The Idea of Europe: Enlightenment Perspectives

Catriona Seth · Rotraud von Kulessa

jun 2017 · Open Book Classics Libro 7 · Open Book Publishers

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In view of the challenges—many of which are political—that different European countries are currently facing, scholars who work on the eighteenth century have compiled this anthology which includes earlier recognitions of common values and past considerations of questions which often remain pertinent nowadays. During the Enlightenment, many men and women of letters envisaged the continent’s future in particular when stressing their hope that peace could be secured in Europe. The texts gathered here, and signed by major thinkers of the time (Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, Hume or Staël for instance), as well as by writers history has forgotten, present the reflections, with a couple of chronological extensions (from Sully to Victor Hugo) of authors from the long eighteenth century—the French Empire and the fall of Napoleon generated numerous upheavals—on Europe, its history, its diversity, but also on what the nations, which, in all their diversity, make up a geographical unit, have in common. They show the historical origins of the project of a European union, the desire to consolidate the continent’s ties to the Maghreb or to Turkey, the importance granted to commerce and the worries engendered by history’s convulsions, but also the hope vested in future generations.

The Idea of Europe follows its sister edition in French, L’idée de l’Europe au Siècle des Lumières, also published by Open Book.

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Catriona Seth is Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls. Her research focuses on French literature of the long eighteenth century, and her books include a biography of Évariste Parny, Évariste Parny (1753-1814). Créole, révolutionnaire, académicien, and La Fabrique de l’intime. Mémoires et journaux de femmes du XVIIIe siècle. She is the editor, in Gallimard’s prestigious Pléiade series, of Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses and, most recently, of works by Germaine de Staël. She was a lecturer at the University of Rouen and a professor at the University of Lorraine. From 2013 to 2014 she was a World Leading Researcher at Queen's University, Belfast.

Rotraud von Kulessa is Chair of French and Italian Literature at the University of Augsburg. She is the author of Démocratisation et diversification - Les littératures d'éducation au siècle des Lumières and Entre la reconnaissance et l’exclusion. La position de l’autrice dans le champ littéraire en France et en Italie à l’Epoque 1900. She has written widely about French, Italian and Spanish literature from the eighteenth century to the present. In 2016/2017 she was Visiting Professor at the University of Lorraine (Nancy) specialising in eighteenth-century French literature and in 2016 she was made an Officer of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques.