Pierre-Charles Levesque, a protege of Diderot, historiographer of Russia.

Pierre-Charles Levesque was one of the first Frenchmen to go to St. Petersburg on Diderot's recommendation. He spent about half his life studying the history of Russia. His contemporaries (among others, August von Schlozer, Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn) considered his History of Russia as the best ever written by a foreigner. Levesque's book, which had a strong influence on the perception of Russia in the West and on Russian historiography, is a concrete example of Diderot's Russian civilization project. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, all Russians interested in their national history knew of Pierre-Charles Levesque, who afterwards fell into long oblivion, even among specialists. Interest for his work was revived in the 1960s thanks to Andre Mazon. However, despite the research conducted then, one must recognize that there is very little information available on Levesque's life in Russia or documentation concerning him in general. The archives that his descendants had saved disappeared in the early twentieth century. We are publishing here a series of documents coming from archives in St. Petersburg, Tartu, Berlin, and Paris. They shed new light on Levesque's stay in Russia, his life in France during the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, his teaching years at the College de France and. his vision of history.