What Jean Monnet Wrought

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Year 1976

Of all the public figures of twentieth-century Europe, Jean Monnet is one of the most sympathetic and inspiriting. He can justly be called a great man who, in a life guided by a pragmatic idealism, has done his best to heal the deep wounds which Europe has inflicted on itself and to place international relations on a basis of reason and the recognition of a common interest among nations. He has been called the founding father of the European Community, and, if not everything has turned out as he foresaw, that is the normal fate of political innovators.

The publication of M. Monnet's Mémoires is, therefore, something of an event - all the more so in that there is no very easily accessible record of his utterances and opinions. Despite his influence M. Monnet has remained a somewhat shadowy figure, and this book, with its forthcoming translation into English, should do much to make readers in other countries than France - particularly the younger ones - more aware of what he has achieved and how he has achieved it.

Jean Monnet's career has been a long and varied one, taking him from the family brandy business in Cognac - the one French town with a street called after the British nineteenth-century freetrader Cobden - to dealing with the supply of food for the Allies in London during the First World War and the purchase of arms for the British government from the United States in the Second. Between the wars he worked for the League of Nations and as an international banker. After 1945, he became the first Commissioner for the Plan for Modernization and Equipment of France, and founded an organization which he himself had suggested and which was to become an example of what can be done to modernize and strengthen a country's economy. Then came what is rightly called the Monnet Plan for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). After its acceptance by Adenauer and Schuman, M. Monnet became the first President of the High Authority in Luxembourg. Then in early 1955, after the failure of the European Defense Community (EDC), he resigned in order to found the Action Committee for the United States of Europe, whose leader he remained until it was dissolved in 1975.

Thus, in 88 years, M. Monnet has lived much history and met many of the actors in it. But it is an odd feature of these recollections that this side of things hardly seems to interest their author. Famous men are mentioned, but the description of them is perfunctory, and there is little in the way of the striking vignettes usually associated with great memoir-writers. What M. Monnet remembers of those with whom he has dealt is their alignment rather than their characters. Also he has not much to add in the way of facts to what is already known by the historian of contemporary politics. It is curious to find him refusing to join de Gaulle in London on the grounds that the latter should not have formed his Free French committee before General Nogues had made up his mind about the Vichy government. It is interesting to hear his account of exchanges with the British at the time of the Coal and Steel plan. But these are historical crumbs.

On the question of whether or not the shipwreck of the EDC treaty could have been prevented, he writes:

To try to discover what would have happened had things fallen out otherwise is an exercise of which I am incapable. To rewrite history on the bases of hypotheses which have not materialized is not only a fruitless task, but, in my eyes, meaningless.

But precisely for most historians the causes of the failure of EDC - and, therefore, the alternate ways in which things might have developed - are of great interest, an integral part of the formation of a historical judgment on these events. For M. Monnet, on the contrary, such discussion appears to inhibit (or, at any rate, fail to further) future action. His attitude, like that of many convinced reformers, is resolutely anti-historical. This is legitimate enough in itself, but inevitably detracts from the interest of those long sections of the book which are, in effect, history. These memoirs have a curiously public air about them. An autobiography must concern its author in the first place, but it is a pity that the other figures on the stage should be quite so ghostly and that, in the narration of events, so little should be given away.

Of course, M. Monnet himself - his beliefs and aims, his strategy and tactics - is the subject of this book. Throughout it are scattered fascinating and revealing hints about its author's methods of work and ways of exercising influence:

I have never acted in any other way: first have an idea, then look for the man with the power to apply it.

How many times have I succeeded at the last moment in substituting the text which I had patiently prepared for that which an irresolute or indifferent politician had failed to perfect.

. . . in this matter of drafting my only rule is to work as much as is necessary, to return to the drawing board a hundred times if a hundred times are needed for the result to satisfy me.