BERLIN (AFP) - France and Germany on Tuesday agreed to hammer out joint proposals for strengthening the crisis-battered eurozone as they marked 50 years since a treaty sealing their post-war reconciliation. Setting past tensions aside, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande put on a show of unity, even dropping past formalities and trumpeting their personal "chemistry". At a joint news conference in the middle of a hectic agenda of pomp and ceremony marking the 1963 Elysee Treaty, Merkel said they planned to unveil by May new initiatives for "stabilising and deepening" the economic and monetary union. Employment, growth, financial stability and competitiveness would be targeted in the proposals, to be laid out ahead of a European Union summit in June, she said. "We are conscious of our great responsibility to improve the situation in the European Union, overcome the euro crisis, make economic growth possible and thereby also making the best model of European life... liveable and operational for the future," she said. Hollande said they were working on making decisions in the coming months "to deepen economic and monetary union" and said they would try to be "as concrete as possible, that's to say, the most useful so that growth is strengthened". Both countries' cabinets held a joint session followed by a debate in the historic Reichstag when a handful of the nearly 400 French lawmakers who had come to snow-bedecked Berlin to meet their Bundestag counterparts ventured several words in German. Signed by then French president Charles de Gaulle and West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the Elysee accord formalised the cooperation between the former foes that has since been a building block of European unity. But the half-century milestone comes amid strains in the Franco-German partnership and as the EU faces testing times over the debt burden of some eurozone members and euroscepticism in Britain.