Helene Carrere d’Encausse, an internationally respected Russian historian who became the first woman to lead the Academie Francaise in 1999, died on Saturday at the age of 94, according to her family.
“She died peacefully surrounded by her family,” they told AFP in a statement.
Carrere d’Encausse wrote biographies of Lenin and Stalin.
She is also acknowledged as foreseeing the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and Russia’s subsequent problems with ethnic minorities.
She addressed these concerns in her 1978 novel “The Shattered Empire.”
She was born on July 6, 1929, in Paris, to a Georgian father and a Russian mother from a family with origins in Austria, Germany, and Italy.
She got French nationality when she was 21 years old, in 1950.
A former political science professor in Paris, she once described herself as “French from head to foot. A case of perfect integration”.
Carrere d’Encausse was also elected to the European Parliament on a right-wing list in 1994, a position she retained until her election as the French Academy’s permanent secretary in 1999.
French President Emmanuel Macron hailed her as “a major historian, the first woman to be permanent secretary of the Academie Francaise — like it, her legacy is immortal”.
