the historian Hélène Carrère d’Encaussewriter, great expert on Russia and permanent secretary of the Academy of the French language since 1999, has been awarded the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences. His son, the writer Emmanuel Carrèreone of the most influential authors of the 20th century and author of novels such as ‘The Adversary’ or ‘Limonov’, was awarded the same prize in the Literature category in 2021.
In a statement, the jury affirmed that the historian’s work “probably constitutes the most substantive contribution that has been made in recent decades to the knowledge of the Soviet Union and Russia, one of the essential issues for understanding the contemporary world” and highlights the stage in which Carrère, as a Member of the European Parliament, “dealt mainly with relations between the European Union and Russia“. “Hélène Carrère d’Encausse is one of the most bright, original and distinguished of French historiography and contemporary European thought”, affirms the jury.
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Born in 1929 in Paris, Carrère has been one of the great French historians, she is an expert on Russia and the collapse of the Soviet Union. She is a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor and a member of the French Academy, of which she has been perpetual secretary since 1999, being the first woman to hold this position. Carrère was the one who promoted last February that for the first time a writer in the Spanish language, Mario Vargas Llosahe entered the Académie, the great institution of French letters founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu. Opposite of equality quotas and inclusive languagehas always refused to feminize his position at the Académie, “perpetual secretary & rdquor ;.
Descendant of a family of Georgian aristocrats who had to emigrate after the Russian revolution, in which they lost their entire fortune, Carrère has also developed part of his career in politics: he was MEP between 1994 and 1999 for the right-wing conservative party. In 1978, more than a decade before the breakup of the former USSR, he predicted the end of the Soviet empire in an essay, ‘L’Empire éclaté’. She promotes and teaches numerous courses on Russia inside and outside France, she has also written about Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. She is the mother of the writer Emmanuel Carrère, also the author of several books related to Russia, such as the famous ‘Limonov’ and ‘A Russian novel’.