• U.S.

WESTERN EUROPE: Voice of the Optimist

4 minute read
TIME

History’s mantle sat lightly last week on the shoulders of the cheery-cheeked Frenchman as he sat breakfasting in the garden in his dressing gown, eating honey and yoghurt. Six nations this week crowned him a civilian Mr. Europe. They made him first president of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (Schuman Plan). The Schuman Plan is rightly named for Foreign Minister Schuman, who alone among Frenchmen had the moral authority to propose it successfully to Europe (TIME, March 1, 1948). But it was Jean Monnet who conceived the plan and did the behind-the-scenes selling.

Eating in the garden, Monnet described the revolution that he hopes to bring to Europe in words that echoed a deep sense of destiny. “The people of Europe want a change,” he said. “This new Community is a revolution in Europe, perhaps the greatest Europe has known. We are embarked on the liberation of Europe from its past.”

Liberation there will be for 155 million Europeans if the Coal-Steel plan achieves its objective: the creation in Europe of an American-style expanding mass market, clean of petty tariffs. By pooling six nations’ annual coal outputs, totaling 220 million tons, and their steel production of 38 million tons, by freeing labor to meet manpower supply & demand without passports, by crushing the tight cartels that keep production low and prices high, the Coal-Steel Community could liberate Europeans from ration cards, ersatz clothing, queues and slums. It might also blaze the trail towards a politically united Europe, free of ugly nationalisms, and able to support itself.

We Must Create Europe. Dapper Jean Monnet, 63, a rare hardheaded optimist in a pessimistic Europe, intends all this. “We are not dealing merely with the pooling of coal and steel,” he observed last week. “We are creating a new political reality.” No man is better qualified to do the job of creating, for the “Little Howitzer,” as his friends call him, has the driving power of an armor-piercing shell. When he gets hold of an idea, he never lets go. “If he were put under an anesthetic,” said a friend last week, “he would still keep repeating ‘We’ve got to create Europe’ as they wheeled him into the operating room.”

In his globe-girdling career, Monnet has sold bonds in Wall Street, peddled French brandy to the fur trappers of Hudson’s Bay, liquidated a Swedish match company, and served in wartime Washington as a British diplomat purchasing arms (his French passport carried a covering letter written by Winston Churchill).

Born the son of a French brandy maker in the little town of Cognac, he quit school at 16, in plenty of time to earn a million dollars by the time he was 40. During World War I he pooled French and British shipping; in the Depression he lost his first million, and in the ’30s he became one of the world’s most active and least-known financial backroom boys. Monnet’s influence on events has often been decisive. It was Monnet’s insistence that the Allies should place large aircraft orders in the U.S. just before World War II that led to the quadrupling of U.S. output, and the production of vital airplane engines that helped win the Battle of Britain. It was his idea for a Franco-British Union that Winston Churchill put forward when France was falling in 1940.

Change Brings Change. But it was

France’s postwar adoption of Monnet’s plan to modernize French basic industries that first brought Europe’s antique trade barriers and obsolescent machinery into the Little Howitzer’s firing line. Then came the Schuman Plan for Europe. Monnet stumped the continent tirelessly, lambasting cynics and pessimists. “Just get the plan started,” he would say, “and the whole framework of your difficulties will change for the better.” He bristled with a sense of adventure: “I believe in the dynamic process which is life itself. A change brings a change.”

Monnet was the unanimous choice of all six member nations as president of the nine-man High Authority that will set the Community up in business. First, he expects to work out a mutually profitable liaison with the only major European coal & steel producer not included in the Community: Britain. “I know the British,” chuckles Monnet. “No Frenchman is more ready than I to establish cooperation with them. But I want real cooperation.”

But what of the Russians, the bogeyman of all European planning? Over his yoghurt Monnet smiles confidently. “I believe we often think too much about Russia . . . The day may come when we will get a look inside there, and find out that there is not really so much as we had thought.”

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com