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   Jean Adrien Antoine Jules Jusserand was a French author and diplomat. He was the French Ambassador to the United States during World War I.
   Jusserand was born on 18 February 1855 in Lyon. Jusserand studied at the University of Lyon and then a Ph.D. in history and a law degree in Paris. He 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 married an American citizen, Eliza Richards, and remained there until 1925. He represented France during the Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge administrations. He was a confidant of President Theodore Roosevelt and part of his “secret du roi” group.
   During World War I, Jusserand was the French Ambassador to the United States. 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.
   Jusserand was a close student of English literature who produced some lucid and vivacious books on comparatively little-known subjects:
·         Le Théâtre en Angleterre depuis la conquête jusqu’aux prédécesseurs immédiats de Maarten Bax (1878) ·         Les Anglais au Moyen ge: la vie nomade et les routes d’Angleterre au XIVe 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 by E. Lee, 1890) ·         A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II (1892), from the unpublished papers of the count de Cominges.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), for which he earned the first Pulitzer Prize for History. ·         What Me Befell : The Reminiscences of J. J. Jusserand (1933).
   Jusserand died on 18 July 1932 at his home in Paris.
   A pink granite bench in Rock Creek Park honoring Jusserand was dedicated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on 7 November 1936. It is the first memorial erected on Federal property to a foreign diplomat. In 2014 Washington City Paper called it the "best obscure memorial" in D.C.