The idea of Europe
In the decades around 1800—when the European past was (as in the present) the topic of fierce discussion, contestation, and political (ab)use—ideas of Europe were dominated by the shocking events of the French Revolution and its violent aftermath in Europe and beyond. The European order as well as Europe’s place in the world, was destroyed, rebuilt, and redefined at this moment. Perhaps comparable to the memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust in the twentieth century, the French Revolution and in particular the Terror, acted as a ‘foundational past’ for inhabitants of the long nineteenth century until the First World War.
In the age of eighteenth-century revolutions—just as after the world wars of the twentieth century—contemporaries turned to history, that of their own lives as well as that of society, to make sense of a confusing and troubling world, where previously unimaginable possibilities as well as horrors had opened up. The European past and the idea of Europe as an essentially ‘historical continent’ was (re)invented by the critics of the French Revolution as part of their ideological struggle against the Revolution: an imagined ‘Europe’ was positioned against ‘the Revolution’.
For these ‘counter-revolutionaries’, the Revolution stood for a false idea of freedom and democratic sovereignty, which led to anarchy and despotism at the same time. In opposition to the new revolutionary world of universal principles, the counter-revolutionary publicists proclaimed the concept of a gradually developing European society and political order, founded on a set of historical and—ultimately divine—institutions that had guaranteed Europe’s unique freedom, moderation, diversity, and progress since the fall of the Roman Empire.
[A]n imagined ‘Europe’ was positioned against ‘the Revolution’.
These counter-revolutionaries (ab)used and transformed an older historical narrative that had been developed in the preceding century by enlightened historians. Both the ‘Enlightenment’ and what is conventionally called the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, or more historically accurate ‘anti-philosophy’, were sources of this counter-revolutionary construction of the European past. The importance of the decades around 1800 lay in the fact that these older Enlightenment histories became politicized in response to the perceived threat of Revolution to this European society.
It is clear that the counter-revolutionary Europeanists of the revolutionary age differed markedly from their self-appointed successors in later centuries. Counter-revolutionaries around the turn of the century were certainly not ardent nationalists, who were as horrified by ‘cosmopolitanism’ as the new ‘national conservatives’ of the twenty-first century. On the contrary, they regarded unqualified expressions of ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’ as excessive, immoderate, and fanatical. The counter-revolutionary authors strove for a new synthesis of ‘enlightened cosmopolitanism’ with loyalty to the patria, whether this was a country, a city, or an entity like the Holy Roman Empire.
[O]lder Enlightenment histories became politicized in response to the perceived threat of Revolution to this European society.
Counter-revolutionary Europeanists, perhaps counter-intuitively, did not aim for a return to a primordial order of European civilisation, as the twenty-first century ‘conservatives’ often do. They regarded the Revolution instead as a threat to the gradual development and improvement of European institutions, whose reform they generally applauded. Often being migrants, refugees, and exiles themselves, they did not entertain an anti-immigration discourse. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these counter-revolutionary ideas of European history and civilisation were rediscovered and adapted to new political contexts, shaping in manifold ways our contested idea of European history and memory until today.
Featured image by Dragos Gontariu via Unsplash.