Merry Bromberger (1906–1978)

One of my first exposures to the French art of biography. Unlike the "Life and Times" approach in the Anglo-Saxon world, many French biographies might be termed "biographic essays".
This was written in cooperation with Monnet, one of the prime architects of the European community. It details the importance of his young years, traveling throughout the United States as salesman for his father's cognac distillery, amazed at the ease of doing business in a vast land sharing one currency. As the authors write: "If we attempt to explain the success of Monnet's career we will discover that these early travels played an important role. With his imagination, his bold self-confidence and disarming optimism, it was a stroke of good fortune for him to have been a mediocre student eager to see the world. He grew accustomed to a continent devoid of frontiers, eluded the traditional pattern of French bourgeois aducation, and was spared the respect for historical tradition and the cultivated scepticism that is the hallmark of Europeans.
"Much later he said, 'I was daring because I knew no taboos. I was unaware of the importance of official functions. Like Americans, I was trained to think that if something needs to be changed every man has the right to point this out. I felt very self-confident because I was not asking anything for myself" (13).
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