For John Kennedy, he was «the statesman of the world»; de Gaulle saw him as the ’inspiration« behind the process of European integration; according to Henry Kissinger, no one has had a greater impact on our time. Yet little is known about the personality and exact role of one of the giants of the century, Jean Monnet. Successively cognac merchant, promoter of the Allied coordination effort 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 that laid the foundation stone for the Europe of Six, president of the High Authority of the ECSC, leader until 1975 of the Action Committee for the United States of Europe, this man of universal influence eludes the usual political and ideological classifications.

In order to reconstruct his astonishing career, Éric Roussel has interviewed a large number of witnesses, delved into French and foreign archives and, for the first time, exploited the famous «pink notes», an unpublished diary in which the father of Europe recorded his thoughts and recounted his conversations with people such as Roosevelt, Adenauer, Churchill, Brandt, Pompidou, Healt, Henry Kissinger, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and many others.

More than sixty years of European and French history are thus evoked, and certain crucial episodes - such as the events that took place in Algiers in 1943 - appear in a new light. Above all, the true profile of a man who was both a visionary and a pragmatist emerges, whose non-conformist views changed the lives of Europeans and whose methods remain surprisingly relevant today as we struggle to imagine the post-Maastricht era.