Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, French historian and great expert on Russia, has died this Saturday in Paris at the age of 94, according to what her children have reported. The news has shaken the French cultural world because she was a well-known and respected personality. Carrère d’Encausse had been the life secretary of the prestigious French Academy since 1999, the only woman to hold the position in almost four hundred years.
Until a few weeks ago, the deceased historian was a regular, as an analyst, on television programs dedicated to the war in Ukraine, where she expressed her opinions very clearly, lucidly, and pedagogically. Mother of the writer Emmanuel Carrère, the secretary of the French Academy was awarded last May with the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences.
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, although 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 were important to her. She dedicated herself to politics for a few years, as an MEP for a formation of the Gaullist right.
In October of last year, the missing historian gave a long interview to La Vanguardia in her office at the headquarters of the French Academy, where the life secretary had a “function apartment” at her disposal. Carrère d’Encausse was extremely cordial during the meeting and she agreed to answer all questions. She admitted, for example, that she thought until the last moment that Vladimir Putin – whom she met in person during her frequent visits to Moscow – would not invade Ukraine because she saw no point in the operation.
Until the end Carrère d’Encausse was a very elegant woman. She went to the sets impeccably dressed and combed, often with necklaces. She was convinced that in Moscow there would necessarily have to be some kind of rebellion against Putin. According to her, the head of the Kremlin experienced a psychological transformation 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 “settling of scores”, not only within power 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 was, on February 9, on the occasion of the admission of the Spanish-Peruvian writer and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas LLosa to the French Academy. Carrère d’Encausse, with the mandatory uniform, complied with all the rituals that the arrival of a new member to the prestigious club of the so-called “immortals” entails.
