How old is romanian

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Not registered? Sign up. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. To the extent that Hungarian historiography stands out as the principal adversary of Romanian continuity north of the Danube, it is clear that what is at issue is, above all, the problem of Transylvania.

The formation of the Romanian people to the north of the Danube, and actually on the land of Transylvania, legitimizes Romanian rights over the province. The coming of the Romanians from elsewhere, on the other hand, demonstrates the historical right of the Hungarians.

The situation is similar with Bessarabia and even Moldavia. What would happen if we found out that the Romanians came here after the Slavs? Without denying the right of the historical imaginary to deploy its resources, it is clear that the real moving force behind territorial evolutions is not the appeal to a distant past.

The forcible modification of borders can easily find a historical alibi: History offers everything. Mussolini wanted to remake the Roman Empire. He had, it could be said, every right: for almost a millennium the Mediterranean Sea had been an Italian lake, and Latin was spoken from Spain to Bulgaria and from Libya to Britain.

On the basis of history—of immigrationist theory, to be precise—the Hungarians could be sent back to the Urals and the Americans back to Europe, leaving the Indians free in their own land. Let no one say I am proposing a stupid game; we can find the same game in our own history, too.

Moreover, history is not a unique and absolute given; it proposes a multitude of sequences, from which each of us can select what suits us. If we place ourselves in the year , then we can send the Hungarians back to the Urals; but if we move on to 1 or 1 things look different, this time in favor of a historical right which can be invoked by those nostalgic for Greater Hungary.

Similarly, the Romanian right to Dobrogea is often related to the rule of Mrcea the Old. Dobrogea, however, was not only ruled by Mircea, but also, and for much longer periods, by the Greeks, the Bulgarians, and the Turks. The rights of the Romanians in Transylvania are only supported in appearance by Dacians or Daco—Romans.

However, they are supported effectively by the fact that the substantial majority of the population is Romanian and that, if the occasion were to present itself, most inhabitants of the province would decisively affirm their belonging to Romania. In the event of an inversion of the numerical relation between ethnic groups in Transylvania—a phenomenon which has occurred in various parts of the world— the situation would be different.

Who could pretend to return to the borders and ethnic proportions of hundreds of years ago? The case of Kosovo is instructive.

Here the affirmation of Serbian antiquity and continuity comes up today against the far more convincing argument of an overwhelming Albanian majority. From this point of view the question of Transylvania is settled. Hungarian or Romanian mythological exercises do not change anything: Transylvania is indisputably Romanian, just as it is also indisputable that a Hungarian minority live there, whose specific rights need to be recognized.

Neither continuity nor immigrationism can alter the data of the problem one iota. Historical right was brought to the foreground, and, since nothing is certain and univocal in matters of historical right—especially in such a complicated question as the origins of the Romanians—a feeble and controversial argument ended up eclipsing the undeniable reality of the predominantly Romanian character of Transylvania, regardless of what might have happened a thousand or two thousand years ago.

A fragile argument was put above an unassailable argumentation. The recourse to history can have a boomerang effect. We have just admired the Romanian map of the Dridu culture, but there is a danger that a Bulgarian one will look much the same.

What do we do then? Do we include Romania in Bulgaria or Bulgaria in Romania? This is valid not just for Romanians, indeed not even especially for Romanians, but for everybody, at least within the Central European space, since the West, learning something from its recent history, has considerably attenuated the conflictual character of the discourse of origins. Europe is being constructed on the basis of present realities, including its present political and ethnographical maps.

The implication of the past in the present which in fact means the projection of the present onto the past can generate inextricable conflicts. It is natural that each nation should respect and love its history, but it is an illusion which can become dangerous that history has already marked out the road which we must continue to follow.

Bucharest, , Teoria lui Roesler. Scieri istorice. Vol 1. Histoire de la langue roumaine History of the Romanian language. Reproduction of the edition. Bucharest: Editura Minerva, , Bucharest Editura Academiei, , , Andrei Ojetea.

Bonn, Horedt, whose familiarity with the eady medieval archaeology of the Romanian area is beyond question, considers that in the seventh century Transylvania was completely Slavicized, that the Slav period continued into the tenth century, and that the Romanian element only appeared from the ninth century. I mention his work not to claim that he is right, merely to show that the problem is too complicated to be dealt with in categorical judgements without appeal. Coordinated by Constantin Preda.

This repeats the interpretation of the culture as strictly Romanian and perfecdy unitary over an area larger than that of present-day Romania. Probably they did not merit a response, since they did not think as one ought to think! Originile limbilor neolatine. Check if your institution has already acquired this book: authentification to OpenEdition Freemium for Books.

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Central European University Press. Chapter three. Chapter two. Chapter four. Search inside the book. Table of contents. Cite Share. Cited by. Continuity p. Text Notes. Full text. Bucharest: Editura pentru Lit Up until the nineteenth century the Romanians were integrated in the Eastern cultural space. Much is made of the occasional Western connections made by scholars, like the high steward Cantacuzino who studied in Padua or the Moldavian chroniclers with their studies in Poland, but these were never enough to change the general condition of a society and a culture.

It was a culture penetrated by the Orthodox idea, not the national idea. The first important break was made in the late eighteenth century in the work of the Transylvanian School, a group of Uniate intellectuals who had studied in Vienna and Rome and who were guided, sometimes to the point of obsession, by the idea of their Latin origins and the need to re-actualize them. The work of the Transylvanian scholars was an important source for the re-orientation of the Romanian space towards the West, but the tone which they set—as the spokesmen of a peasant society under foreign domination—only began to be manifested on a larger scale once the elites of the two Romanian states decided to adopt the Western model.

As long as the generally shared values were those of Orthodoxy, the Romanians could feel at home in the East European space.

But once the sentiment of national identity had come to the foreground everywhere, things took a radical new turn for them. The Russians were no longer the great liberating Orthodox brothers. Indeed, their shared religious identity seemed to pose an additional danger, threatening to facilitate the absorption and assimilation of Romania as had just happened with Bessarabia. Romanian nationalism now stood up against the nationalism of the Slav peoples and Pan-Slavism.

Once Hungary itself or that part of the Habsburg Empire dominated by the Magyar aristocracy began to emerge as a national, and thus assimilating, state, the situation of the Romanians in Transylvania became even more delicate. Whether it was a matter of Hungarians or Slavs, the Romanians were surrounded on all sides by national constructions or national projects which contradicted their own project.

In yet another dramatic and insoluble contradiction, the Romanians tried to break away from the part of Europe to which they nonetheless clearly belonged, and to set sail, in the realm of the imaginary, towards the shores of the West. The Western model found a less than propitious ground in the rural base of Romanian society and in the rural-autochthonist mentality, which, despite being partially masked for a time by the pro-Western activity of an elite, would remain strong and ready to burst forth when the time was right.

The tension between the Western model and indigenous cultural standards was to continue throughout the period which we are considering, and indeed is still in evidence today. This reaction of astonishment was the dominant one, especially in the first phase of contact. They had lost them, however, because they had been obliged for centuries to keep their hands on the sword rather than the pen, in order to defend Europe from the expansion of Islam.

Their sacrifice had contributed to the ascent of the West. For all they were now about to receive, the Romanians had already paid in abundance. Once the Romanians were seen as different from other people the problem no longer needed to be formulated in terms of superiority or inferiority.

A discussion that took place within the Junimist circle some time in the s, between the nationalist Eminescu and the skeptic Vasile Pogor, provides a perfect illustration of the opposition between autochthonists and unconditional admirers of the Western model. A people which has no literature, art, or past civilization—such a people is not worth the attention of historians The prince, who managed for a short time — to rule the three territories that were to be united some three centuries later in modern Romania, begins to be perceived as a unifier only towards the middle of the nineteenth century.

What they emphasized, apart from the exceptional personality of Michael himself, were the idea of Christendom and his close relations with Emperor Rudolf. The idea of a single state for all Romanians had yet to be voiced, and it was still not time for the achievements of Michael the Brave to be exploited in this sense.

He was a great warrior, who fought the Turks and defeated the Transylvanians. And he took Transylvania and gave it to Emperor Rudolf In opposition to Engel, he always sets the record straight in favor of the Romanians.

He is determined to defend, the personality of the voivode, whom he portrays in a morally positive light in antithesis to the defects of his adversaries. The ingredients of the myth are there, but the myth itself is still absent. He reproaches Michael only for the fact that he was not able to give the unified Romanian territories an appropriate constitution.

Only thus might a new era have begun, in which the Romanians would have been able to evolve, united, alongside the other nations of Europe. The man who was later to be the great artisan of the union of the principalities gives no signs in his youthful writing that he was at all sensitive to the national potential of the Mchael the Brave episode.

It is an ascent in which he appears in two different lights, sometimes contradictory but potentially complementary, as both the glorious ruler of Wallachia and the unifier of the Romanians. The former aspect is highlighted by Gheorghe Bibescu, himself a ruler of Wallachia , who liked to present himself as the worthy successor of the great voivode and orchestrated insistent propaganda along these lines. Now Michael was presented as the one who had united the separate parts of ancient Dacia.

The evolution in relation to his earlier essays is pronounced, as far as the national idea is concerned.

For the first time the medieval history of the Romanians, of the three Romanian lands, was explicidy treated as national history, as the history of a national desideratum which had never ceased to be manifested throughout the centuries, the history of an ideal Romanian state, complete and unitary.

The influence of the work on Romanian national consciousness was considerable, despite the delay in its publication a partial edition in , followed by the first of many full editions in Together, Michael and Stephen came to symbolize the separate yet shared history, which had led in any case towards unity, of the two Romanian sister lands. From being a warrior and Christian hero he becomes a symbol of Romanian unity. These are the years when the ideal of union in a Romanian state, an ideal Romania prefigured in consciousness, came to be projected onto the historical past.

This national, political, and historical orientation belongs essentially to a single generation, the generation that carried out the revolution and later achieved the union of the principalities and the foundation of modem Romania. We have seen also how Dacia is frequently invoked in this same period as the expression of the primordial unity of the Romanian land. The two symbols point towards a great aspiration: ancient Dacia, resurrected for a moment by Michael the Brave and destined to be re-embodied in the Romania of tomorrow.

If the national project was broadly similar for all Romanians—a single nation in the homeland of ancient Dacia—the transformations which were thought necessary to propel Romanian society into the modern age naturally reflected ideological divergences and the specific interests of social groups.

Compared with the relative homogeneity of the national discourse, when we turn our attention to the great problem of reform, and especially to the question of property, the historical evocations become contradictory.

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century the past was restructured according to three distinct political-historical sensibilities: democratic, conservative, and liberal. Romanian society was originally, and had long remained, a society of landowning freemen.

The usurpation had come later, after the foundation of the principalities. This unhappy evolution brought with it the decline of the Romanian lands. Only the emancipation of the peasants and their endowment with property could remedy the situation.

Otherwise, the very existence of the Romanian nation was under threat. If the national revolution was to be victorious, it had to be sustained by a social revolution. Carried to its full consequences, the transposition of his historical demonstration into social reform would have meant the restructuring of Romanian society as a society exclusively of small properties.

Clearly, things could not go quite so far. It was also he who upheld the notion of universal suffrage. He, too, set out to de-dramatize the situation by improving the image of the boyars and restoring the legality of the great estates.

The system was only established in the West, as a result of Germanic conquest. This was why revolutions had been necessary in the western part of Europe, to remedy what had been a usurpation there.

Here, however, the Roman colonists had remained masters of their own land. There was no usurpation of any kind, he tells us. The present owners hold the land by inheritance from the earliest times the Roman period , or have bought it with all tide deeds in order. Thus the great estates are fully justified historically, not to mention their economic justification.

While offering a necessary sacrifice to the game of history he insistendy draws attention to the fact that what counts in the end is not the past, but the present.

The skepticism which he manifests as far as historical models, more or less imaginary, are concerned deserves to be noted. However, that is not how things generally are in fact.

The past is more often invoked, and invoked in the most imperative terms, by those who want to break away from it. The logic of the imaginary has its own rules. The French revolutionaries invoked Sparta and republican Rome.

Any project or ideology needs models. Even when it is the future that is at stake, the models are taken from the past. Ultimately there is no other reality than the past. The more transforming an ideology aspires to be, the more radical the project, the more it appeals to the past: to a past restructured according to the necessities and ideals of the present. The boyars, too, could invoke history, and they did not hesitate to do so, but the existing state of things both in fact and in law was on their side anyway.

It was those who sought to modify this state of things who were compelled to appeal to history, to a history that could set an idealized past against the corrupt present. The road to the future presupposed a re-actualization of origins. What could be more modern than liberalism? However, its references to the past, to a clearly oudined historical model, are extremely frequent and significant.

However, the writings and speeches of I. Bratianu belong to the genre of political discourse and their author counts as one of the principal founders of modern Romania, which he set on the path of liberalism. He was a pragmatic politician, but none the less visionary for all that: the two facets are not necessarily antithetical.

What is impressive is his passion for history and the way he understood how to draw from the national past the elements of a liberal doctrine, which had in fact come not from the Roman colonists but from the nineteenth-century West! They had not come from Rome, where the flame of liberty had been extinguished, but from rural areas, where the old beliefs and virtues were still strong. What could be more normal, as the nineteenth century progressed, than the development of avenues of communication?

He himself published essays and gave lectures on this theme. Sometimes these can be unconsciously humorous. There is nothing strange in this: History always justifies everything. The Romanians were descendants of the Roman colonists, with perhaps some minimal concession to the native Dacians.

As a Latin nation by origin and vocation they could hardly do otherwise than integrate into the European community of the Romance-speaking peoples. In , the undisputed leader of this Latinist current, August Treboniu Laurian, linguist and historian and one of the most respected Romanian scholars of the time, published his History of the Romanians, a work of synthesis which began, without more ado, with the foundation of Rome in BC.

The history of the Romanians is presented as a continuation of Roman history. Indeed, any difference between Romanians and Romans disappears. They were the same people, and their history is one and the same. With the launch of the immigrationist thesis in the late eighteenth century, in the works of Franz Joseph Sulzer and Johann Christian Engel, a major problem confronting Romanian historians was how to demonstrate Romanian continuity north of the Danube.

But this was only a minimum requirement. To sustain the significance of Romanian history at a European level, something more than an affirmation of indigenous origins in terms of mere ethnic survival was called for. Thus, even while trying to combat immigrationism, Romanian historians were tempted to emphasize and amplify the phenomenon of Romanian presence south of the Danube, which was better attested in the sources and capable of being integrated into a greater history. In a manner which could, however unintentionally, serve immigrationist schemes, the center of gravity of Romanian history for over a millennium was shifted south of the Danube.

The Romanians thus integrated themselves with greater history again and avoided the marginalization to which a withdrawal within the strictly defined space of ancient Dacia would have condemned them. The archaeological study of the issue, and the invocation of linguistic arguments, were still in the future, and the external data—generally late, limited in quantity, and vague—left the ground free for all sorts of hypotheses.

The document provoked a considerable historiographical and political stir. The ruler of Moldavia, Grigore Ghica, set up a commission of specialists in literary and historical matters to check the authenticity of the source. Opinions were divided. They decided to stay where they were and resist the barbarians. Here, at last, was the much sought after testimony to Romanian continuity! The state was organized as a sort of republic, on Roman lines—a federative Moldavian republic the document refers stricdy to the area between the Carpathians and the Dniester.

A number of objectives were thus attained: the demonstration of state continuity, evidence of old indigenous democratic institutions, and the underlining of the identity of Moldavia and of the fact that Bessarabia had belonged to it from the earliest times. The message needs to be seen in the context of the moment in which it appeared: this was , the year of the Congress of Paris and of the decision to consult the principalities about their possible unification.

An accent was put on the historical rights of Moldavia over Bessarabia, which had been seized by the Russians in At the same time there was an affirmation of Moldavian distinctiveness, in line with the orientation of the minority—including Gheorghe Asachi—who were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of union with Wallachia. This was also the source of the Archondology of Moldavia, written by Constantin Sion, with its numerous fictitious or semi-fictitious genealogies, which were even supported on occasion by the Chronicle of Huru.

The political meaning of the forgery thus becomes clearer: the document testified to the continuity of the Romanians in general, but even more to the rights of Moldavia as a state in its own right.

The famous linguist Alexandru Philippide still found it necessary, in , to test his powers in a detailed study to prove it a forgery. The document provoked more of a stir than the modest ability of the forgers deserved, for the simple reason that it filled in a gap and gave material substance to the illusion that Roman history had continued, through the Romanians, at a high level of political organization and civilization.

Inspired by the Chronicle of Hum, but stimulated even more by his own convictions and fantasies—an amalgam of national messianism, Christian spirituality, conservatism, and democracy—the father of modern Romanian culture cast his own light on the continuity issue in his synthesis Elements of the History of the Romanians and , and in various chapters of The Balance between Antitheses.

Their civil code was the Pentateuch [ But even this history, no less than the unknown history which preceded it, lent itself to an appreciable process of amplification.

There is a particular manner of highlighting the excellence of the Romanian past that we find in the historians of the generation, including the greatest among them, M. In their respect for the concrete data of history they are far from the fantasies of Heliade or the forgeries of Sion, but they manifest, to the same extent, the desire to occupy a privileged place in European history—a desire which is perfectly understandable and in full agreement with the political project of affirming the nation in the community of Europe.

The two registers combined in a contradictory relationship—sacrifice for the sake of Christian Europe resulted in the wearing down of a remarkable civilization. They were the first in Europe to have a regular army; for centuries they were the defenders of religion and civilization against Islam and Asiatic barbarism.

In France, Villehardouin was already writing in French at the beginning of the thirteenth century. We are clearly witnessing a nationalist amplification of history. However, the phenomenon must be understood in a particular context, and especially in relation to two essential coordinates. The Romanians were doing no more than adapting the general formula to their own history.

The excessive exaggeration in the Romanian case reflects the extreme disproportion between reality and ideal. Behind the nationalist discourse we can clearly read the desire for integration with Europe. The strength and persistence of the current find their justification in the general conditions of Romanian political and intellectual life. The national objective became a priority for the Romanians, in the conditions of discrimination to which they were subjected and in the resulting intensification of national movements in the territories under foreign rule: Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia.

The historical discourse continued to be profoundly marked by the ideal project of a unified nation. National antagonisms were supported by historical arguments.

His revitalization of the immigrationist thesis came at just the right time to serve the Hungarian political project—the dream of a Greater Hungary and a fundamentally Hungarian Transylvania in which the Romanians had appeared relatively late. The Romanian response, insisting, with a few exceptions and nuances, on Romanian continuity on the former territory of Dacia, evidently served a no less clearly defined political and national goal.

Through history, the Hungarians and Romanians were tracing the ideal frontiers of the present or future. The implications at an emotional level, with a strong echo in public opinion, of divergent national projects, posed a challenge to historiography.

Was it possible to reconcile the demands of research with the requirement to adhere to a particular national program? Could the historian be a patriot while speaking in any way about the past of his nation? He could, of course, but in less favorable conditions than would have been offered by a society unaffected by conflicts and projects of this sort.

The professional is not beyond all mythological temptations, as indeed this book itself demonstrates. However, he is capable—at least theoretically—of avoiding simplistic and infantile forms of mythologizing.

However daring his constructions may be, they are built on a real foundation of verified facts. The beginning of this process had taken place in the German universities in the eighteenth century.

Around there were a dozen university chairs of history in the German space; by their number had increased to Germany had become the undisputed world center of historiography; here it was possible to acquire the norms of a history based on the rigorous study of sources, a history that at last sought to be free of fantasy. France lagged behind, but professionalization had also made great progress in its universities—there were 71 chairs of history by the end of the nineteenth century.

In principle, these dates could mark the beginning, albeit modest, of the professionalization of history. The reality, however, was somewhat different. Lovinescu in a more optimistic direction with the forms gradually creating their own substance , could be applied here with ample justification.

Only V. Urechia, professor of the History of the Romanians at Bucharest University from to , proved to be a hard worker, although his industry was not matched by his competence. Unconstrained by such a discipline, historiographical romanticism had free rein. The principal historiographical personality of the s and s was Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu , an autodidact with an immense body of knowledge—especially in the field of linguistics, philology, and history—a sparkling mind, a genius even, but with fantastic inclinations and a tendency towards the most unexpected intellectual constructions.

Before this date, as for some time after it, his influence on history was enormous, and not in terms of the disciplining of the field! His solid contributions, including the publication of an impressive number of Slav documents and old Romanian texts, and his fertile ideas, such as those concerning the role of the Dacians in the formation of the Romanian people, his theory of the circulation of words, or, on a larger scale, his project of interdisciplinary research, bringing together history, linguistics, anthropology, economics, etc.

The Moldavian prince secularizes the wealth of the monasteries and thinks of a very intelligent fiscal reform, capable of improving, almost miraculously, the situation of the peasantry. While he was an opponent of pure Latinism and argued for the importance of the Dacians in the Romanian synthesis, he tried to minimize the importance of the Slav element in the Romanian language and in old Romanian culture: although he was a Slavicist he was also a Bessarabian, an opponent of Russia and a partisan of Latin solidarity.

The prestige of Hasdeu, coupled with his undoubted knowledge and other merits, were to further complicate the path towards the affirmation of critical norms in Romanian historiography. There is no doubt that he was a historian in the most complete sense of the word, and even a great historian, but, inclined as he was towards the theory of history and towards great works of synthesis, he did not fully meet the requirements of the time, which were direct knowledge of the sources and immersion in stricdy specialized research.

We may consider as a key moment the publication of the first fundamental study by Dimitrie Onciul in Onciul, a product of the Austrian school, an extension of that of Germany, became professor of the History of the Romanians at the University of Bucharest in Ioan Bogdan, a Slavicist with an identical methodological background, came to the chair of Slav Languages in , and, on the death of P.

It was a remarkable beginning, but only a beginning, limited to the contribution and example of a few historians.

Only in subsequent years and decades would professionalism acquire a solid base through the arrival on the scene of new generations trained in the spirit of a demanding methodology. From it published the journal Convorbiri literare Literary conversations , which moved to Bucharest, where the most important members had by then settled, in Those who set the tone of the movement in its formative years, foremost among them being Titu Maiorescu in cultural matters and Petre P.

Carp — in political matters, were young men with a solid background of study in the West. They were the exponents of a modem-style conservative doctrine, inclined not to traditionalism but to the gradual, organic evolution of Romanian society along the lines offered by the Western model. The key to their philosophical, political, and cultural conception was evolutionism; they did not believe in reactionary immobilism, but nor could they accept liberal voluntarism.

They believed in the necessary solidity of a construction that could not be improvised. They felt no need to refer to the past, either to uphold their privileges like old-style conservatives or to radically change Romanian society by invoking fictive historical models like the liberals. They could look at the past with detachment, and this in itself was a very important change of paradigm, something quite new in the nineteenth-century Romanian context!

It has remained to this day the only notable attempt in Romanian culture to detach the present from the past, to bring current problems under discussion without the obsessive need to refer to real or imagined historical precedents. Having been trained in the spirit of the times at the great European universities, and particularly in the German environment in the case of the leaders of the current, they promoted an objective history, reconstructed strictly on the basis of meticulous and rigorous documentary investigation.

From this point of view, Junimism was perfectly synchronized with the movement of ideas in the West. The model, which was of course an ideal one and, like any ideal, unattainable, was that of a history reconstituted with scientific coldness, unaffected by the pressures of politics and ideology.

This translated into a degree rum, the result not only of conviction but also of a polemical spirit, not without its share of exaggeration, such as is inevitable in the affirmation of any new current.

Polemical attitudes towards nationalist amplifications can be found before Junimea, too. The Latinist school, for example, had come in for harsh criticism. Alecu Russo, too, was scornful of this tendency. Even Hasdeu, nationalist as he was and ready in his turn to amplify Dacian roots, consistendy ridiculed the Latinist mania. However, Junimea developed it and generalized it, giving it the strength of a veritable filtration system capable of separating the true from the false, and authentic values from pseudo-values.

It is worth quoting in its entirety the passage referring to Petru Maior to whom Titu Maiorescu was actually related! In his inclination to demonstrate that we are the uncorrupted descendants of the Romans, Maior maintains in his fourth paragraph that the Dacians were totally exterminated by the Romans, so that there was no mixing between the two peoples.

To prove such an unlikely hypothesis our historian relies on a dubious passage in Eutropius and a passage in Julian, to which he gives an interpretation which it is impossible for anyone in their right mind to accept, and thus the historical demonstration of our Romanity begins with a falsification of history.

Against them we must summon unswerving truth and say that our regeneration cannot begin unless it is in the spirit of modern culture On the basis of this poem V.

All this, of course, delighted the critic immensely. Two of the greatest events in the history of Europe have received their direction, or have at least been born, at the signal given on our land: the French Revolution and the national unifications of Italy and of Germany.

At the cry of the herald, announcing the union of Moldavia and Muntenia, Garibaldi and Bismarck were aroused [ Less noisy, but with no less profound results, was the revolution of the Romanians in the direction of liberalism and democracy. The constitutions which we have produced in these last years are also a foretaste of the new spirit in Europe.

After us Austria will return to parliamentarism; after us Spain will have its revolution; after us France itself will take a few steps forward in the direction of democracy.

We should at least be forgiven a smile! For one of the happiest resources of the human race, a means of defense against many hardships in social and literary life, is precisely that movement, half of the body and half of the soul, which begins with a mere smile and ends in an explosion of delight, and which, in recognition of the liveliness of the ancient genius, we designate as Homeric laughter.

The young author had no special training in history, but, armed with some quick reading, with the liveliness of his own mind, and with Junimist polemical verve, he manages to demolish almost the whole of Romanian historiography and even to tarnish the hitherto almost intact prestige of the great B.

He insists on foreign, and especially Slav, influences, which can be identified on a massive scale in the Romanian language, in institutions, and in customs. The Slav contribution is no longer seen as something additional but as an important constitutive element of the Romanian synthesis.

Panu also considerably limits the sphere of political action of the Romanians, insisting on the far from merely formal relationship of vassalage which bound Moldavia to Poland and Wallachia to Hungary. However, it was to be a few years before a true historical school emerged based on these principles; when it did, it was due in particular to the contributions of Dimitrie Onciul and Ioan Bogdan. In them we can see a fusion of the critical spirit with historiographical professionalism.

Onciul and Bogdan were not opponents of Romanian national identity and unity, nor were they advocates of the integration of Romania in the Slav space. Their model was the Western one, and they went so far as to apply this within the field of historical studies.

Quite simply, they sought to separate the contemporary political project from the realities of the Middle Ages. The fact that the Romanian national state—real or ideal—occupied a well-defined territory did not mean that this national configuration had to be projected back a millennium or a millennium and a half into the past.

The fact that the Romanians were trying to break away from the Slav mass and to turn towards the West did not mean that the very real presence of the Slav factor throughout medieval Romanian history had to be minimized. There is no doubt that such was its aim, but the result was not quite as intended.

The imaginary and ideology cannot be driven out of the historiographical project. The factual material in question becomes more secure, but the guiding lines of the discourse are still determined by the same mental mechanism.

The amplification of Slav influence, which could go as far—in the interpretation, favored by Junimea, of Alexandru Cihac—as the identification of the Romanian language as more Slav than Romance, clearly bears the same mark of countermyth, contrasting with the dominant myth of the pure Latinity of the Romanians. In a generally mediocre synthesis of the history of the Romanians, Onciul gives a clear expression of his dynastic conception and of the supremacy which he attributes to political institutions by the way in which he organizes the whole of Romanian history around rulers, starting with Trajan and ending with Carol I.

Here indeed is a question any answer to which presupposes a sliding towards myth: Who made Romania? The liberals?