Take the Monnet and run

14 November 2008

Thanks to its extensive Swedish network, Euro-correspondent.com can reveal for the first time to an English-speaking audience that one of the EU's founding fathers, Jean Monnet, was even better qualified than previously realised for his role in setting the EU gravy train in motion, writes Stephen Gardner. Monnet, who along with one-time French prime minister Robert Schumann is virtually canonised in Brussels, now rests in the Panthéon in Paris. But he lived for a long time in a house at Houjarray, Versailles, now a museum in his honour. He bought the house shortly after France's liberation in 1944 from a Swedish politician. That politician's grandson, Peter Bratt, is a leading journalist in Sweden. He reveals in his autobiography that when Monnet bought the house a price was negotiated in US dollars, but on the day of the deal, Monnet insisted on paying in French francs. By an extraordinary coincidence, the very next day the franc was devalued, meaning Monnet effectively got the house for one hundredth of the agreed price. By another extraordinary coincidence, Monnet was at the time a member of the French Committee for National Liberation, which oversaw the devaluation. Or, as Peter Bratt writes, the great man "conned" his grandfather. Brussels has no plans to change its description of Monnet as the "main inspiration" behind the European project. A version of this article was originally published in Private Eye. [Headline with apologies to the show of the same name].

 

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