By François Duchêne

W. W. Norton & Co., 1995

Pages 54-56

© 1994 by François Duchêne

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[*54] to [the film] at all. He was just puzzling over what his thoughts were involved in"

Soong had hoped to bring in foreign capital as well as Chinese. At first, the Japanese again frustrated him. When Chiang Kai-shek also refused to commit himself, it was assumed the CDFC would founder. But the major locally based British banks and businesses, alarmed at Japan's growing influence, and hoping to enlist the Chinese "to fight our battles for us", were won over. The first railway bond issued by the CDFC in 1934 with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was heavily oversubscribed; and from the Chinese point of view, the terms were better than usual. The line, from Shanghai to Ningpo, laid a bridge over the natural barrier of the Fuchun River. With this missing link in place, a broad south-east Chinese rail network came for the first time within sight.

Monnet believed the Shanghai market could subscribe more than half the sums to consolidate China's railway debts and rehabilitate the system. At least one expert in London agreed with him. That autumn, the Foreign Office preferred his proposals for redeeming China's railway debt to earlier ones by the British Shanghai banks. Others too were impressed by the CDFC. Because of it, Monnet, in Washington in October 1934, obtained the agreement- in principle of the Export-Import Bank to ingenious credit arrangements enabling China to import equipment for modernisation.

WHEN MONNET LEFT Shanghai for the first time in July 1934, on the Trans-Siberian, he was not simply returning to Europe and America, as he claimed, to complete his financial plans for China. His main interest in Moscow was to conduct perhaps the most important personal transaction of his life. This was to marry, on November 13, 1934, Silvia, née de Bondini, an Italian born in August 1907 and so nineteen years his junior. Photographs of the time show a very elegant woman. John J. McCloy, then a Cravath lawyer working with Blair, thought her the most beautiful he had met. The difficulty was that the future Madame Monnet was married to someone else. Monnet and his wife first met, say his Memoirs, at a dinner in Paris in August 1929, "and we forgot the other participants". Her first husband, Francesco Giannini, whom she had wed on April 6, 1929, was, McCloy recalled, a senior representative of Blair and Company in Italy, and was thus an employee of Monnet.[4] Divorce in the 1930s was a far cry from the routine affair it has since become. In Italy, it was not recognised at all. Worse, Silvia and Francesco Giannini now had a daughter, Anna, born in April 1931, [*55] and in countries of Roman law, including France, custody belonged to the father.

Between August 1929 and November 1934 lay five years and long separations, during which Silvia Giannini and Jean Monnet tried and failed to secure an annulment of her marriage. Salter remembered Monnet's courtship "by cable and transatlantic phone". Monnet finally planned his own marriage like a negotiation between great powers. He "wanted to have the legitimacy of a big country behind us" (sic). The United States was rejected. Even Nevada required residence qualifications, and Monnet and his bride-to-be felt that divorce and marriage Reno-style lacked dignity. This left Moscow. Stalin's Moscow was a surprising venue, but at that time it had two signal advantages. It was possible there to obtain citizenship and residence qualifications rapidly, and to divorce and remarry at once. Rajchman again provided the vital contact, this time with the Soviet government. To the bemusement of Monnet himself, who never found out why, the Soviet government was very helpful. The shift in Soviet policy in 1934 towards the Popular Front against Hitler and the run-up to the Franco-Soviet mutual security treaty of May 2, 1935, may have played a part. In any case, the wedding "cost months of work and a fortune". Monnet as usual roped in influential connections to achieve his ends. The American and French ambassadors in Moscow, William Bullitt and Charles Aiphand, appear to have paved the way.

The actual divorce and wedding in Moscow were a lightning operation. Silvia Giannini travelled from Switzerland, where she had been staying with her mother and child as an Italian. In a few days, she became a Soviet citizen. She then divorced without delay. That done, she and Monnet promptly married and left immediately. Meanwhile, Silvia's mother had taken Anna to Paris, where the newlyweds picked her up. The trio then moved to the United States and, in March 1935, to Shanghai.

In Shanghai, there was an attempt by Francesco Giannini, through the Italian embassy, to abduct his child. It failed because, it seems, Silvia Monnet took refuge for a week in the Soviet consulate in Shanghai. There remained a lawsuit for Anna's custody, which was finally settled in Silvia Monnet's favour in the New York courts in the spring of 1937. The settlement was not valid, however, in countries of Roman law, so that Madame Manner was not able-at least immediately-to return to continental Europe with her daughter. This was a powerful reason for Monnet to work out of New York during much of the later thirties. She did come to Paris, though, on occasion and on June 18, 1939, was naturalised French. She had been long enough in Paris for some of her paintings to be conveyed by a friend to the cellars of the American embassy on the fall of France in 1940. When the whole family came back to France late in 1945, Anna was sixteen. By this time, the Monnets had a daughter of their own marriage, Marianne, [*56] born late in 1941. Many years later still, it seems after Francesco Giannini died in 1974, they celebrated a religious wedding in the cathedral of Lourdes.

The Kremlin wedding was the more remarkable because Silvia Monnet was, and became increasingly, an ardent Catholic. Monnet's own mother was "very devout", and his elder sister, Marie-Louise, was prominent in Catholic Action. With Barbara Ward, she was one of only two laywomen summoned by Pope John XXIII to the Vatican II Council in the 1960s. Monnet himself took extreme unction on his deathbed, though it was notable that Silvia Monnet was careful not to propose it. He struck most of those who knew him as closer in such matters to his father, a "radical socialist", which was synonymous in Monnet's youth with free thought and even anti-clericalism. Monnet was no anti-clerical and evinced respect for a church that had weathered two millennia. But this was a secular tribute, and religion never surfaced in his table talk. Adenauer, who might have done, did not regard him as religious. Nor does his daughter, Marianne. Some observers, however, have felt that his outlook in creating the European Community expressed religious values. It has also been rumoured that in his last years he had a series of exchanges with a priest. Monnet was a very private, pragmatic, complex-and also superstitious-man. This was no doubt as true of his attitudes to religion as to everything else.

Anyone who worked with him knew that Silvia Monnet was very important to her husband throughout the forty-five years of their marriage. She was the daughter of the Italian publisher of a French-language weekly, La Turquie, produced in Istanbul in the years before the First World War and with a large circulation throughout the eastern Mediterranean. She grew up trilingual in Italian, French and Greek. She was an intelligent, forceful woman and a competent amateur painter. It was fairly characteristic that she took up painting as an adult, probably in New York, because, she said, "she was bored to death by all the dinners and women's lunch parties". Joxe wrote of Monnet in Algiers in 1943 that he "would spend hours writing to his wife, whose opinion mattered more to him than that of anyone else". Monnet paid tribute to her "keen and disinterested mind". He would consult her on key documents and, as successive ghost-writers came to know, take her comments into account. Further than that, it is difficult to assess her influence. As far as observers could tell, he seemed to seek out her views more in order to have an astute lay reaction, a private check on "public opinion", than to tap her for policies. Since Monnet liked the country and had virtually no friends outside work, she lived a rather sequestered life: a substantial price paid for his public one.

Three months after his marriage, on February 18, 1935, Monnet set up a financial partnership in New York with George Murnane, who [*57] had been deputy commissioner for France in the American Red Cross. From 1928 to 1935 he was a partner in a then famous investment bank, Lee, Higginson and Company, of Boston, which made the fatal error of backing Kreuger to the hilt. He had come on to the Transamerica board under Walker. He and Monnet were, then, among the financial walking wounded. Dulles made their new venture possible. As managing partner of Sullivan and Cromwell, he occasionally invested in people or businesses. Monnet, he wrote to W. N. Cromwell, the aged head of the firm, was "one of the most brilliant men that I know" and "an intimate friend [who] has the full confidence of many of the most important financial people". Dulles and Cromwell duly invested $100,000 in Monnet, Murnane and Company, incorporated in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Dulles furnished Monnet, Murnane with several of their most profitable clients.

Monnet, Murnane and Co., Lord Perth has said, was "a merchant bank without any capital . . . & the Co. was us["]-that is, David Drummond in London and in Paris Pierre Denis, the son of a French professor who befriended the Czechs in Habsburg days and still has a statute in Prague. Denis, a very skilful drafter of documents, had penned the armistice agreement in 1918. The "and Co." never grew larger. The aim, as Dulles expressed in his understanding of it at the outset, was "to engage in work of a consultative and advisory nature to governments and corporations in financial matters". It was, in short, a financial consultancy, something rare before the war. It lived on the contacts, imagination and judgment-the wits-of the partners.

Less than a month after Monnet, Murnane and Company was formed, on March 13, 1935, Monnet wrote an eleven-page memorandum "on the point of leaving for Shanghai". This shows that he saw his end of the partnership mainly as a way of continuing work in China.

All people of importance . . . are interested in China. We ought to be able not only to build up the [CDFC] . . . but also make substantial profits. I see three main lines of our activity: 1. . . . helping the Chinese in the general financial negotiations now starting . . . 2. Develop the [CDFC] as a Chinese entity, sought as their partner by the most important industrialists doing business in China . . . 3. The financial reorganisation of the railways.

Monnet had told a member of the Far East Division of the State Department the previous October that opportunities for the development of China were almost limitless.

His policy was "to base our action . . . in China on British influence, as . . . [Britain] is the one that best understands China and whose actions most benefit it". Britain controlled 56 per cent of the foreign capital invested in [*58]

[4] One has found no evidence he was related to Amadeo Giannini. A Dr. Francesco Giannini was an Italian member of the Programme Committee of the AMTC. The name reappears on the staff of the secretariat of the League of Nations in 1923. Monnet tended to employ familiar faces.