Europe: Then Will It Live . . .

• Share

(7 of 10)

countered: "Can you ride?" Monnet said yes. "All right," said the man, "take my horse. When you're through, just hitch it up here." Monnet remembers it as his first lesson in pooling resources.

Matches & Railroads. When World War I started, Monnet was rejected for the French army because of a kidney ailment (nephritis), entered the French Ministry of Commerce as a junior official. At the time, France and Britain were bidding against each other for badly needed raw materials, despite the fact they were allies, and no one seemed to know what to do—except Monnet, who proposed an Anglo-French high commission to coordinate procurement and supplies. By war's end, Monnet had made such a brilliant impression in Paris and London that, though only 31, he was appointed Deputy Secretary-General of the League of Nations.

In 1923 Monnet left the League to come home and save the family brandy business, devastated by the war. In two short years he had it bubbling money again, then went wandering as an international banker and economic troubleshooter. He spent a year (1933-34) in Peking as financial adviser to the Chinese government, raised money to repair China's vast, decrepit railroad system. He opened a Wall Street brokerage house, made a fortune and lost it in the 1929 crash. The Polish government called him in to plan a currency reform it never carried out. The Swedish government appointed Monnet one of the liquidators of the complex, bankrupt Kreuger match empire.

Meanwhile, Monnet's personal life took an international turn. At a Paris dinner party in 1928, he met darkly handsome Silvia de Bondini, a painter and wife of an Italian diplomat. Silvia soon left her husband; after five years of trying to obtain an Italian divorce, she was whisked to Moscow by Monnet, for a quick Moscow divorce and wedding. The gay Gallic bachelor became a devoted family man (the Monnets have two grown daughters). At their home at Houjarray, some 20 miles west of Paris,, he often talks through his notions with Silvia while she paints.

Worth the Gamble. As World War II started, France and Britain pressed Monnet back into his old World War I job of organizing their joint production and rearmament to meet the Nazi challenge. In London, during the big German offensive of June 1940, it was evident to Monnet that the French government would soon surrender, and in a desperate attempt to keep France in the war, he suggested one of the few impractical schemes of his career: the immediate unification of France and Great Britain. Monnet put it to De Gaulle, who agreed it was worth the gamble. Both men went to Churchill, and the result was Churchill's historic but futile "declaration of Franco-British Union." Monnet then flew to Bordeaux in a big Sunderland Flying-boat to try to evacuate the whole French Cabinet. The Cabinet refused to budge, for fear of being labeled cowardly émigrés. A disappointed Monnet returned to London with the flying-boat full of refugee families.

Winston Churchill thereupon endorsed Monnet's French passport personally, sent him to Washington to help coordinate Anglo-American war-supply planning. It was Monnet who conceived the idea of Lend-Lease. And it was Monnet who coined President Roosevelt's famous fire side-chat slogan: "We must be the great arsenal of democracy."