Abstract
Modernity does not have a monopoly on universalism. The term itself dates from the 19th century. On the other hand, the claim to universality (the idea that certain ideas, or certain practices, are universal in scope, that their validity, authority and legitimacy do not just fit into a local framework or a particular context, but extend, de jure or de facto, to the whole world) has a much longer history, dating back to the emergence of monotheistic religions and the main imperial formations of the ancient world. In this session, we seek to draw out some of the threads of the languages of the universal that have dominated Western Europe over the very long term, and which the Enlightenment inherited while combating them.
After recalling the origins of Christian universalism and the debates sparked by the Antonian Constitution of 212, granting citizenship to all free men of the Roman Empire, we attempt to propose a model of medieval universalism. This was based on Christianity as the religion of salvation, on the Church as the socio-political institution of the faithful, invested with universal dominion, on the philosophical heritage of Greek rationalism and, finally, on the persistence of an imperial ideal inherited from Rome, in rivalry with other imperial models, Byzantium in the first place .
In a second step, we need to understand how these different elements were progressively called into question in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, before being considered obsolete at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, or at least seeing their universalist claim profoundly challenged. Two elements are highlighted : the rise of discourses of sovereignty and the critique of absolute monarchy ; the rise of vernacular languages and the crisis of Latin as the foundation of cultural unity in Christian Europe.
