[4][5] 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;[6][7] he spoke five languages, as did his wife-to-be.

He worked as a cab driver and a stall trader in provincial towns, while Hélène and her mother lived with distant relatives in Meudon, in an ethnic enclave of white Russian émigrés.

[12] After his dismissal in early 1942 he accepted the offer of one Mariaud, a black market dealer who married a Russian émigrée friend of his wife, to assist the German authorities with the confiscation of Jewish property.

[18][19] After completing her secondary education at the 16th arrondissement's Lycée Molière,[20] Hélène studied history at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), graduating in 1952.

[26] Up until the final days before Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine she refused to countenance such an eventuality, although her opinion of Putin changed after the start of hostilities.

[27][28] After she died, Putin paid homage to Carrère d'Encausse as "a great friend of our country" and expressed the hope that her legacy would help improve French–Russian relations.

[31] She was elected as a member of the European Parliament in 1994, representing Jacques Chirac's Gaullist-conservative party Rassemblement pour la République (RPR).

[32] During her time in the parliament from 1994 to 1999, she sat first with the European Democratic Alliance and later with the Union for Europe group, and she served as one of the vice-chairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and as a member of the delegation for relations with Russia.

[40] In 1952 she married Louis Édouard Carrère d'Encausse, with whom she had three children: Emmanuel (born 1957), an author, screenwriter and director; Nathalie (1959), a lawyer; and Marina (1961), a physician and broadcast journalist.

[42] President Emmanuel Macron announced that he would lead a national homage in her honour at the Hôtel des Invalides before the end of the summer.