She belonged to the exclusive club of “the immortals”, where she had also been a “perpetual secretary” since 1999. Hélène Carrère d’Encausse wanted to respect the literalness of these expressions as much as possible because, until her unexpected death, the day before yesterday, at the age of 94, she remained very active, lucid and with a dense public agenda.
The death of this historian and great expert on Russia shook the French cultural world for being a well-known and respected personality. The head of the Government, Élisabeth Borne, highlighted “her passion for the truth”. She was the first woman elected as “secretary” (she preferred the masculine, to be faithful to tradition) of the French Academy in the almost four hundred years of existence of this institution created by Cardinal Richelieu to preserve the language.
Until the end, this great Parisian dame attended, as an analyst, the television programs dedicated to the war in Ukraine, where she expressed herself with great clarity and pedagogy. The mother of the writer Emmanuel Carrère, she was awarded last May with the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences. Jean-Marie Rouart, also an academic, told Le Journal du Dimanche that a week ago he had dined, sitting next to her, at the house of some friends on the boulevard Saint-Germain, on the rive gauche, stronghold of the intelligentsia.
Born in Paris in 1929 to parents of Georgian and Russian-German origin, Carrère d’Encausse became a renowned specialist in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. Her book L’Empire éclaté (1978) predicted the fall of the USSR, not so much due to the failure of its economic system as due to territorial tensions. Her biographies of Catherine the Great, Lenin and Stalin are of reference to her. For a period she dedicated herself to politics as a Gaullist right-wing MEP.
In October of last year, the missing historian gave a long interview to La Vanguardia in her office at the Academy headquarters, very close to the Seine. Carrère d’ Encausse was extremely cordial and she agreed to answer all questions. She admitted that until the last moment she thought that Putin – whom she met in person during her frequent visits to Moscow – would not invade Ukraine because she saw no point in the operation. She was wrong. But she was convinced that in Moscow there would necessarily have to be a rebellion. According to her, the head of the Kremlin experienced a psychological transformation in recent years that made him recover the Soviet vision of the world.
Although she was cautious with her predictions, Carrère d’Encausse thought that, after Putin, there would be a “reckoning”, not only within power in Moscow but also in the form of centrifugal movements in various territories that today make up the Russian Federation.
One of its most important public events this year, on February 9, was on the solemn admission of the Spanish-Peruvian novelist and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa to the French Academy. Carrère d’Encausse, with the mandatory uniform and a lot of work, fulfilled all the rituals that the arrival of a new member of the “immortals” entails. She undoubtedly set an example to honor this daring description.
