2023-08-05 19:24:52
Academician Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, February 21, 2022. JOEL SAGET / AFP
Historian of Tsarist and Soviet Russia, third woman member of the French Academy, where she was the first elected to the post of perpetual secretary in 1999, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse died at the age of 94, her family announced. Saturday August 5th.
When little Hélène was born in Paris on July 6, 1929, the family fortune, the ease and the prosperity that the Zurabishvili family had known a few decades earlier were only memories, at best a horizon of reconquest still hazy in the future. hour of poverty, the lot of those emigrants who fled the Bolshevik revolution.
Rich in great servants of the Romanov Empire, as well as spirited protesters and eminent scholars, the family, who came from Georgia via Istanbul, settled in France after the invasion of the very recent Democratic Republic of Georgia by the Soviet army at the end of the winter of 1921, less than three years after its birth on the ruins of the tsarist empire. It grew with the birth, in 1936, of Nicolas, who studied with Nadia Boulanger and distinguished himself in composition both for classical formations and for the cinema, notably Otar Iosseliani.
Read also: Hélène Carrère d’Encausse: “I tried to decipher a future where Europe would be recomposed in freedom”
Very early on, little Hélène learned to read, first French then Russian, becoming very familiar with these parallel literatures very early on. The father, Georges, a philosopher with a degree in political economy who became a taxi driver before trying his hand at import-export, took the family to Bordeaux, where his mastery of five languages proved to be a valuable skill. But, working as an interpreter for the Germans during the Occupation, he was kidnapped at the Liberation and disappeared in October 1944, probably liquidated, as suggested by his grandson, the writer Emmanuel Carrère in his book A Russian novel (POL, 2007), evoking “a trivial tragedy”.
Stateless
Returning with her mother to Paris, the teenager is accommodated in the premises of the Orthodox cathedral church on rue Daru. Maurice Bardèche, brother-in-law of Robert Brasillach, met her in February 1950 and became attached to the one who seemed to him to share his “anger and [sa] revolt ». In his Souvenirs (1993), the controversial writer even ignites: “She had the soul of a young heroine, but at the same time she was realistic, determined, lucid. » Despite this portrayal Radical, Hélène Zourabichvili followed a solid education at the Lycée Molière, then at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris.
At her majority, the young woman, born stateless, obtains French nationality. A crucial moment in her eyes, she who then wants to take an oath on the flag and is alarmed that the simple fact of not opposing naturalization before the day of her 21st birthday has already made her a Frenchwoman. She will remember this when she is called in June 1987 to sit among the “wise men” of the commission for the reform of the nationality code.
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