“Estates General of Europe” (European Idea in France during the Congress of Vienna)

This article examines ideas about the future of the European political order promulgated by the French social thinkers during the Congress of Vienna. The author analyzes the project for the creation of a European “political body” drafted by C.H. de Saint-Simon with the contribution by A.Thierry, as well as the supplement to this project published shortly before the Battle of Waterloo, and L. de Bonald’s work Reflections on the General Interest of Europe, which appeared in early 1815. Saint-Simon and Bonald each made a significant, albeit unequal, contribution to the construction of a vision of a united Europe. Saint-Simon’s project proposed a reorganization of social and political institutions that largely replicated the institutional design typical of the British political system. His concept almost completely ignored the historical and cultural diversity of the European nations; in his view, European integration presupposed the unconditional acceptance of liberal political values by all participants. In his model of a European constitutional order, Saint-Simon sought to unite knowledge and property by recruiting their bearers — those capable of rising above group and national interests — for transformative efforts on an international scale. Bonald’s reflections on pan-European interest were also oriented toward political homogenization, but on a fundamentally different basis. In his view, the international order capable of ensuring peace and stability in Europe was, above all, a moral order. Bonald’s Europe was bound by a hierarchy of values, in which individual freedom was clearly subordinated to Christian dogma and the values of social communities. It is precisely the issue of values that prevents Bonald’s works on Europe from being thrown to the archive of obsolete political ideas, positioning him instead as an ideological precursor to contemporary right-wing populists, Euroskeptics, and post-liberal theorists.