ABSTRACT
When the Dutch foreign minister Jan Willem Beyen proposed the formation of a common market among the six member states of the ECSC in April 1955, the French government did not support it. Nor did it support the alternative proposal, launched on the same day by the Belgian foreign minister Paul Henri Spaak and favoured by Jean Monnet, which was based on extending European integration into the fields of energy, transport and atomic energy. Yet two years later the French government had taken the momentous and largely irreversible decision to sign the Treaties of Rome setting up the European Common Market and the European Atomic Energy Community, Euratom.
