The Evolving Politics of Commemoration: French Socialists, German Social Democrats, and the “Founding Fathers” of European Integration, 1958 to 1980

Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Walter Hallstein have been heralded as the most prominent of the French and German “founding fathers” of European integration and Franco-German reconciliation in the initial postwar period. Three of these figures were Christian Democrats. Scholars emphasize the importance of Christian democracy over that of Socialist parties in fostering early efforts at European integration, a claim qualified by my recent dissertation that investigates how French Socialists and German Social Democrats contributed to this process from 1948 to 1957.

This paper casts a long view by investigating how the leaderships of the French Socialist and German Social Democratic parties perceived of and presented these four figures to the public from 1958 to the 1980s. It demonstrates how these parties’ mobilized, invoked, and/or downplayed these figures and their accomplishments. The paper then uses these findings as a window into the parties’ understanding of their own role in the European integration process and the direction it should take in the future. Did commemoration intersect with the mobilization of the memory of these figures for contemporary political struggles during the period of the Fouchet Plan and Empty Chair Crisis of the 1960s, and the negotiations and ratification processes of the Maastricht Treaty and the European Constitution? This will allow an assessment of the degree to which these “founding fathers” have become objects of cross-party consensus or are contested by Socialists in a manner that calls into question contemporary models of European integration.