In 1948 Vladimir Jankelevitch, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, claimed that the squandering of the opportunity to purge Paris properly of collaborationist elements after the Second World War would not be so tragic but for the fact that one was talking about Paris. As he put it, ‘it would be of no importance if France was Afghanistan. But France is France, Europe's guide and the conscience of all free men in the entire world; what happens on the banks of the Seine, between the Hotel-de-Ville and la Concorde has a particular importance for man in general’. Jankelevitch's remarks in this most prominent of journals in the post-war French capital, Les Temps modernes, are indicative of the importance, but also the distinctiveness, of Paris in thinking about Europe in this period.

The unproblematic straight line that he drew between Paris, France, Europe and the universal immediately invites objections, of course. But it also implied the question of the space of Europe in the sense of its scope. Europe was in this account both less and more than itself. Ideas about the meaning of Europe impacted on and were formed in micro-spaces such as the French capital and in spaces within it, just as they were in the expanses of the wider non-European world. It was often the case that Paris, or spaces within Paris, were in a sense conceived of or functioned as a stand-in for Europe as a whole, while Europe was also imagined as constitutively depending on its own presence and power beyond Europe.

An examination of ‘Europeanising spaces’ is primarily taken to mean an analysis of spaces in Paris in which ideas about Europe were formulated, expressed, exchanged, circulated, and contested during this post-war period, roughly between the escalation of the Cold War and the end of the Algerian war of decolonisation. The concept of space here is broadly conceived to include the physical urban space that Jankelevitch so usefully points to, but also academic scholarship, intellectuals and their interventions, political movements, cultural groups, cultural performances and institutions, journals, literature, manifestos, photographs and pertinent images.