UN FASCISME ROUMAIN

The study of Rumanian archives, exploited here for the first time by a historian, reveals the little known reality of Europe's third fascist movement, after that of Nazism and Italian fascism, during the inter-war years. It draws as well a picture of Rumania's role in the Second World War.

The spearhead of Rumanian fascism bears the name of a mass organization called the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Created in 1927, it was known as well by the name of its first political front, the Iron Guard. This legionary movement embodied an apparently atypical fascism, for it was both Christian and rural whereas its fellow organizations in more urbanized and industrialized countries were pagan and atheist. The Iron Guard was responsible for the assassination of two prime ministers, the indoctrination and recruitment of a large portion of the student population—including a group of the most brilliant and spiritual young intellectuals, like Mircea Eliade, or the most brutally modernist, like the young Cioran. It installed an actual counter-society within its “nests” and, in 1937, enjoyed the greatest electoral success of a fascist party (after that of the NSDAP in 1932). In 1938, King Carol II of Rumania had the founder and soul of the Iron Guard, ‘Captain' Corneliu Codreanu, assassinated. The ideological influence of the latter on Marshal Antonescu's antisemitic policies during the war, on Ceausescu's national communism, and on contemporary populism is undeniable and striking. A former student of the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure of Saint-Cloud, Traian Sandu holds a doctorate and is an accredited research director in history. He is the author of several works, including Histoire de la Roumanie, published by Perrin in 2008, and is currently a professor agrégé at the Centre Interuniversitaire d'Etudes hongroises de l'Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle.