The idea of Latinity, which originated in antiquity and gained credence during the medieval period, encompasses the cultural domain of the Latin language and the common heritage of all its Romance descendants. Disguised under the concept of Romanité, it emerged in the French historiographical debate that marked the end of the Ancien Régime, when the history of France came to be viewed from the perspective of an ancient battle between the descendants of the Gauls and those of the Franks. In the 19th century, the idea of Latinity re-emerged as a consequence of the passionate debate on the origins of nations and the purportedly perennial conflict between two cultures, the Roman Empire and Latin Church vs the Germanic tribes of northern Europe. While in the German (and to some extent in the Dutch and English) self-image, a “Germanic” and Protestant religious identity was sought in the historical master narrative of resistance against imperial Rome and its latter-day monarchical and ecclesiastical successors (the papacy, Spain, France), conversely, France could champion its national identity as part of a broader concept, the “Latin race”. This Latin race was not understood as a biological consanguinity of descent, but rather as a linguistic-geographical one.

Among the French Romantics, the idea of Latinity surfaced in their juxtaposition of northern and southern climes and countries, and was consolidated in the nascent philological study of the Romance languages. The pioneering works of François-Marie-Juste Raynouard and Friedrich Diez focused on the study of the ancient and modern Latin languages; and in the historiography of the Restoration period, the master narrative of a deep-rooted conflict between the “two races” of France, Gallo-Romans and Franks, was popularized by Augustin Thierry.

In the second half of the 19th century, and in reaction to Pan-Slavic and Pan-Germanic trends, a somewhat confused Pan-Latinist discourse emerged, covering cultural, political and economic spheres, each with a distinct connotation.

The tenets of Pan-Latinism influenced the foreign policy of the Second Empire in the 1850s, and found expression in the Euro-Mediterranean ambitions of Napoleon III, in both Italy and Spain. A single currency area was established on 23 December 1865: Belgium, France, Italy and Switzerland signed a monetary agreement establishing the Latin Union; it lasted until 1 January 1927.

By the late 1850s, French foreign policy in South America referred to “Latinity” as a means to contrast North American ambitions in that part of the New World. In 1863, in his book Du panlatinisme: Nécessité d’une alliance entre la France et la Confédération du Nord, Alfred Mercier defined Pan-Latinism as the “rising ambition of certain peoples, led by the French, to compete with the Anglo-Saxon race to be at the forefront of progress”.

Pan-Latinist ideals not only played into the hegemonic ambitions of the Second Empire, but also (albeit in a somewhat nebulous and loosely-defined form) into the dream of Occitan cultural revivalists to build a confederation of Neo-Latin nations across existing states. Again, Pan-Latinism was often a reaction against the perceived dominance of Slavic, Germanic and even Anglo-Saxon peoples on the European continent and around the Mediterranean basin. In 1860, Cyprien Robert – an expert on Slavic studies and literature, lecturer at the Collège de France (1852-57) and editor of the Revue des deux mondes – published a book in Paris tellingly entitled Le panlatinisme: Confédération gallo-latine et celto-gauloise. Contre-testament de Pierre le Grand et contre-panslavisme and warning France, “the Romance world and the Gauls” against the dangers of new power blocs emerging in the world: Pan-Slavism, the United States and China. In response, a confederation should be founded consisting of the Romance- and Celtic-rooted nations of Europe: French, Belgian, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as English (or “Anglo-Gallic-Latin”), Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Cornish. The Greeks were also included. Other nations were excluded owing to their constitutional association with enemy states: the mixed-race Rhinelanders, Venetians, Tyroleans and Latin-Greeks, Romanians, Moldavians/Wallachians, Transylvanians, Bessarabians and the French Swiss.

In the following years, other Pan-Latinist fantasies emerged, designed to support their promoters’ federalist and internationalist vocations. From the late 1860s, the dream of a Latin confederation, that is to say, an international cultural alternative to the established states-system, appeared to offer the Occitan and Catalan peoples a way out of the frustrations experienced by those two minority groups within their respective states. This peaked in the 1870s in several “Latinist” events, such as the fifth centenary of Petrarch’s death (Avignon, 1874), the participation of the Romanian elder statesman Vasile Alecsandri at the Jeux Floraux of Montpellier in 1875, and the Fêtes Latines (Montpellier, 1878).

The idea of Latinity was fundamental in the federalist credo of the “Red” félibre Louis-Xavier de Ricard, author of Le Fédéralisme (1877) and founder in 1878 of L’Alliance Latine. Revue internationale de littérature, histoire, philosophie, sciences et arts. In contributions to this journal (1878), Ricard argued that the Latin peoples were “ethnically and historically designed for federation”: already federated spiritually, they should unite politically as well, with France at their head, to counteract the power and the growing ambitions of Germany and Pan-Germanism. Ricard held that the character of the Latin peoples was averse to unitary states, as was demonstrated by the history of Italy, Spain and France (especially southern France). (Ricard distinguished this Latin character and tradition sharply from the “caesarian” monarchism that “resulted from the simultaneous establishment of Catholicism and the Empire”.)

Pan-Latinism made use of the racial discourse that was used at the time to describe all human relations, including European alliances. The pamphlet Aux Latins: Un dernier mot, by the journalist and philanthropist Marc-Amédée Gromier (1883), argued that the fate of the Mediterranean peoples depended on the outcome of the Latin union. According to Gromier, a Latin alliance would be the prelude to the formation of the United States of Europe and to the establishment of a universal humanitarian federation, guardian of world peace. Indeed, the goal of the Latin movement was to promote peace through a sense of respect for “the balance between races”. Gromier developed this ideal of a freedom-loving Latin union further in his 1885 Alliance Latine et Zollverein Méditerranéen suggesting a Mediterranean fiscal union in order to provide a peaceful counter-balance against German and “Anglo-Saxon” predominance. According to Gromier, the union of all the Latin peoples would facilitate the establishment of the “United States of Europe”, as well as the definitive establishment of perpetual peace, thanks to an alliance with the United States of America.

An Italian aspect of Pan-Latinism emerged during the World Fair held in Rome in 1911 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Italian independence. Italian emigrant communities in Latin America used the occasion to express their continuing affinity with the mother country under the auspices of a shared Latinity; thus the lighthouse built on the Gianicolo Hill, overlooking the city, by “Gli Italiani di Argentina”. A small plaque was put up nearby in 1928 (the centenary of Uruguayan independence) by the city of Montevideo praising Rome as “the mother of Latinity”.

Pan-Latinism culminated during and after the First World War, when Latinity became a commonplace opposition to “Teutonism” and all that the German enemy stood for, in what was seen as a life-and-death struggle between civilization and barbarism. In the years following the First World War, Latinity also played a significant role in the rapprochement between France and Fascist Italy, playing as it did on pre-1914 antecedents as well as a sense of “family” relationship between peoples that considered themselves descendants of, and heirs to, the Roman Empire.

Pan-Latinism continued a north-south-divide in (western) Europe dating back to the Reformation, and couched this in the new vocabulary of “races” as the actors of national history. But it was also a response to various major trends in 19th-century Europe. To begin with, there was the emergence of competing alliances and power blocs; and the French need to constitute an economic and political counterweight to the growing power of Germany in Europe, the British Empire in the Mediterranean, and the US in the Atlantic. Furthermore, Pan-Latinism arose in response to the national movements of Europe. Notably, it gave France a platform for an assertive cultural diplomacy (manifested also in the establishment of the Alliance Française), and provided, under the aegis of a shared “Latinity”, an opportunity for certain national minorities (notably, Catalans and “Occitans”) to develop cross-regional and transnational networks.