the facts of the case, facts that when presented here cast serious doubt on the judgments reached in Italy early in 1999. Justice is inevitably contextual, and we should consider ourselves lucky to have someone as skilled as Ginzburg in deconstructing its various questionable manifestations. --Mark Thwaite, Amazon.co.uk
The Judge and the Historian: Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice FROM THE PUBLISHER
December 12, 1969 the highpoint of Italy's "Hot Autumn" the country is rocked by strikes, demonstrations and an insurgent extra-parliamentary left. A bomb explodes in the Agricultural Bank in Milan: sixteen people are killed.
Anarchist railwayman Giuseppe Pinelli is taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli (later immortalised in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an Anarchist) plummets to his death from the window of police commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claim suicide, the left accuses them of murder.
May 17, 1972 Luigi Calabresi is killed with two revolver shots in front of his home. Lotta Continua, the far-left paper, applauds this act of proletarian justice. Right-wing extremists are suspected but no one is convicted.
July 19, 1988 Leonardo Marino, ex-Fiat worker, former armed robber and member of Lotta Continua, gives himself up to the police, claiming responsibility for the murder of Calabresi. Then starts a judicial enquiry in which Marino implicates the leadership ofLotta Continua, including Adriano Sofri, Ovidio Bompressi and Giorgio Piotresetafani, in the affair. Taking its revenge for humiliation in the 1960s, the Italian state imprisons the leftists and drags them through a series of dubious court cases.
In The Judge and the Historian, 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. Carefully exposing the twists and turns of the various trials, Ginzburg also takes the opportunity to reflect more generally on the similarities and differences between the roles of the historian and the judge. Standing in the tradition of Emile Zola's famous J'accuse polemic against the Dreyfus trial at the end of the last century, Ginzburg's book demonstrates the continuing potency of intellectual rigour and passion against political opportunism and dishonesty at the end of this century.
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