Stella Ghervas has been invited by the Collège de France assembly, at the suggestion of Profs Samantha Besson, Edith Heard, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Thomas Römer.
This series of four lectures is part of the Collège de France's Europe cycle. In 2022-2023, this cycle will be devoted to the theme "The Power of Peace in Europe". It is common to consider the political idea of Europe as inseparable from that of peace. This age-old project of pursuing a peaceful European (and then world) order, notably through law, should be of interest to us at a time when the Europe-power discourse is asserting itself in a context of rebalancing of powers in the world, and questions of security and defense are regularly invited into European debates, particularly in France. The cycle will host a first series of lectures on the same theme by Perry Anderson in autumn 2022.
Although the modern history of the European continent has been profoundly marked by war, the idea of peace has gradually become inseparable from that of Europe. We follow the process by which these two ideas, initially distinct, gradually merged into one another. The aftermath of five continental conflicts since 1700, which completely altered the political map of Europe, provided an opportunity to rethink peace. Each of these post-war periods generated its characteristic "spirit", which brought together monarchs or political leaders, diplomats and members of civil society. Acting as veritable "peace engineers", they each developed new mechanisms and institutions aimed at preventing conflict, while consciously building on a tradition they saw themselves as heirs to.
Through their history, we will unravel a "red thread" that links the ideals of the Enlightenment to those of the European Union, via the European Concert of the 19th century and the League of Nations, despite the wars that have regularly shaken the continent. We will see how the idea of peace (as a goal and a value) shaped the idea of a politically unified Europe, long before the construction of Europe and even before the era of nation-states.
In this series of lectures, at the intersection of international and intellectual history, we will examine the paths of thought that regularly led political leaders to consciously work towards political unification on a continental scale, in the name of maintaining peace between states. As a counterpoint, we will measure the extent of the gulf that separates the unpredictable chaos of the great wars from the surprising continuity of the idea of peace in Europe over three centuries.
