Déclaration de l'union

While Reynaud understandably had misgivings and asked if the text had indeed been approved by Churchill himself, de Gaulle gave him his word of honour.  The British Prime Minister took the telephone and added: "Hold tight:  De Gaulle is leaving immediately; he is bringing the text….And now, let's see each other quickly….Tomorrow morning at Concarneau…Good bye!"  [Mémoires, p. 28].

The plan was never carried out.  That evening, Paul Reynaud resigned.  Albert Lebrun, the President of France, appointed Philippe Pétain as President of the Council.  Pétain signed an armistice on 22^nd June.

In his Mémoires, Jean Monnet remembered this 16^th June 1940, the "day of missed occasions":  "In retrospect, this is why I believe that those days in June 1940 strongly influenced my concept of international action.  I had too often observed the limits of coordination.  It is a method which promotes discussion, but it does not lead to a decision….It is the expression of national power, as it is; it cannot change it, it will never create unity….When nations are threatened by the same danger, one does not deal separately with the different interests involved in their destiny….This lesson…I made a firm decision to remember it as soon as the opportunity for joint action arose once more."  [Mémoires, p. 35].

13. What was the rôle of Jean Monnet during the Second World War?

After Marshall Pétain came to power and signed the Armistice which ended the war between France and Germany, Jean Monnet was still in London and did not for a moment consider returning to his country.  In his letter of resignation as President of the Franco-British Coordination Committee  which was sent to Churchill on 2^nd July 1940, he explained:  "In the present circumstances, I am deeply convinced that not only the future of this country but also the liberation of France depends on the victorious pursuit of the war by Great Britain.  I should thus like you to know that I should be extremely happy if the British Government were to give me the opportunity to work in its service and thus to continue to serve the true interests of my country.  I am thus putting my services at the disposal of the British Government for the tasks which appear most useful to it."  [Mémoires, p. 176].  On 16^th July,

Lettre de Winston Churchill à Jean Monnet, 16 juillet 1940

the British Prime Minister replied positively and sent Monnet to the United States with the goal of pursuing his missions involving purchasing American supplies for Britain.  Jean Monnet was already perfectly aware of the inferior Allied supplies of arms compared with Nazi firepower.  Jean Monnet fully exposed this firepower with the balance sheet drawn up several months earlier: 

    " Balance sheet "pour le Victory program

"In early January [1940].", he wrote, "I had asked that the Allied Air Forces' balance sheet…be compared with the state of the German forces as far as the secret services could estimate them….This information…revealed that in April 1940, there were probably twice as many enemy bombers as those of the Allies and that two of our fighters would have to face three of the enemy's.  At the current production rate, it would take the Allies five months to catch up with their  manufacture of fighters and two-and-a-half years to catch up with bomber production.  I had this balance sheet  in front of me [this historic document is displayed in a glass case at Houjarray].  I always kept this large sheet of paper 54 x 40 cm (21 x 16 in.)  near me because, in arithmetical simplicity and precision, it expressed the tragedy of an unequal struggle."  [Mémoires, p. 151].

In Washington, Jean Monnet, then Vice President of the British Supply Council, began exerting relentless pressure on President Roosevelt to persuade him to launch his country on a vast, unprecedented arms programme designed to make "America the arsenal of democracies."  The huge arms project was officially approved by Roosevelt in September 1941 and was called the Victory Program: It represented a formidable increase in U.S. military/industrial production and involved the forceful entry of the country into the war effort.

The war effort began production in January 1942 and achieved prodigious results: the  tanks manufactured rose from 340 in 1940 to 29,500 in 1943.  At the end of the war, 300,000 aircraft, 124,000 ships and 2,700,000 machine guns had been manufactured, requiring a total of 430,000,000 tonnes of steel.  Apart from the figures detailed on the balance sheet, the economist John Maynard Keynes observed:  "When the United States of America entered the war, President Roosevelt was presented with a plan for building aircraft which American engineers all felt to be almost a miracle.  But Jean Monnet felt that it was insufficient.  The president agreed with this viewpoint.  He imposed on the American nation an effort which at first sight seemed impossible but which subsequently was carried out perfectly.  This capital decision perhaps shortened the war by a whole year."  [Mémoires, p. 212].

14. Why and how was Jean Monnet so close to the Americans?

First, because of his training and his early professional activities, Jean Monnet was strongly influenced by the Anglo-Saxon model of civilization (cf. Question 4), initially in the City of London as of 1904, then in Canada and finally in the United States:  "But what I discovered in America was something more, and it had another name.  It was expansion….The predominant American type was not that of the speculator, but that of the entrepreneur.  For the first time, I met a nation of people whose occupation was not to manage what existed, but to develop ceaselessly.  They did not think of limits, they did not know where the boundary was.  In this milieu of constant movement, I learned that we needed to rid ourselves of ancient suspicions which are simply useless worries and time wasted."  [Mémoires, p. 48].

In the course of many trips and sojourns in the United States in the 1920s, Jean Monnet  made friends who were to prove themselves staunchly faithful: Elisha Walker, President of  Blair & Co. introduced him to the banking world (cf. Question 9) and enabled him to broaden his circle of relations in America.  The lawyer, businessman and future Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight Morrow, told him of the famous saying "There are two categories of men in the world: those who want to be somebody and those who want to do something".  (Jean Monnet added that he had chosen the second because there was "less competititon" there.)  The highly renowned journalist Walter Lippman opened to Monnet the world of the press on the other side of the Atlantic.

"He had very few friends," observed François Fontaine [one of Monnet's last collaborators and the writer of his Mémoires], "but the habit of frequenting the same people reflected a sentiment that had no name, not even that of faithfulness.  […].  In truth, as a very young man he had chosen partners of the same metal with which one makes strong, regular, durable springs.  Several lawyers, highly placed functionaries, bankers, editorialists who became -  like him, far from him, but for the same reasons as his -  respected actors on the international stage."  [Roussel, p. 109].  Among these lawyers whom Jean Monnet "revered" were John McCloy, the highly influential advisor to all the presidents, from Roosevelt to Kennedy; John Foster Dulles, the future Secretary of State under President Eisenhower; and Donald Swatland, the most intimate of all Jean Monnet's lawyer friends, who long sought legal solutions to enable Silvia and Jean to marry legally (cf. Question 10).

"I believe the American experience," added Georges Berthoin, "was decisive for Jean Monnet.  He had perfectly understood  the psychology of Americans.  He was a man who could participate in the intellectual elaboration of certain policies in America – I do not mean like an American but as well as an American – which enabled him to introduce  European interests into American mechanisms.  […].  The very direct work methods had marked him, as well as the habit of talking to everyone.   The American is on the same footing with everyone, and Monnet was like that, which made him singular with respect to European ways of thinking.  Thus he became a Frenchman somewhat different from the others."  [Roussel, p. 131].

These "work methods" might in fact be surprising: from 1936 to 1944, the Monnet family lived almost permanently in New York and Jean Monnet "became increasingly American."  [Roussel, p. 169].  He used English as the language of work with his French collaborators René Pleven, the future President of the Council, and Jean-Louis Mandereau, a future ambassador, who said that he "had the feeling of dealing not with a Frenchman but with an American who defended the interests of France."  In addition, Monnet spoke English with his family, to such an extent that his elder daughter, Anna, was obliged to learn French on her return to France in 1944.  And one of Jean Monnet's wills, dated 14^th January 1938, was written thus: "I, Jean Monnet, a resident of the city of New York in the State of New York, being of sound and disposing mind and,…." [Roussel, p. 169].

"…introducing European interests into the American mechanisms" is undoubtedly the most precise way of explaining Jean Monnet's activity from 1938 to the end of the war: In 1938, the American Ambassador to Paris, William Bullit, recommended that President of the Council, Edouard Daladier, send Jean Monnet to negotiate with President Roosevelt for an order of warplanes for the French government.  Another American, Harry Hopkins, a very close friend of Jean Monnet, the éminence grise and special advisor of President Roosevelt, sent the Frenchman to Algiers in February 1943 to mediate between Generals de Gaulle and Giraud, who were vying for leadership of the Free French Government.  On that occasion, Jean Monnet entered the French National Liberation Committee, which in 1944 became the "Provisional Government of the French Republic.  Working with General de Gaulle, he was Commissioner of Arms and Supplies until the end of the War.

With the Victory Program, another American enterprise tending towards European interests (cf. Question 13), Jean Monnet could see the extent to which his connections in the Roosevelt  Administration were viable and faithful:  In 1940, he had met key figures in Washington like the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had deeply influenced Monnet by inculcating him with the idea that law is the guarantor of democracy and by persuading him of the importance of institutions in safeguarding liberty.  Even during the period of setting up the ECSC (cf. Question 17), whenever Monnet was confronted with an unexpected obstacle, he readily turned to his lawyer friends Frankfurter or Swatland.  At the centre of power in Washington, Jean Monnet played such a rôle in the elaboration of the Victory Program and exercised such strong influence on the Roosevelt Administration that, in a letter of 19^th November 1941 to the British Ambassador to the U.S., Lord Halifax, Felix Frankfurter wrote that a high official had confided to him that "Monnet was really the intellect of our Defence administration."  In the United States, Monnet was thus the Europeans' man….

And was Monnet the Americans' man?  We should not forget his activity during the First World War, in the Free French government, during the Second World War as Commissioner of the Plan, of which he was the principal architect; and of course at the ECSC, established in 1950.  On 3^rd September of that year in the midst of the Cold War, Jean Monnet wrote to his friend René Pleven, then President of the Council, concerning the position that France should take vis à vis the United States:

"[…].  In the face of the Russian mystery, we should pursue our arms activity.  But in this regard, we are with associates.  It happens that these associates are the most powerful, that they have helped us and that without them we should not have emerged from  the post-war 'material' difficulties.  But their tremendous help has caused everyone, them and us, to acquire bad habits.  Their aid was material.  They continue to think in material terms.  What they need, and we do also, is a policy that is positive, that is spiritual and moral.

"[…].  I do not suggest to you either our abandonment in an illusory and absurd neutrality, nor a fatal Munich to which, moreover, we are perhaps heading with our current methods.  I suggest that you contribute to our associates a strong, constructive way of thinking, determined simultaneously to create  our exterior defence in Europe, our interior social development, peace in the Orient, the organized construction of our free, Atlantic world, in the diversified forms which correspond to its three constituent worlds: the United States, the British Empire, continental Western Europe, all federated around a developed Schuman plan.  […]. To do so, while there is still time we must replace the policy of containment, which puts the initiative in the hands of Moscow, by a positive, dynamic joint policy, drawn up concomitantly by the United States, France and Great Britain.

"[…].  The hope of being able to change this political context lies in the fact that the 'leaders' are the USA.  For of all the countries of the West, they are the most likely to agree to a change, to agree that we talk to them directly and strongly, on condition that in these discussions, we make a 'constructive' contribution.  The USA is not imperialist.  It is 'efficient'.  They find technical solutions; alone, they do not today know how to contribute the political thinking that the world needs…". [Roussel, p. 574].

This letter is edifying for two reasons.  First, Jean Monnet was clearly proposing a "trans-Atlantic partnership" project, with the Old and the New Continents on equal terms: a idea that was never realized.  Finally, far from being subordinate to the leading world power, Jean Monnet absolutely did not subscribe to the policy of containment pursued by two friends of long standing, Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles, who as U.S. Secretaries of State were the ideologists of restraining Communism.  In no way a neutralist, Jean Monnet in this letter was instead showing the necessity for an arms effort and the desire to create a third power, strong and independent, between East and West, which paradoxically brought him close to General de Gaulle's basic position.

15.    What were the relations between Jean Monnet and General de Gaulle?

At the beginning, the two men belonged to the same generation and both were men of distinction.  But while Jean Monnet came from a rural background in the Charente and became wealthy in business, Charles de Gaulle came from the urban, liberal and Catholic middle class, less rich and more cultivated.  The education and training of de Gaulle were far removed from those of Monnet: he was educated in Jesuit schools and  in the classics, mastering Greek, Latin and German, the language of the enemy: de Gaulle was foreign to this Anglo-Saxon world in which Jean Monnet was steeped.  De Gaulle entered the Saint-Cyr Military Academy in 1909 and subsequently became an officer at the time when Jean Monnet, for his part, was travelling the world to sell his cognac.

The two men met briefly for the first time in London in June 1940.  They met again in London on 16^th June 1940.  Recently promoted to the temporary rank of Brigadier General, de Gaulle had just arrived in England.  For three days, Jean Monnet and his English and French collaborators designed and wrote a plan for total union between France and Britain, with a single nation, a single Parliament and a single cabinet: the object was to avoid the defeat of France (cf. Question 12).

Lettre de de Gaulle à Jean Monnet

For de Gaulle, wrote Eric Roussel, the project for uniting the two peoples was only a ploy designed to galvanize the leaders' morale and undoubtedly he never pardoned Monnet for having urged him to support such a plan:  "I went to London on the 16^th.  First, during the day, I tried to improvise something with  Churchill.  It was the business of the close union between France and England.  Neither Churchill nor I had the slightest illusion.  It was a pretext to make it possible for Reynaud to gain time, perhaps for going to North Africa.  It was a myth invented, like other myths, by Jean Monnet."  [Interview of de Gaulle given to Henri Amouroux and published by Paris Match; quoted by Eric Roussel, p. 241].

On 17^th June in the evening, de Gaulle arrived at Monnet's house in London, where he had been invited for dinner.  As regards the means of resisting the enemy, the two men's points of view were invariably divergent.  For de Gaulle, it was necessary to free France.  For Jean Monnet, it was necessary to conquer the Nazis through an alliance with the English.  According to Jean Lacouture, it was precisely after leaving this dinner at the Monnets that, alone in his small Seamore Grave flat, de Gaulle began to write what became the Appeal of 18^th June.  This dissimulation (de Gaulle said nothing to Monnet of his intentions the following day) was the first breach in their relations and Monnet never pardoned the General for it.  He reproached de Gaulle for  lack of confidence, an immoderate taste for secrecy, but above all, he disapproved of the orientation taken by the former Sub-Secretary of State for War in his unilateral resistance against the occupant.  For Monnet, resistance from the interior and the massive support of the British and American Allies were complementary and indissociable.

And yet the two men, frequently disagreeing, respected each other beginning with this difficult time and were able to agree on certain large orientations for their countries.  Thus, at the end of the War, General de Gaulle invited Jean Monnet to be Commissioner of the Plan, directing the team responsible for the reconstruction and modernization of France.

16.    What is the symbolic value of Jean Monnet's house at Houjarray?

In 1950, as the world was plunged in the Cold War and Germany had been divided since 1949, Jean Monnet had no illusions about the future of Europe:  "…another war will come soon if we do nothing.  Germany will not be the cause, but she will be the reason.  She must stop being the reason and on the contrary become a link.  Only France can currently take the initiative.  Before it is too late, what could link France and Germany, how can we cultivate a common interest between the two countries beginning today….When I returned to Paris in early April, I did not yet have the reply totally prepared…but the time for uncertainty had passed….[Mémoires, p. 342].  The international meetings were scheduled to begin soon.  On 10^th May [1950], Robert Schuman [the French Minister of Foreign Affairs] was to meet his colleagues Ernest Bevin and Dean Acheson in London to discuss the future of Germany….The French Minister had no constructive proposal to offer, although he had given considerable thought to the matter and discussed it at length with those around him.  For my part, I was beginning to see clearly."  [Mémoires, p. 346].

To structure his project, Jean Monnet depended on two indispensable collaborators: Etienne Hirsch, a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Mines [Paris' élite technological university and engineering school, respectively], who had worked with Monnet since his return from Algeria in 1943; and Paul Reuter, a young Professor of Law at the University of Aix-en-Provence, who was working as jurisconsult at the Quai d'Orsay [Foreign Office].  In his Mémoires, Jean Monnet recounted: "On Sunday, 16^th April 1950, we met with Hirsch at Montfort-l'Amaury.  It was during that day  that the first version was worked out of what became the French proposal of 9^th May.  With twenty-five years' distance, I can not say precisely what each of us three contributed to this text….I can only say that without Hirsch and without Reuter, it would not immediately have had the detailed form which actually made it the original document of the Community."  [Mémoires, p. 349].

Jean Monnet and his collaborators had just laid the foundations for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), whose substance was as follows:  "The French Government proposes to place all the Franco-German production of steel and coal under an international authority open to the participation of the other countries of Europe."  [Extract from the Schuman Declaration, quoted in the Mémoires, p. 350].  Between 16^th April and 6^th May 1950 at Houjarray, the three men rewrote the precursor text of the ECSC eight times before arriving at a final ninth version, read by Robert Schuman on 9^th May 1950.

17.    Where is Jean Monnet buried today?

Jean Monnet died on 16^th March 1979 in his home at Houjarray, Yvelines,  at the age of ninety-one.  His funeral was held in the Montfort-l'Amaury Church and he was buried in the cemetery at Bazoches-sur-Guyvonne.  Nine years later, at the instigation of the Friends of Jean Monnet Association and by decision of President François Mitterrand, Jean Monnet's ashes were transfered to the Panthéon on 9^th November 1988: a century after his birth.  His wife, Silvia, died in 1982 at the age of seventy-five and is buried in the cemetery at Bazoches-sur-Guyvonne.

18.    What has become of Jean Monnet's house at Houjarray?

On her husband's death, Silvia left the family home to live in Rome near her brother and considered selling the house to the European Parliament.  The Parliament acquired the house in 1982 and worked on its restoration from 1984 to 1987.  Founded in 1986, the Friends of Jean Monnet Association began refurnishing the house in order to recreate the atmosphere in which Jean Monnet and his collaborators designed the ECSC.  In this undertaking, the Association received the generous support of the Cultural Philanthropy Superior Council, the Electricité de France Foundation, the Crédit Agricole de l'Ile-de-France Bank, the Ile-de-France Regional Council and the Yvelines General Council.  In 1990, the Association took the name Jean Monnet Association and signed an agreement with the European Parliament whereby the Association would administer and organize special programmes at the "House where Europe was born."  Today, the Jean Monnet House, a joint European heritage, is open to the public every day.  It receives 15-20,000 visitors from around the world annually and gives 250 lectures per year.

19.    Does Monnet cognac still exist?

Jean Monnet progressively left the  cognac trade and finally sold the family business to a German company, Scharlachberg, in 1963, the year the Franco-German Friendship Treaty was signed.  In 1985, the German company sold Monnet cognac to the Hennessy Group.  Today, the Monnets' family home in Cognac houses the Hennessy Company offices.  In each cellar of the property, "J.G. Monnet & Co." cognac slowly continues to mature.  It is still sold as V.S.O.P quality, with 1% of its production distributed in France and the remaining 99% in 28 foreign countries.

Jean Monnet, member of the British Supply Council and advisor to President Roosevelt, Washington, 30^th December 1941.

Algiers, 4^th June 1943.  In the first row, from left to right: Jean Monnet, General Catroux, General de Gaulle, Winston Churchill,General Giraud, Anthony Eden.  In the second row, from left to right: André Philip, Harold Macmillan, General Georges, Sir Allan Brooke, Admiral Cunningham, René Massigli.