Legionnaires wanted to be not only a political alternative to the imperfect democracy of interwar Romania. His main vocation was to accelerate the collective revival. At the heart of his project is the totalitarian salvation of the nation by eliminating opponents who threaten its unity. Crime and violence cease to be considered from the point of view of general morality. They become instruments of a deliberate and bloody attempt to create another humanity.

Murder is written in the genetic code of this movement: the symbiosis between doctrine and terrorist actions explains the bloodthirsty power of the Legionnaires. And Christian Manolaki’s book is an important element in this file of interwar drift. The reconstruction of the climate of the era is accompanied by a careful tracing of the route of the protagonists of this Romanian tragedy.

Totalitarian religion

The legionary imagination naturally maintains privileged connections with other radical right-wing movements. Codreanu was not born on virgin soil: the spiritual patronage of AC Cuza is important in the development of his career. Cuzist anti-Semitism and messianic nationalism of Nikolay Yorga is the seed bed of later legionism. The theme of the Jewish conspiracy is not new: Russian anti-Semitism has already organized around this obsession, basing the repression of rioters on a gross forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

On this ground of anti-Semitic violence and integral nationalism, Codreanu is a hero of his time. But the post-war reality will govern the Fagasian, who rushes with cousism: the world in which Codryanu operates is shaped by the Great War and its memory. Greater Romania, with its tensions, is the stage on which Codreanu will play his role as savior. Criticism of democracy and totalitarian temptation are part of the spirit of the age. An autocratic alternative has already crystallized. Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler are those who exemplify the libertarian energy after 1918.

Legionarism, born out of anti-Semitic student unrest since 1922, will not be a simple political group. Codreanu is the founder of a totalitarian religion which, like other currents of the European radical right, integrates all individual and collective existence in its catechism. Codreanu is a politician-prophet, the embodiment of the nostalgia for salvation that haunts Greater Romania.

The religion he preaches is a vivid philetist Christianity marked by the cult of death with its pagan dimensions. The closeness between the legionnaires and part of the hierarchy of the Romanian Orthodox Church is explained by the ability of the guards to mobilize the religious pervert in the service of political actions. Millenarianism is part of the legionary imagination. Their utopia is seductive in its apocalyptic dimension.

The dimension of political religion allows us to understand the mystical cohesion of the legionnaires. Spiritual unity is strengthened by resorting to violence: detention is an opportunity to experience this totalitarian camaraderie. Criticism and doubts are unacceptable in the community of believers. Treason is a mortal sin. The executions of Vernicescu and Stelescu are episodes that prove the criminal dimension of this political commitment.

Terror and politics

Legionaryism opposes a system it hates and condemns. Crime becomes a legitimate instrument of punishment and rebirth. Legionnaires and Russian populists devoted to terror share a belief in the redemptive potential of crime. Legionary political religion corrupts the Romanian interwar period with its bloody mood. The murder of I. H. Duka is a crossing of the Rubicon.

The relationship between the legionnaires and the state is complicated. From initial complicity and tolerance to repression after 1938, the transition is dramatic. The decade after 1930 is the decade of Carlism – the restoration of Charles II undermines the scaffolding of an imperfect democracy and prepares the ground for autocratic reconstruction. Carlism will compete with legionaryism: both the Lord and the Captain are tempted by the role of the savior of the nation. Christian Manolachi carefully and soberly reproduces this atmosphere of psychosis and collective hysteria.

And this symbolic and political rivalry is the cause of one of the most terrible moments in our recent history: the civil war between the state and the legionnaires. Two years of authoritarian monarchy became the peak of interwar violence. Between the Scylla of killing legionnaires and the Charybdis of official repression, there seems to be no middle ground. The mysticism of political religion opposes the scale of extrajudicial executions. Iuliou Maniu’s voice in the era is one of the few that appeals to the order of constitutionalism and the rule of law. Carlism and its guardian enemies are turning Romania into a battlefield. Corpses litter this landscape of devastation and crime. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro