Historiens d'Europe, historiens de l'Europe

Today we are experiencing a moment of rejection of a European ideal, which has, among other things, conditioned more than seven decades of peace on the old continent. Why this crisis which is the bottom of trade of the populist demagogues, in France as elsewhere? How to react to neutralize the forces resorting to the absurd anachronism, to the negationnist error, to the polemic caricature to better mask obscurantist ideologies? The answer given Historians of Europe, historians of Europe is that Europe suffers from a deficit of both historicity and historicization, that the European adventure proposed to the general public is often reduced to a truncated adventure and partial. Much has been written about European construction, about the past of Europe as a collection of national histories and interconflictual temporalities. From Europe as a common referent, there have been approaches, but limited to discontinuous sequences. Yet since the beginning of the XX th century, very large British historians, Italian, German, Russian, French, Belgian, Dutch worked around Europe. Some have invented or promoted another art of writing history by making Europe the instrument allowing a renewal of problems. The others wrote a story that was intended to show that Europe was in the long term a substructure of the imaginary more or less consciously transcending identities. To reinterpret by history the figure of hope and freedom of the spirit that Europe carries in its long duration, and that the patient work of European historians has not ceased to value, to find a desire to be the second part of the XX th century has only realize this is the project of this book which is a book of combat and defense of self-awareness that is necessarily aware of what the other is self .--