The Historian and the Judges

Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice. Translated by Antony Shugaar. New York: Verso, 1999.

There is a sort of general democratic interest in showing how a concrete trial functions.

--Carlo Ginzburg, Libération (October 9, 1997)

Social conflict in Italy during the late 1960s and early 1970s had a particular breadth and impact. Radical-left movements like Lotta Continua championed factory occupations and large demonstrations and saw the Communist Party and labor unions as stifling the workers' revolutionary project. ¹ Elements within the state responded with "the strategy of tension": exceptional police brutality and an instrumental approach to extreme-right violence (the cause of more deaths than extreme-left violence), often carried out sub rosa in conjunction with state secret services and intended by some to destabilize the state and create the basis for an authoritarian regime. In the mid-1970s, Italy promulgated a series of exceptional laws that bolstered police powers at the expense of individual rights and gave a special place to informers; increased the time an individual could be held in preventive detention; and made individuals of the same group liable for the same sentence despite differences in individuals' actions. ² Faced with declining expectations for revolution, factions of the extreme left turned to vanguard party terrorism. The "years of lead" culminated with the Red Brigades' kidnapping and assassination in 1978 of Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democrat party, who had been negotiating a "historic compromise" with the Eurocommunist Italian Communist Party that would have given it a place in the government. The Red Brigades believed such an agreement would have sealed what they saw as the Communists' betrayal of the prerevolutionary social movements of the past decade. The Italian Republic responded with a heightened campaign of repression which threatened both the extraparliamentary left and the foundations of Italian democracy.

In recent years, as Italy has worked to adopt a new constitution and to make the economic and political changes necessary to participate in the European Union, it has elided confrontation with important legacies of the decade after 1968--the New Left's radical critique of neoliberalism and the existence of a state still compromised by profoundly antidemocratic and illiberal activities. Italy had responded to the "years of lead" by changing elements of normative legal processes rather than establishing exceptional courts whose jurisdiction would have ended when abolished (and whose sentences are more easily amnestied as an act of civil reconciliation than are the individual sentences delivered through the normative judicial system). Italian politicians appear to have feared that amnesty and abrogation of the exceptional legal codes promulgated during the "years of lead" would disrupt the nation's amnesia. ³

In July 1988, the Italian Republic arrested and charged three militants of the long-defunct Lotta Continua, the most important extraparliamentary left organization in Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Adriano Sofri, who was a student insurgent against the Italian Communist Party in the early 1960s and a founder of Lotta Continua a few years later, before becoming a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and a frequent contributor to the left press in Italy, and Giorgio Pietrostefani, another Lotta Continua leader, were charged with ordering the murder of the police officer Luigi Calabresi in May 1972. A third member, Ovidio Bompressi, was charged with having shot Calabresi. Calabresi had been implicated in the fatal four-story fall of a detained anarchist as he questioned him concerning a bank bombing in Milan in December 1969--the subject of Nobel Prize-winner Dario Fo's play "The Accidental Death of an Anarchist." ⁴ Lotta Continua had immediately launched a virulent campaign against Calabresi, making him the symbol of illegitimate state power, but the police had never been able to build a case against the organization for Calabresi's homicide. Sixteen years after the assassination, the situation changed with the confession of a onetime Fiat factory worker and...