him an honorary Companion of Honour. He was the first to be bestowed Honorary Citizen of Europe by the European Council of the European Union, for extraordinary work to promote European cooperation on 2 April 1976, he remained the only one for a generation until Helmut Kohl received the same distinction in 1998. Following this, he became the first person then living to be pictured on a Federal Republic of Germany stamp who was not a German head of state. Memorialization Public monuments Public memorials to Monnet include: bronze busts in front of his birthplace in Cognac; at the entrance of the square Jean-Monnet in Montpellier; in Angers; inside the Peace Palace in The Hague; and as part of the Monument to the Founding Fathers of the European Union in King Michael I Park, Bucharest. a sculpted memorial in a garden named after Monnet in Vanves near Paris; a life-size statue by Zurab Tsereteli, part of a group offered by Russia in 2012 and erected in front of the in Scy-Chazelles near Metz; commemorative plaques on the Willard Hotel in Washington DC, where he worked during World War II; the building at 18, rue de Martignac, where he created France's General Planning Commission; the Hotel Grand Chef at Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg, where he lived in 1952-1953; the house at 138, rue des Muguets in Luxembourg, where he lived in 1953-1955; the building on 83, avenue Foch in Paris, where his Action Committee for the United States of Europe had its office from 1955 to 1975; and the house at Houjarray where he lived after 1945 and died in 1979. In the United States, a bill was introduced in 2022 to erect a bench in memory of Monnet in Rock Creek Park, with support from the National Capital Memorial Advisory Commission and National Park Service. Places Jean Monnet House at Houjarray The Jean Monnet House is located in Houjarray, a hamlet of Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, Yvelines, 80 kilometres (50 miles) outside Paris. This old farm became Jean Monnet's property in 1945, upon his return to France. It was there that Jean Monnet and his advisors, in the last days of April 1950, drew up the historic declaration that Robert Schuman used to address Europe on 9 May 1950, proposing the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community. In the house, Robert Schuman, Walter Hallstein, Paul-Henri Spaak, Konrad Adenauer, René Pleven, Helmut Schmidt,