The French statesman Robert Schuman (1886-1963) was the public author of the plan that pooled the French and German coal and steel industries into the European Coal and Steel Community.

Born in Luxembourg on June 29, 1886, into a prosperous family from Lorraine, Robert Schuman was educated in Germany as a lawyer. Of military age during World War I, he did not serve in the German army, although later his political opponents often made that accusation. After the Treaty of Versailles restored Lorraine to France in 1919, Schuman was elected to the French Parliament, a deputy of the Catholic Popular Democratic party.

Exerting a generally conservative influence, Schuman was a member of the parliamentary finance commission for 17 years and its president in 1940. Undersecretary of state for refugees in the Paul Reynaud government after March 1940, he was arrested by the Gestapo in September and confined at Neustadt. Schuman escaped in 1942 and immediately...