Vol. XXXI, 2018
The documents published here are administrative acts, issued after the princely command from 1835, according to which no prefecture clerk was allowed to be involved in commerce (including land lease). Certainly, the motivation behind this decision was to prevent the abuse of power. The princely command was followed by measures taken in order to strengthen this principle, and most of these documents concern this issue. In 1837 there was a pressure that the sub-prefects would declare on their own responsibility that they do not practice any form of trade. There was also required that prefectures would be attentive to the practice of trade through intermediaries or associates. This letters also include a few cases of conflict of interests, only two being followed by the instant loss of the position. Even so, one of the cases was a withdrawal, and not an actual punishment. It is easy to presume that this principle, specific to modern administrations, was difficult to be put into practice. These documents fully prove this, as they reflect characteristics of the reform attempts during the Organic Regulation period: the relativity (or generality) of instructions (without concern for details), the absence of an actual plan of translating theory to practice, the tense relationship between centre and territory, the lack of uniformity in the answer of local authorities. Last but not least, we notice the prevalence of the power relations which eroded the rule of law, as in the situation when Prince Alexandru Dimitrie Ghica formally allowed one of his familiars to be excluded from the application of the law. The present 72 documents are not the only ones which may enable the study of the idea of the conflict of interests, yet we publish them together as they were archived in a single file.
2. Venera Achim, Eufrosin Poteca aboliţionist, p. 57-66.
This study deals with the less known abolitionist activity of theologian, philosopher, and pedagogue Eufrosin Poteca (1786-1858). After receiving a scholarship from the School Administration of Wallachia, in order to study at the Universities of Pisa and Paris from 1820 until 1825, he returned to the country with modern ideas. Among these ideas one may find social justice, freedom of slaves, education through school, equality in front of the law, and progressive taxation. The topic of liberation of the slaves appeared in the sermons and writings from the early 1820s to the end of his life. Eufrosin Poteca may be regarded as the first Romanian abolitionist. He raised the issues of slavery and the necessity of the abolition of this institution within the Romanian society. His arguments were both moral and religious: the immorality of slavery, the Christian law and the pride of the Romanians as descendants of Saint Constantine, whom freed the slaves. Some of Eufrosin Poteca’s writings were not published due to the opposition of the authorities towards his social ideas.
3. Raluca Alexandru Partenie, Expresii ale afilierii şi contestaţiei politice în modă, p. 67-78.
This essay aims to correlate the political life to fashion, to find political meaning in the different forms that the attire takes in history. Essential for dress is the social and aesthetic purpose. But, given the fact that the changes of polity and ideology always brought changes in fashion, we understand that there is a direct bond between them, and that study of this relation may reveal interesting meanings. The first example offered is that of the French Revolution, a time when clothes bear great ideological and ideational significance (the long trousers of sans-culottes, the Phrygian beret, fashion à la victime, à la greque, Empire). The instability of the political situation was reflected by eccentric changing trends in fashion. The second example is the Romantic fashion. The Restoration brought a conservatory fashion style, inspired by the fashion of the Ancien Régime. The romantic fashion favoured dramatic contrasting forms: successive straits and over-sizes (corset and huge mutton-leg sleeves, and dome skirts), a reflection of the emotional exacerbation. The third example is that of the Western men fashion of the 19th Century, the English bourgeois “uniform” that spread across Europe, creating a more democratic attire. Fashion was illustrative for the political alliances, and the powerful men of the moment lend their names to a great variety of fashion items.
This article aim to underline the numerous contesting ways developed in feminine traditional imagery, as they appear in women artist self-portraits, between 1917 and 1942. Major differences and significant details are investigated in comparison with self-portraits of the women artist from the West European space in the same period of time. The new social statutes in which the women were making their debut – women as art creators – were followed by a dramatic reorganization of the traditional feminine imagery, owing to dislocated parts from of classical male imagery, seriously changed after the First World War.
Starting from a case-study of the cultural landscapes of the Aurès: the traditional villages of the Ghoufi gorges, this article proposes to check the functioning of the ‘image / text’ couple and to show how these two elements are articulated to reveal ancient values of culture, architecture and landscape. The objective is to recognize the material values according to an ancient visual framework, and to identify the heritage and cultural interest of the place in relation to the intangible values revealed by the imagination of the orientalists who lived this landscape during the first half of the 20th century. It is a question of researching the values relating to the landscape of Ghoufi within two categories of sources; iconographic, and there it will be a question of analysing the content of old photographs and postcards, and also literary (accounts of travels, or scientific exploration) describing this landscape. A content analysis is applied to these sources in order to decipher the image components, identify visual values, and then verify their correspondence with literary texts. It will therefore be a question of restoring and identifying the tangible and intangible values of a landscape lived and observed in the same period.
6. Remus Brihac, Naţionalismul ca reacţie a spaţiului ortodox la modernitate, p. 115-123.
This article briefly presents the answer of the orthodox world to the modernity with a reference to the problem of nationalism. The ecclesiological and historical differences determined the orthodox world to specifically react towards the challenges brought by the Enlightenment thought and the French Revolution. The concepts of the French Revolution were revalued from the perspective of the actual situations from the orthodox countries. The Orthodox Church has revalued main concepts like the autocephalous principle, which from the perspective of the development and evolution of a local church, now received a greater importance revaluing in this way the ethnic identity and giving from this point of view a theological justification for the concept of the primordialism as a paradigm of nationalism. The forcing of the orthodox ecclesiology, from the perspective of the modern nationalism, led to the schisms within the orthodox world from the nineteenth century and to its condemnation like an ethno-philetism heresy, according to the Synod of Constantinople from 1872. The conflict between the universalism of the Orthodox Christian faith and the narrowness of this nationalism gave birth both to the new theological developments, respective ecclesiological doctrinary clarifications, and to a new positioning of the Orthodox Church in history.
Par rapport au processus de developpèment de la Roumanie en tant qu’Etat-nation, les relations entre l’Eglise et l’Etat peuvent être comprises dans le sens d’une confrontation entre deux types de légitimités. Face aux ingérences de l’Etat, légitimes du point de vue politique (civil), qui cherchaient à moderniser l’Eglise et parfois même de la subordonner, l’Eglise, par ses représentants de marque, a réaffirmé une certaine indépendance provenant d’une légitimité d’autre type, fondée sur le droit divin et sur sa tradition historique.
L’étude surprend la manière dont le vaste processus de réorganisation de l’Etat roumain, entamé par le prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza à partir des conceptions libérales modernes, inclua également une série de mesures pour la réorganisation de la vie ecclésiastique, qui ont provoqué plusieures réactions contestataires de la part du haut clergé. L’Etat roumain, animé par le principe de la suveraineté nationale, voulait surtout à détacher les deux Métropolies roumaines du Patriarcat de Constantinople et la création d’une seule Eglise Roumaine, géré par une seule autorité ecclésiastique, conformement à la nouvelle organisation de l’Etat. La Loi synodale et celle pour la nomination des hiérarches, qui impliquaient l’intervention directe de l’Etat dans l’organisation de l’Eglise, ont suscité l’opposition la plus véhémente de la part du haut clergé. La „lutte pour la canonicité” s’est achevée en 1872 par la promulgation du prince regnant Carol I de la Loi organique, mais elle a été reprise à l’occasion de „la crise ecclésiastique” en 1909-1911, déclenchée par la promulgation de la Loi du Consistoire Supérieur Ecclésiastique, initiée par le ministre Spiru Haret dans l’esprit des réformes de Cuza.
The 1877–1878 conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire made the Central and Western European public opinion attentive towards the South-Eastern part of the continent. The Romanian declaration of Independence and the war attracted the interest of diplomats, soldiers, aristocrats, physicians, professors, artists, reporters, photographers, press correspondents, actors, and tourists. All these let written accounts on the events and realities they encountered in Romania, as well as the battles from Dobrudja. They also witnessed the last days of the Ottoman administration in Dobrogea and the transition towards the Russian administration, as well as the abuses and the lootings of the Bashibazouks and Circassians against the Christian population.
Among the immigrants who contributed to the modernization of the Romanian state one finds the Italians. Settled after 1829 in the Danube ports, also in the main Romanian cities, the Italians contributed to the development of trade, to the construction of railways and roads, building of important edifices, foundation of publications that marked the history of the press, and also through the work of illustrious university professors they have contributed to the consolidation of Latin spirituality. Artists, writers, publicists, construction engineers, the Italians settled in Romania left testimonies about the dramatic years that marked the generation of the Great War. Based on press articles, unpublished correspondence, and memoirs, this article presents the experiences of several personalities of the Italian colony in Bucharest during the Great War. Benedetto de Luca (publicist, founder of Romanian-Italian cultural associations, press attaché of the Italian legation during the War), Ramiro Ortiz (well-known university professor, translator, first director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Bucharest), Cesare Fantoli (renowned builder) and other members of the Italian community observed the Romanian realities and were also involved either in the propaganda, or with the Red Cross during the war.
L’article est une approche concernant les dispositions affectives et les penchants morales dans la société russe durant le XIXème siècle et au début du XXème siècle, retrouvables d’une manière très marquée à l’occasion des journées révolutionnaires de 1917. On remarque alors, d’une part, la culpabilité ressentie par les nobles et par les bourgeois en rapport avec le peuple, culpabilité qui empêcha toute tentative de rapprochement entre les élites sociales et les catégories populaires sur le terrain du projet politique libéral. D’autre part il y avait, notamment parmi les représentants de l’intelligentsia, une reconversion de la culpabilité en sentiment de devoir envers le peuple. Un sentiment appuié théoriquement surtout par le matérialisme historique, qui engendra une attitude d’engagement messianique pour la cause des ouvriers et des paysans. Cette attitude explique en effet la résolution sans compromis des bolcheviques, capables de pousser à outrance leur programme radical et, par conséquent, de surmonter leur infériorité numérique en comparaison avec des autres partis et puis de gérer avec succès la crise de la guerre civile.
The article presents how the 1917 February and October Revolutions were evaluated during Michail Gorbachev’s glasnost, after the downfall of the USSR in 1991, as well as in the year celebrating 100 years from the events. The study tackles the main approaches in Russian historiography regarding the causes of the revolution and its main actors.
After Prince Gheorghe Bibescu abdicated on June 13th 1848, the revolutionary government which took the power in Wallachia needed to prove its legitimacy, both externally and internally. Because of the high illiteracy rate among the common people in Wallachia, a more effective means of reaching a wider public for political purposes was the use of public ceremonies. This aims to analyze both the revolutionary symbolism used in the public ceremonies, meant to mobilize the masses, as well as how these ceremonies mixed the new revolutionary with popular and religious symbols and festivities.
13. Alexandru Mamina, Memorie şi legitimitate: Avram Iancu, p. 201-206.
L’article analyse les ressorts qui ont présidé l’émergence de la mémoire collective et officielle autour de la personnalité d’Avram Iancu en Roumanie, entre les deux guerres et aussi pendant le régime communiste. Durant ces périodes, on lui consacra des cérémonies publiques, des films documentaires et artistiques, des chansons et surtout une bonne appréciation dans les manuels scolaires. Cette situation s’explique par des raisons à la fois militaires et politiques, Avram Iancu étant perçu comme protecteur des roumains de Transylvanie face à l’agression des nobles hongrois qui débuta déjà au mois de mais 1848, assez sage pour comprendre que les droits nationaux ne s’obtient pas en absence d’une force militaire capable de les défendre contre tout adversaire.
La continuité entre la Roumanie avant 1945 et le gouvernement communiste en ce qui concerne l’image positive d’Avram Iancu découle du fait que les deux régimes partageaient la même identité structurelle et idéologique de l’État-nation. En dehors de la séparation droite – gauche, les États-nation soutient la tradition historique, avec ses événements fondateurs et ses personnages héroïques.