On Marie Antoinette's direction, he left Paris in 1790 for Vienna to discuss the recent events of the
French Revolution with her older brother, the Holy Roman Emperor
Joseph II. Before he got there, however, Joseph died. Instead, Richelieu attended the
coronation of the new Emperor,
Leopold II, in
Frankfurt and then followed the
Habsburg court back to Vienna. There, he renewed a friendship with
Prince Charles de Ligne, the son of the Austrian diplomat, the
Prince de Ligne. Together, they decided to join the
Imperial Russian Army as volunteers. Accompanied by another friend, the
Comte de Langeron, they reached the Russian headquarters at
Bender,
Moldavia on 21 November. The three were present at
Alexander Suvorov's
capture of Izmail. For his service in that battle, Fronsac was decorated by the Russian Empress
Catherine the Great with the
Order of St. George and given a golden sword. On the death of his father in February 1791, he succeeded to the title of
Duke of Richelieu. Because of an unwillingness on the part of various nobles to serve in the
royal household, King Louis XVI soon afterwards summoned him back to Paris in order for him to resume his position as a
premier gentilhomme at the
Tuileries Palace. He was not, however, sufficiently in the confidence of the court to be informed of the projected
flight to Varennes on the night of 20 June 1791. 's statue of the Duke of Richelieu in
Odesa, Ukraine Feeling that his role at court was useless in helping the King deal with all the revolutionary agitation that was embroiling Paris, Richelieu in July obtained with royal permission a passport from the
National Constituent Assembly in order to return to Vienna as a diplomat. After a short stay in Austria, however, Richelieu joined the counter-revolutionary
émigré army of Louis XVI's cousin, the
Prince of Condé, which was headquartered in the German frontier town of
Koblenz. Later, after Condé's forces had suffered several defeats, Catherine the Great offered positions in her army to the officers serving under Condé. Richelieu accepted. 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 successor, Emperor
Paul I. His prospects brightened, however, after Paul was murdered in 1801. The new Russian emperor,
Alexander I, was one of his friends. The erasure of Richelieu's name from the list of prohibited
émigrés 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 government, and in 1803 Alexander appointed him as the governor of
Odessa. Two years later, he became
Governor-General of a large swathe of land recently conquered from the
Ottoman Empire and called
New Russia, which included the territories of
Kherson,
Ekaterinoslav and the
Crimea. He commanded a division in the
Russo-Turkish War, 1806-1812, and was engaged in frequent expeditions to the
Caucasus. Richelieu played a role during
Ottoman plague epidemic which hit Odessa in the autumn 1812. Dismissive of any attempt to forge a compromise between quarantine requirements and free trade, Prince
Kuriakin (the Saint Petersburg-based High Commissioner for Sanitation) countermanded Richelieu's orders. In the eleven years of his administration, Odessa greatly increased in size and importance, eventually becoming the third largest city in the empire by population. The grateful Odessans erected a bronze monument to him in 1828. These are the famous
Odessa Steps, crowned by a statue of Richelieu. ==Return to France==