[FR] Artistic heritage, the European spirit and freedom

Beyond the most immediate current events, the European Heritage Days provide an opportunity to question what underpins Europe and what the ‘European spirit’ is. The political situation in Europe can be interpreted as a crisis of the European spirit, and a reflection on how to overcome such a crisis presupposes a diversion through the European tradition of freedom, its sources and its evolution. It is here that the current European problem and its crisis of legitimacy linked to the crisis of meaning on the one hand, and the question of the transmission of knowledge about the arts which have been, in European history – at least since the Renaissance – one of the essential and major expressions of the invention of the European idea of freedom on the other, come together. If we agree on this hypothesis, responding to the current crisis of meaning in Europe must lead us to renew the thread of the idea of freedom, and the arts are a key entry point in this work of enquiry and genealogy. The central question, then, is this: what kind of education should we give Europeans ‘to remain faithful to the civilisation from which we came’, and what place should the transmission of knowledge of the arts have in it?