Building · Clausen
Robert Schuman's Birthplace
The house in Clausen where, in 1886, the man who would propose the European Union was born — a German citizen with a Lorraine father and a Luxembourg mother, three hundred metres from the offices that carry his name.
On the 29th of June 1886, in this house on the road up out of Clausen, Robert Schuman was born. His father came from Évrange, a Luxembourgish-speaking village just over the French border in Lorraine, and had become German when Germany annexed Lorraine in 1871; his mother was from Bettembourg, half an hour down the road. So the child was, by the law of the day, a German — born in Luxembourg to a Luxembourger, speaking Luxembourgish at home. He went to school in the city, at the Athénée, until 1903, then took his German school certificate in Metz, studied law in Bonn, Munich, Berlin and Strasbourg, and settled in Metz as a lawyer. When Lorraine became French again in 1919 he became French, and was elected to the National Assembly.
The Gestapo arrested him in 1940; he escaped in 1942 and went into hiding. After the war he was Prime Minister of France, and then, from 1948, its Foreign Minister — and on the 9th of May 1950 he read out a short declaration proposing that France and Germany pool their coal and steel under a common authority open to every country in Europe. That proposal became the European Coal and Steel Community, and the Community became the Union. The 9th of May is Europe Day because of what was said that morning.
The border he was born on ran through his own family, which is why he spent his life trying to make it not matter. The plaque on the wall says as much. Look up the hill: the European Parliament's secretariat on the Kirchberg, three hundred metres away, is named after him, and the roundabout on the far side of the city has his monument. This is the house.
