Jean Monnet

Jean Monnet (9 November 1888 - 16 March 1979) was a French civil servant, entrepreneur, diplomat, financier and administrator who never held elected office but worked behind the scenes as one of the founding fathers of the European Union, earning the epithet the Father of Europe for his pioneering work establishing European integration structures in the 1950s. He was the chief architect of the Schuman Declaration of May 9, 1950, which proposed pooling French and German coal and steel industries, and served as the first president of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community from 1952 to 1955, afterward founding the Action Committee for the United States of Europe in 1955, whose initiatives helped lead to the European Economic Community in 1958. In 1976 he became the first person ever designated an Honorary Citizen of Europe, a title he held alone for a generation, and on the centenary of his birth in 1988 France transferred his remains to the Pantheon in Paris.