With Americans of Past and Present Days
by Jean Jules Jusserand
Summary
With Americans of Past and Present Days collects essays by Jean Jules Jusserand, the French ambassador to the United States, tracing the historical friendship between France and America from the Revolutionary War alliance forward. Jusserand writes as a diplomat as much as a scholar, drawing on individual figures, notably the officers Lafayette and Rochambeau who brought French troops and money to Washington's cause, to trace how the two nations understood each other across a century and a half. Each essay works as a portrait more than a chronology, moving between political history and biography to show how a shared revolutionary experience kept shaping French and American relations long after independence was won.
Jusserand had spent decades before this book writing literary history rather than diplomatic history, three volumes on English literature and studies of medieval English poetry among them, and that training shows in his approach: measured, closely researched prose that treats character and circumstance as carefully as it treats treaties and votes. Reading the book means spending time with a working ambassador's own view of the alliance he was, at the moment of publication, trying to keep alive, since Jusserand wrote it in 1916 while actively pressing the American government to enter the war then consuming his own country.
It suits a reader curious about how a diplomat turns archival history into an argument for the present, rather than a reader looking for a single continuous narrative. The essays assume some familiarity with the individual episodes they cover and reward a reader willing to move with Jusserand from one figure to the next rather than expecting one connecting story pulled taut across the whole book.
Historical Context & Significance
With Americans of Past and Present Days won the very first Pulitzer Prize for History in 1917, the inaugural year of a category that has run every year since except when the board chose not to give an award at all. No finalists were named for a prize this young, and the Pulitzer board would not begin publishing runner up nominees until 1980.
Jusserand served as French ambassador to Washington from 1902 until 1924, longer than any predecessor, and used the post to campaign publicly for American entry into the First World War even before this book appeared. He continued writing after the prize, and his reminiscences, What Me Befell, appeared in 1933, the year after he died. He had retired from the embassy in 1925 and gone home to France, where he died in Paris in July 1932. The prize itself has become better known for what came after it than for this book, since Jusserand's win set the pattern of honoring serious historical scholarship by writers working outside the American academy.