The newly elected French president, Emmanuel Macron, is due to meet Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the first time on 29 May at the Château de Versailles, where they will inaugurate a major exhibition celebrating the 300th anniversary of Peter the Great’s diplomatic visit to France in 1717. The meeting falls on a Monday, when the palace and grounds are closed to the public.
The show Peter the Great, a Tsar in France (30 May-24 September) is billed as an “exceptional collaboration” between the palace and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, which is lending around 100 works. More than 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings, curiosities and books from the tsar’s private library will be brought together to retrace his two stays at Versailles, in May and June 1717. It is a symbolic occasion for Macron to renew Franco-Russian relations, which have deteriorated since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The news follows the cancellation of Putin’s long-planned trip to Paris last October, after the then French president François Hollande suggested that Russia had committed war crimes in Syria by supporting the bombing of Aleppo. The two heads of state were due to attend the opening of a Kremlin-funded Russian orthodox cathedral and cultural centre and the blockbuster exhibition Icons of Modern Art: the Shchukin Collection at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which closed in March.