Eighty Years of Federalist Commitment in Europe

Michel Theys
Editorialist of the daily bulletin Agence Europe

Jean-Francis Billion, Wilfried Loth, Jean-Pierre Gouzy, Daniela Preda, Angelica Radicchi, Fabio Zucca (eds.)
Les fédéralistes en Europe des années 1930 à la fondation de l’Union européenne des fédéralistes (Paris – décembre 1946), Annexe: soixante-dix ans de campagnes fédéralistes pour une Europe unie et fédérale (1946-2016)

Presse Fédéraliste and UEF France, Maison des Européens de Lyon, 242 rue Duguesclin, 69003 Lyon, www.pressefederaliste.eu, coll. Textes fédéralistes, n° 16, 2018, p. 216, € 20, ISBN 978-2-9558710-5-8.

Dedicated to four French Federalists who died recently, this book has been conceived as an Introduction to the history of the modern federalist movements in Europe, and it ends with the foundation in Paris of the Union of European Federalists (UEF) on December 15, 1946, a moment of history which became the object of a Symposium that this work represents. In its first part, the historian Daniela Preda (University of Genoa) defines how the British federalist school influenced the birth of this organization, and she goes back to its genesis in Italy. Then other contributions shed light on how the European idea, and the Federalists, evolved in France from the thirties to the Liberation and the end of World War Two (Jean-Francis Billion). Professors Wilfried Loth (University of Duisburg-Essen) and Fabio Zucca (University of Insubria) did the same work concerning Germany and Switzerland. This part is completed by a testimony of the journalist Jean-Pierre Gouzy, who, being present at the inaugural meeting, reminds us that «it would probably never have taken place without the repercussions of the Ventotene Manifesto of 1941, without the European Resistance and personalities such as Henri Brugmans, Henri Frenay and Altiero Spinelli» and also the action of intellectuals such as «Jaspers, Spendler, de Rougemont, Lukács». For her part, Angelica Radicchi (University of Pavia) brings to light what was «the supranational vision» in the UEF publications between 1948 and 1953. In the second part of the book are painted the portraits of three of the founders of the UEF and the French Union of Federalists: Jean-Francis Billion and Jean-Luc Prevel remind us the work of Henri Frenay, the founder of the Resistance movement Combat; Professor Danièle Lochack (University Paris X) usefully remembers the memory of her father Pierre Lochak, born in Bessarabia, who illustrated the fact underlined by Spinelli that the future European Federalists were in a fairly important number longtime or former Communists; finally Jean-Pierre Gouzy comes back on the emblematic figure of integral federalism, Alexandre Marc.