But his writing matches his wretched end: he committed suicide within yards and minutes of safety. Benjamin was no doubt a mighty mind and gave us his incomparable reflections on the meaning of the modern, commodified city. Some such conclusion would sort well with Traverso’s saturation in a Jewish historiography for which Walter Benjamin is first prophet. But Traverso’s epic roll call theorises the accumulations of sadness, here richly documented, which frame and suffuse two and a half centuries so completely that they might as well be counted out as historically deleted. Traverso compiles a lengthy succession of glorious defeats – of revolutions roused up and mobilised with the lofty rhetoric of Saint Just, the Communards, 1905, the Finland Station, due homage to Catalonia, and in a concluding diminuendo, the Black Jacobins, the betrayal of Salvador Allende and Danny the Red painting the town during les événements de mai 1968: all of them tableaux of doomed heroism and hope.ĭefeats are not failures, says the old Left. He assembles a mighty cast, dominated by his great original, Marx himself, and conceiving of the inheritance of the Left as a sumptuous record of strictly cultural achievement – memoirs, novels, movies, paintings, letters, journals – each summarised and criticised in almost choking accents, but each done sympathetic justice and with an accurate pedagogy.

Enzo Traverso, writing, one would guess, in his second language, colours his tale in the dark opulence of Jewish eschatology. At a time of the breaking of nations, when the horizon is darker than it has been for nearly 60 years, this mournful lament comes on its cue.

Enzo traverso left wing melancholia