Salomé Zourabichvili, alumna and President

Graduate of the class of 1972, professor at Sciences Po from 2006-2015, Salomé Zourabichvili is, as of 28 November, 2018, the first female president of Georgia. But she is also one of very few female alumna who is now a Head of State. Returning to her alma mater to give a lecture on the 18th February 2019, we look back at the path of a quiet but promising student. 

She was just 17 years old when she first came through the doors of the 27 rue Saint-Guillaume in September 1969. Her high results on the French Baccalaureate earnt Miss Salomé Zourabichvili the “privilege” of “direct admission” into the “terrible” Preparatory Year, a prestigious but highly demanding foundation programme. At the end of it, only one in two students were invited to pursue their studies at Sciences Po, in the “cycle du diplôme”.

Intelligent and discreet

The young student soared during this highly feared and challenging year. During her final exam, completed in May 1970, she opted for the subject “Revolution and counter-revolution in Europe between 1917 and 1923”, which earned her a place at Sciences Po. This topic struck a chord with Zourabichvili - her family having moved to France after they had been hunted out of Soviet-occupied Georgia in 1921. 

After undergoing the infamous “multiple choice questions” - a very Sciences Po style quiz comprising of tens of general knowledge questions ranging from the “Date and importance of the encyclical Rerum Novarum” to “What is Kulturkamp?” to “Cite the main reforms of the Tsar Alexander II” - Salomé Zourabichvili triumphed. One of her professors wrote in a satisfecit that she was “a very intelligent student who quickly picked up methodology and thus acquired a wide-range of knowledge”. She joined the “International Section”, Sciences Po’s pioneering internationalisation operation, which was often considered to be the royal road for future diplomats. It attracted only a small minority of students amongst the 4,000 enrolled at Sciences Po in the 1970’s. At a school where women were barely visible (they represented less than a third of students), they were sneered at, and told they had been steered down this path, “tempted by interpretation and marriage”. The few foreign students at Sciences Po at the time were also enrolled in this section.

The international track, however, was neither an imposed decision nor one made at random, given its coherency with her background and her impeccable proficiency in the field. Salomé was in eminent professors’ classes in the 1970’s and was taught by the head of the history of international relations Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, in addition to the historian and demographer Louis Chevalier. She also took classes given by the only two female lecturing fellows in the 1960s, Suzanne Bastid, in public international law, and Hélène Carrère D’Encausse, her first cousin with whom she shares family history but also an interest in the Soviet Union and surrounding lands of the Empire. 

A brilliant cursus honorum diplomat 

Seminars and lectures by the renowned Sovietologist, as well as “Politics Outside of the USSR”, “Economics and Politics in the USSR”, “An Overview of the 20th Congress”, “Marxism” and “The Revolutionary Phenomenon”, anchored her in her family’s past and paved the way for her future. For her oral examination, she was tested by Pierre Milza on “The peaceful coexistence of Soviet dogma”. She graduated in July 1972, and went on to pursue her studies at Columbia University, long before the dual degree between our two institutions existed. René Henry-Gréard, the then-Secretary General of the IEP, highlighted in a letter of recommendation addressed to his American colleagues, Salomé’s “exceptional” qualities as a student, and “although timid”, he predicted great things of her. 

His forecast would soon become reality. After Columbia, Salomé began in 1974 an impressive diplomatic cursus honorum. Rome, New York, Paris, Washington, Vienna, N’Djamena, Brussels; her responsibilities took her on a world tour for about 20 years of her life. She returned to Paris in 1996, and worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, followed by the Ministry of Defence, and collaborated with NATO, before becoming Georgian ambassador in 2003.

Madam President

She was the first woman to be appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2004 and also the first “foreigner” (she is a French national) to obtain dual citizenship, after receiving the approval of President Jacques Chirac and the Georgian parliament. Having studied international relations theory and the exterior politics of the USSR, she had room for manoeuvre in dialogue with Russia. Dismissed in 2005 from this position, she began in 2006 two new careers: as a politician in Georgia… and as a lecturer at Sciences Po. She gave classes up until 2014 at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) and at the Undergraduate college. She went full circle after studying the constitution of the Soviet Union as a student, to analysing its collapse upon her return as a professor. Amongst other things, she taught foreign politics of great powers, the post-Soviet space spread between Europe and Asia, and “new democracies”, the art of diplomacy. One student praised Mrs. Zourabichvili’s course extensively: “She offered us a very good analysis of somebody who has actually been taking part in some of the events and knows a lot about the EU foreign and security policy. She encouraged very lively debates.” Salomé Zourabichvili became a member of Georgian parliament in 2016 and ran for presidency in 2018, which she won with 59% of the vote, becoming the country’s first woman president. She is equally, the first alumna to cumulate the titles of alumna, former lecturer, and Head of State. 

Read more:

• Amongst our alumna, only one other woman has been a head of state, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, who was president of Sri Lanka. We also have had two “first ladies”: Rula Ghani, formerly Saadé, first lady of Afghanistan, who graduated in 1969, and before her Jacqueline Bouvier, wife of President Kennedy, who studied at Sciences Po between 1949 and 1950. 
• Read about more of our famous female alumni: Simone Veil, Jeannie de Clarens and Bianca Jagger