L’Europe en crise vue depuis l’Espagne : Andrés Laguna (1499-1559), Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (1584-1648), Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853) et José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)

As some past Spanish authors pointed out in their time, when one thinks of Europe, it seems that one cannot but imagine it going through one crisis after another. Their writings deal with the events that took place between 1543 and 1949, starting from Andres Laguna’s narrative when he was in Cologne and ending with José Ortega y Gasset’s speech in Berlin, among the ruins. Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, who travelled from Utrecht to Nijmegen in 1643, and Juan Donoso Cortés, who travelled from Paris to Berlin in 1848, also described the eras they lived in. In the heart of the European mainland, these authors witnessed the major crises affecting what they considered to be their common home. Not only as a geographical entity but also, and mostly, as a mental space. Europe – a legacy from the Greco-Roman era – was at the time mainly shaped by Christianity, which gave it its moral standards. It cannot be denied that the events, which spanned such a long period of time affected Spain although they took place outside its peninsula.