Odessa City Guide. Duc De Richelieu. Ukraine Historical Facts

Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septemanie du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (1766 - 1822) was a prominent French statesman during the Bourbon Restoration. He was a Royalist aristocrat and during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, he served as a soldier in the Army Of Russian Empire.

Armand Emmanuel Sophie Septemanie du Plessis, duc de Richelieu was born in Paris, the son of Louis Antoine du Plessis, duc de Fronsac and grandson of King Louis XV of France's favorite, the Marechal de Richelieu (1696-1788).

He was married in 1782 at 15 years old to Rosalie de Rochechouart, a deformed child of twelve, with whom his relations were never more than formal.

In 1785 he entered Queen Marie Antoinette's Regiment of Dragoons and the next year assumed his aged grandfather's place at court as a premier gentilhomme de la chambre to King Louis XVI of France. When his grandfather died and his father succeeded to the Richelieu dukedom in 1788, he became the Duc de Fronsac. On the death of his father, in February 1791, he succeeded to the title of Duc de Richelieu.

In the Russian army, he achieved the rank of Major General but later resigned his commission after what he considered an unwarranted reprimand by Catherine's unstable successor, Russian King Paul I. His prospects brightened, however, after Paul was murdered in 1801. The new Russian emperor, King Alexander I, was one of his friends. The erasure of Richelieu's name from the list of prohibited EMIGRES who could NOT LEGALLY RETURN TO FRANCE, which Richelieu on his own had previously been unable to secure from Napoleon Bonaparte, was accorded on the request of Alexander's new imperial government, and in 1803 Alexander appointed him Governor of Odessa.

Two years later, he became Governor-General of a large swathe of land recently conquered from the Ottoman Empire called New Russia (Ukraine), which included the territories of Chersonese, Yekaterinoslav and the Crimea. In the eleven years of his administration, Odessa rose from a miserable village to an important city, and the grateful Odessans erected a bronze monument to him in 1828. These are the famous Odessa (Potemkin) Steps, crowned by a statue of Richelieu.

He commanded a division in the Turkish War of 1806-1807, and was engaged in frequent expeditions to the Caucasus.

Richelieu returned to France in 1814; on the return of Napoleon from Elba he accompanied Louis XVIII as far as Lille, whence he went to Vienna to rejoin the Russian army, believing that he could best serve the interests of the new King and of France by attaching himself to the headquarters of Russian King Alexander.