Duke de Richelieu

17 hrs. 22 min.

Language Russian

Author Ekaterina Glagoleva

Narrator Mikhail Roslyakov

Description

Armand Emmanuel du Plessis, 5th Duke de Richelieu (1766?–1822), received in Russia the name Emmanuel Osipovich and was immortalized in bronze as the Duke. A great-great-grandnephew of the famous cardinal and the grandson of a marshal, he was forced to leave his homeland during the revolutionary upheavals. He participated in the bloody assault on the Turkish fortress of Izmail as a volunteer; for 24 years he served “his adopted homeland”—Russia—faithfully. As governor-general, he fought ossification, ignorance, and bribery so that a thriving city, Odessa, would rise where there had been only a shabby settlement.

Returning to devastated France, he as head of government waged exhausting cabinet battles for the country’s independence and prosperity—but he did not become a courtier, remaining “a stranger among his own.” His boundless capacity to love had to squeeze itself at the edge of his dream of personal happiness. The Russian Emperor Alexander I called the Duke his only friend who spoke the truth to him, and the English Duke Wellington believed that “the word of Richelieu is worth a treatise.” He carried his family name with honor and earned a worthy place in the history of France, Russia, and Ukraine.