ABSTRACT
Thinking and regretting Europe The first part of this book examines the founding moment of modern Europe, the period which, foreshadowed by the Enlightenment, ran from the French Revolution to its most visible European outcome: the Congress of Vienna. All three essays tackle the problem of the use of history in the contemporary rhetoric and historiography on Europe. All too often this has involved an approach that tends to see history, in particular the history of the Enlightenment, as a sort of a highroad towards European integration, and which is based a posteriori on a simplistic canon and an undeviating story free of exceptions and stumbling blocks. It is also a strategy that ignores periods and viewpoints deemed unhelpful to the progress of the European project. The three essays are thus an attempt to contribute to a reconsideration of the European project by reinterpreting certain distinct moments in the history of the continent. The word ‘thinking’ is used in the title above because this first part of the volume focuses on the crucial period of European history in which the first great discourse on Europe emerged, namely the years spanning from the second half of the eighteenth century to the early decades of the nineteenth. While the current political debate tends to depict the Enlightenment as the cradle of Europe and, conversely, characterizes the counter-Enlightenment (a much less studied movement) as the origin of anti-Europeanism, the first essay reveals how such theories are in fact anti-historical. Through a careful reexamination of the sources, Patrizia Delpiano’s contribution explains how, even though Voltaire or Montesquieu did consider the salient features of European society and the constituent elements of Europe, on the whole the Enlightenment did not actually launch a discourse about Europe. Such a debate was instead constructed a posteriori by a historiography ideologically influenced by the post1945 European project and its lofty vocation, but it was a debate that never actually took place at the time: Europe was not a hot topic even for the Enlightenment thinkers who dedicated some thought to it, nor were there shared positions about the continent. What instead prevailed in the eighteenth century was a plurality of voices and visions, which do not fit with traditional Orientalist or postcolonial theories about the birth of a European sense of superiority. Instead
they provide arguments supporting the idea that discourses on Europe (and on other parts of the world) represented an important chapter in the development of a new way of writing history. Thus the debate on Europe was not baptised by the Enlightenment nor indeed by its detractors. The task was instead left to the French Revolution and the Congress of Vienna, tackled by Manuela Ceretta and Giuseppe Sciara in the second and third chapters. Ceretta investigates the ideological rationale and polemical motivations underlying the counter-revolutionaries’ appeal to medieval and Catholic Europe of Charlemagne, while Sciara analyses how discourses on Europe were used instrumentally during the Restoration in order to deal with the internal poltiical struggle. The debates on Europe that developed after 1789 were moulded by a political and historical context in which intellectuals, writers and political actors began to be ever more aware of the strict correlation between domestic politics and foreign policy. As this European moment progressed, a new way of thinking about the continent closely linked to the concept imposed itself, of which the notion of regret became one of the key cognitive elements, hence the second keyword of our title. When the counter-revolutionaries began to attack the nation in the name of Europe and to fight the Revolution in the name of God, Europe began to be regretted for something that no longer existed (e.g. peace, social order) and which in fact had never existed. This manufactured nostalgia became a myth, a memory that would play an important polemical-rhetorical role and serve concrete political objectives. It was no coincidence that discourses on Europe intensified in the moments of greatest crisis, between the First and Second Restorations, when the clash between the old and new France was most ferocious, or following the revolts of the 1820s, when struggles for liberty or for national independence broke out in the east and west of the continent. Thus the notion of Europe was built on crisis or, more accurately, on a combination of crisis and fear. This is of course an old theme: both Marc Bloch in 1935 and Lucien Febvre in 1944-1945 argued convincingly that these concepts are of key importance to understanding Europe, its hesitations and fragilities. So why listen again to the voices that animated counter-revolutionary circles and refocus on Restoration France? Perhaps, because doing so helps to dismantle, in Febvre’s words, ‘this seductive image of a completed Europe that has become the true home of the Europeans’ and to remind us, in the middle of our own difficult moment, that while crisis and trepidation have been an integral part of European identity, they have also nurtured transformations and visions of change.
