Current crises – such as climate change, the pandemic, and wars – have highlighted the fragility of established patterns and generated a widespread sense of uncertainty. These crises reflect an ongoing, decades-long change in our relationship with the past. History no longer seems to proceed by meaningful adjustments and discontinuities, marching towards progressive civilisation. To avoid losing ourselves, we end up seeking refuge in the eternal present of memory. And so, we ask historians to become popularisers, narrators of small individual stories, dispensers of reparations to those wounded by history ¬– in order to soften the sense of rupture between acknowledgement and understanding. Reflecting on what we are asking of history today, the author explains how historians can help us not to give in to the temptation to interpret the past as a manipulation-prone fiction but rather deal with its complexity.

Francesco Benigno teaches Modern History at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.