“The court of history”, the lesson of Paolo Mieli

We live in an age of rewriting, even erasing historical events and phenomena. Thus, in recent years, we have witnessed stances and epochal declarations with heads of government who apologize in the name of their country for wrongs and omissions, for the role played by their states in rough and terrible events more or less distant.

The past is therefore increasingly subjected to a real process in which the theses, even the most widely accepted ones, are debated as in a courtroom.

In his latest work, "Il tribunale della storia" (Rizzoli, 2021, pp. 380, also e-book) Paolo Mieli succeeds, with the brilliance of the great popularizer and the acumen of the attentive observer of today, to explain in what does the application of a "judicial" method consist of for a review of the facts and figures of history. It does so by retracing the past from Fidel Castro to Mussolini, passing through Vittorio Emanuele III, Philip V and even Jesus of Nazareth and starting from two fundamental assumptions: first of all, the real trial, necessary and precious, is the one against any type of falsification; secondly, there cannot be absolute, immutable truths because the court of history, in the age of widespread information, is always assembled to issue new sentences.

This is confirmed by Paolo Mieli:

“The title of the book is deliberately provocative and implies an important reasoning if you want to make history correctly. First, historical research should take place as a trial, a kind of appeal process. There is usually a truth delivered by the first reconstructions. Next, the historian's job is to check that the first court ruling in history was appropriate. It is necessary to understand, for example, if the first judgment was not the fruit of the point of view of the winners and totally crushes the losers. Then there could be many appeals processes, but the first is fundamental because it has to put things right starting from three assumptions ".

What prerequisites?

“The first is the examination of further papers, of further documents with respect to the first historical pronouncement. The second assumption - which should be clear to anyone involved in history - is that the reason cannot be on one side: there is no good all good, there is no bad all bad. Last assumption: a historian who confirms to a thousand per thousand the point of view of his predecessors or who makes the original thesis his own is a scholar who probably did not want to see some elements. He did not do his job well because there are always changes and examining with a careful eye even those that seem secondary aspects can lead to shake up the overall picture, can lead to unexpected novelties. This is the historian's way of proceeding, a way of proceeding typical of a trial in which there is an accusation, there is a defense, there is evidence that is refuted, checked, sifted ".

Why should the expression "court of history" be understood in a provocative sense?

“The expression court of history is used in an almost ironic way because every self-respecting historian must know that his sentence can never be considered final. There will always be a new trial, a new scholar pronouncing a new sentence. It is a continuous and infinite process and it is basically the beauty of the story ”.

Do you never arrive at a truth then?

“Any historian knows that there are no absolute truths. If I write about history to show that my side was right, that some were on the side of good and others on the side of evil, I can also be very successful, I can also write an important book but I'm not doing the job of the historian. From a historical point of view my work is destined not to leave a trace because I am a kind of political agitator who supports his own idea. A well-disguised political agitator, but not a historian. If, on the other hand, I am capable of overturning a judgment, then I am working as a serious scholar of history: I keep a path open that others will then follow after me or that they will take and then follow alternative paths in their turn ".

Where does this conception of his in the study of history come from?

“My method was greatly influenced by the two masters who were supervisor of my thesis work: Renzo De Felice and Rosario Romeo. The first, with the method described above, studied the figure of Mussolini, the second that of Cavour. Dealing with history means paying a debt to these two masters for me, a need that has grown over the years as I devoted myself to journalism. De Felice and Romeo have shaped my way of being intellectual and studying the past ”.

Did this method learned from De Felice and Romeo also influence your way of doing journalism?

“Certainly: when faced with a story I have always wondered if what I was told was the truth, if those who passed for good were really good and if the reason was all on one side. After all, as a journalist I acted as a historian: as a historian of the present ”.