Robert Schuman was born a German subject in Luxembourg, of a family from Lorraine, and became French when Lorraine did. He was a lawyer, a deputy, and by temperament a private man: he never married, lived alone, said the Divine Office, went to Mass every morning, and kept a library of Aquinas and Maritain. The Gestapo arrested him at Metz on 14 September 1940 and he spent the war in hiding, some of it in monasteries, following the hours with the monks who sheltered him.
On 9 May 1950 he stood in the Salon de l'Horloge at the Quai d'Orsay as foreign minister of France and proposed that France and Germany place their coal and steel — the materials of war — under a common authority open to other countries. The declaration is five paragraphs long and it created the European Coal and Steel Community, out of which the European Union grew. He said plainly what it was for: to make war between France and Germany not merely unthinkable but materially impossible. Five years after Dachau, he was proposing to share an industry with the country that had jailed him.
He held that democracy owed its existence to Christianity and would not survive without it, and he governed as a man who expected to be judged. He died at Scy-Chazelles on 4 September 1963. His cause was opened in 1990 and Pope Francis declared him Venerable on 19 June 2021 — the first statesman of the European project to be so named, and a reminder that the site's map of Europe is drawn over a peace that a daily communicant argued for.