Lettres d’Europe

(Letters from Europe)

Authors: Patrick Besson, Jacques Borel, Pierre Bourgeade, Serge Bramly, Michel Butor, Annie Cohen-Solal (“Lettre d’Italie”), Laurent Dispot, Jean Duvignaud, Dominique Fernandez, Viviane Forrester, Eric Neuhoff, Jean-Louis de Rambures, François-Olivier Rousseau

Europe is our homeland. Europe was the homeland of the medieval knights bachelors and the Renaissance painters, the homeland of all those enlightenment thinkers. Europe was our homeland until the day fear, death camps and the holocaust taught us to thoroughly loath or despise ourselves. Since then, we have relied on customs regulations and agricultural summits to gradually renew our European fellowship. Notwithstanding, bearing a book in one hand and a notebook in the other, we have travelled to and fro, ten times from Edinburgh to Sofia, from Lisbon to Leningrad. We have got to know this ideal polygon that binds us one to another.

One question there is that we simply cannot fail to ask. Here in the midst of this onslaught of fashion and passion, the European cultural identity, that which makes us what we are, does it really still exist? A dozen French writers set off to the four corners of the Europe of Twelve (the one we are currently building, the other, bigger version, will exist one day). They have tried to answer this question by consulting their peers from Amsterdam to Barcelona and from Copenhagen to Athens. A discussion is planned in Paris in 1988. This book presents the letters sent by each of the “twelve” after their return.