Map of the
Cape Cod Canal from Poussin's Travaux d’améliorations (1834)
Guillaume Tell de La Vallée-Poussin (1794–1876) was a French engineer and diplomat.
Life
Poussin was born at
Poissy (Yvelines) on 10 February 1794 and was named after the republican hero
William Tell. His father, Jean Étienne de La Vallée dit Poussin (1735-1802), was a painter and decorator who had won the
Prix de Rome in 1759; his mother was Élisabeth Félicité Gillet (born c. 1750).[1] In 1814 he was registered as a student of architecture at the
Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but soon thereafter he departed for the United States. He served as a captain in the
United States Army Corps of Engineers, becoming
aide de camp to General
Simon Bernard. He returned to France in 1831, and spent time travelling through England, Belgium, and the Rhineland, taking a particular interest in the development of railways. In 1841 he published Considérations sur le principe démocratique, to correct what he saw as
Alexis de Tocqueville's superficial understanding of American democracy.[2] From 1848 to 1849 Poussin served as ambassador of the
French Second Republic to the United States, answerable to Tocqueville, who was then French foreign minister. He was recalled after diplomatic relations became strained due to the intemperate language that he and the US Secretary of State,
John M. Clayton, had used to one another in correspondence over an attempt by the captain of the
USS Iris to claim
right of salvage over a French ship stranded off
Veracruz.[3]
In 1850 he married Louise Roux, who in 1853 gave birth to their daughter,
Camille Emma Aline.[1]
Poussin died at home in Paris (13 rue Say) on 7 November 1876 and was buried in the
Père-Lachaise Cemetery.[1]
^Jeremy Jennings, "French Visions of America: From Tocqueville to the Civil War", in America through European Eyes: British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited by Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey C. Isaac (Pennsylvania State Press, 2009), pp. 171-176.
^Henry Blumenthal, A Reappraisal of Franco-American Relations, 1830-1871 (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), pp. 77-80.