Érase una vez Europa

Europe is the ambition of Periclean Athens and the idea of democracy; the annihilation of enemies and the sermon on the mount; the tyrants described by Tacitus and the moral reflections of Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius; the fierce persecution of heretics and the call for tolerance; the predation that sails the seas with explorer ships and the criticism of the exploitation of defenseless populations; the Index of Banned Books and the Great Fight for Freedom of Expression; the sinister business of slavery and the Declaration of the Rights of Man; the Gulag and the fall of the Berlin Wall; the Holocaust and the defeat of Nazism. Europe has spawned a changing gallery of monsters. But it has also given birth to the men and women who have faced and defeated those monsters. With great sensitivity and narrative power, combining literary imagination with the most serious historical knowledge, Fernando García de Cortázar reminds us in this very personal biography of Europe that the Old Continent cannot be eternally identified with its shadows: its tyrants, its wars, its misdeeds and rogues. Quite the contrary, it must also be seen in its lights, it must be contemplated in its heroes: those people who, in the most critical hours, understood that the only possible civilization is the one that unites human beings against barbarism, men and women who knew how to illuminate paths of justice, kindness, tolerance and freedom.