At the end of the 1930s, a little girl had to answer the call of an “unpronounceable name, coming from the depths of the Caucasus, which excluded her from the community of descendants of the proud Gauls with round”: Zurabishvili; a name that is nevertheless gratifying since it roughly means, in Georgian, “daughter of light”.
In fact, young Hélène’s paternal grandfather was an important political actor in the briefly independent Republic of Georgia, and her father, a leading publicist and thinker, armed with diplomas, but whose tragic and unsolved end, in the summer of 1944, made him dead without burial, a painful secret that Hélène’s son, Emmanuel Carrère, seized on in Un roman russe (2007).
The mother comes from a considerable Russian lineage, with German, Swedish and Polish contributions, and some members of which participated in the elimination of the tsars Peter III, in 1762, and Paul I, in 1801, while another was signatory of the act of abolition of serfdom by Alexander II in 1861. The takeover of Georgia by the Soviets in 1921 forced the family into exile in France, in embarrassment. The first language for the little girl was Russian, the second, almost immediately, French, in which she learned to read.
1950: the young woman, until then stateless, applied for French nationality on her 21st birthday. To his indignant surprise, an official delivers him without a word a receipt: neither flag, nor Marseillaise, nor oath. She enters France as in religion, so strong is her carnal attachment to her true homeland, its landscapes, its language and its history: Vercingetorix, Louis XIV, Napoleon. Because history, she already knows, is made by men more than by the price curve and the volume of trade.
1990: the professor of contemporary history at the Sorbonne and Sciences Po is elected in the first round to the French Academy, on the initiative of Henri Troyat, born Lev Tarassov, also a child of exile. Ten years later, here she is, perpetual secretary of the institution which, in its own way sometimes considered obsolete, has illustrated our country for longer than any other, having survived all regimes and all fashions. Hélène Zourabichvili, who became Mme Carrère d’Encausse in 1952, has traveled the path that leads to French excellence.
However, it was with the study of Russian history and Soviet society that it all began. Always, perhaps because of her origins, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse felt a taste for travel, and first of all through her youthful reading, which led her to Central Asia. Thus, René Grousset took her to his Steppe Empire to meet Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, whose peripheral republics of the Soviet Empire retained a part of their visible heritage.
Working under the direction of Maxime Rodinson and Roger Portal, the young researcher explores a field that was little explored at the time: the often conflicting encounter between the development of national feeling and the Soviet revolution, particularly among the peoples of Russia with a Muslim majority. . His state thesis, defended in 1976, focused on Bolshevism and Nations, from theoretical debates to the consolidation of a multinational state 1917-1929.
She had already taken the measure of it on the ground in the early 1960s, when stays in Central Asia were not commonplace: unexpectedly favored by an epizootic congress, she went to Alma-Ata , thus discovering the complex realities of Kazakhstan, from there to Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. From the temptation of communism, from which, rare in her generation, she was unscathed, she brought back enough to be definitively immunized, and also to nourish her university work.
On this double base, she built, through documentary investigation, political reflection and impressive statistical tables, a work with an involuntarily premonitory and powerfully effective title: L’Empire exploded, published in 1978, immediately obtained a resounding success. How can Homo islamicus and Homo sovieticus coexist in one person? This fundamental challenge, two generations after the revolution, the Soviet state grappling with the awakening of the hundred nations that compose it had not managed to meet it.
It was to show in an unexpected light the intrinsic weakness of the Empire, and to explain its hardening of then. The author did not conclude that it was about to fall, but clearly brought to light the quasi-geological fault from which the earthquake could come one day. From there to affirming that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse had foreseen and described the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there was only one step that Moscow took immediately: from the publication of the book, and for ten years, she was prohibited from entering the USSR.
On the other hand, now a figurehead of Sovietology, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was consulted regularly by Presidents Mitterrand and Chirac and by various governments, and finally by Gorbachev himself, who put an end to his quarantine. Yeltsin and Putin took over, and from then on she was received there with the highest honours, more like a Georgian princess than a French scholar.
The upheavals of 1989-1991 gave hope for a reconstruction of Europe in which Russia would regain its full place. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, of whom this was a major cause and who, by her origins, presented herself as “Europe incarnate”, thought so. Special adviser to EBRD President Jacques Attali, she accepted, at the request of Jacques Chirac, to sit in the European Parliament from 1994 to 1999, assuming the vice-presidency of its Foreign Affairs Committee.
However, she never stopped pursuing her work as a historian, trying, in her own words, to “make Russia a country that can be deciphered by reason”. Putting into perspective the ruptures that marked the evolution of Russia in a generally bloody way, and that described in 1988 Le Malheur russe. Essay on political murder.
This misfortune sui generis, for which, said Michel Déon receiving her under the Dome, she never ceased to feel immense pity, but above all the continuities of which, for having ignored them, the Soviet Union died, she was interested in the major figures who embodied them, going back from Stalin to Lenin, from Nicolas II to Alexander II and Catherine II, ending in 2021 with “the Valkyrie of the Revolution”, Alexandra Kollontaï, in a series of biographies called to make date, and all in search of this “missed transition” which characterizes Russian society after the second 18th century, the only moment of balance when Russia, for once contemporary with its time, seemed to positively assume its European identity and its openness to Asia.
“Mother Superior”, according to the affectionate expression of her colleague Erik Orsenna, “tsarina” for others, author of a good thirty books, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, dean of election and age of the French Academy, exercised for four decades, without however founding a school, an intellectual and moral magisterium which has hardly any examples in the recent annals of the Republic, barely altered by a certain blindness until the very days of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, of which she was slow to take the measure.
Engaged in a vigorous defense of the French lexical tradition, in the preservation of heritage, particularly Parisian because the capital was her favorite garden, in the debate on immigration and integration, in the deepening of European civilization, this woman endowed of unfailing optimism and radiant, even imperial energy, follower of the Victorian principle never explain never complain, embodied, by the very originality of his career, a particular moment in French and European culture.
