Ceauşescu was my father! Letters about the Children of the Decree at the end of the ‘60s.
Ceauşescu was my father! Letters about the Children of the Decree at the end of the ‘60s.

Summary/Abstract: The present paper proposes a Lacanian discourse analysis of 38 private letters addressed to Nicolae Ceauşescu, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), in 1968. Most of the authors of these letters, found in the National Archives of Romania, were inviting the agnostic, openly anti-religious, general secretary of the RCP to participate to the baptism of their newborns, to be their godfather, and even to give his name, “Nicolae”, to their children. I argue that these requests indicate the transformation of Ceauşescu into the Symbolic Father of the newborn children, and by extension, of the future Romanian nation. Moreover, they show the citizens’ renunciation of their parental functions on behalf of the state: their children are not theirs anymore, but become “children of the decree” (decreţei in Romanian), as the children born in Romania between 1967 and 1971 were commonly called. Ceauşescu, the new “symbolic father”, society’s source of law and prohibition, is articulated at the most intimate structures of the citizens it governs, becoming “Nicolae”, a Symbolic Father, source and custodian of the higher symbolic order of culture.

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