Russia and France: a relationship going back a thousand years

Franco-Russian diplomacy goes back a long way. And it has had its moments. In 1051, Anne of Kiev, daughter of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise, ruler of much of what is now Ukraine and Western Russia, married Henry I of France and served briefly as regent after her husband’s death pending the succession of their eight-year-old son, Philip. 

Interestingly, Kiev at that time was not so much a part of the Russian empire as one of its key components – a fact of which Vladmir Putin no doubt reminded Emmanuel Macron during the French President’s peace mission to Moscow. He may even have pointed out to his guest that Yaroslav was a direct descendant of one of Russia’s founding fathers, Vladimir the Great. 

In the 500 or so years that followed Anne of Kiev’s arrival in Paris, the forever war between Russia and its slavic neighbours, Poland and Lithuania, made regular contact difficult. France didn’t want to take sides in a bitter conflict 2,000 miles from home. But the arrival on the throne of Louis XIII (of Four Musketeers fame) kick-started a process that had its fruition in the long reign of Louis’s son, Louis XIV, when ambassadors were exchanged and trade flourished. 

In the 18th century, there were myriad ups and downs, due for the most part to shifting alliances involving the Austrian, Swedish, Polish, Lithuanian and Ottoman empires. At the level of the two courts and the noble families who held sway in Paris and Moscow, relations remained cordial – so much so that French was widely spoken in the Kremlin and the two countries’ armies fought together during the Seven Years War, from 1756 to 1763. 

The French Revolution put an end to all that, and the eruption of the Paris Communards in 1871, with their dangerous talk of workers’ rights, went down badly with the Tsar. The Great War saw common interests come back to the fore, only for the Russian Revolution to reinstall enmity and mistrust. The Soviets’ vital role in the Second World War brought the two sides together again, with a spillover into post-war politics in France when Moscow-inspired Communism was a force to be reckoned with well into the 1990s. 

Charles De Gaulle, François Mitterrand and Lionel Jospin (prime minister 1997-2002) all included Communists, or ex-Communists, in their governing structure.   

De Gaulle was no Marxist, but he did see value in playing Russia and America off against each other, creating space, as he saw it, for the development of a French-led European Community. He hosted a Nato summit at which Nikita Kruschev was the guest of honour, and then when America refused to go along with his softly-softly approach withdrew France from the alliance’s integrated military command. 

The advent in the 1970s of so-called Eurocommunism, an empathetic version of Marxism-Leninism that was popular in France, was not appreciated in Moscow, which persisted in its belief that the Internationale was essentially a Russian anthem. But the surprise emergence of Mikhail Gobachev as the last President of the Soviet Union, preaching Glasnost and Perestroika, quickly reset both détente and realpolitik, allowing East and West to exhale after nearly half a century of the Cold War. 

Vladimir Putin’s ambition to restore the Russian Empire to its fullest extent did not go down well in France. Yet when Russian forces invaded Georgia in 2008, President Nicolas Sarkozy refused to condemn Moscow. Instead, the French line was that the two sides should get round the table and arrive at a compromise. 

When François Hollande, as President, visited Moscow in 2013 at a time when Putin was under fire for imposing draconian laws against dissidents, he said it wasn’t for him to either judge or evaluate what his Russian counterpart was doing. Hollande did, however, block the sale of two French-built assault ships to the Russian navy in the wake of the annexation by Russia of Crimea. The vessels were berthed in Saint-Nazaire until they were sold to the Egyptian navy. 

More recently, when Russian forces threw their considerable weight behind President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war, Macron – a supporter of the rebel side – let it be known that he wanted no part of any confrontation with Moscow. 

Nearly a thousand years after Anne of Kiev moved to Paris, France continues to seek stability on the far side of the European Continent. Macron’s peace mission to Moscow (followed by a meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy) was based on the premise that France is uniquely placed to understand Russian anxieties and that Macron himself is the only western leader, following the retirement of Germany’s Angela Merkel, with whom Putin could plausibly establish a personal rapport. The assumption is arrogant and could easily come to grief. But the fact remains that it may just contain a grain of truth.