‘Notre heritage europeen,’ suggested Jorge Semprun in 2005, ‘n'a de signification vitale que si nous sommes capable d'en deduire un avenir’. Looking perpetually backwards and forwards was central to processes of making sense of Europe in Paris in the post-war period. Yet, for all the validity of Semprun's maxim, it needs to be reconciled with Frederick Cooper's critique of ‘doing history backwards’. Cooper takes aim at the enlistment of history to try to shed light on the present at the expense of ‘what one does not see: the paths not taken, the dead ends of historical processes, the alternatives that appeared to people in their time’. Following Cooper, it has been the aim of this book not to do history backwards; it is not intended as an exposition of the historical origins or sources of the Europe of today, or as a pre-history of how Europe is understood in Paris and France at the start of the twenty-first century. Rather, by examining various examples it has tried to show how the meaning and course of Europe were understood multifariously in Paris in the post-war historical conjuncture.

Yet these specific understandings of Europe do nonetheless have value for reflecting on Europe today, not least through what they reveal about the contingency of putatively settled notions of European identity; the shifts in and clashes over definitions of Europe; the essential plurality and opposition of understandings of Europe; how ideas of Europe and Europeanness presuppose mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion; and the relationship between the experience of violence and the formation of ideas of Europe.

To take a step back, what exactly have been the findings of this examination of ‘Europeanising spaces’ in Paris, roughly between 1947 and 1962? The notion of Europeanising spaces has been employed to point to forums in the French capital in which ideas about Europe were explicitly or tacitly articulated, exchanged and contested. Retrospectively, ‘Europe’ tends to be associated in the post-war period almost reflexively with intergovernmental European integration.