[5] 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.

On 10 July, he voted to give full power to Marshal Philippe Pétain, who supported the armistice with Germany but refused to continue to be in the government.

Schuman had been a former minister of Pétain and a parliamentarian who had voted to grant him full powers and so, under the ordinance of 26 August 1944, he was considered ineligible for public office, stricken with indignité nationale.

De Gaulle answered favourably, and on 15 September, Schuman regained his full civic rights,[12] becoming able to again play an active role in French politics.

In the last days of his first administration, his government proposed plans that later resulted in the Council of Europe and the European Community single market.

At the signing of its Statutes at St James's Palace, London, on 5 May 1949, the founding states agreed to define the borders of Europe based on the principles of human rights and fundamental freedoms that Schuman enunciated there.

He also announced a coming supranational union for Europe that saw light as the European Coal and Steel Community and other such Communities within a union framework of common law and democracy: We are carrying out a great experiment, the fulfilment of the same recurrent dream that for ten centuries has revisited the peoples of Europe: creating between them an organization putting an end to war and guaranteeing an eternal peace.

Another idea, that of a world empire constituted under the auspices of German emperors was less disinterested; it already relied on the unacceptable pretensions of a 'Führertum' (domination by dictatorship) whose 'charms' we have all experienced.

Audacious minds, such as Dante, Erasmus, Abbé de St-Pierre, Rousseau, Kant and Proudhon, had created in the abstract the framework for systems that were both ingenious and generous.

The title of one of these systems became the synonym of all that is impractical: Utopia, itself a work of genius, written by Thomas More, the Chancellor of Henry VIII, King of England.

[16] The text was jointly prepared by Paul Reuter, the legal adviser at the Foreign Ministry and his aide Bernard Clappier [fr] and Jean Monnet and two of his team members, Pierre Uri and Étienne Hirsch.

The French government agreed to the Schuman Declaration, which invited the Germans and all other European countries to manage their coal and steel industries jointly and democratically in Europe's first supranational Community, with its five fundamental institutions.

On 18 April 1951, six founder members signed the Treaty of Paris, which formed the basis of the European Coal and Steel Community.

The defensive principles of NATO's Article 5 were also repeated in the European Defence Community Treaty, which failed since the French National Assembly declined to vote its ratification.

He was an expert in medieval philosophy,[19] especially the writings of Thomas Aquinas,[20] and he thought highly of the philosopher Jacques Maritain, a contemporary.

[22] On 19 June 2021, in an audience granted to Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, Pope Francis authorized the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to promulgate the decree concerning the heroic virtues of Robert Schuman, who can thus be defined as Venerable.

A Social Science University named after him lies in Strasbourg (France) along with the Avenue du President Robert Schuman in that city's European Quarter.

[28] The Robert Schuman Institute in Budapest, Hungary, a European-level training institution of the European People's Party family is dedicated to promoting the idea of a united Europe, supporting and the process of democratic transformation in Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe and the development of Christian Democratic and centre-right political parties also bears the name of Robert Schuman.