Where the "Marshall Plan" Became the Organization for European Economic Cooperation.

• Author: Earle, Renee M.

In 2022, Europe and the U.S. marked the 75th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, and this year is the 20th anniversary of a permanent Paris exhibit that documents its achievements. When I was posted to Paris as the Public Affairs Officer from 2002 to 2006, the public affairs offices (except for the press section), along with the consular affairs services, were in the Hotel de Talleyrand facing the Place de la Concorde, about a block from the main U.S. embassy building. The Talleyrand, as we called it, gave visitors easier access for these more public functions of the embassy. Running back and forth to meetings at the embassy was a small price to pay for offices overlooking the majestic Concorde.

In 2003, the Talleyrand marked a new milestone. Following initial restorations of the Talleyrand's State Apartment rooms, the embassy invited representatives of the Marshall Plan's participating nations and restoration sponsors to celebrate the opening of the George C. Marshall Center and its permanent exhibit, "The Marshall Plan: The Vision of a Family of Nations," created by French and American historians and curators to memorialize the project that revitalized Europe after the devastation of World War II.

The Talleyrand has an illustrious history dating from the 18th century and a no-less-illustrious list of inhabitants that included the building's namesake today, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, and the Rothschild family, who made the Talleyrand their home until the German occupation of Paris. The "hotel particulier" (private urban mansion) lived through an evolving history of changes, including its own salvation when only quick action by the Allied forces saved the Place de la Concorde and surrounding buildings from Hitler's order to destroy Paris.

The U.S. government began renting the building after WWII in 1948 and purchased it in 1950. During those years, its rooms housed the U.S. Economic Cooperation Administration, led by Ambassador Averill Harriman, and soon thereafter the representatives of the sixteen European countries who came together to plan and administer the European Recovery Program under what had already become known as the "Marshall Plan." Noteworthy at the time is that the plan also included Germany. The USSR was the original seventeenth member but since "glasnost" was not the order of the day in the time of Josef Stalin, the USSR decided that the project's conditions of transparency were not to its liking and, amid fear...