Venerable Robert Schuman

Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Robert Schuman was a Luxembourg-born French statesman. Schuman was a Christian democratic (Popular Republican Movement) political thinker and activist. Twice Prime Minister of France, a reformist Minister of Finance and a Foreign Minister, he was instrumental in building postwar European and trans-Atlantic institutions and was one of the founders of the European Communities, the Council of Europe and NATO. The 1964–1965 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour. In 2021, Schuman was declared venerable by Pope Francis in recognition of his acting on Christian principles. Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Robert Schuman was born in 29 June 1886 in Clausen, Luxembourg, inheriting his father's German citizenship. His father, Jean-Pierre Schuman (d. 1900), who was a native of Lorraine and was born a French citizen, had become a German citizen when Lorraine was annexed by Germany in 1871, and he left to settle in Luxembourg, not far from his native village of Evrange. Schuman's mother, Eugénie Suzanne Duren (d. 1911), was a Luxembourger. Though Schuman would later become involved in French politics, he grew up and attended school in Luxembourg City, speaking Luxembourgish as his mother tongue. Schuman's secondary schooling from 1896 to 1903 was at Athénée de Luxembourg, followed in 1904 by the Kaiserliches Lyceum in Metz. From 1904 to 1910, he studied law, economics, political philosophy, theology and statistics at the Universities of Berlin, Munich, Bonn and Strasbourg, and received a law degree with the highest distinction from Strasbourg University. In 1904, Schuman joined the Catholic student association Unitas in Bonn. In 1912, Schuman set up practice as a lawyer in Metz and joined the L'Union Populaire Catholique. When the war broke out in 1914, he was called up for the auxiliary troops by the German army in Metz but was excused from military service on health grounds.