2023-08-06 01:30:50
This historian had entered history herself, by becoming the first woman to head the French Academy. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, 94, died on Saturday, her family announced. “She died peacefully surrounded by her family,” said the press release from her relatives.
Born Zourabichvili in 1929, her work “The Exploded Empire”, published in 1978 and announcing “the end of the USSR” had made a lot of people talk about him. We also owe him biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Catherine II of Russia.
Hélène Carrère d’Encausse has left us.
Attached to the country that saw her grow up, to her language and her heritage, she will become French at the age of 21.
A major historian, she was the first female Permanent Secretary of the French Academy. Like her, her legacy is immortal.
—Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) August 5, 2023
“Like her, her legacy is immortal,” Emmanuel Macron tweeted. “Hélène Carrère d’Encausse lived, until the end, to defend the richness of the French language with unifying energy. A convinced European, she was free and tenacious in her commitments, ”also posted the Minister of Culture Rima Abdul Malak.
Former head of state Nicolas Sarkozy said of X that he remembers “his great intelligence, his sense of humor and his commitment to freedom”. And Marine Le Pen salutes the memory of a woman “whose torments of history had deprived her of a homeland but who will choose France for the love of our civilisation”.
“She embodied, with firmness and courage, for a long time, what an intelligence and an extraordinary knowledge can bring the best to a society”, praised to AFP Xavier Darcos, Chancellor of the Institut de France and member of the French Academy. Questioned by BFMTV, the former Minister of Culture Jack Lang hailed “a great lady of Letters and the Arts” who gave the Academy “a luster, an incomparable brilliance”.
Third woman to join the Academy
It was in 1990 that Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was elected to the 14th chair of the French Academy left vacant by the writer Jean Mistler. At the time, she was the third woman to join the institution after Marguerite Yourcenar and Jacqueline de Romilly. Nine years later, she became the first woman to serve as perpetual secretary of the Academy, replacing Maurice Druon.
She had indicated in 1999 that it should be called “Madame Perpetual Secretary”, without feminizing the function. Because, according to her, “there has only been one Perpetual Secretary for three and a half centuries. It is this idea of continuity that must prevail. It is a line that continues”.
Opposed to the feminization of titles
Visiting professor at many foreign universities, especially in North America and Japan, she was decorated in 1998 by Russian President Boris Yeltsin with the Order of Friendship between Peoples “for her study of Russia”.
Since 1999, she has had the opportunity to express her opposition to the feminization of titles and functions for women in the French language, then, years later, to inclusive writing, while striving to “replenish the Academy” as great novelists.
Recognized in the world of “Kremlinologists”, these specialists in Russian power, she was until recently regularly invited to the media to provide her perspective on the conflict that has been raging in Ukraine since February 2022.
She also had a short political career between 1994 and 1999, when she was a Member of the European Parliament under the RPR label.
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