JUDGE AND THE HISTORIAN

A bomb, an anarchists 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 Zolas famous Jaccuse 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 states 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.