After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

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Rappaport presents masterful portraits of these refugees… Rappaport not only crafts a lovingly detailed picture of the City of Light, she also fills its parks and cafés and boulevards with an amazing cast of characters. For years, Russian aristocrats had enjoyed all that Belle Époque Paris had to offer, spending lavishly when they visited. Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich, the youngest of the four sons of Alexander II, was by far the most modest and democratic of the Russian grand dukes; his beautiful home at Boulogne-sur-Seine would become, thanks to the charm and social skills of his wife, Olga, Countess von Hohenfelsen, not just a magnet for the most cultured and influential on the French literary, musical, and political circuit but also effectively an “annex” to the Russian embassy in Paris.

The Russian Revolution in the early 20th Century brought forward a welcoming new world for many and tore down a comfortable one for others. The most important take away (implicitly rather than explicitly emphasized) is that Russia has lived under severe top down autocracies since 1613 ( which continues to the present day). Good-looking, and fairer than Vladimir, Alexis was remembered by Queen Marie of Romania as “a type of the Vikings who would have made a perfect Lohengrin, as Wagner would have dreamed of him. But sometimes when the Boyars were out for a whirl, their behavior got out of hand: one particular count was “partial to making pincushion designs with a sharp-pronged fork on a woman’s bare bosom,” and a group of Russian officers “played an interesting little game with loaded revolvers.By the late nineteenth century, so popular were the wealthy Russians in Paris that they were nicknamed “the Boyars. By 1903, having spent some time in Italy, Paul and Olga decided to make a base for themselves in Paris. Events in Russia in 1905 caused both Grand Duke Paul and Countess von Hohenfelsen a great deal of anxiety.

Throughout the visit security was very tight, for the tsar was the number one target of Russian revolutionaries and anarchists. Readers will be swept up in the author’s leisurely yet informative narrative as she sheds new light on the lives of the four daughters. Dr Helen Rappaport is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including Magnificent Obsession, Four Sisters, and Caught in the Revolution.Many of these highly educated and cultured aristocrats were forced into routine taxi driver, auto worker, seamstress labor while longing for the restoration of the monarchy which never came. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.