Jean Monnet
Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet was a French civil servant, entrepreneur, diplomat, financier, and administrator. An influential supporter of European unity, he is considered one of the founding fathers of the European Union.
Jean Monnet has been called "The Father of Europe" by those who see his innovative and pioneering efforts in the 1950s as the key to establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor of today's European Union. Although Monnet was never elected to public office, he worked behind the scenes of American and European governments as a well-connected "pragmatic internationalist".
For three decades, Jean Monnet and Charles de Gaulle had a multifaceted relationship, at some times cooperative and at other times distrustful, from a first encounter in London during the Battle of France in mid-June 1940 until De Gaulle's death in November 1970. Monnet and De Gaulle have been referred to together as "probably the two most outstanding Frenchmen of the 20th century".
Jean Monnet was the first-ever individual to be designated as an Honorary Citizen of Europe in 1976. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1988, his native country of France honoured Monnet's memory by transferring his mortal remains to the Panthéon in Paris.
Early years
Monnet was born in Cognac, a commune in the department of Charente in France, into a family of cognac merchants. According to Jacques-René Rabier, the values of laicism and republicanism, as well as a strong Catholic tradition, co-existed in Monnet's family. His father, Jacques-Gabriel Monnet, had taken control of a mid-sized distiller and distributor of cognac and had it renamed in 1901 as Monnet Cognac. His mother, née Marie Demelle, was deeply religious; his sister Marie-Louise was a founder of the French branch of Action Catholique, to which Monnet contributed financially. She would later introduce her brother to Pope Paul VI.Monnet did not complete the baccalauréat qualification and instead travelled to the United Kingdom, where he lived in London learning business with Mr Chaplin, an agent of J.-G. Monnet. Subsequently, he travelled widely – to Canada, the United States, Scandinavia and Russia, for the family business, as well as Egypt for health reasons.
World War I
Monnet firmly believed that the only path to an Allied victory lay in combining the war efforts of Britain and France, and he reflected on a concept that would coordinate war resources. In 1914, a friend of the family, Fernand Benon, arranged for young Monnet to meet French Premier René Viviani in Bordeaux to talk about this issue; Monnet managed to convince the French government to agree with him, in principle.However, during the first two years of the war, Monnet did not have much success pressing for a better organization of the allied economic cooperation. It was not until two years later that stronger combined efforts like the Wheat Executive and the Allied Maritime Transport Council were set into motion, adding to the overall war effort.
Interwar period
At the Paris Peace Conference, Monnet was an assistant to the French minister of commerce and industry, Étienne Clémentel, who proposed a "new economic order" based on European cooperation. The scheme was officially rejected by the Allies in April 1919.Due to his experience organizing inter-Allied committees during the war, Monnet was asked to take on the job of Deputy Secretary-General of the League of Nations by French premier Georges Clemenceau and British statesman Arthur Balfour, upon the League's creation in 1919 and after Élie Halévy had declined to take the position, which was reserved for a French national.
Monnet left the League of Nations at the end of 1922. He says "I certainly did not leave out of disenchantment with the League's weakness" and he believed "a great deal more could usefully be done." However, he felt it necessary to devote himself to managing the cognac family business, Monnet Cognac, which was experiencing difficulties. In 1925, Monnet moved to America to accept a partnership in Blair & Co., a New York bank which merged with Bank of America in 1929, forming Bancamerica-Blair Corporation which was owned by Transamerica Corporation. He returned to international politics and, as an international financier, proved to be instrumental to the economic recovery of several Central and Eastern Europe nations. He helped stabilise the Polish zloty in 1927 and the Romanian leu in 1928. In November 1932, the Chinese Minister of Finance invited Jean Monnet to act as chairman of an east–west non-political committee in China for the development of the Chinese economy where he lived until early 1936. During his time in China, Monnet's task of partnering Chinese capital with foreign companies led to the formal inauguration of the China Development Finance Corporation as well as the reorganization of the Chinese railroads.
In 1935, when Monnet was still in Shanghai, he became a business partner of George Murnane in Monnet, Murnane & Co. Murnane was connected to the Wallenberg family in Sweden, the Bosch family in Germany, the Solvays and Boëls in Belgium, and John Foster Dulles, André Meyer, and the Rockefeller family in the United States. He was considered among the most connected persons of his time.
World War II
In September 1939, French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier sent Monnet to London to coordinate the organization of Franco-British war supplies. Shortly after the invasion of France in May 1940, Monnet advocated for a Franco-British union because he believed victory was impossible if “the two countries did not act and fight as a single people and if the two nations were not completely and profoundly aware of their unity." Winston Churchill supported the union as did Charles de Gaulle and the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, but the French cabinet was opposed and France instead pursued an armistice with Germany.File:Jean Monnet plaque.jpg|thumb|Memory plaque at the Willard Hotel where Monnet had his wartime office in Washington DC
Following the failure of the France-UK union attempt, Monnet hosted De Gaulle for a dinner at his London home on, during which De Gaulle first articulated and tested the themes of the historic appeal he would announce on radio the next day. Following the Armistice of 22 June 1940, Monnet disagreed with De Gaulle's claim that he alone represented fighting France. He would have preferred that de Gaulle work with others who were supporters, at that time, of continuing the resistance such as General Charles Noguès in North Africa. Also, Monnet thought that an organization centred in London would appear to the French as a movement under British protection and inspired by British interests. In a letter to de Gaulle on June 23, Monnet said he had made these concerns known to British Foreign Office officials Alexander Cadogan and Robert Vansittart, as well as Churchill’s envoy Edward Spears. Monnet would later play a critical role in the consolidation of De Gaulle's position as France's leader, in Algiers in 1943.
As France was no longer allied with Britain, Monnet resigned as Chairman of the Anglo-French Coordinating Committee and wound up its operations. Churchill invited Monnet to continue his work securing supplies from North America with the British Purchasing Commission. In this role he would ask for rapid and massive increases in the flow of American weapons, and he became known for arguing “Better ten thousand tanks too many than one tank too few."
Soon after his arrival in Washington, D.C., Monnet became an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Convinced that America could serve as "the great arsenal of democracy", he persuaded the President to launch a massive arms production program, both as an economic stimulus and to supply the Allies with military resources. Unlike De Gaulle, Monnet was popular with the Americans and the English. A co-worker of his claimed that sometimes he would help Churchill to write a message to Roosevelt and then subsequently help Roosevelt to compose the response. According to Edward R. Kantowicz, Monnet was impressed by the American organizational energy and saw cooperation with the new superpower as Europe's only chance to reorganize and recover itself. In 1941, Roosevelt, with Churchill's agreement, launched the Victory Program, which represented the involvement of the United States in the war effort. After the war, British economist John Maynard Keynes stated that Monnet, through his coordination work, had probably shortened World War II by a year.
While in Washington, Monnet and his family lived in a comfortable house built in 1934 at 2415 Foxhall Road NW, which was later home to Adlai Stevenson III and James Baker. He worked from an office of the British Mission at the Willard Hotel.
On, Monnet became one of the first seven members of the French Committee of National Liberation, the French government-in-exile co-chaired by De Gaulle and Henri Giraud and stationed in Algiers, as Commissaire à l'Armement. During a meeting on 5 August of that year, Monnet declared to the Committee:
"There will be no peace in Europe if the States are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty, with all that that entails in terms of prestige politics and economic protectionism. The countries of Europe are too small to guarantee their people the prosperity that modern conditions make possible and consequently necessary. Prosperity for the States of Europe and the social developments that must go with it will only be possible if they form a federation or a "European entity" that makes them into a common economic unit.”