The 1996 François Guizot Prize

The second Prix Guizot of the Calvados General Council was awarded to Éric Roussel for his book Jean Monnet.
With a degree in literature and a doctorate in law, and a critic at Le Figaro since 1985, he is the author of several works of contemporary history.

For John Kennedy he was “the statesman of the world”; de Gaulle saw him as the “inspirer” of the process of European integration; according to Henry Kissinger, no one left a stronger mark on our times. Yet the personality and the exact role of one of the giants of the century, Jean Monnet, remain little known. By turns cognac merchant, promoter of Allied coordination during the Great War, deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations, banker in America and China in the 1930s, first Commissioner-General of the Plan (1947-1952), initiator in 1950 of the Schuman Plan, which laid the first stone of the Europe of the Six, president of the High Authority of the ECSC, and driving force until 1975 of the Action Committee for the United States of Europe, this man of influence with a worldwide reach defies the usual political and ideological classifications.
To reconstruct his remarkable career, Éric Roussel interviewed a great many witnesses, combed through French and foreign archives, and drew for the first time on the famous “pink notes”, the unpublished journal in which the father of Europe recorded his reflections and his conversations with figures such as Roosevelt, Adenauer, Churchill, Brandt, Pompidou, Heath, Henry Kissinger, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and many others.
More than sixty years of European and French history are thus brought to life, and certain crucial episodes – such as the events in Algiers in 1943 – appear in a new light. Above all, there emerges the true profile of a man who was both visionary and pragmatic, whose unconventional views transformed the lives of Europeans and whose methods remain surprisingly relevant at a time when people are trying to imagine Europe after Maastricht.

© Source : Éditions Fayard (publisher’s description).