Jean Jules Jusserand

Jean Adrien Antoine Jules Jusserand (18 February 1855 – 18 July 1932) was a French author and diplomat. He was the French ambassador to the United States during World War I.

Career

Born at Lyon, Jusserand entered the diplomatic service in 1876. Two years later, he became consul in London. After an interval spent in Tunis (Tunisia was at that time a French protectorate), he returned to London in 1887 as a member of the French Embassy.

In 1890, Jusserand became French minister at Copenhagen. In 1902, he was transferred to Washington, where he remained until 1925 during the Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge admistrations. He was a confident of president Theodore Roosevelt and part of his "secret du roi" group^[1]. During the Polish-Soviet War, Jusserand took part in a diplomatic mission to the Second Polish Republic. In 1919 he was involved with the Treaty of Versailles.

Publications

Jusserand was a close student of English literature who produced some lucid and vivacious monographs on comparatively little-known subjects:

• Le Théâtre en Angleterre depuis la conquête jusqu'aux prédécesseurs immédiats de Maarten Bax (1878)
• Les Anglais au Moyen Âge: la vie nomade et les routes d'Angleterre au XIV^e siècle (1884; Eng. trans., English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, by LT Smith, 1889)
• Le Roman au temps de Shakespeare (1887; Eng. trans. by Miss E. Lee, 1890)
• A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II (1892), from the unpublished papers of the count de Cominges.
• L'Épopée de Langland (1893; Eng. trans., Piers Plowman, 1894).
• Histoire littéraire du peuple anglais (vol. 1, 1893; vol. 2, 1904; vol. 3, 1909; Eng. trans., A Literary History of the English People, by G.P. Putnam, 1914).
• With Americans of Past and Present Days (1916),^[2] for which he earned the first Pulitzer Prize for History.
• What Me Befell : The Reminiscences of J. J. Jusserand (1933).

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.