La «Revue philosophique et réligieuse» di Charles Lemonnier e i dilemmi dell’europeismo ottocentesco (parte prima)

Abstract

The article, of which the first part is published here, intends to study in depth the mid-nineteenth-century Europeanist movements and in particular the initiatives promoted in the Fifties by the French philosopher-jurist Charles Lemonnier, who was among the organizers of the Congress of the International League of Peace and Freedom, held in Geneva in 1867. He also published a book, The United States of Europe, in 1872 and a journal of the same name. In the Fifties Lemonnier played an important role in the railway and banking activities of the Pereire brothers, famous Sephardic entrepreneurs of Sansimonian culture and education, as was Lemonnier himself. The latter, of republican tendency and very critical towards Napoleon III, published also, between 1855 and 1858, a magazine entitled «Revue philosophique et réligieuse», with which he intended to specify and perfect the conceptions of republican (also anticlerical) socialism after the failure of revolution of 1848, with its conceptual and ethical inadequacies. Among the collaborators of the «Revue» there was also an important German personality, i.e. Moses Hess, who had established himself as a Europeanist and a communist, as well as a friend of Marx and Engels until 1948, but later turned to Zionism, on which he wrote the important Rom und Jerusalem in 1862. Hess's writings in the journal of Lemonnier constitute a phase of transition between the two aforementioned phases of his cultural and political life, in which he deepened his scientific-naturalistic conceptions in reference to the history and cultures of peoples. In its first part, this article carries out a survey on the premises and contexts for which the deepening of the analyzes on the intellectual contributions provided to «Revue», in particular those of Hess, can be of certain historical and cultural interest.