Periodisation and the Middle Class in Romanian History

No Middle Ages? No Middle Class! No Mass Civic Psychology for you!

Summariser: In Romania, the necessary historical-material-dialectical conditions for the emergence of a national bourgeoisie were never met owing to the underdevelopment of the productive forces during th KJKglgglkgLGLGLKlkhb,n.j’k’kKJGJFYJTn.jk

There is a youtube channel I quite enjoy, called Corpus Draculianum. It is a self-consciously objective, impartial, SCIENTIFIC—and therefore de-romanticised and emotionally unsatisfying—review of Romanian history, directed mainly at a Romanian audience. The stated aim of the people behind Corpus Draculianum is to debooooonk (not their word) the alleged distortions of communist-era historiography.

However, what the conspirators at Corpus Draculianum neglect to state is that the myths propagated under the communists were at their core a continuation of mainstream liberal-nationalist Romanian historiography prior to WWII. Historians of both eras identify the freedom-loving and inherently democratic peasantry as the motor of historical progress. While communist-era historians naturally made some changes, mutatis mutandis, to the interpretation of specific events, they also embroidered—with even more veneration of the pre-modern rustic masses—the overarching tale of progress woven by their liberal-nationalist forerunners. A reverence for the deeds of the more effective centralisers among the native aristocracy (boyars, boieri in Romanian) likewise suffuses both pre-WWII and communist historiography. Vlad the Impaler, Stephen the Great and Michael the Brave are the holy trinity for Romanian historians, regardless of the political-economic system under which they laboured.

Corpus Draculianum is thus EXPOSED as a throughgoing revisionist project, aimed at the entirety of traditional Romanian historiography, both under and preceding communism. Nonetheless, I commend the channel to you as a generally…Reliable Source, Free of Disinformation (but really—take a look; there is some very interesting material, genially narrated by the host).   

Incidentally, Dan Davis staunchly maintains the dialectical materialist case for a mythical-heroic Vlad the Impaler here, if that’s the sort of thing you’re after—and I know you are (I also know you’re reading this Dan, and I’m only joking; Dan is not a commie).

Dan Davis: not a commie

Anyway, this video from Corpus Draculianum recently caught my eye. In it the likeable host, evidently a historian of some candlepower, discusses periodisation in Romanian historiography. The gist of it is that the communists deceived the nation with the lie that the Romanian Lands—meaning in this case the ‘Danubian Principalities’ of Wallachia and Moldavia—were stuck in the Middle Ages until 1821 (there was no state of Romania until 1859).

The Romanian Lands (rightful historical claims to Iceland, Canada, Zimbabwe, The Philippines, Madagascar, Fiji and Antarctica not shown)

Indeed it was in the year 1821 that a rebellion of the lower aristocracy and peasantry took place in Wallachia, led by the valiant and handsome Tudor Vladimirescu. It sought to supplant the Ottoman governors, called Phanariots, after the quarter of Constantinople in which most of them were accustomed to dwell. These pseudo-Greek cockroaches, beginning in the second decade of the 18^th century, had grovelled and bribed their way into overlordship of the Romanian Lands, with whose inhabitants they immediately commenced a ruthlessly extractive relationship. The Wallachian uprising of 1821 is commonly framed, by communist and liberal-national historians alike, as the first stirring of popular Romanian nationalism—a precondition for the end of the feudal relations of production and the subseque kjkj.gb.kjasbdf.kjb.kn sdfkh’p;LJ:Mmsfv

The valiant and handsome (NO HOMO) Tudor Vladimirescu

Gay

However, according to Corpus Draculianum, the more *Scientifically Plausible* reading of THE DATA is that the Danubian Principalities emerged from the Middle Ages and into modernity precisely as a result of the very dispensation that the 1821 rebellion sought to overthrow: Phanariot rule, on behalf of the Ottoman Porte. The claim is that the Phanariots were enlightened despots who initiated the abolition of serfdom, accelerated the publication of books in Romanian, tried to make bureaucrats of the boyars and did various other things of a progressive ilk.

Strangely, the host of Corpus Draculianum neglects his SCIENTIFIC remit by defining neither the Middle Ages nor modernity (I haven’t either, but then again I’m not a SCIENTIST). In his defence we can allow that such definition is a difficult task for any geocultural zone. This is especially so for the Romanian Lands, where the first locally-written records begin late, and such sources as do exist for earlier periods are written by neighbours, some of whom were enemies; see particularly the calumnies hurled at Vlad the Impaler by the Transylvanian Germans (in reality he was a standup guy…provided you don’t mind ‘standing’ with a stake up your arse). Thus, to a substantial extent, historians of the Romanian Lands are bound to argue from an absence of evidence…

ALTERNATIVE FORMULATION: of absence not is evidence absence evidence of

Race

Nevertheless, in the interests of finally getting to the point, let us ignore these oversights and difficulties and concentrate on making yet another withering criticism of the extremely pleasant host of Corpus Draculianum and the Satanic Sorosian cabal in which he is plainly implicated.

For all its pretence of curing the benighted communist mindvirus, the abovementioned video makes the same basic kind of error as that committed by previous historical analyseseses, communist or not: it is yet another doomed attempt to force the past of the Romanian Lands into alignment with Western historical periodisation and thus the enlightenment metaphysic of *universal human progress*. Contemporary historians of Romania labour over the same meagre interpretative scraps as did their predecessors:

Were we medieval until 1821? No! We became modern a hundred years before, in 1711! You see—we’re not really as far behind as the communists made out! We are TRUE (EU)ROPEANS!

Such straining towards the West—to Romanian intellectuals of today a synecdoche for (EU)ROPE—is a high-brow (middle-brow?) analog of the Romanian doctor, made good after 10 years in Germany and returned home with a BMW convertible on which he proudly retains his licence plates from the state of Bavaria and a sticker reading DE.

Lower down the scale, it represents the same desperate sense of national inferiority as a shop which advertises its trustworthiness by proclaiming NOI REPRESENTĂM CALITATE GERMANĂ.  

Lower still—and I am really pushing it now—it is like a Gypsy palace, over the front door of which the clan chief demonstrates what he imagines to be his Occidental credentials by erecting a fully operational neon Tuborg beer sign (no photo; you will have to take my word for it).

We represent German quality

But look, here’s the asseveration I want to put to you. In the Western sense, Romania never had a Middle Ages; neither have its people attained to modernity in the Western sense. Maybe they never will—and the *REASON IS* that Romania lacks a numerous genetic middle class of the Western type.

I spoke here about England as the paradigmatic mass middle-class society. Beginning in the English Middle Ages, and owing to the manorial system and the prevalent ‘absolute nuclear family’ structure on which it was built, a ‘middle-class trait package’—genes for thrift, low time-preference and the ability to trust non-kin and build civic institutions outside the family—became common. The Anglo middle class which emerged during the Middle Ages was the fittest (in an evolutionary sense) sub-population in England, and its off-puttingly circumspect and parsimonious yet inarguably civilised behavioural phenotype perforce came to constitute the Anglo norm.

In Romania, by contrast and to be brief:

no manorialism → no prevailing absolute nuclear family structure → no association of fitness and the middle-class trait package → no mass genetic middle class → no dominant middle-class behavioural phenotype → no mass civic psychology

FIT: at left, the purely evolutionary fitness of middle-class English birds; at right, the purely evolutionary fitness of middle-class English-Burmese birds FIT FIT FIT FIT!!!!

PUZZLING: fitness incontrovertible yet ‘no association of fitness and middle-class trait package’

Communism

In vainly attempting to counter my sweeping assertions, the historians among you may protest that Wallachia partook of the tumult of 1848, the main local aims of which were land redistribution and national liberation from the oriental yoke (Russian, chiefly). A further objection on the part of the relatively well-informed may centre on the adoption of various measures, such as the abolition of serfdom and the partition of boyar estates, following the 1859 union of Wallachia and Moldavia. Who, if not a cultured and enlightened middle class, would have an interest in such reforms and the social power to try to effect them?

My response would be that the social layer predominantly responsible for these liberal convulsions comprised a small number of scions of the boyar class who, having been educated in France, had imbibed French revolutionary ideas. These men were a tiny minority even among their social peers, a ‘progressive’ offshoot of the aristocracy. Their endeavours in the direction of liberal reform were desultory, piecemeal, largely ineffectual and obstructed by either foreign powers or the still-regnant representatives of the same caste from whose loins the reformers themselves had sprung.

So 19^th and 20^th century Romanian liberals were in origin men of the hereditary nobility. They most certainly were not—as at least some of the (post-)medieval middle class in England were¹—the descendants of the rural low-born. I reiterate: Romania produced no mass genetic middle class and, consequently, no (Western) middle-class behavioural phenotype.

If you doubt that Romania could have gone through the 19^th century without engendering anything much in the way of a native middle class, take the word of Neagu Djuvara, Romania’s best-regarded postwar historian. Of Vladimirescu’s 1821 rebellion he writes:

An actual ‘bourgeoisie’ had yet to be created in the principalities. There was a fairly large class of merchants (though many of them were foreigners) … but they did not yet share a sense of belonging to a class that could stake its claims, let alone rule.²

On the events of 1848 in Wallachia, up to the first union of the Romanian Lands in 1859:

… Jews had immigrated into Moldavia by the tens of thousands after the Treaty of Adrianople [1829, concluding the third Russo-Ottoman War, by which Russia gained control of the Romanian Lands, leading to mass immigration of Jews from the Russian Pale] … [However,] [s]ince there had been no bourgeoisie to speak of in the Principalities, our reaction was like that of a seashell closing its plates.³

(not) addressing The ______ Question while (pretending not to) address(ing) it

As I don’t want this substack to COdE aS lOw StATus, I’m not going to address The ­­­­______ Question, now or ever, except to state the following facts (they’re all on Wikipedia, so there’s no need to worry about DisMissinformation).

(1) In 1825 there were about 20,000 Jews in the Romanian Lands, almost all of them Sephardic. In 1859 there were nearly 200,000—by then mostly Ashkenazi immigrants from the Russian Pale. This number represented more than 10 per cent of the population of the two principalities combined at their initial unification. By 1900 the city of Iași (pron. YASH), Moldavia’s largest town and capital of Romania during WWI, was at least 50 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish.

(2) As in Poland, Russia and the Ukraine, Jews in rural areas of Moldavia often acted as middlemen between landowners and peasants. They also kept taverns. The latter activity involved supplying alcohol to peasants on credit, at interest. Many peasants, unable to pay their debts, eventually forfeited their land to Jews. As an indication of how big a problem this was thought to be, consider that the first independent political venture of the late 19^th century right-wing intellectual A.C. Cuza (not to be confused with his boyar kinsman A.I. Cuza, the first prince of the first union of Romania) was named the Liga contra Alcoolismului—of which, as you might have guessed, alcoholism as such was not the primary target…

(3) All political parties in pre-WWI Romania were anti-Semitic, particularly the ‘progressive’ Partidul Național Liberal.

(4) Nobody was more vexed than were Romanian liberal-nationalists by the proper civil status of the Jews; the solution was to effectively deny them Romanian citizenship until 1923.

(5) Anti-Semitism remained prevalent between the wars—and not just among the ‘fascist’ parties. Commerce was dominated by non-Romanians (Armenians, Germans and especially Jews), and there was wide support for barring Jews from practicing law, though such a measure was never legislated.

I will leave it to the reader to contemplate what, if anything, all this might have had to do with the ‘failure to launch’ of a numerous, native Romanian middle class prior to WWII. In any event, it is indisputable that the near absence of a native middle class was a deficiency the solution to which greatly exercised Romanian nationalists of all stripes throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

The end of the boyars

But enough of that…Let us now change tack to answer a question that might be occurring to you at this juncture: What became of the descendants of the progressive Romanian boyars? Well, having declined by degrees from a nobility of arms to the status of absentee landlords—and, their holdings much reduced, now somewhat resembling a middle class—they were variously killed, expropriated or forced into emigration by the communists. The Danube-Black Sea Canal project, spoken of in the Romanian politburo as the ‘graveyard of the Romanian bourgeoisie’, accounted for some of them, and for many doctors, lawyers, teachers and so on besides. In such ways the country lost most of what pre-war middle class it had to communist social engineering. Yet *I* would paradoxically profess the view, for what it’s worth and begging the indulgence of Corpus Draculianum, that it was only under Communism that Romania made the leap from a pre-modern to a (sort of) modern society—no capitalist bourgeoisie required!

Now, you might think that I am trying to make you believe that Romania today has no middle class at all. But I am not. I am only, for the 675th time, stating the quite obvious point that the presently myriad and rapidly multiplying Romanian middle class has its origins elsewhere than on the Western European manor, and that consequently it is not of the Western European—or more particularly the Anglo—type.

Women (are evil)

My wife (hi babe your such a strong woman and so so AMAZING!) is a fairly typical representative of the contemporary Romanian middle class. Both of her parents were born to tillers of the soil, and both of them became doctors, as did she in her turn. The middle class to which they belong was brought forth under communism; as a matter of fact, in Das Kapital, Marx calls this ‘the rustic to urban professional pipeline’.⁴

The point I am making here is that, as a very recent creation, the contemporary, (post-)communist Romanian middle class is no more genetically middle class than were the boyar liberals of the 19^th century. Moreover, they most assuredly do not conform to the (Western) middle-class behavioural phenotype. For, though they live in cities and are occupationally middle class, they still harbour essentially rural and pre-modern attitudes. They are not in any sense thrifty. They exhibit relatively (compared to me) high time-preference. They are impulsive. They are needlessly competitive, obstinate and uncompromising. They are quietly but extremely mistrustful of strangers. These I say rather uncivil by Jove what what! characteristics are the opposite of those which make up the weak-kneed and pusillanimous Anglo ‘middle-class trait package’.⁵

Many such cases

The Romanian behavioural phenotype has been shared by the rural high and low since time immemorial (or maybe it hasn’t been that long idk tbh), and it remains the norm across rural and urban Romania. In consequence, the Romanian social order is oddly horizontal and coherent in a way that Anglo societies are not. People do not trust each other, but they are united in their absolute distrust.

As a social technology engineered to compensate for lack of trust, Romanians indulge in the sort of courtly manners encountered typically in places like Turkey, Iran and Arabia. People are addressed, and referred to in the third person, as Mr/Mrs (first name). There is a flowery formula for every occasion: sărut-mâna, lit. ‘I kiss your hand’ (said to a parent or other respected elder); casa de piatra (lit. ‘house of stone’, pronounced repeatedly and by everybody at weddings); Să fie sănătos! Să vă trăiască! (something like ‘I wish you joy in your child’s health and accomplishments’); and…MY ROMANIAN IS NOT THAT GOOD I’M STILL LEARNING OK?

In their origins these are the manners of a small-scale, rural, low-trust yet close society, with well-established hierarchies of age and precedence (IS THIS THE LONGHOUSE). As you, PassportBro, know well and lament, manners of this type are absent from icy, individualistic, high-trust Anglodom.

in conclude: premodern man in his (technologically) modern world

So there is my argument: today’s Romanian middle class, having arrived late to history, is principally composed of people with a premodern behavioural phenotype. They do not trust each other; they do not conserve resources; they act primarily according to feeling rather than reason; and they are relatively poor at deferring gratification. Wat means for culture in motion of Romanian man?

Though he cleaves to his premodern, extravagantly oriental manners, the Romanian man of the middle class is not much concerned with civility, at least not as we Anglos would see it. Rather, he is intensely and bloodymindedly competitive. He wants to win at everything, no matter how petty the stakes may appear to you, ANGLOBOY. He will not admit fault or error, and he is still more loath to apologise for anything.

Since his framing of the world is in essence rural and premodern, he sees two archetypes: the Boyar Big Man and the peasant. At all costs he wants to be the former, and he wants to demonstrate it to you—loser!—right now. To him it is one or the other, all or nothing: life is a zero-sum game.

Since the stranger cannot be trusted, there can be no good-faith contribution to public goods and no compromise between your interests and his. You are either a șmecher—a word signifying a cunning chad winner, i.e. a Boyar Big Man, and borrowed from Yiddish(((!))) into the Balkan Sprachbund —or a fraier, also from Yiddish, meaning an abject virgin loser, i.e. a peasant whom you can hook on cheap vodka via usury and then steal his land. The behavioural phenotype, the culture in motion, of the Romanian middle class man does not evince the WEIRD and wimpy civic psychology typical of middle class Westerners.

It ain’t complicated and it sure ain’t fresh

The interaction of psychosocially premodern Romanian man with his technologically modern world determines what gay musician/linguist types might call ‘the fundamental frequency’ of life in Romania. In future poasts I will try to show something of what this interplay has so far wrought, for good and for ill.

1. Note that I am following Alan Macfarlane’s model here. Gregory Clark’s exceptionally data-rich A Farewell to Alms proposes an alternative: the higher survival rate of offspring of the medieval Anglo upper class, in interaction with the manorial system and at-will inheritance, led to a population bulge in the socioeconomic middle and the suffusion of the ‘middle-class trait package’ throughout English society. It is not necessary that one model be wrong for other to be right. Perhaps Macfarlane and Clark are both correct, and there was a ‘meeting in the middle’.

2. p. 227 of English edition of A Brief Illustrated History of Romanians

3. p. 255 of English edition of A Brief Illustrated History of Romanians

4. No not really

5. The rural ethos of the burghers of Bucharest was remarked upon by the noted Anglo ROMANOPHOBE Olivia Manning, a mid-century author of lady novels set in exotic locations. In The Great Fortune, she

… sees the citizens of Bucharest as a sort of peasants, some of them authentic peasants and others more evolved peasants, dressed up in city clothes.