About Hélène Carrère d'Encausse
Hélène Carrère d'Encausse (French pronunciation: [elɛn kaʁɛːʁ dɑ̃kos]; née Zourabichvili; 6 July 1929 – 5 August 2023) was a French political historian who specialised in Russian history. From 1999 until her death in 2023, she served as the Perpetual Secretary of the Académie Française, to which she was first elected in 1990. Carrère d'Encausse was a member of the European Parliament between 1994 and 1999, representing the Gaullist-conservative party RPR. She was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal and Grand Cross with Star of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in 2008 and 2011, respectively. She was a cousin of Salome Zourabichvili, the current disputed President of Georgia. In 2023 she was awarded the Princess of Asturias Award in Social Sciences. == Early life, family and education == Hélène Zourabichvili was born in the 16th arrondissement of Paris to Georges Zourabichvili, a Georgian immigrant of an educated middle class background, and Nathalie von Pelken, a penniless descendant of Prussian barons and Russian counts. Both parents arrived in Paris in 1925. Her mother had grown up in Tuscany, where the remainder of her Russian family fortune was lost through misinvestment. Of her two maternal great-uncles, the Counts Komarovskii, Viktor was in 1905–1907 the vice-governor of Vyatka, notorious for defenestrating Muslims, and Georgii a veteran of the Second Boer War, Russian invasion of Manchuria and Russo-Japanese War executed in 1920 by the revolutionaries. Hélène's father, son of a Tiflis lawyer and a translator, had fled the Bolshevik takeover of the briefly independent Georgia in 1921 and studied philosophy and political economy in Berlin before re-joining his exiled family in Paris; he spoke five languages, as did his wife-to-be.
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