"Europe without shores' and the global free flow of ideas

We have defended in previous editorials the point of view that ideas and languages cross the political boundaries, not that because political boundaries do not play a role, but because boundaries have never been watertight and political power is an important actor, but one among many.

We have borrowed the expression from the title of a famous work published in 1954 by the economist, historian and philosopher François Perroux (1903-1987)¹ . The thoughts on Europe of this heir of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), despite the evolution of the historical context, remain perfectly topical and are premonitory in more ways than one.

Among other things, we have to thank him for a better understanding of the asymmetrical and irreversible influences that human groups, particularly nations, exert on each other and for renewing approaches to economic spaces, as distinct from geographical spaces and politically organised spaces. In particular, he developed the concepts of 'growth hubs' and 'development hubs' that Michael Porter, a famous Harvard professor, reinvented forty years later under the term 'cluster', a catch-all word for mass, bundle, or agglomerate, etc., which resurfaced during the pandemic to replace the expression 'source of contamination'.

As we are more particularly interested in cultural and linguistic phenomena, we will use in french the word 'foyer' instead, since 'foyer', which is derived from 'fire', has an infinitely greater trans-civilisational symbolic power than 'cluster', which, if we are to believe the latest version of the Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (DHLF), takes us back to the Old French 'cloître'. But the 2016 version of the same DHLF traces the term back to Old English (before 800) which seems to come from °klutto (modern English clot), from the Indo-European radical °glod, °gloud, with the idea of an agglomerated mass. Cloister and cluster would thus have the same Indo-European root. In any case, the connection with cloister is attractive and certainly correct, but there is nothing to justify the elimination of French words such as "foyer", "centre", "pôle", "conglomérat", "agglomération", "concentration", etc., which have all their legitimacy. All the more so as the use of the word "cluster" is the expression of the double normalising action of the scientific community and the Brussels authorities who imposed the term on translators in the 2000s in the sense of "competitiveness cluster".

So, we resort to the notion of "foyer/source" with the idea that in the "fire" there is its intensity, its propagation and its speed of propagation, potentials that the poor "cluster" is quite lacking.

Perhaps the word is appropriate in a number of technical uses, but culturally, the notion of 'home' can give us the key to many of the phenomena of the circulation of knowledge and ideas to which we will devote the rest of this article.

French, a non-territorialized and non-ethnic language

A theory that still circulates today in the form of a refrain or dogma would have us believe that French originated from Francian, which is supposed to have been the language spoken in Paris and the surrounding area, a language that was selected by the King of France and then extended to the whole of France through his conquests at the expense of regional languages.

As gross errors sometimes have a grain of truth, this idea, supplemented by a quip attributed to the sociolinguist Max Weinreich, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"² , is now flourishing and reappearing in unexpected forms.

Thus, to requalify the policy advocated by Abbé Grégoire in his famous 1794 report to the National Convention, "Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d'anéantir les patois et d'universaliser l'usage de la langue française" (Report on the necessity and means of annihilating the patois and universalizing the use of the French language), Michel Feltin-Palas, lover of the French language and regional langages that he is, whose columns we often publish, uses this formula: "A policy that has a name: "ethnocide", i.e., the destruction of the culture of one ethnic group by another, more powerful ethnic group. "³

Let us forgive Michel Feltin-Palas this concession to the spirit of the age where excesses of language are daily bread. But such a shortcut poses a serious problem of definition.

First, one could ask the inhabitants of the former regions of Picardie or Languedoc-Roussillon if they feel they constitute an 'ethnic' group. In the second case, is the ethnic group in question the inhabitants of Paris and its surrounding territories or all the people who spoke or wrote French in the 13^th century? The question is important because at that time, like today, the extension of the French language did not coincide at all with the territories included in the Kingdom of France. The Nouvelle Histoire de la langue française, published in 1999 under the direction of Jacques Chaurand, maps this out in a chapter entitled "L'extension géographique du français et les frontières de la France" (The geographical extension of the French language and the borders of France)⁴ , which allows us to verify that there is no coincidence, far from it, between the spread of a language and the political borders, which does not mean that these variables are independent of each other, but they have their own laws of development. And this phenomenon will never cease to expand.

One should also know that at that time and until the 19^th century, French, depending on the region, may not have been spoken by the lower levels of society. Nevertheless, the extremely rapid development of legal and administrative documents in French, often with a mixture of local features, during the 13^the century in territories inside and outside the kingdom of France, and even in distant lands, shows that its spread was far from marginal as a written language, still little standardised.

French is therefore not to be confused with the language of Paris, and this new koinè, like Greek in antiquity, is above all a non-territorialized and non-ethnic language. The question remains as to which centres were responsible for the diffusion of French⁵ . We refer to an abundant literature on the subject which is not unanimous, but none of which confirms the nonsense which lingers in the minds of many French people.

As for Abbé Grégoire, this is really another subject. He could have promoted, and this was apparently his ambition, the Enlightenment in the French people and the social ascension of the citizens through French, the common language, instead of a radical monolingualism, there is no doubt about that. To call him a "genocidaire" is to join the ideological and linguistic extremes which are flourishing on all sides and are a real nuisance for our societies.

 

Al-Andalus

The European Conference on Plurilingualism, which the OEP organised in Cadiz in collaboration with the University of Cadiz on the theme of "Plurilingualism between diversity and universality", took place in a region of Europe which we consider to be an exceptional source of lessons for the period we are living through.

Andalusia was a zone of tension between religions, between Islam and Christianity, but not only. It was a zone of intellectual tension between theology and philosophy, between traditionalist clerics and religious philosophers who wanted to reconcile science and religion, in debates which had their counterpart in Christianity in the 13^th century. But there is more. Andalusia, with its capital Córdoba from the 10^th century to the 13^th century, was a place of considerable exchange between the East and the Islamic West, i.e. Andalusia, and then between the Islamic West and Christianity.

Alexandria

From the 3^th century BC until the 5^th century, that is to say for almost a thousand years, Alexandria, following in the footsteps of Athens, was the major intellectual centre of the Mediterranean area. It was the centre of a vast network of cities, including Athens, Pergamon, Rhodes, Antioch and Ephesus, to which Rome and Constantinople were later added. Books and scholars moved easily between them in the thriving marketplace of ideas⁶ . The library and the museum were more than the symbol of this influence, but rather its pure concretisation as a centre of conservation and a center of creation, based on an idea supposedly put forward by Aristotle. It is roughly estimated that more than 800,000 manuscripts were deposited and brought together in the library through a major acquisition policy. Euclid (3^rd century BC), Ptolemy (1^st century AD) and Galen (2^nd century) were residents.

The most brilliant period was the Hellenic period. After the Roman conquest, the library continued to flourish, but entered a slow decline with Christianisation, the schism and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. By the 5^th and 6^th centuries, book production had declined considerably, and libraries and state schools had become scarce. What remained of the Roman elite no longer spoke Greek and translation from Greek into Latin was non-existent. Philosophers were frowned upon even in Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Significantly, in 529, Emperor Justinian closed the Academy of Athens, the centre of Neoplatonic philosophy and pagan resistance. The philosophers fled to Persia, taking their books and teachings with them⁷ . For the Church, the challenge was and will remain to either destroy or absorb the philosophy, the science and the literature of the ancient world. Erudition had not disappeared, but had found refuge in monasteries where monks sought to reconcile the salvation of souls and the progress of the human mind.

In the West itself, the disappearance of the political and administrative structures of the empire was seen as one of the causes of widespread impoverishment, resulting in the decline of the cities and the retreat into the countryside, aggravated by epidemics and the decline in population.

The transmission and circulation of non-religious ideas had entered a kind of ice age.

The Muslim Empire

The breakthrough came from Mesopotamia, from the legacy of Alexander, from Persia and from the Arab conquests of the 7^th and 8^th centuries. The new Muslim empire was built up over a century and stretched from North Africa to the Himalayas, covering more than 12 million square kilometres - more than the Roman Empire at its height. In fact, it largely covered the empire of Alexander the Great. As Violet Moller points out, this was the first time in a thousand years that 'the countries once united by Alexander the Great were once again ruled by the same ruler'.

Like the barbarian peoples who had swept through the Roman Empire, the Arabs were not numerous enough to control the peoples they had subjugated, people whose civilisation was more advanced and brilliant than their own, still young and emerging from the desert. They had no other option than to withdraw or to maintain themselves by dealing with the populations and powers in place.

And it is the exceptional intelligence of the first caliphs, first the Umayyads, then, from 750 onwards, the Abbasids, characters as brutal as they were visionary and dazzled by the cultures of the surrounding peoples, that in just a few decades they were able to combine trade, extreme wealth, intellectual development and development in general. The enterprise had its federating focus in the immense urban project of Baghdad which, from a small village at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates, became in a few decades an immense metropolis, at the crossroads of the trade routes between East and West, and which in order to develop needed science and technology. It is impossible to go into more detail, but it is worth mentioning some important linguistic facts.

- « In the eighth century, Arabic was standardized from a shapeless collection of oral traditions into an official written language »⁸ .

- « A huge translation programme was then set up from Persian or Pahlavi (written form of Middle Persian) ».

- A new wave of translation began towards the end of the eighth century when a close adviser to the Caliph, who himself possessed Greek, commissioned a translation of Euclid's Elements. The translation movement was boosted by the support of Nestorian Christians, who were numerous in the empire after fleeing persecution by the Byzantine authorities.

- The caliphs did not hesitate to ask the Byzantine emperor to send them scientific texts for translation into Arabic.

- Baghdad had become a centre of culture which attracted scholars from all over the world in many languages.

- In 771, a Hindu astronomical work entitled the Brähmasphutasiddhänta by the mathematician Brahmagupta was introduced. It was through the translation of this work that the concept of "positional notation" was discovered in Baghdad, the basis of our modern decimal numbering, whose foundations go back to the Babylonian empire and which took another six centuries to become established in Europe.

- At the end of the eighth century another major innovation transformed the world of books forever: the appearence of paper. "In 751, the Arabs had crushed the Chinese at the Battle of Talas, in present-day Kyrgyzstan, deep in Central Asia. Two of the prisoners brought back to Samarkand revealed the secret of producing paper from hemp and other woody plants. The first paper mill in the Arab world was built in Samarkand and this innovation gradually spread along the silk roads, reaching Baghdad in 793"⁹ .

- The caliphs knew how to surround themselves with brilliant scientists and engineers of all origins, as long as they were imaginative and enterprising. Among these, the Banû Mûsâ brothers not only played an important role in the management of the great developments of Baghdad, but they also gave a decisive impulse to translation activities. One of the most brilliant translators employed by the Banû Mûsâ, a young Nestorian Christian by the name of Hunayn, "revolutionised the process of translation: instead of merely translating word by word, he exploited his extensive knowledge of Syriac, Greek and Arabic to render the exact meaning of each sentence"¹⁰ . "Hunayn's other great innovation was to collect as many versions of the same work as possible (often in different languages) and collate them to produce an authoritative edition"¹¹ .

The Abbasid Empire fell into decline in the 12th century and its glory ended with the invasion of the Mongols who destroyed Baghdad in 1258.

 

Cordoba

Our analysis of the influence of the city of Cordoba from the ninth to the thirteenth century will be more rapid, because with the emirate of Cordoba, founded by the sole survivor of the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus, swept away by the Abbasids in 750, the city, which is much older, will have many points in common with Baghdad, its one and only rival on the cultural level.

Two points should be particularly emphasised.

The conquest of North Africa and southern Spain by Arab and Berber tribes proved much more difficult than in the Near East. Nevertheless, the Arabs quickly defeated the Visigothic kingdom because of several favourable factors. The Visigothic kingdom was weakened demographically by epidemics, drought and famine, politically by divisions in the kingdom and rebellions of the aristocraty, and socially by the religious persecutions, especially of the Jews. The conquerors were thus able to benefit from divisions and internal struggles and were sometimes welcomed as liberators. Violet Moller describes the society of the Visigothic kingdom in terms which are not very favorable to culture and prosperity: "The success of this warrior society depended on regular victories and thus on battles which would secure them booty and lands. Their authority over the Iberians was that of a proportionally small elite who, unlike the Romans, never really assimilated and did not create a new society. Constant infighting and an increasingly oppressive attitude towards their subjects (especially the large Jewish community of Iberia) led to stagnation in almost all areas"¹² . Therefore nothing to do with the Muslim conquest, which was accompanied by a relative religious tolerance and, on the whole, over a period of five centuries, of a great cultural openness.

In this respect, the second characteristic of Cordoba is that it developed less culturally through translation than through the transfer from the Near East of works of antiquity already translated into Arabic. Nevertheless, before it was partially destroyed and its works dispersed in 971, in a wave of religious intolerance, the library of Cordoba comprised, according to the testimonies around 400,000 works and Cordoba was the largest city in the West and remained so until the middle of the 12th century. It was a leading intellectual centre. The scholars, doctors and philosophers Maimonides and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who were born in Cordoba, practised there until they were themselves the victim to persecution and exile.

Toledo

From the middle of the 12th century, after the hardening of Islam under the Almohad dynasty and then the fall of Córdoba in 1236 faced with the Catholic Reconquista and the withdrawal of the emirate to Granada, the intellectual centre moved to Toledo. After returning to the Christian fold in 1085, Toledo had already received many refugees from Cordoba due to the Almohad persecutions.

The fall of Cordoba in 1236 and the destruction of Baghdad in 1258, both of which occurred almost simultaneously, marked the end of Arab-Islamic philosophy in the West from the point of view of the history of thought, leaving room in the centuries which followed for currents dominated by mysticism¹³ .

Most of the translations of ancient works from Arabic into Latin were done in Toledo, which made it the main centre for the transmission of scientific knowledge from the Muslim world to the Christian world.

It should be noted that in the territories reconquered by Christianity "no thought will grow that can be included in a history of philosophy in Islam"¹⁴. However, it is worth noting the presence in Toledo of a new clergy made up of Benedictine monks from the Abbey of Cluny in Burgundy. Violet Moller points out that "a busy line of communication and travel opened up between Toledo and France, and more particularly with the episcopal schools of Paris and Chartres"¹⁵ .

In this vast movement that began, one person played a central role in the person of Gerard of Cremona, who crossed Italy and the south of France to reach Toledo in search of Ptolemy's Almagest (100-168 AD in Canope, Lower Egypt). But he also found Euclid's Elements and many other scientific works. In this vast movement of translations that spanned the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many works were sent to France to be studied and copied in monasteries and episcopal schools, and then distributed through the vast Benedictine network¹⁶ . After Chartres, Paris, but also Venice, for different reasons, became the main centres of European intellectual life.

Paris

Paris first of all, because the 11th and 12th centuries witnessed strong demographic, economic and urban growth. At the turn of the century, within the walls built by Philippe Auguste between 1189 and 1215, Paris had 50,000 inhabitants. A century later, the population of Paris was estimated at around 200,000.

Christian thought moved from the monasteries to the cities around the episcopal or the cathedral schools.

The debates were centered around between religious and pagan truths, between faith and reason, between philosophy and revelation, which were not without similarities to those which had livened up intellectual life in Cordoba a century earlier. They would end for a time with the canonisation by the Church of Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274), who was himself steeped in by both Christian and classical culture, the institutionalisation of Aristotle and the adoption of Thomism as the official doctrine of the Church in 1323¹⁷ .

Venice and Florence

But Venice deserves special attention, with Petrarch (1304-1374) at the heart of the action, who stayed there from 1362 to 1367. The great project that occupied his entire life was to "recover the very rich teaching of the classical authors in all disciplines and, on the basis of this sum of knowledge, which was most often dispersed and forgotten, to revive and continue the research which these authors had begun"¹⁸ . In the course of his travels and encounters, Petrarch had built up a "cultural network which covered Europe and even extended to the East. Petrarch asked his relations and friends who shared the same humanist ideal as he did to help him find in their countries, their provinces, the Latin texts of the ancients which the libraries of the abbeys, private individuals or cities might possess"¹⁹ . Venice, with a population of around 120,000 in 1300, was also a land of welcom for merchants, intellectuals and adventurers, with a large Greek community. Petrarch aroused vocations there, in particular that of Coluccio Salutati, who, having become chancellor of Florence, according to Violet Moller, "made Florence the heart of Italy's intellectual life in the 14th century and the largest market place for classical texts". In 1396, he invited the Byzantine diplomat Manuel Chrysoloras to come and teach Greek. "Chrysoloras's students were prolific translators who used their newly acquired linguistic skills to produce new and revised editions of classical texts, translated directly from the original Greek"²⁰ . This period proved particularly fruitful and was marked by important discoveries, notably that of Cicero's Letters to his friends Epistulae ad familiares, and that of the manuscript of Lucretius' De rerum natura (99-55 BC). But the most significant event geopolitically and culturally was the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. This fall of the Byzantine Empire led to one of the most important scattering of manuscripts in history. "Thousands of texts that had previously been kept safe in the ancient libraries of the city on the Golden Horn were removed from their shelves and packed into wooden boxes, then laboriously transported by cart to the port and loaded onto ships which took their owners into exile in Europe. Humanist scholars awaited their arrival in Italy, pen in hand, ready to copy, translate and correct them to produce the best and most accurate versions"²¹ .

The Italian and French 'renaissances' were not far off.

The story ends here temporarily.

Everywhere we went, we saw plurilingual populations. The centres of culture have always been in the city, because it is in the city that exchange takes place, but the scholars have always travelled from city to city. Travelling and meeting people remains an essential attribute of the scholar, the scientist, the thinker, quite simply of the enlightened man. It is not mobility which is creative, but the network. The network did not wait for the Internet to exist. We have also seen the effects of intolerance, dogmatism, identitarianism before its time, and of the persecutions. Generally, when societies are affected by these evils, they turn in on themselves and go into decadence, and the revival comes from outside.

Understanding one’s time is the first of all imperatives.