Gheorghe (George) I. Brătianu (28 January 1898 – 23–27 April 1953) was a Romanian politician and historian. A member of the Brătianu family and initially affiliated with the National Liberal Party, he broke away from the movement to create and lead the National Liberal Party-Brătianu. A history professor at the universities of Iași and Bucharest, he was elected titular member of the Romanian Academy. Arrested by the Communist authorities in 1950, he died at the notorious Sighet Prison.
Contents
Biography
Gheorghe (George) I. Brătianu was born on 28 January 1898, in Ruginoasa, Baia County (nowadays in Iași County). He was the son of Ion (Ionel) I. C. Brătianu and of the princess Maria Moruzi (1863-1921) (widow of Alexandru Al. Ioan Cuza) and the nephew of Ion C. Brătianu. Although his parents separated shortly after the marriage, just before his birth, Ionel Brătianu recognized him as a legitimate son and took care to supervise the intellectual formation of the young George. The relationship between father and son had an occasional character, because his mother did not allow contacts between the two. His parents had divorced the day after the religious wedding, just for Ionel Brătianu to be able to recognize the future historian as a legitimate son. Only after 1918, will Gheorghe I. Brătianu visit his father, asking for his advice and support. He married Hélène Sturdza (1901–1971), sister of prince Mihai Gr. Sturdza, in Bucharest on 27 January 1922 and they had three children.
Education
He spent his childhood and adolescence with his mother, in Ruginoasa, in the Royal Palace of Alexandru Ioan Cuza – built in 1811 in the neo-Gothic style, which had originally belonged to the Sturdza family – and which is now a museum, and on his mother's property in Iași, Casa Pogor. In 1916 he got his bachelor's degree in Iași, and in the summer of the same year he visited for the first time the historian Nicolae Iorga, in Vălenii de Munte. Nicolae Iorga was the one who published his first study "A Moldovan army three centuries ago" (O oaste moldovenească acum trei veacuri), in "Revista istorică", representing the historiographical debut of the young Gheorghe I. Brătianu, aged 16. At the age of 17, Gheorghe Brătianu founded the magazine-manuscript "Challenges" (Încercări).
After Romania joined World War I, on 15 August 1916, Gheorghe I. Brătianu, aged 18, was enrolled voluntarily and incorporated into the 2nd Artillery Regiment. Between 10 October 1916 – 31 March 1917, he attended the school of artillery reserve officers in Iași, and on 1 June 1917, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. In the summer of 1917, after participating in the heavy fighting in Cireșoaia, he was wounded, and after recovering he returned to the frontlines, now in Bukovina. He presented his experience in World War I in the book "Broken Files from the Book of War".
In 1917 he was enrolled at the Faculty of Law at the University of Iași, which he graduated in 1919, when he got a Law Degree. Attracted by history, he abandoned his legal career and enrolled at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he attended the courses of prestigious historians, such as Ferdinand Lot and Charles Diehl, and got a Degree in Letters in 1921. He later became a doctor of philosophy at the University of Cernăuți (1923). In 1929 he received his French (State) PhD at the Sorbonne in France, with the thesis entitled "Recherches sur le commerce génois dans la Mer Noire au XIIIe siècle" (Research on Genoese trade in the Black Sea), obtaining the title of Doctor (State) in Letters. The actual thesis was printed in Paris, right in the year when he got his PhD in Sorbonne in 1929.
Professional career
In 1924, he became a university professor at the department of universal history of the University of Iași, and in 1940, of the University of Bucharest. In 1928 he became a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy and a full member in 1942. Between 1935 and 1947 he held the position of director of the Institute of Universal History in Iași (1935-1940) and then of the Institute of Universal History "Nicolae Iorga" in Bucharest (1941-1947). In the 1930s, he was the leader of a dissident fraction of the National Liberal Party, which he had set up. As early as the third decade of the twentieth century, Gheorghe Brătianu was elected a corresponding member of the Ligurian Society of Storia Patria in Genoa (1925), in 1935 a member of the Kondakov Institute in Prague, and in 1936 of the Society of Sciences and Letters in Bohemia. In 1926 he was appointed a member of the International Committee of Historical Sciences.
Political career
Gheorghe I. Brătianu has joined the National Liberal Party in 1926 and, on 12 October 1927, became the head of the Iași organization of NLP. In 1930, he was disappointed with the NLP policy, which fiercely opposed the return to the country of Carol Caraiman, the future King Carol II, the politician Gheorghe I. Brătianu, who was one of the supporters of the future king, has followed his suggestions, and left the NLP unity and created a dissident liberal group: NLP Gheorghe Brătianu (Georgist), in the period 1930–1938. He will be expelled from the NLP due to his attitude. Along with Gheorghe I. Brătianu, a series of prominent personalities of the Romanian interwar culture and politics left NLP, such as Ștefan Ciobanu, Constantin C. Giurescu, Petre P. Panaitescu, Simion Mehedinți, Artur Văitoianu, Mihai Antonescu, among others. Without having a notable electoral influence, the new political party, in the first years after its establishment, supported the policies of Carol II, but later started distancing itself from him, as the king continued his policy of fragmenting political parties and strengthening his personal power.
In terms of foreign policy, Gheorghe I. Brătianu categorically opposed the policy pursued by Nicolae Titulescu to approach the Soviet Union, rejecting any alliance with it, being convinced that an alliance with Nazi Germany would be a good thing for Romania. King Carol II notes in his diary that the historian Gheorghe I. Brătianu was "the great apostle of the agreement with Germany".
According to the claims of fascist politician Michel Sturdza, on 22 October 1934, the German Minister of Air, Marshal Hermann Göring, speaking on behalf of Adolf Hitler, presented to the Romanian Ambassador to Berlin, Nicolae Petrescu-Comnen, a German offer to Romania, respectively the full guarantee of borders, especially the border with the Soviet Union and the border with Hungary, while offering a complete rearmament of the army, demanding in return that Romania oppose with all its might any attempt to cross Soviet troops into the national territory. Nicolae Titulescu, who supposedly had already promised his French and Czechoslovak partners that they had already concluded mutual assistance treaties with the Soviet Union in the event of a European conflict, that he would also conclude a similar treaty, which would have allowed Soviet troops to pass through Romania to "support" France and Czechoslovakia against Germany, also allegedly hid the government's Petrescu-Comnen report.
A month later, on 20 November, informed by Mihail Sturdza about this fact, Gheorghe I. Brătianu, travels to Berlin, where Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler, with whom he had conversations, but also baron Konstantin von Neurath, the foreign minister Nazi, supposedly confirms the offer made to Romania. Subsequently, the offer was allegedly renewed, following talks with the same officials, on 7 November 1936 and on 16 November 1936. Nicolae Titulescu's "Combinations" were the subject of several interpellations in parliament by Gheorghe I. Brătianu, who was called a fascist leader by the newspaper "Pravda" on 15 December 1936.
The beginning of communist repression
In 1947, during the repressions carried out by the communist authorities, he was removed from the university and from the management of the history institute. In September he was forced into home lockdown and his external contacts were forbidden. On 9 June 1948, with the reorganization of the Romanian Academy (which now took the name of the R.P.R. Academy), his academic status was withdrawn, as was done with 97 other Romanian scientific and cultural personalities.
Arrest, imprisonment, and death
On the night of 5/6 May 1950, he was arrested by the Securitate and imprisoned in the Sighet Prison, being detained for almost three years, without being judged or convicted.
On one of the days between 23 and 27 April 1953, he died in prison, at the age of 55, under circumstances that are still unexplained. He was buried in a common grave at the Pauper's Cemetery in Sighetu Marmației. In 1971, the family was allowed to dig up his remains and bury him in the tomb of the Brătianus from Ștefănești, Argeș County.
The main works
Recherches sur le Commerce Génois dans le Mer Noire au XIIIe Siècle, Paris, Paul Gauthier, 1929.
Privilèges et franchises municipales dans l'Empire Byzantin, Paris, P. Geuthner; Bucharest, "Cultura naţională", 1936.
Les Vénitiens dans la mer Noire au 14e siècle: la politique du sénat en 1332-33 et la notion de la latinité, Bucharest: Impr. Nat., 1939.
La Mer Noire. Des origines à la conquête Ottomane. Vol. I (München 1969; posthumous)