Europe’s tragedy is to have made Jean Monnet boring. This extraordinary figure, who crossed the world for decades, living incredible adventures and relentlessly pursuing the mad ideal of a united Europe, has been turned into a dusty reference point, a stuffed founding father, good only for quoting in the most conventional speeches on the state of the Union.<\/p>\n
Over the course of the next hour I will first try to restore to Jean Monnet the madness that belongs to him, retracing a few episodes of his life. Afterwards, I will try to explore his legacy and what the example of Jean Monnet means for us today.<\/p>\n
One of the rare positive aspects of the dark period we are going through is that we understand history, we feel it in the depths of ourselves. In the past we read the chronicles of the first half of the twentieth century and they seemed distant to us, like something tragic and long past. We studied them with a kind of detachment, as though they didn’t concern us directly. Today, on the contrary, we read the account of those events through the voice of the witnesses of that era, and we vibrate together with them, because their condition is also ours.<\/p>\n
We now understand \u2014 more than that, we feel \u2014 what Stefan Zweig meant when he wrote in 1936:<\/p>\n
“Rarely has the atmosphere of the world, and of our old Europe in particular, been so poisoned by distrust, disunity, and fear. Every morning one feverishly grabs the newspaper, and puts it down with a sigh of relief when nothing especially dangerous has happened. Distrust of one’s neighbors has gradually become a pathological phenomenon among many peoples; everywhere borders close in fear, day and night Europe’s factories work to create, after twenty centuries of magnificent achievements in every field of culture, the most impressive and ingenious instruments of destruction.”<\/p>\n
That morning sigh of relief, when turning on our phones we discover that nothing especially dangerous happened on the world stage overnight: today we know it well.<\/p>\n
But if we must endure, must feel in our own flesh the darker side of history, then perhaps we can also pay tribute to, and understand better than ever, the men and women who knew how to stand up to the darkness. All those who, after the Second World War, laid the foundations of one of the longest periods of peace and prosperity in human history.<\/p>\n
The Adventure<\/strong><\/p>\n Jean Monnet is one of them. And perhaps, of all of them, the one whose example is most essential. But for him to inspire us, we must first free him from the layer of pomposity and rhetoric with which he has been covered over the past decades.<\/p>\n And to do that, the best way is perhaps not to start from the central role he played in building Europe, nor from the almost incredible results that marked his career as a statesman and visionary builder, but rather from a few more intimate episodes. I will keep only three.<\/p>\n The first takes us back to 1906. Jean Monnet is eighteen years old. Two years earlier he left Cognac and his studies for an apprenticeship in the City of London; now he is sent to North America as a representative of the family business. He lands first in Canada, then crosses the American West. There he discovers a world without limits, where Europe already seems distant, almost insignificant.<\/p>\n One day he arrives at a farm in the middle of nowhere. Trying to reach a farm of Scandinavian settlers, big consumers of cognac, he asks a blacksmith what means of transport are available. Without pausing his work, the man tells him there are none, then, pointing to a horse, simply suggests he take it and bring it back later to the same place. This trust seems natural to him.<\/p>\n “I was far from Cognac and from countries of written law,” Jean Monnet comments in his Memoirs. “In America I found everywhere that impression that, where space was not limited, trust was not measured either.”<\/p>\n Monnet faces difficulty the way he always will: by widening the frame.<\/p>\n For nearly eight years he thus travels the world \u2014 North America, Scandinavia, Russia, Egypt. To the almost motionless stability of European society is added, in his spirit, the dynamism of an expanding world.<\/p>\n The second episode belongs to his private life, but is in its own way just as revealing. In July 1934, Jean Monnet leaves Shanghai, where he works as an investment banker and is close to Chiang Kai-shek, to go to Moscow. There he finds Silvia Giannini again, whom he had met five years earlier: an immediate coup de foudre, hindered by one major problem, since she is at the time married and divorce is practically impossible in Europe.<\/p>\n Monnet faces difficulty the way he always will: by widening the frame.<\/p>\n The only country where divorce is then accessible is the Soviet Union. So the two arrange to meet there \u2014 he coming from the Far East, she from Switzerland, where she lives with her son. Within a few days, Silvia becomes a Soviet citizen, obtains her divorce, and the two marry without delay before leaving again. Monnet would later describe this episode as “the best deal of his life.” Their union would last forty-five years, until Silvia’s death in 1979, and would be an essential anchor for him.<\/p>\n The third episode no longer belongs to the intimate sphere, but illustrates spectacularly the breadth of his influence. In December 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers a famous radio address in which he presents the United States as “the arsenal of democracy.” The expression is Jean Monnet’s.<\/p>\n Having arrived in Washington a few months earlier, after the fall of France, he has already established himself as a central interlocutor within the American administration. A State Department memo describes him at the time as “the master mind of our defense.”<\/p>\n Over the following two years he plays a decisive role in shaping the Victory Program. Though not himself a technician, he imposes a method: precisely assess military needs, compare them with industrial capacity, and expose the gap. Monnet fights tirelessly for a logic of abundance \u2014 better, he says, ten thousand tanks too many than one too few. He thus helps convince the Roosevelt administration to double its production targets.<\/p>\n This process leads to the message Roosevelt sends to Congress on January 6, 1942, setting industrial targets of unprecedented scale. Less than a month after entering the war, the United States has launched the decisive production effort. Keynes would later say that Monnet had “shortened the war by a year.”<\/p>\n Examples of this kind could be multiplied. But these alone give an idea of a personality and a career quite out of the ordinary. Of a mad cosmopolitanism \u2014 and a madly adventurous one.<\/p>\n Adventure, according to Giorgio Agamben, is what brings something or someone into being, what forges an identity, what gives a name: “Adventure is being as it happens.” At the beginning of Chr\u00e9tien de Troyes’s The Story of the Grail<\/em>, before setting out, the hero has no name. Only at the end will he learn that he is called Perceval the Welshman.<\/p>\n Jean Monnet’s life is an adventure. But so is his work, his principal work: Europe as we know it today.<\/p>\n It is not a matter of proclaiming European unity, but of making it necessary, concrete, almost inevitable.<\/p>\n We will not retrace the whole trajectory here. But, again, three moments \u2014 three genuine adventures \u2014 are enough to understand why Jean Monnet came to be considered one of the founding fathers of the European Union.<\/p>\n The first is set in 1914, at the dawn of the Great War. Jean Monnet is twenty-six years old. He holds no official position, represents no one but himself, and can claim only the experience gained in the field, in the course of his travels. Declared unfit for military service, he decides to serve in another way. One thing becomes clear to him: it is absurd for France and Great Britain, allies against Germany, to organize their raw-material supplies separately. The insight is simple; its realization, highly improbable. And yet, in the midst of the Battle of the Marne, Monnet manages to meet the President of the Council, Ren\u00e9 Viviani, and convince him of the need for close coordination between the two countries. Sent to London, he devotes himself until the end of the war to this task of organization and rationalization, in relative obscurity. This action is no less decisive for that: it helps give the Allied effort the material coherence without which victory would have been jeopardized.<\/p>\n The second episode takes place in June 1940. French defeat seems inevitable. Monnet, who refuses to accept surrender as inevitable, takes up on his own an idea both bold and desperate: that of an immediate and total union between France and the United Kingdom. In a memo titled Anglo-French Unity<\/em>, he proposes the merger of the two states: one government, one Parliament, one army.<\/p>\n Against all odds, he manages to convince Churchill, his cabinet, and General de Gaulle, then in London. On June 16, de Gaulle himself dictates the text over the telephone to Paul Reynaud. For a few hours, the prospect of shared sovereignty, born of the most extreme urgency, appears to be a real possibility. But that same evening, Reynaud is replaced by Marshal P\u00e9tain, who chooses the path of the armistice. The project vanishes instantly. That does not stop it from being a striking precedent: the idea that European nations can, if circumstances require it, come to unite politically to face their own destiny.<\/p>\n Finally, the decisive moment. In 1950, Jean Monnet proposes to Robert Schuman that coal and steel production be pooled with Germany. The Treaty of Paris of 1951, which establishes the European Coal and Steel Community, gives shape to this insight. For the first time, six states agree to transfer a part of their sovereignty to a common, independent authority, tasked with organizing a key sector of their economy. The choice of coal and steel is no accident: these are the very resources that had fueled Europe’s wars. Placing them under common management makes a new conflict between France and Germany not only unthinkable but materially impossible.<\/p>\n In politics, boredom is a formidable weapon.<\/strong><\/p>\n This is the point at which Jean Monnet fully enters history. But it is also here that the great paradox of Jean Monnet and of European construction lies: an extraordinary adventure that ends up in its opposite, boredom. Not by chance, but by strategy.<\/p>\n At the end of the Second World War, some think Europe must be united. They make grand declarations, appeals, they organize conferences. Jean Monnet is not part of this. When, in 1948, Churchill tries to launch the project of the United States of Europe at The Hague, Monnet does not go. For him, the point is not to proclaim European unity, but to make it necessary, concrete, almost inevitable, by anchoring it to shared material interests.<\/p>\n This, I believe, is where Jean Monnet’s true genius lies. European boredom is not the fruit of chance, but of a precise \u2014 and enlightened \u2014 political project. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Monnet understands that union is at once indispensable and impossible. Indispensable, to prevent the history of fratricidal conflicts from repeating endlessly. And impossible, because the peoples, despite everything, do not want it. Indeed, even in the following years, membership of the European Federalist Movement never exceeded 250,000.<\/p>\n This is why Monnet decides to take another route: that of technical agreements. First on coal and steel, then on an ever-broader range of sectors, until an inextricable web of relations and shared interests is created, one that turns the European Union into an accomplished fact, a technocratic construction endowed with its own implacable logic.<\/p>\n In politics, boredom is a formidable weapon. If a subject can be made so boring that everyone loses interest in it, then one can do whatever one wants. The American writer David Foster Wallace, in The Pale King<\/em>, describes how Republicans built a two-speed society in the United States, favoring the unlimited enrichment of some while widening inequality through fiscal policy. He writes that the true reason American citizens had \u2014 and still have \u2014 no awareness of these conflicts, these transformations, and what is at stake in them, is that the whole question of politics and fiscal administration is boring. Massively, spectacularly boring.<\/p>\n This is how boredom and apathy become a kind of political tool.<\/p>\n Such has been the case for the Europe of bureaucrats, at least until Maastricht and, in part, up to the present day. We must take our hats off to them: they have managed to hide one of the most thrilling political epics in history behind an endless series of rules on the color of life jackets and the diameter of pizzas.<\/p>\n Facing the Predators<\/strong><\/p>\n The European Union is without doubt the finest political project of the last century: the first attempt in history to build a supranational entity in peacetime, without weapons or threats, on the basis of peoples’ free adherence. No other political project is more exhilarating; and yet, over the past seventy years, Europe has not been built through grand speeches. It has been built by weaving an ever denser web of rules, which have led to ever-greater integration of our continent.<\/p>\n This strategy has enjoyed a success that has exceeded even the most optimistic expectations.<\/p>\n The problem today is that failing to respect the rules has become, almost everywhere, the fastest way to seize power and the surest way to hold onto it. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” says Shakespeare \u2014 or rather, Dick the Butcher in Henry VI<\/em>, when the question arises of what the first move should be at the moment of rebellion. Today, that is the program of all the predators who want to free themselves from any check on their power: national-populist leaders, brazen autocrats, the new tech oligarchs.<\/p>\n Faced with this situation, the Europeans who grow indignant, who raise great outcries treating their enemies as ignorant barbarians, bring to mind that Persian emperor who, according to Herodotus, ordered his soldiers to whip the sea to punish it for having obstructed his plans.<\/p>\n It is no use simply denouncing the predators around us who base their success on flouting the rules. We must understand the strength of this model.<\/p>\n In societies like ours, a growing share of citizens has the feeling \u2014 rightly or wrongly \u2014 that the system is stuck, that the problems remain always the same, and that voting for this or that politician changes absolutely nothing. In such a context, the predators burst in offering a veritable form of miracle.<\/p>\n In theology, a miracle corresponds to the direct intervention of God, who bypasses the normal rules of earthly existence to produce an extraordinary event; the logic of Trump and the other national-populist leaders is the same. Breaking the rules \u2014 and very often the laws \u2014 while claiming to produce an impact on the problems afflicting their voters.<\/p>\n The moment demands that Europeans have the ability to reinvent themselves, not merely to defend themselves. This is why we need Jean Monnet again. What would he have done, in our place?<\/p>\n Faced with this kind of offensive, the response of those who merely invoke respect for rules and procedures risks appearing weak. Not because it is wrong. It is obvious that without respect for rules and procedures there can be neither democracy nor the rule of law, still less the European project as conceived so far. All those who work to protect democracy or defend Europe are thus right.<\/p>\n But their effort cannot stop there. Because we risk giving a formal answer to a fundamental challenge. Citizens demand that their problems be solved, not that forms be respected.<\/p>\n Populist leaders focus on substance, or at least pretend to. They promise to solve people’s real problems: crime, immigration, the cost of living. If liberals, progressives, good democrats, and pro-Europeans entrench themselves solely behind the defense of forms and institutions judged ineffective by an ever-larger share of voters, they are doomed to be swept away.<\/p>\n The moment demands that Europeans have the ability to reinvent themselves, not merely to defend themselves.<\/p>\n This is why we need Jean Monnet again. What would he have done, in our place?<\/p>\n This is not a rhetorical question. I believe he himself would have appreciated it, because he was a being entirely projected forward: only the future interested him. This is also why he did not even want to publish his Memoirs (which would have been a terrible loss\u2026). “Could one conceive of memoirs that evoked the future?” he would ask his friend, the historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle.<\/p>\n But if it is not a rhetorical question, we must avoid answering it with a clich\u00e9: “If I had to start again, I would start with culture.” First of all because Monnet never said this phrase in this form. And moreover it is wrong: Monnet’s strategy was the right one; had he started with culture, he would never have gotten where he got.<\/p>\n The true lesson of Jean Monnet is more complex. The Monnet method rests on three main elements. First, a very clear and extraordinarily ambitious vision, which constantly guides every one of his actions. Andr\u00e9 Bazin would have said that bad directors have no ideas, good ones have many, but the great ones have only one. Jean Monnet has one great idea: union among peoples, and in particular union among the peoples of Europe.<\/p>\n Monnet is the most pragmatic man in the world, but what fuels his pragmatism is one of the noblest of ideals: the United States of Europe.<\/p>\n The second aspect of Monnet’s action lies in an almost divinatory ability to find, in every situation \u2014 even the most desperate \u2014 the precise point on which to lean in order to trigger a virtuous dynamic.<\/p>\n To do this requires technical competence, which Monnet cultivated above all thanks to the extraordinary circle of collaborators he surrounded himself with throughout his life. His subordinates adored him. He gave them the thrill of feeling at the center of the action and of making history.<\/p>\n In recent decades, the pro-European has become a being of caution rather than conquest, which has allowed his opponents to usurp change, while in reality they offer only a pernicious return to the past.<\/p>\n Monnet is not a technocrat, but he always starts from a technical, concrete lever, knowing that if he can move it, everything else can follow. In the early 1950s, coal and steel were clearly that lever, the spark that set off a chain reaction still ongoing today.<\/p>\n Third point: Jean Monnet gets his hands dirty. He does not content himself with cultivating a broad vision and identifying the precise technical solution. He mobilizes, with all the force of his energy and tactical intelligence, drawing on his immense network of relationships across the world, to make things move forward. And he does not stop until he has succeeded, or at least until he has exhausted every avenue for doing so.<\/p>\n The history of the two years separating the presentation of the Schuman Plan from the ratification of the treaty establishing the European Coal and Steel Community ought to be a required subject for every political science student. What emerges is a Jean Monnet who, as they say in Italy, could get two empty chairs to agree with each other, so remarkable are his diplomatic talents and his ability to constantly adapt to circumstances in order to reach his goal. To stay with the metaphor of the great director, rather like Fellini rewriting the script of his greatest films during shooting.<\/p>\n It is this incredible combination of vision, technical competence, and executional capacity that makes Jean Monnet a wholly exceptional figure.<\/p>\n As Alexandre Koj\u00e8ve would have said, the only thinkers who matter from a historical point of view are those whose thought became embodied in institutions. Jean Monnet is one of them. He used to say he had never held a position that he had not created himself.<\/p>\n If we decided to apply Jean Monnet’s lesson to our own era, we would have to tackle these three fronts at once: vision, leverage, and execution.<\/p>\n First, from the point of view of vision, the challenge posed by the predators \u2014 if we agree to consider it from a positive angle, which is certainly difficult, but necessary if we truly want to fight them rather than merely pretend to \u2014 consists, as I was saying, in widening the field of the possible. In the end, this is where all of Trump’s appeal lies.<\/p>\n “You say it’s impossible? Well, I’ll show you it’s not, to the point of actually doing it.” Now, it is clear that many of their miracles fail, and it is clear that, from our point of view, the Putins, the Trumps and so on mostly widen the field of the worst.<\/p>\n But the fact remains that this expansion of the sphere of the possible must be taken seriously. If all the transgressions they commit are possible, then it must surely also be possible for Europeans to be more ambitious.<\/p>\n It is up to us alone to rediscover the epic side of European construction.<\/p>\n I do not think it is a coincidence that today, Europeans known for their realism increasingly, and with determination, invoke the United States of Europe. Having reached this point in our journey, it is clear that we have a choice between turning back or crossing a threshold, committing resolutely to the path of the pragmatic and ideal federalism that Mario Draghi has been pointing us toward for some time now.<\/p>\n In recent decades, the pro-European has become a being of caution rather than conquest, which has allowed his opponents to usurp change, while in reality they offer only a pernicious return to the past. The United States of Europe remains, in my view, the only response equal to today’s challenges, the only revolution that \u2014 as Jean Monnet wrote \u2014 “wants to allow a new flourishing of our civilization, and a new renaissance.”<\/p>\n Today, each of us can get behind the wheel and drive three thousand kilometers to Tallinn without crossing a single border and without changing currency. An unimaginable miracle, if one thinks of the history that preceded us. Today it is up to us alone to rediscover the epic side of European construction.<\/p>\n This is, of course, a minority position. But in the new information ecosystem, it is the extremes that generate energy. We have seen this with the far right, which, starting from a very small base, managed to tip the situation in its favor. Pro-Europeans too must be able to move within this context. This is why we need a minority of activists who keep alive the dream of the United States of Europe.<\/p>\n It will take time, we will get there little by little, through coalitions of the willing, as has been the case so far, but it is a horizon we must not lose sight of.<\/p>\n Second point. Aim well, find the crucial point from which all the others follow. In the early 1950s, Monnet started from coal and steel because they were the sinews of war. Today the equivalent is obvious: it is the digital sector and, even more, artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n Today’s coal and steel are the digital sector and artificial intelligence: the challenge is finding a way to place them at the center of Europe’s reinvention.<\/p>\n One of Silicon Valley’s most powerful and unsettling sociopaths, Marc Andreessen, published his manifesto fifteen years ago titled “Software Is Eating the World.” His thesis was that, little by little, the advance of the digital would conquer every sphere of economic activity and of human activity as such. Fifteen years later, everyone can see that this process is nearing completion and that software has begun to devour the last bastions of state sovereignty: military action, control of territory, the monopoly on violence.<\/p>\n Today’s coal and steel are the digital sector and artificial intelligence: the challenge is finding a way to place them at the center of Europe’s reinvention. If Monnet were among us, he would probably not try to compete head-on with the great powers on every front; he would identify a structuring lever, and would work to create organized interdependencies around it.<\/p>\n We do not have time here to go into details, but the initiatives and proposals currently on the table are not lacking. Among all those available to us, the task is to identify the one capable of triggering a new chain reaction, on the model of the one set off by the Schuman Plan in the early 1950s.<\/p>\n But once the thread is found, it must be pulled. This is the third part of the Monnet method: execution, the setting in motion of the mechanism, the patient building of the political consensus that will allow the vision to be made real. It is on this level that, compared with Jean Monnet’s era, we run into the elephant in the room.<\/p>\n In Jean Monnet’s time, America was the most powerful promoter and catalyst of European integration. If today we celebrate Europe Day on May 9, the date the Schuman Plan was presented \u2014 a plan drawn up by Monnet \u2014 it is because two days later, on the 11th, Schuman himself was due to go to London for the meeting of Allied foreign ministers, at which Dean Acheson, the American Secretary of State, had asked him to present a plan on France’s relations with Germany.<\/p>\n Europe Day itself is born of an American deadline!<\/p>\n Today, not only has this resource disappeared, but our old allies have now turned against us, rejecting any form of European integration \u2014 a trait they share with the other geopolitical predators.<\/p>\n On the other hand, a new element has emerged, one Monnet did not have available: a nascent European public opinion, itself the fruit of his strategy, which has ended up uniting the continent. Where, after the war, Monnet had to adopt an almost furtive strategy \u2014 for lack of any popular support, and faced with peoples who were exhausted and deeply divided \u2014 we today have a base of expectations. Despite its limits and fragmentation, a European public opinion is taking shape, one that the Grand Continent’s Eurobarometer-style surveys confirm spectacularly. They show a strongly growing attachment to the Union through the crises we are going through, almost everywhere, and, even more, a very strong expectation of action in key areas, starting with defense and technology.<\/p>\n There is thus a demand for Europe that exceeds the current political supply. Where Monnet had to get ahead of public opinion, today it is possible, at least in part, to lean on it. We need political entrepreneurs capable of taking advantage of it.<\/p>\n Today we do not have the luxury of waiting for a new Jean Monnet to appear and get us out of trouble. The least one can say is that none is to be seen on the horizon. On the other hand, we can perhaps set ourselves the horizon of bringing about a form of “collective Monnet.”<\/p>\n The enemies of Europe want to live forever, but one wonders why exactly, given that they do not give, not even for an instant, the impression of knowing how to enjoy life.<\/p>\n This is the pledge, and the invitation, I would like to put to you: let us try to become, together, a collective Jean Monnet.<\/p>\n The task may seem burdensome. But there is also, in Jean Monnet’s story, something else besides courage, something else besides vision and perseverance.<\/p>\n There is a more discreet, gentler part, to which I would like to turn in closing.<\/p>\n Jean Monnet was also someone who knew how to live. I have told you of his great love. I could have described to you his sense of friendship and his kindness: Chiang Kai-shek used to say of him that he could have made a great general, had he not been so kind to his subordinates.<\/p>\n In his memoirs, Paul-Henri Spaak recalls the quality of the dishes served at Jean Monnet’s table. In 1942, in Algiers, where he played a decisive role, Monnet lived outside the city, in a magnificent setting of Roman ruins, scented with wild thyme, bathed in clear Mediterranean light, amid a profusion of flowers and birds.<\/p>\n Back in France, he settled in the enchanting thatched-roof house of Houjarray, in the heart of the forest of Rambouillet, where he would spend the rest of his life. Today his archives are kept at the Ferme de Dorigny, in Lausanne, another delightful place.<\/p>\n It may seem anecdotal, but it is not.<\/p>\n The enemies of Europe are not made this way. They do not seek beauty, because they do not know what it is. They spend immense resources surrounding themselves with ugliness. One need only look at Trump’s real-estate choices, the palaces Putin has built for himself, the bunkers of the tech oligarchs. They want to live forever, but one wonders why exactly, given that they do not give, not even for an instant, the impression of knowing how to enjoy life.<\/p>\n Our mission today is to reinvent a European art of living, one equal to the challenges of our time. The task may seem modest; it is in fact the most decisive one.<\/p>\n If Europe has today lost a certain number of positions, it remains the place everyone wants to live. Even those who despise it. A recent survey of highly educated young people places six European countries among the top ten. The United States, once in first place, no longer figures among the top ten today.<\/p>\n Throughout history, the art of living has always been the antidote to every form of totalitarianism. Because the totalitarian aspiration \u2014 whether religious or technological \u2014 is to control time, to standardize behavior. Its dream is that man be reduced to a machine: predictable, uniform, transparent. Quality of life is the exact opposite. Freedom, pleasure, whim, and wasted time. Everything that makes the individual unique, and which we must be able to protect and make flourish in this new dimension of the digital and of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n Our mission today is to reinvent a European art of living, one equal to the challenges of our time. The task may seem modest; it is in fact the most decisive one.<\/p>\n We will not succeed without drawing inspiration from Jean Monnet’s noblest qualities: his courage, his open-mindedness, his strategic intelligence, and his perseverance. But to succeed, we will also need, and perhaps above all, his joy, his sense of friendship, and his taste for life.<\/p>\n This is the speech delivered by Giuliano da Empoli, writer and essayist, on July 1 at the Panth\u00e9on in Paris, as part of the \u201cLe\u00e7ons exceptionnelles\u201d series organized by the Grand Continent research center.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Europe’s tragedy is to have made Jean Monnet boring. This extraordinary figure, who crossed the world for decades, living incredible adventures and relentlessly pursuing the mad ideal of a united Europe, has been turned into a dusty reference point, a stuffed founding father, good only for quoting in the most conventional speeches on the state […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7836,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7824"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7952,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7824\/revisions\/7952"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}