European empiricist
Alastair Forbes
Memoirs Jean Monnet (Collins £13) L'Etonnement d'Etre: Journal 1939-1973 Nerve Alphand (Paris, Fayard FF59) Roy Jenkins's claim, in his brief foreword to Richard Mayne's workmanlike translation of Memoirs' which first appeared in France in 1976, that 'the range and achievements of Jean Monnet's life are well-known', must surely be, for most of their potential British readers (perhaps not many expected by their publishers at the price designated), a questionable one, his being a name unfairly linked in the public mind with the Community and its Commission from which, according to currently received idiocies, in Brussels sprout all the woes that curse our island's racialists and its latter-day Luddites. bent on breaking up tachygraphs and any other redoubtable reminders of uncomfortable truth. Yet from his first visit (he is ninety this year) to England, where he spent his specially formative years learning the English language and English ways of business, this Charentais peasant pragmatist, the very opposite of any stereotype bureaucrat or bourgeois, has remained full of ungratefully unrequited love of his country.
Admitting to 'having no imagination for anything that does not seem necessary' he possessed, nevertheless, a sharp eye for the essential. Found medically unfit for military service in 1914, the extraordinary young Frenchman threw himself into the selfappointed task of pointing the way to victory through inter-Allied co-operation on a closeness of scale never previously envisaged, 'It was not', he writes, 'in my nature to respect established authority for' its own sake. What counted for me was its usefulness.' So he had no scruples about going straight to the top. He gives a very moving account of his interview with Viviani, the French prime minister, who listened patiently and intelligently to his proposals for harnessing British production and shipping to France's military, contribution, though that very morning he had heard of the death in battle of two of his sons.
After three years Monnet had become chef de cabinet to France's economic minister and could watch the Allied machinery he had helped to create finally getting into top gear, culminating in the transport of a quarter of a million American troops across the Atlantic every month. At war's end he was made Eric Drummond's number two on the League of Nations secretariat.
There was a period of business activity, much of it conducted with the Soong family, in China, where he learned respect for Oriental rituals of delay that has stood him in good stead ever since in the Occident, whither he had returned by March 1936 in time to hear, as a private citizen, Bruning's reaction to Hitler's reoccupation of the Rhineland. `The Allies must enter Germany, or Hitler will think himself invincible and the German Army will believe he's always right.' By 1938 Monnet was working on the draft of a 'Note on the possible establishment of an aeronautical industry abroad out of reach of enemy attack', and a few weeks after Munich he was closeted in FDR's small Hyde Park study scheming with the President towards producing, in three eight-hour shifts a day, 5000 aircraft a year,
to be assembled, in order to get round the Neutrality Act, in Canada. Though all this was to be too late to save France going down to her subsequent military defeat by the Wehrmacht, Monnet secured the important appointment, soon after the war's outbreak, of chairman of the Anglo-French Co
ordinating Committee set up `to ensure the, best use, in the common interest, of the too countries' recourses', his instructions drafted by himself, but confirmed by Chain' berlain and Daladier, being `to use your best efforts to bring about joint decisions by adopting an Allied rather than a national ptiint of view'. An urgent aim was to stiony late the American production potential bY large forward orders, particularly of aircraft. Both before and after the fall of France. Monnet's aim was always to make the United States 'the Arsenal of Democracy'. a phrase later effectively borrowed from hial by Roosevelt. After starring in the brief tragi.comedY al the offer of a Franco-British union, Monne had in 1940 preferred to leave de Gaulle in London to pursue his personal political adventure while he himself, under Char. chill's direct orders, expertly served Britain and her allies in Washington as what Hall, Hopkins called 'the great, single-minclea apostle of all-out production'. No wonder that when Nerve Alphand, a brilliant young, Inspecteur des Finances whose family hau for two centuries provided France With fonctionnaires, up to the 'ambassadorial level reached by his father and later himsel!' switched his allegiance from Vichy to de Gaulle while serving in America, he first saW Monnet as a 'secret and an enigma', railing against `les imbeciles qui ne parlent que de souverainete', imbeciles still pretty thick on the ground in London and elsewhere al 1978. Then after a period of collaboration with him, he noted in his journal, from which 1 here translate: 'Jean Monnet astonishes me. He it is who drafts the memoranda sub* mitted to the US President. All this is done with extreme modesty, and total se* lessness. I shall be the only Frenchman t° know how much we owe to him at this stage of the war.' Jenkins calls him 'impregnably optifl1istic. but not Utopian', yet Monnet himself is al pains to explain, 'I am not an optimist. I arit simply persistent'. Alphand came to serve as, something of a buffer between Monnet aP de Gaulle whom, a decade anda halflater, he did not hesitate to call `the two great con' temporary Frenchmen'. Monnet had ma1 aged, in Algiers and Washington, to P.° plenty of de Gaulle's chestnutsout of the hre, for him and, in turn, the General's last ac". before his gesture of miscalculated black, mail in retiring for the first time to ColombeY in January 1946 had been to sign the &creel to set up the small Commissariat du PO, with Monnet, again drafting his own insrru,.c, tions, as its Head, the body which througu.c out the vicissitudes of the Fourth RuPtIbile was to set in train the modernisation of rho French economy. 'The only alternative ti modernisation is decadence' has atwilY.11been the core of Monnet's doctrine. Even is wartime Algiers, Alphand had noted 'he 'vial. thinking of European heavy industry (roue international control, and of a custonl: union'. The later progression of the Scba,s man Plan was as inevitable as Britoil purblind contempt for it was inexcusable' Alphand, a neurotic depressive whose twin solaces were hard work and an obsessive dependence on frivolous diners en Wile, in the company of café and showbiz society rather than the Faubourg St Germain, came to respect the ascetic Lorrainer, Robcrt Schuman, whom he nicknamed (though he doesn't mention it in his book) Thomme Chou'. It was the chance of his old Blair and Co office assistant, Rene Pleven, becoming premier which gave Monnet the opportunity t° try to put some flesh on the bare bones of Strasbourg European Army idea tossed into the °trasbourg arena in August 1950 by a Winston Churchill desperate to appear to be on t° a good thing towards the end of a political career he was uncertain of being physically Or electorally capable of prolonging. , Had the EDC Treaty been ratified, and had Churchill, Eden and Mendes-France not made sure of the contrary, we might today have some future to contemplate other than our Finlandisation by steady shameful Stages. It was Alphand who, at the Quai d'Orsay, thanks to his earlier conversion by Monnet, was to nail his colours to the EDC mast and kept them there, greatly to his moral credit, for, as a result, his career at the 011ai was nearly sacrificed altogether and he was lucky to be reprieved at the last minute. tie escaped with a socially ambitious second Wife in 1956 to first Eisenhower's and then Kennedy's Washington, which neither of them came even near to spotting as being a good deal less Camelot than 'de la camelote' (trans: shoddy mechanism). Of Harold Wilson, Monnet writes, 'I had nfidence in his skill and in nothing else'. He has not yet had time to analyse the even weaker contribution to the energy of Europe of his successor's North Sea oily ways and his female opponent's mimicry of them. Alphand's album contains some interesting snapshots of past British attitudes and in Particular an indiscreet one of the now forgotten 'Affaire Soames' when Wilson Shamefully contrived to let his personally appointed Ambassador to Paris suffer agonising humiliation, in part at the hands of AlPhand, then in his last post as head of the QUai d'Orsay.
, On his Luxembourg desk, Monnet tells us,
used to keep a picture of the Kon-Tiki, Whose adventure for me was a symbol of our °\vn'. A rather unfortunate choice, one feels, Placing much more reliance on drift than on st,Iiilful captaincy, while just now the whole 'ropean show seems to be listing in more alarming reminiscence of Gericaules 'Le ..kadeau de la Meduse', with former Navy minister David Owen's tousled head very 11)1101 in evidence in the foreground. Ytt !veil Alphand, for all his sometime 'YeoPhancy towards the unregretted General and the albatross constitution he has jung around France's neck, well ocumented in his journal, must now agree With Monnet's conclusion that 'The sovereign nations of the past can no longer solve the problems of the present: they can11„01 ensure their own progress or control 'kir own future'. Both these books, rich in
valuable reminiscence and usefully indexed, must be classified, despite their expense, as essential reading for all students of politics, economics and international relations. I suppose it would be too much to hope for them to be read also by politicians, even those expecting election to a European Assembly a whole year after the date solemnly promised by Monsieur Callaghan, whose 'best endeavours', it can be seen are strictly reserved for . . . reserving his own place in Downing Street.
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