Russian-French relations in Russian historiography of the 1870-1880s

In the complex, largely contradictory history of international policy of Modern times, in particulary of the 19th and 20th centuries, the relations between France and Rus- sia occupied a special place. As researchers of international relations have noticed, the agreements between France and Russia in different forms and variants took place more often than agreements between other states. Despite the fact that such a subject as the history of Russian-French relations of the last third of the 19th century seems at first glance the simplest and clearest, it is not so in fact. In the literature devoted to the history of the Russian-French Union of 1891-1917, the issues of its genesis, origin, prehistory and specific content is one of the most difficult. Given that that most researchers focused primary on the problem of the Patriotic War of 1812, the period from 1801 to 1811 in the context of relations between the two powers, as a rule, remained outside the subject field. Therefore, the article considers Russian-French relations in Russian historiography of the 1870-1880s.