Historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, first woman at the head of the French Academy and a great specialist in Russia, died this Saturday in Paris, her children announced to AFP.
Author of some thirty books, including the resounding Empire shattered, which was a huge success (1978), Hélène Carrère d’Encausse marked her time by her talent as a historian and academic, but also by her tireless activity within numerous institutions of a sometimes political nature – it appeared on a UDF-RPR list in the 1994 European elections.
Representative and symbol of a French Academy which has been able to welcome a woman of foreign origin at its head, she will have met many important personalities including Russian President Vladimir Putin with whom she will speak directly in Russian, a language learned as a child. Born in Paris on July 6, 1929 to a Georgian father and a mother of German-Russian origin, Hélène Zourabichvili became French in 1950 after having lived in a cosmopolitan and polyglot family universe. His father, compromised during the Occupation, disappeared after the Liberation, leaving his family in great precariousness.
After brilliant studies – she graduated from the Institut des Sciences politiques and has a doctorate in literature – she became a history professor at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University and then at Science Po. Her roots led her to work on Russia. His thesis is on “Reform and Revolution among Muslims in the Russian Empire”.
She publishes and participates in academic works, before publishing the Empire exploded: the revolt of the nations in the USSR (Flammarion) which foresees the explosion of the Soviet system under the demographic pressure of a growing Muslim population. The book is making a splash. Some even see it as an obscure maneuver for the free world to lower its guard against the Soviet ogre, considered more dangerous than ever.
“It was enough to read Pravda every day to read between the lines of the economic news the real state of the Soviet Union,” she explained.
The events that follow will prove the historian right: the USSR has indeed broken up thirteen years later. But not as she expected, the neighboring Muslim republics did not play a decisive role in this implosion.
Hélène Carrère D’Encausse subsequently published more than twenty essays almost exclusively devoted to Russia and the Soviet Union. Among them are biographies of Catherine II, Lenin and Stalin as well as a remarkable summary of The Romanovs, a dynasty under the reign of blood. In Nicolas II the uninterrupted transition, a political biography (Fayard, 1986) she reevaluates the role of the last tsar often portrayed as a dull and inconsistent character.
Respectful of the action of leaders, from Gorbachev to Vladimir Putin, in whom she sees a patriot restoring Russian dignity, not an imperialist, she will never stop defending the idea of a Russia linked to a Europe of which she will lament the ingratitude.
His credo can be summed up in a few words: Russia is a world apart, its democratization cannot be brutal, nor comparable to that of an old Western nation. Let’s give him a chance. Let’s not push this great country into the arms of China.
During the 1980s, solicited by the political world, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse engaged in activities in the service of a country, France, for which she had a genuine passion. She participated in the Commission of Elders for the reform of the nationality code in 1986 and 1987, which suggested making the acquisition of nationality dependent on a voluntary process. She became involved in the camp of the liberal right, notably with Raymond Barre, whose candidacy for the 1988 presidential elections she supported. must cross to go further” and became an adviser to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development which, in 1992, helped former communist countries.
She was elected to the French Academy in the chair of Jean Mistler, in 1990 on the proposal of Henri Troyat who felt that she embodied the intellectual fight against the Soviet idea. It was Michel Déon who received her under the Coupole in November 1991: between them, the friendship dates back to the post-war years when the young student with light braids rolled up over her ears had found refuge in Paris in circles where found Marcel Aymé, Maurice and Suzanne Bardèche, Antoine Blondin or the publisher Bernard de Fallois.
In 1999, she became permanent secretary of the Company, replacing Maurice Druon. She is the first woman to access this prestigious position but refuses the feminization of her title of “perpetual secretary”. She affixed her mark, courteous and firm, and received new elected officials, such as the novelist Jean-Marie Rouart, René Rémond or Cardinal Lustiger.
By this intellectual and honorary consecration, little Zourabichvili washes away the humiliation experienced by her parents from a failed integration in France between the two wars. “Until my marriage, I wore a name to sleep outside,” she said, always impeccably dressed, with a charming smile.
If her historical essays are written in a very chastised language, she is not always averse to controversy. President of the Scientific Council of the Statistical Observatory of Immigration and Integration, she comments for a Russian television channel on the riots in the Parisian suburbs which hit the headlines in December 2005. Her remarks on the rising communitarianism make waves among the beautiful souls, always quick to be indignant. For her, France was a generous land and newcomers had to do everything to integrate into it: the attitude of the White Russians was an example of this.
Married to a discreet and mischievous man, Louis Carrère, the historian had three children, including the talented novelist Emmanuel Carrère, author of a work from which Russia is not absent (Limonov, Roman russe). His daughter Marine Carrère d’Encausse is a renowned journalist in the field of health.
And it is until the end to Russia that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse dedicated her last books, among which General de Gaulle and Russia where she takes issue with the alleged complacency of De Gaulle towards the Sovietism.
One of her last battles at the Académie française was that of the integrity of the language, threatened according to her by the “deadly danger that inclusive writing constitutes”, but she also accompanied the evolution of the Académie on the question. the feminization of titles and functions (February 2019).
This exceptional and unanimously respected woman of action – she was an honorary professor at many foreign universities. Until the end she will have wanted to strengthen the ties between her two countries of heart, and honored the one who had welcomed her by donating her talent and her formidable energy.
