Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence Book

In this sweeping biography, Francois Duchene explores Monnet's complex personality, from his birth in Cognac through his eventful political and personal lives. First a merchant in the countryside of France, from 1919 to 1923 Monnet was Deputy General of the League of Nations. During the Second World War, he was a member of the Washington-based British Supply Council; in 1947, he drafted the Monnet Plan, calling for the modernization of French industry and agriculture. This led to France's participation in the Marshall Plan, and later, in Monnet's drafting of the Schuman Plan, establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, of which Monnet was the first president. In the 1950s, Monnet organized the Action Committee for a United States of Europe, which supported development of the European Common Market. He remained active in the movement towards unification throughout his long life.

Publishers Weekly

Born in the French town of Cognac, a world center of brandy production, Jean Monnet (1888-1979) went from being a cognac salesman in his father's firm to ``Mr. Europe,'' the driving force behind European unification. Through behind-the-scenes diplomacy in WW II, Monnet helped bring U.S. power and material to bear decisively on the defeat of Hitler; worked with his sometime opponent, Charles de Gaulle, to secure Marshall Plan aid for France; and later cemented the Euratom treaty. The Monnet Plan (which laid the foundation for France's postwar industrial renewal) and the Schuman Plan (devised principally by Monnet but named after French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman) forged a Franco-German coal and steel federation that, in Duchene's view, laid the cornerstone of today's European Union. In this absorbing, dramatic biography, Duchene, an Economist correspondent and former aide to Monnet, closely reassesses the achievements of an ``entrepreneur in the public interest.'' This long overdue biography brings him out of the shadows. Photos. (Sept.)