In his lifetime Monnet was widely viewed as essentially a colourless, able, hardworking bureaucrat or technocrat, the man behind the scenes who could implement the ideas of men with greater vision than he possessed. His role as one of the founding fathers of European unity was only vaguely glimpsed by the greater public, and probably Schuman and Spaak had a sharper political profile as architects of the Common Market. Recently, however, there has been a kind of posthumous canonisation of him, and this biography continues the process. Monnet was not, in fact, a typical French style technocrat his early background was in business, in the wine and brandy trade (he was born, appropriately, in Cognac) and travelling for his father's firm made him familiar with England and fluent in the language. He was never a front window politician, instead he was primarily an administrator, "fixer" and man to man negotiator and persuader who came into politics through a side door and never desired or sought any public or glamour image. In fact, Monnet all his life was a poor public speaker who hated facing crowds he was happier in behind the scene activity, using his vast range of "contacts" and pulling a hundred strings or dynamically chairing small, select meetings. A genuine grassroots, provincial Frenchman, he also had a clear political intellect and is credited with inventing the phrase "arsenal of democracy" which Roosevelt used so effectively. World leaders, for the most part, greatly respected him and an invitation to lunch in his spartan little Paris suite was reckoned a special honour. As this book makes plain, he did not view European unity as an economic expedient only he saw it as a new way of thinking.