ABSTRACT
Introduction When talking of the ‘House of Europe’, the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, recently said that it is ‘the greatest achievement of our European civilisation since the Enlightenment’.1 While there are many European leaders who invoke the Enlightenment movement, seeing it more or less explicitly as one of the founding moments of Europe, there are, on the other side, not a few politicians ready to support a ‘Christian Padania, a new Vandea’ against ‘a Europe without God [. . .], daughter of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution’,2 as a representative of Italy’s Northern League (Lega Nord) party put it. It is a well known fact that historical discourse is an integral part of political debate, but our concern here is rather to highlight how pro-and anti-Europeans alike, albeit with different objectives, make reference to the century of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, thereby establishing close links between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.3 In other words, this chapter takes into account the ideas of eighteenth century philosophes and anti-philosophes as a tool to unveil how much some of today’s discourses on Europe have a tendency to oversimplify its history considering the past a sort of unstoppable and unavoidable path towards the European Union. These are discourses and counter-discourses that are to be found not only in the political sphere, but also in the historiographical debate. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall favoured a rapprochement between Eastern and Western Europe that encouraged research into the links between the past and the present, an investigation further stimulated by the birth of the European Union. During the 1990s and the first years of the new century – in the wake of undisguised pro-Europeanist enthusiasm – studies of the idea of Europe and its historical construction in the early modern age multiplied. Thus there emerged renewed enquiries into the links, more or less direct, between certain philosophes and the European Union and/or Europe (the two terms are not always kept separate).4 Indicative of that period are the words used by the historian Krzystof Pomian, director of the Scientific Committee of the Museum of Europe in Brussels, who was prepared to recall Christian traditions in the European Constitution ‘on one crucial condition: add immediately that the Europe of today, while
having many Christian foundations, was built by the Enlightenment’.5 These correlations abound and, in some cases, relate to the origins of anti-Europeanism, whose matrices are brought back into the fold of anti-Enlightenment and antiRevolutionary culture,6 although resistance to Europe in reality involves a diversity of political orientations. So is the European Union the daughter – for better or for worse – of the Enlightenment, while anti-Europeanism drinks from the wells of antiphilosophie? This discourse and counter-discourse are examined here by giving voice to men of the eighteenth century: the French Enlightenment thinkers (or the philosophes, to use the eighteenth-century term), in particular Montesquieu and Voltaire (given that nowadays their names recur persistently), and the antiphilosophes, who organized a vigorous opposition to the Enlightenment movement throughout Europe. The chapter is divided into three sections: the image of Europe in the culture of the Enlightenment is analysed (section 1) in particular as related to the specific features that, according to the Enlightenment thinkers, characterized Europe as compared to other civilizations (section 2); the last section is devoted to the antiphilosophique culture and to the link between the Enlightenment and Europe through the eyes of opponents of the Enlightenment, a theme underinvestigated so far by historiography. For both philosophes and antiphilosophes – who looked suspiciously at the interest philosophes had in other cultures, especially China and the Turkish empire – the idea of an non-compact Europe, of a world divided by deep internal fractures, prevailed. Accordingly in reading their writings one inevitably ends up demolishing every rhetorical, linear and simplistic interpretation of the construction process of the ‘House of Europe’. Indeed, this seems to be a good time to do so: with the fading of Europeanist ardour, the current political crisis of the European Union has cooled the passions of even the most fervent historians, making the subject less intense and thus also less conditioned by visions of a teleological character.7
