Narrating European History in the First Half of the ‘Age of Extremes’

In the years between the aftermath of the First World War and the Second World War, political and cultural historians narrate and reconstruct the history of the idea of Europe. Their common aim is to find the elements of a common European mind. In 1932, Benedetto Croce publishes the Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono. The key to unravelling the history of Europe is, for Croce, Freedom, a notion expressed politically and ideally in the nineteenth century, in the age of liberalism. And that the totalitarianism of the twentieth century radically deny. On the background are the widespread consideration of a radical historical ‘crisis, of Western society and culture; in the catastrophic version of the twilight (Spengler), in the universalist and less reactionary and nostalgic version of the ‘crisis of civilization’ (Huizinga). Ernst Robert Curtius, seeking and finding in classical antiquity and in the Middle Ages a vast European literature, strives to find in the present the reasons of the permanence of a European community based on the values expressed in its literature. In their classes, offered in the same years, at the end of the Second World War, Lucien Febvre and Federico Chabod narrate with similar tones the process of formation of a European self-awareness. From all this emerge three great political myths: the State/nation; Europe; Civilization. These myths characterize, albeit with profound metamorphosis, the second half of the twentieth century, and seem to survive even in the early decades of the twenty-first century.