Guillaume Tell Poussin

Guillaume Tell de La Vallée-Poussin (1794–1876) was a French engineer and diplomat. He served as a captain in the United States Army Corps of Engineers and aide-de-camp to General Simon Bernard, working under the War Department’s Board of Engineers for Internal Improvements (1824–1831) on multi-state road and canal surveys. He later interpreted American internal improvements and railways for European readers and served as ambassador of the French Second Republic to the United States (1848–1849) before recall after a dispute with U.S. Secretary of State John M. Clayton.

Early life and education 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). In 1814 he registered as a student of architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but soon thereafter departed for the United States. He consolidated these efforts in Travaux d’améliorations intérieures (1834).

After returning to France in 1831, he traveled in England, Belgium, and the Rhineland to observe railway development and published Chemins de fer américains (1836), an early French-language survey of U.S. railways and their administration. was born in 1853. 1841: Considérations sur le principe démocratique qui régit l'Union Américaine (Paris). 1843: De la puissance américaine (Paris). New edition, 1848; vol. 1 and vol. 2 on Google Books. 1845: La Belgique et les Belges depuis 1830 (Paris). 1846: Question de l'Oregon. 1874: Les États-Unis d'Amérique: étude historique et d'économie politique, 1815–1873 (Paris).

Legacy and assessment Poussin’s writings helped circulate American practices in internal improvements and railroad management to European audiences.