A Man of Europe

Flags flew at half-mast in Brussels over the headquarters of the Common Market. The tribute was in homage to that grand old Eurocrat, Robert Schuman. His death last week at 77 remined the world that the new Europe which Charles de Gaulle so grandly purports to head owes much of its impetus to other Frenchmen with broader horizons.

Reared in Lorraine while it was un der the Kaiser's rule, Schuman was a German for the first 33 years of his life. When the Treaty of Versailles returned Lorraine to France after World War I, he became French (although he never lost his German accent) and was elected a Deputy. Educated in the law, lean and tall with a toothbrush mustache, the ascetic Schuman was a natural for the finance commission, where he served for 17 years. He ate cheap meals, prowled his offices snapping off lights. A lifelong bachelor, Schuman once answered the door of his Paris apartment wearing a maid's apron; he had been doing his own dusting.

Lone Loss. But when it came to his dream of the future Europe, Schuman was a leader among Europe's postwar generation of Christian Democratic radical integrationists. After helping found the Catholic M.R.P. and twice serving as postwar Premier of France (from November 1947 to July 1948, and for another brief period later in 1948), Schuman took over the Foreign Minister's post. In 1949, after helping draw up the North Atlantic Treaty blueprint, he signed the historic NATO pact on France's behalf. In 1950, in league with another French Eurocrat, Jean Monnet, he proposed the "Schuman Plan" for the European Coal and Steel Community, which proved to be the forerunner of the six-nation Common Market, and of the Euratom pool for peaceful nuclear resources. In 1954 Schuman lost his only major battle--a drive for an all-European army (EDC).

No Orations. In recent years Schuman lived in semiretirement at his family estate, poring over his rare books (among them the handwritten school manuscripts of Louis XIV) and penning his memoirs. Intimates say he was "very upset" by De Gaulle's opposition to Britain's entry into the Common Market; but he kept his silence.

Last month, felled by a cerebral thrombosis, Schuman rallied weakly, but remained bedridden. When news of his death was announced, messages of eulogy poured in--from Pope Paul, President Kennedy (he "combined vision with realism"), and from De Gaulle, who acknowledged "the high conscience with which he served." At week's end, with no orations (at his request), Robert Schuman's funeral service in the Metz Cathedral was attended by five former French Premiers.*Eventually his body is to lie in a special mausoleum--to be built facing eastward across the Rhine.

-Afterward the five--Antoine Pinay, Guy Mollet, Pierre Pflimlin, Rene Pleven and Rene Mayer--were invited to luncheon at the Metz prefecture by De Gaulle's representative, Minister of State Louis Joxe. But the ex-Premiers declined the invitation when they learned that Schuman's old friend Jean Monnet, who was also present, had been left out of the party.

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