# The First Eurofederalist Manifesto from 1814 Every movement has its origin myth, and much of current organised European federalism has a particularly cinematic one: 1941, a fascist prison island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi writing the Ventotene Manifesto on cigarette papers, smuggled to the mainland by Ursula Hirschmann. It is a genuinely great story. It deserves to be told, and I told it myself as one of many story beats in [The Lost History of European Federalism](https://nikodemskrobisz.substack.com/p/the-lost-history-of-european-federalism). But it is not the beginning of the story, far from it, and the insistence of many if not the majority of the people in the organised eurofederalist movement on treating it as the beginning is a problem. The Union of European Federalists (UEF) — founded in 1946 by the federalist resistance movements, with Spinelli’s _Movimento Federalista Europeo_ at its core and Spinelli himself soon at its helm — and its youth wing JEF have built their entire institutional identity around Ventotene. The annual pilgrimage-seminars on the island; the [manifesto enshrined as founding document](https://federalists.eu/federalist-library/the-ventotene-manifesto/). And as UEF has together with Paneuropa Union shaped much of the EUs history, this has left its impact on our european institutions: The main building of the European Parliament in Brussels named _Altiero Spinelli_; the Spinelli Group of federalist MEPs. Within much of the organised movement, the history of eurofederalism effectively begins in 1941, and anything before it is treated as prehistory — vague, aristocratic, not really _ours_. Ask a JEF activist who wrote the first eurofederalist manifesto and you will get one answer, _Spinelli_, delivered with the confidence of catechism. Catechism is the right word. Somewhere on the road from resistance movement to Brussels fixture, the organised movement traded the risk and labour of thinking for the safety of commemorating; its historical memory is now curated like a grant application — one saint, one island, one annual seminar, deliverables met; time for drinks at the beach, financed by grants and membership fees. And the answer is wrong by 127 years. In October 1814 — while the crowned heads of Europe were assembling in Vienna to carve the continent back into its pre-revolutionary shape — a financially ruined ex-count who had fought at Yorktown and a nineteen-year-old future historian published a pamphlet in Paris. Its title: _De la réorganisation de la société européenne, ou de la nécessité et des moyens de rassembler les peuples de l’Europe en un seul corps politique, en conservant à chacun son indépendance nationale_ — _On the reorganisation of European society, Or on the necessity and the means of gathering the peoples of Europe into a single political body, while preserving for each its national independence_. Read that subtitle again. A single political body; national independence preserved. That is the definition of federalism — _united in diversity_, stated as a constitutional formula, a century and a quarter before Ventotene. This essay is about that text: who wrote it, what it actually says, why it — and not the venerable proposals before it — deserves the title of the first eurofederalist manifesto, and why the movement’s collective amnesia about it is not a harmless quirk of institutional memory but a strategic self-wound, that is haunting and weakening the eurofederalist cause. ## Paris, October 1814 But let’s first take a step back and look at the context this first manifesto was written and published. The French Revolution and Napoleonic wars had shaken up the continent. Napoleon has abdicated in April; he is on Elba, plotting. The Bourbons are back in the Tuileries. And in Vienna, the congress of the victors is gathering to answer the question of the age: how do you organise Europe so that the quarter-century of republican revolutions and devastating intereuropean war never happens again? The official answer, drafted by Metternich and Castlereagh, was a reactionary restoration of a balance of powers: restore the dynasties, ring-fence France, and keep the great powers in a carefully calibrated equilibrium of mutual threat. Peace as a permanent armed standoff, managed by monarchs. Henri de Saint-Simon looked at this and called it out for what it was: a mechanism for producing the next great war (as he would be proven right a hundred years later in 1914). He opens the pamphlet by describing the scene with almost cruel precision — Europe, after a violent convulsion, dreads new calamities and longs for lasting rest; the sovereigns of all its nations are assembling to give it peace; all appear to desire it, all are celebrated for their wisdom — _and yet they will not arrive where they wish to go_. The balance of power, he argues, is not the opposite of war; it is war’s standing administration, a system whose stable state is armed rivalry occasionally boiling over. If Europe wants peace, it does not need a better equilibrium between its states; it needs common institutions standing above them. There is no salvation for Europe, he concludes on the first pages, except in a general reorganisation. He wrote this while the Congress was still unpacking its luggage. Within a year the Congress had already needed the Hundred Days and Waterloo to reboot itself; within decades it was dead; within a century its logic had delivered the continent into Verdun. Rarely has a pamphlet aged so well against the diplomacy it attacked. The two men who wrote it were, on paper, nobody’s idea of ideal prophets. Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, was fifty-four and had already lived several complete lives: a teenage officer in the American Revolutionary War who fought under Washington at Yorktown; an aristocrat who renounced his title during the French Revolution; a land speculator who made and lost a fortune; a man who had spent 1812–13 in poverty and mental breakdown and had only just clawed his way back. His co-author and secretary, Augustin Thierry — credited on the title page as _son élève_, his pupil — was nineteen years old and would go on to become one of the founders of modern French historiography. (Saint-Simon had a habit of hiring secretaries who turned out to be geniuses; Thierry’s successor in the job was a young man named Auguste Comte). The pamphlet was addressed, tellingly, not to the sovereigns gathering in Vienna but _to the Parliaments of France and England_ — to elected chambers, over the heads of kings. ## What the text actually says Under the early-nineteenth-century prose and the architecture of the argument is startlingly familiar. **First: the diagnosis.** Europe’s wars are not accidents of wicked tyrants alone but the structural product of its organisation — sovereign states with no common institutions above them are condemned to permanent rivalry. The medieval order, for all its faults, had possessed something the modern state system lacked: a shared framework — the Catholic Church (which as I pointed out in the last essay, function often like a Proto-EU) and canon law — standing above the aristocrats. The Reformation and the rise of sovereign states had destroyed that framework without replacing it, and Europe had been at war with itself ever since. The task is not to restore the old religious unity, which is dead and remains dead, but to build its modern, secular, constitutional successor. **Second: the method.** The reorganisation must happen on two levels at once — and this is the pamphlet’s decisive innovation. Internally, every European state must adopt representative, constitutional government; Saint-Simon, in his thoroughly Anglophile phase, held up the English parliamentary constitution as the best yet devised. Externally, the states so constituted must be joined under a common _parlement européen_ — a European parliament standing above the national governments, with its own powers, deciding the common interests of Europe. Not a congress of ambassadors, not an arbitration court of princes: a legislature. The homogeneity of internal institutions is the precondition of the external union; you cannot federate absolutist monarchies, only constitutional states of the same fundamental type. **Third: the constitutional design.** The European parliament in this manifesto is bicameral, on the English model of that times. The chamber of deputies is to be drawn from the professions whose horizons naturally exceed the nation — commerce, science, the magistracy, administration — men whose work, as the text puts it, is useful to all peoples rather than bounded by national custom, and who are therefore capable of the _generality of views_ that must be the spirit of the European constitution. Alongside them, a chamber of peers, including twenty members chosen from those — or the descendants of those — who have rendered the greatest services to _European society_ through science, industry, the magistracy or administration, endowed by the parliament itself with landed income so that their loyalty runs to Europe and not to any national paymaster. The parliament is to levy resources, adjudicate disputes between member states, direct great public works — canals, connective infrastructure binding the continent together — organise continent-wide public education, and cultivate through shared institutions what the text unashamedly calls a European patriotism: the _esprit de corps_ of a common political body. **Fourth: the sequencing.** The union does not begin with everyone. It begins with a core: an Anglo-French parliamentary union, the two great constitutional (or newly re-constitutionalising) powers binding themselves together first. Germany — then a loose confederation of thirty-nine states — joins as soon as it organises itself under representative government, and Saint-Simon predicts it will be next. The union then expands outward, nation by nation, as each people adopts free institutions, until the whole continent is gathered into the single political body of the title. Now let’s translate this into the vocabulary of 2026. A core group of states integrating first, with others acceding later: _two-speed Europe_, the concept we still argue about [today](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYl38AX8kCw). Membership conditional on the internal character of a state’s institutions — representative government as the entry ticket: the _Copenhagen criteria_, drafted 179 years early. Legitimacy built through great connective public works and shared education: the Coal and Steel Community’s method, Erasmus, the TEN-T corridors — Monnet’s _de facto solidarity_ through concrete achievements, anticipated in full. A directly constituted European chamber whose members owe their position to Europe rather than to national governments: the European Parliament, which took until 1979 to be directly elected. Saint-Simon and Thierry did not use the word federalism, but they and commenters of their text, already spoke of a _[federal constitution](http://davidmhart.com/liberty/FrenchClassicalLiberals/Comte/CenseurAnthology/C1-11-en.html)_ and of an European Parliament. Their scheme for that has still an unmistakable aristocratic residue: hereditary peers, a franchise filtered through the useful professions rather than universal suffrage, a constitutional-monarchist frame, and an embarrassing Anglophilia; especially coming from a Frenchman. Judged as a democratic constitution by the standards of 2026, the pamphlet fails. Nobody should pretend otherwise, and I am not going to. But judged as _architecture_, it contains, assembled in one place for the first time, nearly every structural element of the federalism we practice and argue about today: supranational parliamentary institutions with independent legitimacy; the coupling of external union to internal constitutional form; enlargement by conditionality; the core-and-periphery sequencing; integration through infrastructure and education; the deliberate cultivation of a European political identity alongside — not instead of — national ones. And then there is the closing line, the sentence with which the pamphlet ends and which alone should have secured it a permanent place in every federalist’s memory: _The golden age of the human race is not behind us, it is before us; it lies in the perfection of the social order. Our fathers did not see it; our children will arrive there one day; it is for us to clear the way for them._ That is an optimistic forwardism, stated in 1814 — the temperament that looks at history and sees an unfinished construction site rather than a lost paradise. If the European movement ever wants a motto that is not a bureaucratic compromise, it has been sitting in a Paris pamphlet for two centuries. ## Why 1814, and not 1693 or 1713 The obvious objection (unless you are still believing Spinelli started Eurofederalism, but then I cannot help) — and I raise it myself, because in the last essay I called the Abbé de Saint-Pierre the first true European federalist — is that plans for European union are much older. There have been several proposals for Union-like projects even in medieval times. Penn sketched a European parliament in 1693; Saint-Pierre published his _Projet de paix perpétuelle_ in 1713; Rousseau condensed it, Kant transfigured it into the federation of free republics in 1795. If precedence matters, why do I pick this 1814 pamphlet? Because there is a difference between a unionist _project_ and a federalist _manifesto_. Penn and Saint-Pierre wrote peace plans addressed to monarchs and princes. Their schemes were unions and leagues of sovereigns: diplomatic machinery designed to abolish war between existing rulers while leaving those rulers, absolutist warts and all, exactly as they were. The internal constitution of the member states was none of the plan’s business; a despotism and a republic could sit side by side in Saint-Pierre’s senate, provided both renounced war. This is precisely why Rousseau, who admired the idea, pronounced it hopeless: peace was rational for the peoples and irrational for the rulers, and a plan that depended on the voluntary self-abolition of princely ambition depended on nothing at all. By the end of the eighteenth century the whole tradition had run into a wall — a genuine intellectual deadlock between federative peace, which seemed to require submission to the existing sovereigns, and free government for the people, which required their overthrow. Looking at the Napoleonic wars, many of the first eurofederalists so to speak, came to this conclusion: You could apparently have a united Europe of despots or a Europe of free peoples at war; not both. _De la réorganisation de la société européenne_ is the text that broke the deadlock. Saint-Simon and Thierry’s answer was to fuse the two problems into one: the union of Europe and the constitutional liberty of Europeans are not in tension, because the union must be _built out of_ representative governments and _governed by_ a representative parliament. Free institutions inside the states; a free institution above them. The peace project and the republican project, which the eighteenth century discourse still had treated as incompatible; or at least in Rousseaus case as impossible to combine realistically; became a single programme. Every federalism worth the name since — Mazzini’s Young Europe, Hugo’s United States of Europe, Proudhon’s federal principle, Ventotene itself, the EU’s own accession criteria — stands on that fusion; on the great synthesis. And what also matters: Penn and Saint-Pierre petitioned rulers. Saint-Simon and Thierry appealed _past_ the rulers, to parliaments — to the representative organs of the peoples — publicly, programmatically, in the middle of a live constitutional moment, demanding not a restoration of the monarchies but a reorganisation of the continent on republican ideals. That is what a manifesto is. As I wrote in the last essay, the first eurofederalist proposal came from Saint-Pierre, and that honour stands untouched; but it took another hundred years of Enlightenment discourse — Rousseau wrestling with the Abbé’s plan, Kant grounding perpetual peace in a federation of free republics, the Revolution putting citizens above subjects, Napoleon disappointing everyone by turning from a Hero of Liberty to a Roman Empire Larper — before the idea of European union fully merged with republican, liberal constitutionalism. Only after that merger could a proper eurofederalist manifesto be written at all, because only then did the idea have a _people_ to appeal to rather than a monarchs to petition. Saint-Simon and Thierry wrote it — the first public, programmatic appeal for a parliamentary Europe of free peoples in a single political body — and it went to press in October 1814, under the high up noses of the Congress of Vienna. ## How the manifesto was buried What happened next is the same story I told in the last essay, so I will compress it. The pamphlet fell into a unreceptive Europe. The Holy Alliance was consolidating; the censors were already at work. A text proposing that elected parliaments should stand above kings was not going to flourish in Metternich’s continent. Saint-Simon moved on — to industry, to the very wild writings that would make him cross the political spectrum all over the place and make the accidental grandfather of both socialism and sociology — and the pamphlet became a footnote in his own biography, remembered, when at all, as an eccentric prelude to the more famous eccentricities. But the idea did not die; it went underground and resurfaced within a generation, carrying the same fused programme of republican liberty and European union: The first real eurofederalist movement, long before UEF and even long before PU, Mazzini’s _Young Europe_ was founded in 1834. Cattaneo on the barricades of Milan in 1848 demanding the United States of Europe, Hugo doing the same at the Paris Peace Congress in 1849. Proudhon’s crafting an entire eurofederalist philosophy in 1863. The republican federalism of which the 1814 pamphlet was the first full manifesto became one of the great currents of the mid-nineteenth century — and then it was buried, deliberately and thoroughly, by the monstrosetiy that defeated it: the post-1848 nation-state with its schools, its conscript armies, its press, its propaganda, its national myths and its manufactured hatreds; dividing europeans who had risen up together before. Bismarck’s iron and blood did not just beat the federalists politically; the states he exemplified spent two generations erasing the federalist current from the continent’s memory, teaching every European child a national genealogy in which the idea of Europe simply does not appear. The nationalists did not merely win the 19th century. They rewrote its history — and they rewrote ours. Eurofederalism as an ideas has flourished in the 19th century for the first time; but it was smashed and then erased from much of the history books by the nationalists. So when Spinelli and Rossi sat on Ventotene in 1941, they were not starting a new tradition. They were — and Spinelli knew it — rejoining one. The federalist literature that reached the island came via Luigi Einaudi, who pointed the prisoners to the English federalist writers, Lionel Robbins and Lord Lothian among them; Einaudi himself stood consciously in the long line running back through the 19th century to the Enlightenment projects. Ventotene is a magnificent and very significant link in a chain. But the mainstream of todays eurofederalist movements has turned it into the chain’s first link, and that is a falsification the manifesto’s own authors would have probably never committed. Nor is the amnesia reserved for the distant ancestors. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi re-founded _organised_ eurofederalism in 1923 — eighteen years before Ventotene — built it into a mass movement that drew Briand, Stresemann, Churchill, Adenauer, De Gaulle and Einstein, and supplied the ideas and proposals that lead to the creation of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. ## Cult, canon, and what the amnesia costs us Let me be fair about why the year-zero myth around Ventotoe exists. Institutions need founding stories, and the UEF’s is true, heroic and legally accurate: the _organisation_ was born from the wartime resistance, and Spinelli was its greatest figure — he dedicated his entire live to the unification of Europe; the Parliament building carries his name for defensible and sensible reasons. The problem is not that the movement honours Spinelli. The problem is that honouring curdled into canonisation, and canonisation leads to airbrushing. Because the saint was not a saint. He was an activist — a great one — in a long chain, and he arrived at federalism from a very specific direction: the far left. Spinelli joined the Italian Communist Party at seventeen, spent a decade as a militant, and went into Mussolini’s prisons in 1927 as a communist cadre; the party expelled him in 1937 — for objecting to Stalin’s purges, not to communist revolution. He carried the far left convictions with him onto the island; and four decades later, in 1979, he entered the first directly elected European Parliament as an supposedly independent MEP, but on the Italian Communist Party’s list. None of this is secret. All of it is airbrushed out of the commemorative version, in which he floats above history as an ideologically weightless martyr of the European idea. His scripture carries the same fingerprints. The reason why the Ventotene Manifesto is so revered and mythologized today, is mostly because barley anyone reads it really; most just pretend to have done so. If at all. Read the whole Ventotene Manifesto, not the excerpts. It declares outright that the European revolution _must be socialist_. It declares that the democratic political methodology will be _a dead weight in the revolutionary crisis_. It envisions the new order being formed through _the dictatorship of the revolutionary party_, with democracy to be granted afterwards, once the enlightened minority has built the federation the masses were never asked about. And it calls for a socialist federation not of Europe but of Europe _and the world_ — the united Europe demoted to the first instalment of a federated planet, a means rather than an end, instead of the political form of an actual civilisation with an actual two-thousand-year history. This was Lenin’s method with Stalin subtracted, and it shows on every page of the Vententone manifesto: federation first, consent later. To his lasting credit, the older Spinelli spent decades trying to democratise what the younger Spinelli had conceived — Spinelli campaigned for a directly elected Parliament, the 1984 Draft Treaty. But anyone wondering where the Union’s chronic legitimacy problem comes from should notice that it has two parents, not one: Monnet’s technocratic stealth, and Ventotene’s leninistic idea of vanguardism. The two men fought bitterly over method their entire lives — and on the one point that matters most they agreed without ever noticing: that the peoples of Europe were something to be organised rather than asked. Unlike the republican eurofederalists of the early 19th century, who envisioned European Unification as a bottom up process; both Spinelli and Monnet believed more on top-down approaches. And here the biography and the cult compound each other into something larger: an appropriation. The tradition Spinelli joined in 1941 was centuries old and politically plural — republican at its core, liberal in its Enlightenment prime, with socialist tributaries like Proudhon — and it belonged to no faction, because a constitutional design for a whole continent cannot belong to one. We, the European people, are a diverse bunch, with very pluralistic ideas and visions - which is a good thing, because democracy and progress thrive on a diversity of opinion and thougths. Ventotene claimed it for a single ideological family: it declared the old dividing line between left and right obsolete in one breath and prescribed a socialist revolution in the next. I have quoted that dividing-line passage approvingly myself; but it reads differently once you notice what follows it. And when the post-war movement then fixed federalism’s birthday to 1941, the appropriation was made permanent: the socialist re-founding was promoted to the founding, and the liberal, republican centuries — Saint-Pierre, Kant, the manifesto of 1814, Mazzini, Hugo, Kalergi the liberal aristocrat — were quietly erased out of a story they had co-written. Reclaiming the full genealogy is therefore not antiquarian pedantry. Uniting Europe should not be a leftist project; it should be a project for all Europeans; and a project, that allows for a plurality of views, as long as they are within democratic boundaries. By canonising the text instead of criticising and contextualising it, the eurofederalist movement handed the job of contextualising and quoting its own scripture to its enemies. [In March 2025, Giorgia Meloni](https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/meloni-italian-parliament-ventotene-manifesto-federalism-socialism/) stood in the Italian parliament and read the buried passages aloud — the dead weight, the dictatorship of the revolutionary party, the abolition of private property — and concluded, to uproar and suspended sessions, that this was not her Europe. The eurofederalists movement’s answer was mostly outrage. It should have been an argument, and a eurofederalist tradition confident of its century depth could have delivered one in a single sentence: the manifesto is a war document and one link in a long chain; its authoritarian and leninistic smudges belong to 1941, not to eurofederalism today; and the tradition is older, deeper and freer than any one text written on any one island. Even more: The EU is in many ways a heir to the Roman Republic; something being a part of, maybe even a reactionary italian nationalist like Meloni might appreciate. A eurofederalist movement, that aknowledges a pluralistic and century old canon can say that. A Spinelli cult cannot, because a cult has bet everything on the one text being holy — which is how Europe’s federalists managed to lose a news cycle about their own founding document to a post-fascist prime minister. That is what the amnesia costs. Beneath all of it lies the deeper confusion: the movement has allowed the founding of the _organisation_ to be mistaken for the founding of the _idea_ — and the costs of that mistake are no longer theoretical. What follows is my argument, not archival fact; judge it on its merits. ## My argument for a pluralistic eurofederalist canon **First:** a federalism that begins in 1941 is, by construction, a reaction — an anti-war reflex, a trauma response to nationalism’s implosion. That framing worked for the generation that remembered the trenches and the camps. It is visibly failing now, because the memory is gone. Tell a twenty-year-old European that Europe must federate so that Verdun never happens again and you are answering a question she has not asked. A movement whose entire justification is _never again_ has nothing to say once _again_ stops feeling possible — which is exactly the rhetorical vacuum the sovereigntists have spent two decades filling. Or even worse: tell around, Europe must federate to achieve Spinellis Socialim, and you won’t find any friends in the eastern half of our continent, where people still remember the communist terror. The combined political center-left and left in Poland has less than 6% of the seats in the Sejm for reasons. **Second:** the year-zero myth voluntarily surrenders centuries of intellectual pedigree at the precise moment we need it most. When the far right claims the European past — Rome, Charlemagne, the whole larping — a movement that dates itself to 1941 has unilaterally disarmed; it has agreed, in advance, that the deep past belongs to the nationalists and that federalism is a recent administrative invention. This is madness, because the opposite is true: the european federalist idea is _older_ than every nationalism on this continent, all of which were manufactured in the nineteenth century, and the 1814 manifesto predates the unification of Germany by fifty-seven years and of Italy by forty-seven. We, the eurofederalist, hold the senior claim and yet some of us behave like shy squatters. **Third**: the buried tradition contains something Ventotene alone cannot supply — a _positive_ foundation. The republican, Enlightenment federalism of Saint-Simon and Thierry does not derive the union from catastrophe; it derives it from the ideals of the French Revolution preceding it; from liberty, from reason, from the conviction that free peoples under common institutions can build something no nation can build alone, and that the golden age lies ahead. That is a federalism you can offer a generation that actually longs for a future: a construction project. It is also, not incidentally, a eurofederalism with an answer to the technocratic-soullessness problem I wrote about last time — because it comes with history and pathos built in, the pathos of the Revolution and the Enlightenment, of parliaments over kings and futures over supposedly golden pasts. Beneath all three lies the deepest issue: A united Europe cannot be built out of law, regulation and policy alone — and the men of 1814 already knew it. Their parliament was not just a legislature; it was, quite deliberately, an identity machine: continent-wide public education, great common works binding the peoples together physically, institutions designed to breed what the text unapologetically calls a European patriotism — the _esprit de corps_ of a common political body. Saint-Simon and Thierry understood, decades before the nation-states perfected the technique divide and weaponize the peoples of europe, that political bodies live on memory, story and identity, not on statutes. This is precisely the half of the blueprint the post-war builders mostly left out. The EU has erected the legal skeleton of a federation and almost none of its cultural flesh except of a few programs like Erasmus; and a polity that offers its citizens directives but no story becomes what the Union too often is today — an ahistoric, grey, distant spaceship hovering above the continent, liked for its usefulness and loved by no one. Nobody sings about the internal market. Nobody dies for a regulation. If we want Europeans to carry the union in their hearts the way generations were drilled to carry their nations, we have to give the union its memory back: teach the deep history of European thought from the Romans onward — the _ius gentium_, Roman Liberalitas, Caracalla, Erasmus and the Republic of Letters, Saint-Pierre, the manifesto of 1814, Mazzini and Hugo, Kalergi and Briand, Spinelli on Ventotene — and reconnect today’s mission of uniting Europe with the roots it actually has. So no, I am not proposing to erase Spinelli the way his cult erased his ancestors. I am proposing something better for him: honesty, and company. A cult has one saint and one scripture and defends both with the anxiety of people who suspect the shrine is smaller than it should be. A canon has a deep and broad shelf — Penn beside Saint-Pierre, Saint-Pierre beside Rousseau and Kant, the 1814 manifesto beside Mazzini and Hugo and Proudhon, and Kalergi and Spinelli at the modern end of the line, greater for the company, not diminished by it. ## Where you can read the Reorganisation of European Society for yourself The pamphlet _De la réorganisation de la société européenne_ itself is [freely readable on Gallica](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k83331f), where the french governments _Bibliothèque nationale_ keeps it for free. If you like me do not speak French and refuse to learn it, you can find the key passages from the manifesto in Ghiţa Ionescu’s, _The Political Thought of Saint-Simon_ (Oxford University Press, 1976), which conveniently is availble publicly for free over at the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.130352). A review of the original by Augste Comte is available [publicly in English](http://davidmhart.com/liberty/FrenchClassicalLiberals/Comte/CenseurAnthology/C1-11-en.html) aswell and also gives a very good summary. Unfortunately, there is no publicly available version of a complete english translation — or rather there was none until now. If you wanted one, you needed to download the OCR generated .txt version from _Gallica_, shove it through an AI translator and let it review by a french friend and go through it with them; thats what I did, but that’s really not the most citizen-friendly access to such an important text. This is why, I will herby make _De la réorganisation de la société européenne_ for the first time publicly and openly available in English; my little contribution to our eurofederalist canon. You can download [it here as a .pdf,](https://leveret-pale.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/On-the-Reorganisation-of-European-Society.pdf) though you should notice, that as it is mostly AI generated, it isn’t necessarily up to the high academic standards I think such crucial text should be translated. So I hope that some experienced professional translator(s) may be found in due time, to create a better translation with than this amateurish one; including critical commentary and more attention to lingustic nuance and so on. [Download the PDF here](https://leveret-pale.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/On-the-Reorganisation-of-European-Society.pdf) ## A European Federalist Library That absence of this foundational text of european federalism is not a quirk of the book market; it is the amnesia in physical form, a consequence of nationalist priorities and the supression of eurofederalist thought in the late 19th century and early 20th century. And it repeats across the entire canon. The foundational texts of European federalism are scattered across Latin, French, German and Italian and other European Languages, and where translations exist at all, they lie buried in out-of-print academic volumes. Penn survives as a stray PDF on the website of a Danish peace academy; Saint-Pierre exists on blurry scans; Kalergi’s Paneuropa is barely in print in any language, a century after it built a mass movement. Meanwhile every nation-state on this continent maintains subsidised critical editions of its national classics — whole institutes exist to keep minor national poets in circulation — and the Union itself translates every directive, every regulation, every annex on product labelling into twenty-four official languages. It has never found it worth translating the texts that explained why the Union should exist at all. So let me end with a demand concrete enough that even a grant committee could act on it in the middle of the european summer break: translate the canon. A European Federalist Library — the foundational texts professionally translated into English and the other European languages, annotated, open-access, free to every citizen on the continent — would cost less than a single Brussels conference season and do more for European identity than a decade of them. If anyone wonders what rebuilding the cultural foundation of a united Europe looks like in practice, this would be a nice start; creating an open acess library of our eurofederalist history, before even more gets forgotten. If you are a translator or publisher or academic or just someone with a lot of energy or ideas how to make this real, feel free to shoot me a message. --- Two hundred and twelve years ago, a ruined veteran of the American Revolution and a teenager looked at a continent of triumphant kings and wrote down, that Europe’s peoples belonged in a single political body under a common parliament and a federal constitution— and that the golden age was not behind us but ahead, waiting for someone to clear the way. The way is still being cleared. The least we can do is remember everyone who worked on it — and the crew stretches back to Rome. And of course, continuing the good work. --- --- _This is a spin-off from_ [[The Lost History of European Federalism]]_, which tells the full two-thousand-year story of the European idea._ --- _The picture used to illustrate this post is Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’, Apotheosis of Homer, 1827._