Grand Duke Michael of Russia

A grandson of Tsar Nicholas I who gave up his place in Russia for love, Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich spent his long exile between Cannes and England. Known on the Riviera as the “Uncrowned King of Cannes”, he was one of the financiers behind the Carlton, the palace that still defines the Croisette.

A Romanov raised in the Caucasus

Michael Mikhailovich was born on 16 October 1861 at Peterhof, near St Petersburg, the second son of Grand Duke Michael Nicolaievich and Grand Duchess Olga Feodorovna, a princess of Baden by birth. In 1862 his father was appointed Viceroy of the Caucasus, and the family settled in Tiflis, today’s Tbilisi, for some twenty years. The children grew up under tutors and a famously spartan regime; within the family the boy was nicknamed “Miche-Miche”, and his strict mother is said to have thought him the least gifted of her seven children.

Destined for the army, he served in the Russo-Turkish War, rose to colonel and became an adjutant at the imperial court after the family returned to St Petersburg in 1882. His marriage plans, however, went nowhere: overtures towards Princess Mary of Teck and Princess Irene of Hesse came to nothing, and his parents blocked a match with a Russian countess.

Love, scandal and exile

Everything changed in 1891. On 26 February, in San Remo, he married Countess Sophie von Merenberg without the Tsar’s consent. The union was morganatic and, under the house laws of the Romanovs, illegal. Alexander III reacted harshly: Michael lost his military rank and his court position and was banished from Russia. His mother, it is said, suffered a fatal heart attack on hearing the news, and he was not permitted to attend her funeral. Sophie, a granddaughter of Pushkin according to the Carlton’s own history, received the title of Countess de Torby from her uncle, Grand Duke Adolphe of Luxembourg.

The couple first lived in Wiesbaden, where two of their three children were born: Anastasia, known as “Zia”, Nadejda, known as “Nada”, and Michael, nicknamed “Boy”. Exile proved gilded. Part of the Grand Duke’s income came from a mineral-water bottling plant near Borjomi, in Georgia, a reminder of his Caucasian childhood.

The uncrowned king of Cannes

From 1899 the family lived in Cannes, at the Villa Kazbek, named after a Georgian peak. The Grand Duke threw himself into the life of the resort, then the winter playground of European aristocracy. He was involved in the building of the Russian church of St Michael the Archangel and founded and presided over the Cannes golf club; such was his standing in the town that he became known as its uncrowned king.

His decisive contribution came with the Carlton. When the hotelier Henri Ruhl set out to build a palace on the Croisette, the Grand Duke became his principal backer; the hotel’s own history goes as far as to say that he financed almost all of the construction. Designed by Charles Dalmas with Marcellin Mayère, the first wing opened on 30 January 1911, and the enlarged palace was completed in 1913. For the Russian colony and for the British winter visitors who mixed with them, it quickly became the meeting place of the season.

Between England and revolution

The family also put down roots in England, leasing Keele Hall in Staffordshire from 1900 and moving in 1909 to Kenwood House in Hampstead. Edward VII made him a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order in 1901, and in 1908 he published a novel, Never Say Die, about a morganatic marriage. Allowed back to Russia briefly in 1912 for the Borodino centenary, he warned Nicholas II in a letter of 31 October 1916 that revolution was coming. It came: three of his brothers were killed by the Bolsheviks, and his fortune largely vanished.

After the war the couple returned to Cannes. Sophie died on 4 September 1927; the Grand Duke followed on 26 April 1929, carried off by influenza in London, and was buried beside her in Hampstead Cemetery. Through his daughters, who married into the Wernher and Mountbatten families, his line joined the British aristocracy, while on the Croisette the Carlton he helped to finance remains, more than a century later, the emblem of Riviera glamour.

Sources Wikipedia (EN), “Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich of Russia” · Wikipedia (EN), “InterContinental Carlton Cannes” · Carlton Cannes, “Carlton Story” · Ministère de la Culture, “Cannes – Grand-Hôtel Carlton”