Yet French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, with the assistance of his counselor Jean Monnet, announced a plan for the ECSC in 1950, only five years after German troops had left Paris, with the aim of making “war not only unthinkable but materially impossible.” Schuman proposed putting Franco-German coal and steel production under a common High Authority, thereby preventing the two sides from using the raw materials of war against each other, and powering a common industrial economy.