France's historical influence on Russia is well known, yet the French themselves, as well as foreigners in general, were viewed with extreme caution in Imperial Russia. Nicholas I considered France a source of 'revolutionary contagion,' and King Louis-Philippe, who came to power in 1830, was viewed not as a 'brother' but as a usurper. Vera Milchina's book recounts the misadventures of French travelers to Russia in the 1830s and 1840s. Obtaining visas was fraught with difficulties, and the secret police kept them under constant surveillance, potentially expelling any 'harmful' Frenchman from the country based on an anonymous denunciation. The author builds her captivating narrative on valuable historical material: the memoirs of French travelers, private correspondence, diplomatic reports, and the archives of the Third Section, which shed light on the origins of the state's modern attitude toward 'foreign influence.' Vera Milchina is a historian of Russian-French relations and a leading researcher at the Institute of Higher Humanitarian Studies at the Russian State University for the Humanities and the School of Contemporary Humanitarian Research at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.