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1821, 1848, 1859, 1918: Romania’s Compressed Modernisation

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Article 9 of 10 — ‘The Technological Twilight of the Romanian Lands’

Previous articles: Articles 1–8.

I. Padeș, 23 January 1821

Snow covered the hills of Mehedinți. On the edge of the village of Padeș, in a narrow valley between Bibicelu Hill and the beech forest, a crowd of about two thousand people had gathered since eleven o’clock in the morning. It was not an ordinary gathering. Most of them were armed peasants—with old muskets, axes, scythes, clubs—who had come from the villages of Gorj and Mehedinți at the call of a man they knew only by reputation: Tudor Vladimirescu, a sluger (innkeeper), former Russian soldier, a man of Craiova and the Gorj region.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, an old priest—Father Ioan from Prejna—read, with a voice that cracked several times in the middle of sentences, a text that Tudor had composed himself and dictated, two days earlier, to a logothete from Cerneți. The text would remain in Romanian history as the Proclamation of Padeș. It began with words that no one in the entire 18th century would have dared to utter in public:

‘To all the people of the Romanian Land, to all those who dwell in the towns and villages of this country, greetings!'

‘Brothers, inhabitants of the Romanian Land, of whatever kin you may be. No rule forbids a man from meeting evil with evil!'

The priest read louder and louder, as if the frozen air had cleared his voice. The crowd listened in silence. Most of them probably did not understand the exact meaning of each phrase. But they understood that something was being declared. That someone, at last, was openly saying that the evil of the treasury and the Greek ispravnici (district governors) had to be stopped. That the Romanian peasant, in his frozen village of Padeș, Prejna, or Cloșani, had the right to say: enough.

Tudor was a short man, with small eyes, an unkempt beard, and a scar on his forehead from a sabre wound in 1807 during the war with the Turks. He had little education—he could barely write—but he had an extraordinary memory for numbers and justice. He was forty-one years old. In four months, he would be killed by emissaries of his former ally, Alexandru Ipsilanti (the younger—not to be confused with the elder, the former Wallachian ruler; he was the leader of the Greek Hetaeria, who wanted to use Tudor’s uprising to trigger a general anti-Ottoman insurrection). He did not live to see the results of his work. He did not live to see that Phanariotism would indeed end. He did not live to see that 1821 would become, in an unexpected way, the zero hour of Romanian modernisation.

This is the opening scene of our article. After eight articles in which we described a pre-industrial world, a Phanariote world, a Levantine world, a world that resisted modernity with its tightly woven structure—we open Article 9 with the moment when that world breaks. Under Tudor Vladimirescu’s feet, in the snow of Mehedinți, on 23 January 1821, something new begins.

This article follows that arc—from Padeș to the Great Union, from the Organic Regulations to the Malaxa factories, from the first technical schools to the first planes built in Brașov. A century of compressed modernisation. A century in which Romania tried to do, in one hundred years, what England had done in three hundred and France in two hundred. It did not fully succeed. It succeeded, perhaps, to the extent of 60%. And that 60% is all that gives us, to this day, the mental categories of a modern country.

II. What 1821 Meant: The End of a Phanariote Era

Tudor’s uprising lasted seven months. From January 1821, when he issued the Padeș Proclamation, until July 1821, when he was killed in Târgoviște by a handful of men who declared him a traitor. In those seven months, he effectively controlled a large part of Oltenia and Wallachia. He entered Bucharest in March 1821 with twelve thousand armed pandurs (militia). He negotiated with the Porte, with Russia, with Austria. He tried to obtain recognition of a ‘Romanian rule’ in place of the Phanariote one.

He did not succeed. Young Ipsilanti, with his Hetaeria, entered Moldavia in February 1821 and essentially opened a second front that Tudor did not want and that the Porte interpreted as Russian coordination. The leaders of the uprising—Tudor, Ipsilanti, and other secondary figures—fell, one by one. Tudor was betrayed by his own captains, killed in a forest near Târgoviște. Ipsilanti was defeated at Drăgășani in June 1821, fled to Austria, was imprisoned in the fortress of Munkács, where he would die six years later.

Apparently—a total failure. The uprising was suppressed, the leaders killed, the country devastated by Ottoman troops who entered to restore order. By the end of 1821, Wallachia and Moldavia seemed, superficially, in the same situation as before. The Ottomans still appointed princes. The Phanar still existed as an institution. The boyars still paid tribute. The peasants were still serfs.

Fundamentally—a delayed victory. But behind the scenes, something had changed irrevocably. At the Porte, the Grand Vizier understood that Phanariotism had become a problem. His Greeks, who had been loyal dragomans and obedient princes for a century, had proven capable of coordinated rebellion. And the rebellion, through the Hetaeria, had connections with Russia—which wanted to use the Greek question to enter the Balkans itself. A Phanariote on the throne of Wallachia or Moldavia became, in this perspective, a national security risk for the Empire.

Therefore, in 1822, the Porte made a decision that seems banal to us today but marked a turning point. It replaced the Phanariotes with ‘native’ princes—Grigore IV Ghica in Wallachia, Ioniță Sandu Sturza in Moldavia. They were autochthonous boyars, with local clienteles, with local interests. The appointments were not ‘democratic’—they were still made by the Porte, still with peșcheș (bribes), still with mucarer (tribute). But they no longer came from the Phanar. They were of the country.

1821 indirectly produced the end of the Phanariote century. This was the most important framework for the reforms that were to come. Without the end of Phanariotism, what followed—Kiselev, the Organic Regulations, Cuza, Carol—would not have been possible.

And Tudor Vladimirescu—upon whom national historiography has built a cult that is sometimes exaggerated, sometimes unjust—deserves to be understood in this perspective. He was not, as some have said, the ‘first moderniser.’ He was not a moderniser; he was a rebel against a system that extracted everything from the peasant. But by breaking that system, he made the entry of modernisation possible.

A tragic irony that Beevor would savour: Tudor did not live to see that he had won. He died believing he had lost.

III. The Organic Regulations: Russian Reformism, 1831–1832

Between 1828 and 1834, the Principalities were under Russian military occupation for six years. The sixth and last Russo-Turkish war of the century (1828–29) brought Alexander I’s armies to Adrianople. Through the 1829 treaty, the Porte accepted a ‘Russian protection’ over Moldavia and Wallachia. In practice, this meant: Russian governor (General Pavel Kiselev), boyar councils under Russian supervision, cadastre, codified reforms.

Pavel Kiselev—a ambiguous figure. A liberal Russian (rare), a modernising aristocrat (rarer), a general with administrative experience (unique), Kiselev understood that the Principalities could not be transformed into pure Russian guberniyas—the Porte would not accept it, Austria would object, England would make a diplomatic scandal. But they could be ‘modernised’ in a direction that served Russian interests—a more efficient bureaucracy (hence better-collected taxes), a less chaotic local army (hence less cost for stationed Russian troops), a cadastre that made economic mobilisation possible.

Thus were born the Organic Regulations—designed by the joint Romanian-Russian commission, approved by the boyars (with grumbling, but approved), and put into force in 1831 in Wallachia, 1832 in Moldavia.

Technically speaking, what were the Organic Regulations? Quasi-constitutions—the first modern constitutional texts in Romania. They included: separation of powers (General Assembly elected among boyars, with legislative function; the Prince with executive function; courts with judicial function); simplified fiscal code (a single land tax instead of dozens of specific dues); embryonic commercial code; clarified boyar obligations (corvée—12 days a year, later extended); militia military service (the beginning of the modern Romanian army); regulated public education (though slowly implemented).

Reforms applied. Starting in 1831, in Wallachia, the first postal service with printed schedules was organised (imitating the Austrian model we discussed in Articles 3 and 8). The first streets of Bucharest were paved (Calea Mogoșoaiei, the future Calea Victoriei). The first systematic quarantines were established on the Danube (after the great cholera epidemic of 1831, which killed 30,000 people). The first civil registry offices (birth, marriage, death) were created—previously managed exclusively by the Church. The first systematic cadastre was completed—Wallachia in 1832, Moldavia in 1834.

The cumulative effect. The modern Romanian state began to emerge. Not as a national project (which would come in the following decades), but as an administrative instrument. This is an important distinction. What the Principalities lacked in 1780—cadastre, postal schedules, clear codes, salaried bureaucracy—appeared, in incipient form, in the 1830s under Russian tutelage.

The irony. Romanian modernisation thus began through Russian instruments. The same Russia that, in Article 5, appeared as an ‘extractive empire’ with the Demidovs and factory serfdom brought to the Principalities the first modern codes. Because in the period 1815–1848—between the Congress of Vienna and the revolutions of 1848—Russia was a conservative but selectively reformist actor. It brought institutions to secure its client states. Kiselev was not Voltaire. But he was a better cadastre than the Phanariote one.

And when the Organic Regulations were, in the 1860s, criticised as ‘oppressive’ and ‘anachronistic,’ the criticism came from the new generation of Bălcescu and Kogălniceanu. They were right—for their time. But they would not have existed, as politicians and intellectuals, without the infrastructure that the Organic Regulations had built twenty years earlier.

Progress, in history, is often made on the shoulders of those whom the sons later kill politically.

IV. 1848: The Moment That Failed

All over Europe, the spring of 1848 was a moment of hope. In Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Milan, Prague, people took to the streets demanding civil rights, free elections, constitutions. Kings were deposed. Governments fell. A generation of intellectuals saw their projects fulfilled overnight.

And overnight—well, a little slower than overnight—everything failed. By the end of 1849, the conservative armies (Russian, Austrian, Prussian) had restored order. Constitutions were annulled. Revolutionary leaders were exiled or executed.

In Bucharest, 11 June 1848. A group of young intellectuals—Nicolae Bălcescu, Ion C. Brătianu, C.A. Rosetti, Alexandru and Ștefan Golescu (the sons of Dinicu), Ion Ghica, Cezar Bolliac—proclaimed, in the square at Islaz, a Romanian Constitution. It included: the enfranchisement of peasants with compensation (not confiscation—the serfs received land, the boyars received compensation), legal equality among all citizens, universal civil rights, free elections, free and compulsory public education, the emancipation of Jews and Roma slaves, freedom of the press.

A radical programme for 1848. Comparable to the French revolutionary programme, the Hungarian one, the German liberals’ one.

It lasted three months. From June to September 1848, a liberal governmental commission functioned effectively in Bucharest. It published newspapers. It convened General Assemblies. It began to prepare the application of agrarian reform. It made plans for the emancipation of the Jews.

In September, Ottoman troops entered Bucharest from the south, and Russian troops from the east. The commission was dissolved. The leaders fled—some to Constantinople, others to Paris. The Organic Regulations were reinstated. Apparently, a return to 1830.

In Iași, March 1848. A shorter and smaller episode. A group of young boyars—Kogălniceanu, Alecsandri, Costache Negri—drafted the Petiția-proclamațiune with similar demands. It was rejected by Prince Mihail Sturza within two weeks. Without bloodshed, but also without immediate result.

What remained. Although the revolutions failed, they had three lasting effects.

First—they formed a generation. Bălcescu, Kogălniceanu, Rosetti, Brătianu, the Golescu brothers became, through exile, contemporaries of Marx in London, Mazzini in Genoa, Herzen in Paris. They learned modern European politics. They built networks that would function after 1856. When they returned, they were different men from those who had left.

Second—they codified a programme. The Islaz Constitution of 1848 is, chronologically, the starting point of any subsequent Romanian reform. The agrarian reform of 1864—is 1848. The Civil Code of 1864—is 1848. The Education Law of 1864—is 1848. The emancipation of the Roma slaves in 1855–56—is 1848. Nothing new was invented in Cuza’s decade. The Islaz programme was applied.

Third—they shattered the legitimacy of the Organic Regulations. Even though they were reinstated after 1849, they had the shadow of revolution over them. The conservative boyars who defended them knew they were tolerated, not loved. In 1859, when Cuza was elected through a constitutional manoeuvre, the Organic Regulations would fall quickly.

The 48ers—a nickname and a class. In Romanian historiography, the 1848 generation is known by the generic name ‘pașoptiștii’ (the 48ers). They are foundational figures. Bălcescu—died in 1852, at 33, of tuberculosis in Palermo, without living to see the Union. Kogălniceanu—became Minister of Justice under Cuza, author of the agrarian reform of 1864. Brătianu—became Prime Minister under Carol I, in the long decade 1876–88. Rosetti—founder of the newspaper Românul, one of the great political journalists of the 19th century. The Golescu brothers—supporters of Cuza, then of Carol.

A golden generation, in a way. That paid the price of a lost revolution, but in the end won most of its political programme.

V. 1859: Union Through Constitutional Manoeuvring

The Congress of Paris in 1856, which ended the Crimean War, changed the geopolitical context. Russia was defeated. Napoleon III’s France and Victorian England forced a new approach: the ‘Russian protection’ of the Principalities was replaced with a ‘collective guarantee’ of the great powers (France, England, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia, plus Turkey as suzerain). Ad-Hoc Divans (1857) were organised in which boyars, clergy, and ‘mesenii’ (urban petty bourgeoisie and lesser boyars) were consulted on the future of the Principalities.

The conclusions of the Ad-Hoc Divans were almost identical in Wallachia and Moldavia: the union of the two Principalities under a foreign prince. The great powers refused total union—they accepted only a ‘personal union,’ with two separate princes. The Paris Convention (1858) legislated this compromise.

January 1859—the double election. The electoral Divans, convened in January 1859, had the task of electing two princes—one for Wallachia, one for Moldavia. In Iași, on 5 January 1859, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, a Moldavian militia colonel, a man of the liberal-moderate party, was elected.

In Bucharest, two weeks later, the election of a Wallachian prince was scheduled. Here, the game that would make history was played. A group of liberal deputies—including C.A. Rosetti and Ion C. Brătianu—proposed, in a move that the Paris Convention did not explicitly forbid, the election of the same Cuza for Wallachia as well. Formally, Cuza would become prince of both Principalities—a ‘personal union,’ not a state one. But in practice, it would be the first step towards a total union.

24 January 1859. Cuza was elected Prince of Wallachia. The great powers, faced with the accomplished fact, accepted the compromise—they did not want to trigger a diplomatic crisis over a formal detail. Cuza reigned simultaneously in both Principalities. The ‘de facto union’ began.

Cuza—a complex figure. He was not a great intellectual. He was not a charismatic leader in the modern sense. He was a moderate officer, with Pașoptist sympathies (he had participated in the 1848 revolution in Iași), with modest administrative experience (he had been pârcălab of Galați). What he had was: a good political network (he had gained the trust of both moderates and radicals); personal pragmatism that allowed him to work with Kogălniceanu (a radical) and conservative boyars simultaneously; a loyalty to the idea of reform that did not waver at the first obstacle.

His Minister—Kogălniceanu. Here is the key to the decade 1859–1866. Mihail Kogălniceanu—a historian, jurist, former 1848 revolutionary, a polyglot trained in Berlin—was, under Cuza, the minister who designed most of the reforms. The Civil Code of 1864 (based on the Napoleonic one). The Penal Code (same). The Commercial Code. The Public Education Law of 1864 (compulsory and free at primary level). The agrarian reform of August 1864—the most important social reform of the 19th century in Romania.

The Agrarian Reform. The enfranchisement of over 400,000 peasant families with plots ranging from 3 to 8 hectares (depending on family size and land quality). The boyars received compensation (state bonds—which proved, in the following decades, to be less valuable than their nominal worth, which pushed many boyar families into material decline). The peasants received land, but with obligations—payment in instalments over 15 years, plus new taxes. It was not a perfect solution. It created, in the following decades, a class of small peasant landowners with low productivity, which would explode socially in 1907.

But it solved, formally and legally, the ‘peasant question’ inherited from the 17th century. And legal formalisation was the premise of a modern economy.

1864—the Secularisation of Monastic Estates. Another reform with profound impact. Greek monasteries (‘dedicated’ to Mount Athos and Jerusalem) controlled, in 1863, about a quarter of the agricultural land of the Principalities. Cuza decided to confiscate—or, as it was formally said, to ‘secularise’—these estates, handing them over to the Romanian state. An act of national sovereignty against the Greek Church of Constantinople. An act of economic reform (the Romanian state suddenly entered into possession of enormous resources). A definitive break with the Phanariote order.

The End of Cuza—1866. A ‘monstrous coalition’—conservative boyars revolted by the agrarian reform, plus radical liberals dissatisfied that the reforms did not go further—overthrew Cuza in February 1866. Cuza went into exile, where he would die six years later in Heidelberg, of tuberculosis. An anti-heroic end for a man who had done more than any other modern Romanian prince.

He would never return alive to the country.

VI. Carol I: The Monarchy That Built the State, 1866–1914

A young German prince—Karl Ludwig Eitel Friedrich Zephyrinus Ludwig von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, 27 years old, a dragoon officer in Berlin—was brought in March 1866 to replace Cuza. His journey through Austria, under a false identity (since Austria forbade the passage of a foreign pretender to the throne of a country it considered within its sphere of influence), is a minor epic. He arrived in Bucharest on 10 May 1866, by train to the foot of the Carpathians, then by carriage.

No one knew him. He spoke only German and French. He knew nothing about the country. He had no local political network.

Forty-eight years later, in October 1914, when he died in Sinaia at the age of 75, he left behind a functional state, a victorious army at Plevna (1877), a stable dynasty, a nascent industry, a railway network of over 3,500 kilometres, a modern port at Constanța, the first great bridge over the Danube, two polytechnic universities, a Romanian Academy, dozens of universities and technical schools, and—crucially—a Constitution that lasted, with modifications, until 1938.

He did not do this alone, of course. But by remaining—with German patience—above political intrigues, he allowed the reforms.

The Constitution of 1866. Based on the Belgian one of 1831—considered at the time the most modern liberal constitution in Europe. It introduced: constitutional monarchy (the prince was legally responsible but could not legislate alone); two chambers (Chamber of Deputies, Senate); civil rights for Christian citizens (Jews would receive full civil rights only in 1923); freedom of the press (formal—practised with compromises); compulsory education.

Independence—1877. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. Romania entered as an ally of Russia. The Romanian army—60,000 men under the command of Carol I—participated in the siege of Plevna (July–December 1877). The Battle of Grivița on 30 August 1877, in which the 13th Dorobanți Regiment under Major Șonțu took the main redoubt—with devastating losses (over 40% dead and wounded)—became the founding act of the modern Romanian army.

The Treaty of Berlin (1878) recognised Romania’s independence. Russia, in a gesture that would remain in Romanian consciousness for a long time, demanded Southern Dobruja (the Quadrilateral) in exchange for Southern Bessarabia, even though the latter had been lost in 1856. Romania was forced to accept.

The Kingdom—1881. Carol I was crowned king on 10 May 1881. The new ‘Kingdom of Romania’ was internationally recognised. The period that would later be called, in retrospect, the Romanian Belle Époque began.

VII. Infrastructure, 1866–1914: Railways, Bridges, the Polytechnic

Here—finally—is the moment in our article when the steam engine, the furnace, and the factory appear. After seventy years in which we have followed them in England, Russia, and Austria, they also enter Romanian territory.

The First Romanian Railway—1856. Yes, even before the Union. A short stretch, 62 kilometres, between Cernavodă and Constanța—built by a British company (Barclay Brothers) under Ottoman concession for the transport of grain from Dobruja. It was not yet connected to the European network. It was, essentially, a colonial railway—built to extract grain, not to connect Romanian cities.

The real network began in 1869. The Bucharest–Giurgiu line (dedicated to grain transport to the Danube), inaugurated on 26 August 1869. Built by an English company (John Trevor Barkley). 66 kilometres. The next few lines—Ploiești–Roman (1872), Bucharest–Craiova (1875), Iași–Cucuteni (1870), Suceava–Iași through Austrian Bucovina (1869–1871)—built by German, English, and Austrian companies, with mixed financing.

Here, a famous scandal emerged: in 1870, the Romanian government signed a contract with the Prussian firm Bethel Henry Strousberg for the construction of over 900 km of railway in Wallachia and Moldavia. The contract proved catastrophic—Strousberg went bankrupt in 1873, the works remained unfinished, the Romanian state lost millions. The ‘Strousberg Affair’ would be a wound in Romanian politics for a decade. It led, indirectly, to the nationalisation of the railway network—the Law of 1889 transferred the railways from private companies to the Romanian state. The Romanian Railways (CFR) was created, which would become one of the largest state companies in Romania, with tens of thousands of employees.

The Bridge of Cernavodă—1890–1895. A project by engineer Anghel Saligny, the first great bridge over the Danube on Romanian territory. Total length (with access roads): 4,088 metres. At the inauguration on 14 September 1895, Saligny—refusing to go out with the king on the bridge until two locomotives and 15 loaded wagons, totaling over 200 tonnes, had crossed it at half the normal speed—showed that engineering could be done to European standards in Romania. It was a symbolic affirmation that mattered.

Saligny became, at the end of the 19th century, the prototype of the modern Romanian engineer. Born in Focșani, trained in Berlin (Polytechnic of Charlottenburg), chief engineer of the CFR, then rector of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest in the 1900s. Author of the silos in Brăila and Galați (the first American-style grain silos on the Danube), author of the port of Constanța (built between 1896 and 1909).

The Polytechnic. As early as 1818, Gheorghe Lazăr had founded in Bucharest the first school of ‘land surveying engineering’ in Romanian. In 1832, it was transformed into the ‘Colegiul Sfântul Sava’ with a course in applied mathematics. In 1867, in Bucharest, the National School of Bridges and Roads was founded, which became, in 1881, under Carol I, the Polytechnic University of Bucharest. A similar Polytechnic was founded in Iași in 1875. The graduates of these two schools—between 1880 and 1914, approximately 3,000 engineers—built, essentially, Romania’s technical infrastructure. There was Saligny, plus Elie Radu, plus Ion Ionescu de la Brad, plus dozens of other less famous names.

This is the generation that the Principalities lacked in 1780. By 1900, we had it—one century late, but we had it.

The Port of Constanța, 1896–1909. The gateway to the Black Sea, built after the model of the port of Trieste. Silos, docks, direct railway connection to Bucharest via the Cernavodă Bridge. At its full inauguration in 1909, Constanța became one of the main grain ports of the Black Sea.

Refineries, factories, the first great industrial plants. At the end of the 19th century, the oil industry began to develop in Ploiești with English, Dutch, and American capital. The first modern refinery—Marincovici’s in Ploiești, 1857 (very small, but the first). By 1900, Ploiești, under firms like Standard Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Steaua Română (Romanian capital), became one of the great oil centres of the world. Romania’s production in 1914 was the second in Europe after Russia (Baku).

Assan’s Mill—1853, the first steam engine on Romanian territory. An important moment for our narrative. Marin Ionescu Assan—a salt merchant, an enterprising man, trained in Vienna—installed, in the Obor district of Bucharest, the first steam-powered mill in Romanian territory. The engine, brought from Vienna. The chimney, the first in Bucharest to exceed 15 metres. The production—300 kilograms of flour per hour. A contemporary miracle.

Seventy-two years after James Watt’s first steam engine (1775), Bucharest had its first. Seventy-two years of delay that our series tries to explain.

VIII. 1914–1918: The World War and the Great Union

Over this incipient but already functional infrastructure, the First World War fell. We will not tell the military story here—it is more than an article. We will only outline the general arc.

1914. King Carol I—emotionally and dynastically linked to Germany—wanted neutrality. He died in October 1914, leaving the country neutral.

Ferdinand I. His nephew, who ascended the throne in 1914, hesitated between sides. His liberal advisers (Brătianu the father, Vintilă Brătianu) and conservative advisers (Marghiloman) supported opposite positions.

1916. Romania entered the war on the side of the Entente on 27 August 1916. The offensive into Transylvania failed quickly. The German-Austro-Bulgarian counter-offensive brought, by December 1916, the occupation of Bucharest. The court, government, and army retreated to Iași. Moldavia remained the only free Romanian zone.

1917—Mărășești, Mărăști, Oituz. Three defensive battles in which the Romanian army, under the command of Generals Prezan and Averescu, stopped the Central Powers’ offensive. They were among the toughest battles of the Eastern European front. They are foundational moments of modern Romanian national identity.

1918. Russia exited the war (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, March 1918). Romania, isolated, signed the Treaty of Bucharest in May 1918—the conditions were humiliating. But in November, when Germany fell, the treaty became void.

The Great Union. 1 December 1918. The Assembly of Alba Iulia proclaimed the union of Transylvania with Romania. In April, there had been the union with Bessarabia; in November, with Bucovina. By the end of 1918, ‘Greater Romania’—with Transylvania, Bessarabia, Bucovina, part of the Banat—had 295,000 km² and approximately 15 million inhabitants. It was almost three times larger than the Old Kingdom.

Economic consequences. Romania entered the interwar period with a completely new economic structure. Transylvania brought the Banat of Reșița—the furnaces we discussed in Article 3, now Romanian. Bucovina brought the timber and paper industry. Bessarabia brought rich agriculture and railway infrastructure. A doubling or tripling of national wealth.

It was the moment when Romania ‘caught up.’ One century behind England, but it caught up.

IX. 1918–1948: The Peak of Romanian Industry

The interwar period was the peak of modern Romanian industry. We can only indicate a few figures and names.

Nicolae Malaxa. Born in 1884, trained as an engineer in Vienna, he became in the 1920s one of the greatest Romanian industrialists. The Malaxa factories in Bucharest Noi built: locomotives (over 1,000 between 1925 and 1948), wagons, guns, tanks, marine engines. In 1938, Malaxa was the second-largest Romanian industrial company after Astra. It employed 15,000 workers.

Astra—Reșița, Arad, Sibiu. A consortium of metallurgical and mechanical factories with a Habsburg history (Reșița—the one from Article 3). Under Romanian control after 1918. In the 1930s, it produced steel, railway tracks, engines, the first Romanian automobiles (Astra 12), aircraft.

IAR—Brașov. Industria Aeronautică Română, founded in 1925. By 1944, it had produced over 1,000 aircraft (mostly under French and British licence—Potez, Blenheim). By the late 1930s, aircraft of integral Romanian design: the IAR-80, a fighter that would be effectively used in the war.

Herman and Max Auschnitt. Jewish industrialist brothers, in control of ‘Titan-Nădrag-Călan’—the third-largest metallurgical complex. Production of steel, rails, heavy equipment.

Blank and Chrissoveloni. Major commercial banks. Banca Marmorosch Blank—perhaps the largest private Romanian bank in the interwar period—financed most major industrial investments.

Aggregate figures. In 1938, the last year of peace, Romania:

  • Produced 3.4 million tonnes of steel (compared to 900,000 in 1913)

  • Extracted 6.6 million tonnes of oil (4th in the world)

  • Had 11,000 km of railway

  • Had three major ports (Constanța, Brăila, Galați)

  • Produced 100 aircraft per year

  • Had 30 universities and polytechnics with over 30,000 students

It was not England. It was not Germany. But it was, undisputedly, a medium industrial country. At a level comparable to Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, but below Poland and Czechoslovakia (which had begun modernisation earlier).

1940–1944. The Second World War devastated part of this infrastructure. The Allied bombings of Ploiești (Operation Tidal Wave, 1 August 1943) destroyed a significant part of the oil capacity. German requisitions extracted resources. The battles for Iași and Chișinău in 1944 left entire areas in ruins.

23 August 1944. Romania changed sides. Romanian troops fought alongside the Allies until May 1945. The cost: approximately 170,000 Romanian dead on the Eastern Front (against the USSR, 1941–44) plus 90,000 on the Western Front (against Germany, 1944–45).

1945–1947. The Soviets installed, in stages, a communist government. The elections of November 1946 were rigged. King Michael I was forced to abdicate on 30 December 1947.

11 June 1948. The Nationalisation Law. In a single day, approximately 8,000 industrial enterprises passed into state ownership. Families like Malaxa, Auschnitt, and Blank lost everything. Some fled (Malaxa emigrated to the United States, where he would found another company). Others were arrested (Auschnitt was imprisoned in the 1950s, died in Iași in 1957).

The arc of Romanian ‘bourgeois’ industrialisation closed abruptly. An arc of exactly one century—from Assan in 1853 to nationalisation in 1948.

X. Conclusion: What We Did, What We Did Not Do, What Was Too Little

Tudor Vladimirescu rose at Padeș on 23 January 1821, on a day with snow and the priest reading the proclamation. He did not live to see what was built in the next thirteen decades.

We built a lot. Between 1821 and 1948, we created a modern state, a medium industrial economy, a literary culture of European level, a network of universities, an army that fought on two world fronts, a constitutional dynasty that lasted eight decades. We did it with delay, with compromises, but we did it.

We did not create an industry of innovation. We built locomotives under licence (Malaxa was, essentially, a large assembly plant); we built aircraft with licensed engines; we extracted oil with foreign technology; we produced steel with Western processes. We were competent imitators. We were not paradigmatic creators.

We did not, by 1948, create an industrial bourgeoisie that could resist generationally. Families like Malaxa, Auschnitt, and Blank had, at the time of nationalisation, two or three generations of continuity. They did not have time to solidify. When communism struck, they evaporated rapidly.

We did not, in the communist decades, create a transformation that overcame the extractive structure. The socialist industry of Romania—built between 1948 and 1989—was, structurally, a replica of the Demidov model: immense complexes (Reșița Works, Galați Works, Călărași Works), mobilised sub-optimal labour, centralised planning, bulk industrial exports. It produced steel, aluminium, cement, heavy chemicals. It did not produce, with rare exceptions, high value-added products.

Conclusion in Three Questions.

First: How much of the 1780 gap was recovered by 1948? Approximately 60–70%. We became a medium industrial country. We did not become a paradigm. The gap between Romania and England was reduced, but not closed. And the remaining gap in 1948 would persist, with variations, to this day.

Second: What was missing to recover more? Time—we did not have England’s 300 years. Cadres—we trained engineers, but few founder-scientists of industry. Continuity—two world wars, plus the communist revolution, cut the generational line. Geopolitical alliances—Russia was not, for a century, a modernising ally (Kiselev being the exception, not the rule); Germany, the main interwar commercial partner, led us into war.

Third—for the contemporary reader. What arcs of compressed modernisation are playing out today? Post-1989 Romania is, in its own way, an attempt at compression—thirty-seven years to make the leap from a command economy to a market economy, from a communist state to a European rule-of-law state, from bulk production to potential high value-added production. We are in the thirty-seventh year of this compression. How are we managing?

We will see in the last article. Which will also be the most speculative. Three scenarios for 2050—re-Phanariotisation, internal Habsburg model, inclusive modernisation post-1821. The reader will be left with the open question: which path are we on today?

Tudor Vladimirescu rose at Padeș on 23 January 1821. He did not live to see. We do. We are the only ones who can decide whether what began on that day, with snow and a proclamation, ends in the way he would have wanted, or otherwise.

Selected Bibliography

  • Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa. Acumularea decalajelor economice (1500–2010) (Romania and Europe: The Accumulation of Economic Gaps, 1500–2010), Polirom, 2010, chapters on the 19th–20th centuries: archive.org.

  • Keith Hitchins, România 1866–1947, Humanitas, multiple editions—a classic synthesis.

  • Lucian Boia, Istorie și mit în conștiința românească (History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness), Humanitas, multiple editions—on the historiography of the national myth.

  • Neagu Djuvara, O scurtă istorie a românilor povestită celor tineri (A Short History of the Romanians Told to the Young), Humanitas.

  • Nicolae Iorga, Istoria românilor (History of the Romanians), volumes on the 19th century.

  • Wikipedia RO, Tudor Vladimirescu’s Revolution: ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia RO, Organic Regulation: ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia RO, 1848 Revolution in Wallachia: ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia RO, Union of the Romanian Principalities: ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia RO, Anghel Saligny: ro.wikipedia.org.

  • Wikipedia RO, Nicolae Malaxa: ro.wikipedia.org.

*The final article in the series: ‘Re-Phanariotisation, Internal Habsburg Model, Inclusive Modernisation: Three Scenarios for 2050’—what Romania might look like in 2050. Three possible paths, with the signals of each in 2026. The closing of a long history of 245 years, with the question of where we choose to go. Coming in two weeks.*