Year XXXVIII, Number 3, November 2025

Bernard Barthalay 

Senior Lecturer, Jean Monnet Chair in the Economics of European Integration at Université Lumière Lyon 2

Jean-Francis Billion

Researcher, President of Presse fédéraliste. 

Mario Albertini
Fédéralisme. Anthologie et définition.
Ed. Bernard Barthalay. Publisher « Presse
fédéraliste », Lyon. Collection « Textes
fédéralistes »January 2026, 301 p.

Even in the twenty-first century, federalism remains a source of frequent misunderstandings. The finitude of the planet requires humanity to strive for an “union of differences” (A. Camus) and, at all levels, to move beyond a culture of war.¹

This culture essentializes the presumed superiority of each sovereign nation over all others and continues to expose peoples to its lethality – even within the European Union, where democratic integration gave way at the beginning of the century to disintegration through wage, fiscal, and social competition among Member States. These forms of competition, imposed and distorted by the States themselves to the detriment of their peoples, reflect an Orwellian reversal: so-called “free and undistorted competition.”

To overcome the prevailing confusion and to shed light on its causes, books are indispensable. The French-language federalist bibliography is already substantial. Yet one book was missing: a work capable of presenting the sources of federalism and tracing the real historical development of this social and political form since its modern invention at the Philadelphia Convention (1787), thereby offering a definition to French-speaking readers. Mario Albertini (1919–1997) – political philosopher, professor of Mario Albertini’s at the University of Pavia, and President of the Movimento Federalista Europeo (1966–1993) and of the Union of European Federalists (1975–1984) – filled this gap as early as 1963 by publishing in Paris a collection of major texts from this school of thought.²

In 1979 and again in 1993, the author published two new Italian editions with the publishing house Bernard Barthalay and Jean-Francis Billion Il Mulino (Bologna), expanded with additional authors’ texts, a new introduction and sectional presentations, a sixth and entirely new section, and a revised critical apparatus of notes. The aim was to offer a more fully developed definition of federalism within the historical context of the end of the bipolar world. What we publish here is the French adaptation of the latest edition, that of 1993. The French translation of the introduction, the presentations of the first five sections, two texts absent from the 1963 edition – one by historian Ludwig Dehio, translated from German, and the other by federalist Altiero Spinelli, translated from Italian – as well as Albertini’s own sixth and new section (European Identity and the Crisis of Reason), is the work of one of us, Bernard Barthalay, who had already translated another major work by Albertini, The National State (Fédérop, “Federalist Texts” series, 1978).

Albertini’s anthology brings together texts – often little read – by authors who are sometimes little known, and which together help establish what, within a heritage of remarkable breadth, deserves to be retained for the purpose of definition. Albertini explains what can legitimately be understood by the term federalism: a contribution to the understanding of historical processes, approached from a materialist perspective – wars between states and class struggles; unity and division; concentration and dispersion of power; and crises of national and colonial state systems.

The publication of this anthology in France comes after the centenary of the birth of a mutual friend, our comrade Bernard Lesfargues (1924–2018) – writer, Occitanist, translator, and publisher, and editor-in-chief of Le Fédéraliste (1961–1974 and 1984–1988), the French edition of Il Federalista, the political journal founded by Albertini in 1959. Likely the translator and editor of the 1963 anthology, Lesfargues was the inspiration behind, the co-founder of, and later the sole driving force of Éditions Fédérop, based first in Lyon and later in Périgord (1975–1999). Tribute is owed to him, as well as to two other companions of our publishing endeavor: Jean-Pierre Gouzy (1925–2017) – a close collaborator of Resistance figure Henri Frenay, founder of Combat and co- founder of the Union of European Federalists (1946) – almost an exact contemporary of Lesfargues, who acted as intermediary for Albertini with S.E.D.E.I.

¹ Albertini, M., “Culture of Peace and Culture of War,” Il Federalista, 26th year, 1984; French edition Le Fédéraliste, 1984, no. 1, p. 9.

² Albertini, M., What Is Federalism? Paris, S.E.D.E.I., 1963