Jean Monnet As Others Saw Him
Extracts
"From his youth, either by chance or by taste, he had not taken the paths of traditional education. He had to devise more than a system for himself. He was thus unaware of the habitual limits of a career or an ambition. He preferred action to appearance. He worried little about forging an image. He loved anonymity. Thus, placed outside of any hierarchy, with neither official title nor function, there were no restrictions on him."
Georges Berthoin, Jean Monnet's Private Secretary at the ECSC High Authority.
Member of the Honorary Committee, Jean Monnet Association.
"The methods that Jean Monnet used were exceptional. By means of long, insistant discussions, he attempted to persuade the main political figures of the European countries of the accuracy of his objective. He never used pressure, he trusted in the strength of his arguments."
Karl Carstens, Former President of the Federal Republic of Germany
"Jean Monnet had a kind of functional optimism which made him think that if the idea were good, the people adequate and the institutions competent, the result could only be positive. [….] Because Monnet knew how to inspire trust, people trusted him, and at the highest level. [….] It was not enough for the method to give results in order to trust and to inspire trust. It was also necessary to commit oneself only at the right moment and on the essential point. The whole Monnet technique of positive decision, in crisis and in progress, could operate only with an irreplaceable personal quality, which is the ability to sort out ideas. In the permanent mêlée of causes and results, in the pandemonium of diverse facts, one must be capable of discerning the one element which dominates the others, the fundamental objective. One must know what is the most difficult in the modern world: discerning the obvious. This was perhaps one of the rarest virtues of Jean Monnet. I shall never forget those working sessions. His collaborators marching back and forth in front of him, formulating theories, would suggest steps to take and explain permutations on them. Sometimes, for almost an hour, Monnet, seated, would say nothing. And then, suddenly, he would speak: 'Repeat your last sentence, not that one, no, the one before.' And beginning with that sentence, everything fell into place and action could be taken."
Jean-François Deniau, Former member of the European Communities Commission; former Minister.
"While Monnet did not like literary effects, or rather a certain literary flourish, this was certainly not through lack of analysis. We know that his morning and daily walks in the woods around Houjarray were absolutely essential to him. […]. He liked to test his ideas, his sentences with his chauffeur, the postman or young people he respected, and this was not just a matter of style. We would not understand Monnet at all if we did not agree that, although he spent his entire life, or most of it, manoeuvring in the antechambers of power, he did not have the mandarin's mentality at all. On the contrary, he was in a sense foreign to the administrations he frequented and, in fact, he was never part of them in a permanent or orthodox way. What he sought to translate into facts were initiatives, like the United States of Europe, which would come naturally to the average man but which would often appear naïve to those familiar with politics or the university. His entire effort and his art consisted in building a bridge, normally judged impracticable, between the citizen's natural but unrealized dream, and the action of government leaders."
François Duchêne, former collaborator in the Action Committee for the United States of Europe.
Member of the Administrative Council of the Jean Monnet Association.
"Monnet to the Panthéon! To those who knew him well, the idea might at first appear paradoxical. […]. On his 80th birthday, he willingly attributed his success to the fact that his wife, once taken away from an Italian businessman under quite romantic circumstances, had never taken him seriously. […]. The Panthéon is intended to express the "country's gratitude" to its "great men"; the very discretion of Jean Monnet was instrumental in keeping a good number of French people – many do not even know who he was – from realizing how much they owe him. I can easily imagine myself with a small smile at the announcement of this supreme consecration, rejoicing because in the end, it surely represents a fine way of attracting attention to his beloved Europe."
André Fontaine, journalist and former Director of Le Monde
"The secret of his influence lay in his ability to identify decision makers, at whatever level they were. That done, the force of his arguments as much as the simplicity of his eloquence persuaded them to support his ideas and to assure him that they would be put into practice. Throughout his life, Jean Monnet was never content to direct the organization he had helped set up. He was always anticipating new developments. He was a great European, with a vision of the world open far beyond our continent."
Sir Edward Heath, Former British Prime Minister.
Member of the Honorary Committee of the Jean Monnet Association.
"There are few men or women of whom one can say that their life gave a new turning point to the time in which they lived. There are still fewer who were able to rise above dealing with daily affairs to conceive of an ideal to which they then worked to give substance. I believe that we can say, without the risk of error, that no man in the world has marked and modified the political life of our time more than the one whom we are honouring today. The great works of history have never been anything other than dreams before becoming realities. At the end of the War, Mister Monnet had dreamed that from destruction and ruins a united Europe might emerge; and that in concert with the United States, it would work in a spirit of independence allied to a desire for cooperation aimed at the greatest good for all free peoples. What was in 1946 only an absurd idea is today a tangible reality. All those among us whom Mister Monnet charmed, criticized, inspired and led in his wake when our imagination was unable to entirely follow his own, are entitled to be proud on this occasion. […]. We are all grateful to you not only for what you have accomplished on the political level, but for having demonstrated so many human qualities; and for having shown such wisdom and such patience."
Dr. Henry Kissinger, Former Secretary of State of the United States in a speech given during the presentation of the Grenville Clark Prize to Jean Monnet in Paris, 15th November 1975.
"At the time, in 1956, Jean Monnet was sixty-eight years old and looked about fifty-five. He was already a legend. The press called him 'Mister Europe' or the 'father of Europe', nicknames which made him scowl. 'You don't mean grandfather?', he asked someone who was questioning him. He had a horror of metaphors but this one was appropriate. Paternity is conceived only by two people and Jean Monnet believed in co-authored action. His rôle was that of a catalyzer."
Richard Mayne, former collaborator of Jean Monnet in the Action Committee for the United States of Europe.
Member of the Administrative Council of the Jean Monnet Association.
"Precisely one-hundred years ago, on 9th November 1888, Jean Monnet was born in Cognac in the Charente region; his life, which was long and full, recounts how a small provincial boy from Saintonge became the first citizen of Europe."
François Mitterrand, Former President of France, in a speech given during the transfer of Jean Monnet's ashes to the Panthéon.
"What was remarkable was the authority that Jean Monnet exercised over his Committee [of Action for the United States of Europe], which was composed of men of very different outlook and character. In his simple style, never raising his voice, Jean Monnet would analyze the situation and suggest initiatives to take. His ideas were so clear, so sensible that everyone adhered to them, often without discussion. We knew that Jean Monnet would be able to make a good number of statesmen share his views."
"Pierre Pfimlin, former minister, former President of the European Parliament.
Member of the Honorary Committee of the Jean Monnet Association.
"Like all those who worked with him closely, I learned a great deal from him. If he is one of the great men who have marked our time, it is not only because of his extraordinary clairvoyance and the sureness of his judgment. It was because of his indomitable will not to be subjected to events. He never resigned himself to the idea that a problem, however difficult, could not be solved."
René Pleven, former President of the Council
"First, Monnet was a man who trusted. Not that he was not prudent, even suspicious before he granted his trust, judging and sizing up his close collaborators and his interlocutors according to his own criteria and intuitions in the manner of a farmer who evaluates people before coming over to their side. If at first a certain face, a certain way of thinking, were not to his liking, why hide it? Some people undoubtedly were wounded in this regard, not to be admitted to the team or rapidly put aside, despite their merits and their diplomas. That is the way it was: Monnet had his convictions, and he did not like to change….But when he judged people, I know well that there was no consideration of a social order, of political opinion, of convictions or absence of religious convictions."
Jacques-René Rabier, Jean Monnet's Private Secretary at the Plan and the ECSC. Honorary Managing Director of the European Community Commission.
Member of the Administrative Council of the Jean Monnet Association.
"The pioneer of European unification, Jean Monnet exercised considerable political influence although he was never a politician in the sense that he never held elective office. He took his most important initiatives without an official mandate. He listened only to his conscience, his sense of politically necessary and salutary actions; his highly developed responsibility as a citizen of the world went far beyond the national framework. Monnet was a rare, I would even be tempted to say unique, political man who succeeded in carrying out his work without the essential factor of politics which is power."
Helmut Schmidt, former Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Member of the Honorary Committee of the Jean Monnet Association.
The majority of these texts are extracted from the book Témoignages à la Mémoire de Jean Monnet (Testimonials in Memory of Jean Monnet), Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe, Lausanne, 9th November 1989.