Armand-Emmanuel de Vignerot Du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu - in Exile

In Exile

On Marie Antoinette's direction, he left Paris in 1790 for Vienna in order 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, Moldova 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.

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 de Condé, which was headquartered in the German frontier town of Coblenz. 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, Czar Paul I. His prospects brightened, however, after Paul was murdered in 1801. The new Russian emperor, Czar 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 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 and called New Russia, which included the territories of Chersonese, Ekaterinoslav and the Crimea. 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 Odessites erected a bronze monument to him in 1828. These are the famous Odessa 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.