Review: An American by Degrees The Extraordinary Lives of French Ambassador Jules Jusserand

Abstract

AN AMERICAN BY DEGREES The Extraordinary Lives of French Ambassador Jules Jusserand Robert J. Young Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009. 368pp, $59.95 cloth ISBN: 9780773535725Although Lyon, the city of his birth in 1855, has an Avenue Jules Jusserand, the longest-serving French ambassador to Washington (1903-25) is well-nigh forgotten today in his home country. He is better remembered in the United States, especially thanks to the Theodore Roosevelt scholars in whose works he features prominently. Canadian historian Robert J. Young's biography, published exactly 100 years after the end of Roosevelt's presidency, is a most welcome study that underscores the scarcity of French publications about this Quai d'Orsay luminary. Jusserand's close friendship with Roosevelt, under whom he served seven of his 22 years in Washington, is only one of the many extraordinary lives of this exceptional man, who died in 1932 at age 77. Jusserand represented France under five US presidents (Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge) and proved an efficient but discreet player in all of the great world affairs of the first quarter of the 20th century, including the Russo-Japanese War, the Moroccan crisis, America's intervention in World War I, the Versailles peace negotiations, the French mission to Poland after the Russian invasion, and the Washington naval conference. He was a long-time dean of the diplomatic corps in Washington. Young's thoroughly researched and elegantly written book offers his readers an extensive and fascinating slice of diplomatic and cultural history on both sides of the Atlantic during France's third republic.Jean Jules Jusserand was appointed to Washington as France witnessed the advent of a leftist coalition whose raUying cries were the republican defence of the regime and the anticlerical struggle. This radical republic, a sequel to the Dreyfus affair, led to the 1905 separation of church and state and the deterioration of France's relations with the Vatican. Ironically, Jusserand would be recaUed 23 years later foUowing the 1924 electoral victory of another leftist bloc headed by another Lyonnais, Premier Edouard Herriot. Jusserand was a renowned historian and English literature scholar, an Anglophile with a perfect command of the English language. He was an authority on the middle ages, pre-Shakespearean theatre, and 17th- and 18thcentury novels, and he wrote countless books on those subjects. He had been a member of the most important fin-de-siecle artistic, literary, and political circles in Paris and London. He knew Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Albert Sorel, Anatole France, Edmond Rostand, Alexandre Dumas fils, John Morley, William Gladstone, Robert Browning, Bret Harte, and Henry James, and was a contemporary of Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, Pierre Loti, Maurice Barres, and Emile Zola. He traveUed extensively in northern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and North Africa. …