GHEORGHE BRĂTIANU, ACȚIUNE ȘI DESTIN POLITIC DUPĂ REVENIREA ÎN PARTIDUL NAȚIONAL LIBERAL (1938−1953)
GHEORGHE BRĂTIANU’S POLITICAL ACTION AND DESTINY AFTER HIS RETURNING INTO THE ROMANIAN NATIONAL LIBERAL PARTY (1938−1953)

Summary/Abstract: Early 1938, after their returning to the National Liberal Party, the Georgist wing acted in order to be integrated and accepted. Gheorghe Brătianu, the former leader of the dissident Liberal Party, tried to rebuild his prestige inside the new political party he had adhered at, by respecting the Liberals’ principles and decisions. Thus, the historian’s political activity carried out in several stages with different intensities. This study covers the entire period between 1938 and 1953, when the historian died in a communist prison, at Sighet. The study reflects important periods of Romanian contemporary history, such as the Authoritarian Monarchy of the king Carol the second, between 1938 and 1940 and the National Legionary State and Antonescu’s Dictatorship, between 1940 and 1944. Therefore, we structured the paper in two chapters corresponding to the two historical periods mentioned above. Within each chapter, we defined several centers of interest. We present Gheorghe Brătianu’s involvement in negotiations with other political leaders, particularly with Iuliu Maniu, the leader of the National Peasant Party. Their main political objective was to preserve democracy and to oppose the new totalitarian political group, The National Renaissance Front, imposed by the king Carol the Second. The new political group was designed to absorb the old political parties and to discredit the country's governance through them. We also analyze the repeated negotiations to include the historian into Romanian Governments between 1940 and 1943. Such proposals came from the king, from political personalities belonging to different political groups, or from some members of Brătianu family, who wanted to preserve the family position in the National Liberal Party and the country’s leadership. Gheorghe Brătianu’s attitude towards the territorial cessions accepted by the Romanian Government during the year 1940, his political and historical opinions represent other important issues of the study. Gheorghe Brătianu’s increasingly implication in reorganizing the National Liberal Party during the years 1942 and 1943, or his controversial role in preparing and conducting the events of August 23, 1944 seemed that they would provide a major political destiny for the historian at the end of the Second World War. But there was another side of Gheorghe Brătianu’s political involvement which prevented this destiny. It was related with his opinions about Romanian foreign policy during the Second World War. Thus, Gheorghe Brătianu sustained the orientation of the Romanian foreign policy towards Germany and he opposed to any collaboration with the Soviet Russia during the war and at its end. As a result, George Brătianu met to a tragic ending marked by marginalization and by political repression. The last aspects which we present in our study aim are concerned with Gheorghe Brătianu’s gradual margi-nalization after 1945 and at his exclusion from the political life and from scientific activity. Finally, the historian was arrested and imprisoned and he died in the communist prison at Sighet, in April 1953. We used original sources, such as primary documents from the National Archives and from the Archives of the National Council for the Study of the Security Archives (CNSAS). We combined the information obtained from these sources with those existing in our historio-graphy in order to reinterpret some considerations made by the earlier historians and to contribute directly to a more nuanced knowledge of the period and of the Romanian political and scientific elites of those years.

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