Traian Braileanu

Origins and education

Born in Bilca, Suceava County, a village located in Austrian-ruled Bukovina not far from Radauti, Braileanu was the ninth of twelve siblings. His father Gheorghe (1839–1902) was the director of the local primary school for at least forty years. Gheorghe's father Ioan, born in 1807, had been a simple peasant, but two of his sons became teachers, and the third a Romanian Orthodox priest. Traian's mother, Maria (nee Polonic) was the daughter of a shoemaker from Suceava, and married his father in 1865. The first serious tragedy in his life came when his sister Ilenuta died, leaving the entire family despondent. Another two beloved siblings died of diphtheria in late 1893, leaving him a mature individual at an early age. His mother predeceased his father, so that both parents had died by the time he was twenty. The young Traian was a voracious reader, his interests including classical literature, German literature, other European literatures in German translation, Romanian literature and Romanian history, including Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol's Istoria romanilor. He was attached to his brother Constantin, who settled in the Romanian Old Kingdom, which he represented as consul at Bitola and Thessaloniki; an employee of the Romanian Foreign Ministry, his son was killed in action during World War I.

Braileanu attended three grades of primary school in his native village, followed by a fourth grade in 1892–1893 at Radauti, where he and a number of Romanian classmates spent the year perfecting their German and preparing for admission to the local German High School. He passed the entrance examination easily, entering the school in the autumn of 1893. German was the language of instruction; Latin and Greek the principal subjects. Upon graduation in 1901, he was fluent in all three. Entering Czernowitz University, he took courses in philosophy and classical philology, the subjects of his degree. His professors included Richard Wahle and Ion G. Sbiera. Initially, he shared a rented room with two older sisters of his, who were attending a normal school. In late 1902, after starting his second year of university, he went to the Romanian capital Bucharest to bury his father, who had sought medical treatment there.

As a student, he was associated with Societatea Academica Junimea, a Romanian youth movement. In December 1901, already a member of the local chapter, he was selected as editor-in-chief of its satirical-humorous newsletter. Under his aegis it appeared bimonthly, and some issues were written entirely by Braileanu. In 1904, he was named president of the society's literary section. In this capacity, together with Ion Nistor and George Tofan, he founded Junimea Literara, a literary journal. There, he published a short story, a series of humorous sketches and several poems. The magazine had a nationalist and Samanatorist agenda, and, according to Nistor, sought to counterbalance Austria's "hatred and contempt for all things [Romanian]". Another member, Romulus Candea, described the society and its magazine as preservers of "the nationalist flame" and "the Romanianist line".

Upon graduation, Braileanu became a teacher at a German-language high school in Czernowitz, but, not finding the daily routine suitable to his studies, left after completing the 1905–1906 academic year. He then performed his military service in the Austrian Army, first at Czernowitz and then at the officers' school in Lemberg. For a time, he held a series of low-paid jobs, including that of journalist. In November 1909, he obtained a doctorate in philosophy magna cum laude, his adviser being Wahle. The same year, he became engaged to Emilia Silion, of an old Bukovina family; the couple, who married in 1910, had three sons and a daughter.

Academic beginnings

Thanks to his elder brother, in 1909 he obtained a position as translator at the Romanian Legation in Vienna, where he remained until 1914. During this period, he took courses at the University of Vienna and undertook research at its library. In 1912, he published a work of epistemology, followed by one on ethics (Die Grundlegung zu einer Wissenschaft der Ethik) in 1919. During that interval, he became especially interested in the work of Vasile Conta, a 19th-century metaphyisician and political thinker. Writing in 1915, Ana Conta Kernbach identified Braileanu as one of "the few young men who are researching [Conta's] work".

Upon the outbreak of World War I, Braileanu was drafted into the Austrian Army. Wounded, he was hospitalized in Bohemia, then moved to Lemberg with his regiment, after which he returned to Vienna. Meanwhile, his wife and the two children had taken refuge in Siret and then in Suceava, later returning to Austria. The union of Bukovina with Romania occurred at the end of World War I, and he immediately left Vienna for his native province, upon his older brother's urging.

Beginning in 1919, Braileanu was a librarian at his alma mater in what was now Cernauti. He occupied this role until 1921, while in 1920, he became a lecturer. In 1924, he was named full professor at the department of sociology, ethics and politics. As an academic, his objective was to write survey texts of sociology, then ethics and finally politics. His introduction to sociology, published in 1923, was noted for on the sociological work of Conta, whom he identified as the founder of Romanian philosophy, and a personal guide. Following Conta, Braileanu described a holistic social system of organic unity, grouping "social tissues", for which he eventually coined the term "human community". While ethics dealt with individual behavior, the community was the inextricable object of sociology. His first major success, this work drew positive reviews from, among others, Nicolae Iorga. Nicknamed "Socrates" by his admiring students, he was known to appreciate the term, considering the Greek philosopher a model.

Politically, he was, after 1919, involved in nationalist movements within the nascent Greater Romania. Braileanu was at first a follower of Alexandru Averescu and his People's League, the Bukovina wing of which he led. He was involved in a lengthy dispute with a Nicolai Mitenco, after deposing him as editor of Taranimea newspaper and "purging" the party of undesirables. In September 1924, with an article he published in Societatea de Maine, Braileanu sought to identify the political problems of Greater Romania as they affected Bukovina's society. It suggested that, in the new political climate, "entirely stunted by the supremacy of timely politics, or what we call politicking", Romanian intellectuals were "caving into a despotic domination by the bankers". He claimed that the Bukovina Jews were a parasitical class, 90% of whom "made a living from the stupidity of the native population", and justified economic antisemitism as a reaction to historical "imbalance". Nonetheless, he argued in favor of complete Jewish assimilation, including "long processes of interbreeding" with Romanians and a renewed social organization, based on the "division of labor" (with references to Conta and Emile Durkheim).

Braileanu eventually quit the People's League due to internal maneuvers that displeased him. Then, he entered the Democratic Nationalist Party of Iorga, whom he sincerely respected, and organized the party's Bukovina chapter from 1922 to 1925. He left this party too, unhappy with certain mergers it had undergone. He then migrated to the antisemitic group called National-Christian Defense League (LANC), which he left following a disagreement with its leader A. C. Cuza.

Joining the Iron Guard

Braileanu presided over the commission which investigated the clashes between Romanian authorities in Bukovina and Jewish students who had failed the Romanian Baccalaureate of 1926. He wrote an angry report, noting that Jews were ignorant of "the history and geography of the fatherland", and claiming that the riots were "premeditated". His antisemitic bias was brought up publicly by Mayer Ebner, the Jewish community spokesman, and may have led to Braileanu's eventual dismissal. In 1926–1927, Braileanu was member of the small political group called "Statutory LANC", which, as academic Lucian Butaru noted, was home to "shady figures of the Romanian political and cultural life", including Ion Zelea Codreanu and Corneliu Sumuleanu. He was also one of the editors of Gheorghe Alexianu's Bucovina, a review of law, sociology, and criminology, and contributed to Ion Petrovici's philosophical journal, Minerva, with an essay on the sociology of Vilfredo Pareto.

After flirting with other parties, Braileanu came to identify with the extreme right, claiming that the mainstream parties took a "soft attitude" toward ethnic minorities. Braileanu's sociological work intertwined with his politics. As noted by historian Lucian Nastasa, he was one of the Romanian academics whose work exemplifies "strongly nationalistic and extremist ideologies". In his 1928 Politica, considered the first Romanian volume of political theory, he suggested the establishment of a military dictatorship to consolidate the Romanian monarchy.

Braileanu most likely joined the Iron Guard (or "Legionary Movement"), a radical antisemitic and fascist group, upon its founding in 1927. He entered its senate in 1930, helping to consolidate the movement's intellectual prestige, and is seen by some as its most important theoretician after Nae Ionescu. Possibly radicalized under the influence of racial eugenicist Iordache Facaoaru, Braileanu's views on minority issues were recast into a scientifically racist sociological theory, which postulated that Jews were not capable of being integrated into any other nation. His support for racial determinism led him to conclude that "the variation of social types" was only a historical action of environmental and demographic factors, and that, in all other respects, individuals of the same race were identical.

Braileanu also founded the literary society Iconar, noted for its strong xenophobia, which eventually divided itself into a far-right wing, under Braileanu, and a more moderate one, supportive of the National Liberals. Writing in 1936, he demanded a neo-traditionalist and nationalist revival in Romanian art, placed in service to "the Church and the State", and rejecting "kike commercialism". According to literary historian Rodica Ilie, his call to "purge Romanian society of corrupting influences" was a "trope" shared by extreme nationalists and communists of the day, the latter of whom targeted "bourgeois seductions" rather than "Jewish spirituality".

Throughout the interval, Braileanu carried on with his research, writing textbooks of sociology and ethics for the high school level. A translator from German and Greek, he was especially drawn to Immanuel Kant and Aristotle. Braileanu's translation of the Critique of Pure Reason appeared in 1930, being hailed by philosopher Tudor Vianu as one of the prime achievements of its era, but criticized by Ernest Bernea as "confusing" and "fragmentary". There followed more works on ethics (1935–1936) and the history of sociological doctrines (1936–1937). From 1931 to 1933, he was dean of the Philosophy and Letters Faculty. He had ties to foreign sociologists, and in 1937 became a member of the Columbia University-affiliated Academy of Political Science. In addition, from 1933 he was assistant professor in the history of philosophy department, replacing the deceased Vasile Gherasim. He was made a commander of the Order of the Crown in 1933.

Insemnari Sociologice and senatorial mandate

Braileanu ultimately became the unchallenged leader of a sociological school at Cernauti, akin to those led by Dimitrie Gusti at Bucharest, Virgil Barbat at Cluj and Petre Andrei at Iasi. During this time, he founded Insemnari Sociologice magazine. As noted by various historians, it should be seen as largely dedicated to supporting the Iron Guard platform. Braileanu's articles there combined a condemnation of the multi-party system with the theory of "Judaeo-communist revolution", arguing that the former would inevitably lead to the latter, and proposed instead a corporate state headed by the Guard. Leon Volovici concludes that Insemnari Sociologice "did not differ from Legionary propaganda", with its ample references to "the Internationale of the yids", anti-Masonic lore, and calls for racial segregation ("complete, biological and spiritual separation from the Jews").

Braileanu's writings, including his articles in teachers' magazines, shifted toward developing a Romanian "elite theory" and the role of state pedagogy in cultivating a fresh political establishment. His idea of corporatism differed from that espoused by Mihail Manoilescu, arguing a strong dictatorship by an "ascetic elite", with a charismatic leader, could set up the Romanian corporations, but never the other way around. He saw his "meritocratic aristocracy" embodied in Ion Mota and the other five Iron Guard men who left as volunteers for the Spanish Civil War.

Invoking the examples set by Italian fascism and Nazism, Braileanu argued that educating the masses to accept leadership and social selection "without a murmur" was far more beneficial than perpetuating universal suffrage. In a June 1937 article for Buna Vestire, he identified international fascism as the quintessential enemy of communism and Jewishness, and postulated that freedom was only possible within nationalism. Unlike other Guard intellectuals, he was skeptical of territorial expansionism, writing that, as Greater Romania, the Romanian state had reached its "natural borders" and economic self-sufficiency. His complaint was that the entity had not yet become a "nation state".

Like the rest of the Guard, Braileanu found himself in conflict with King Carol II and the political factions who supported him, leading to a series of violent clashes and retaliatory murders. According to one report, Insemnari Sociologice was banned in February 1937. The Guard itself was also outlawed, but reemerged under the guise of the "Everything for the Country Party". Although by then a secondary figure, cut off from the major political centers, Braileanu was deeply involved in its creation, in recruiting youth, and in organizing charity campaigns, his activities closely monitored by the Romanian Police. He was particularly enthusiastic about the Guard's work-camp network, deeming them the "formative school of the Legionary Romanian". Braileanu was still the inspiration behind Iconar, described in police records as "a camouflaged Legionary newspaper of the defunct Iron Guard". Other magazines he edited included Cugetari, Poporul, Gazeta Poporului and Inaltarea, the last at Sibiu between 1940 and 1941.

Braileanu was sent to the Romanian Senate following the general election of December 1937. This had resulted in minority rule by a LANC successor, the National Christian Party (PNC), with the king's endorsement. Writing in Insemnari Sociologice in January 1938, Braileanu complained that the PNC's antisemitic program was incomplete, since it failed to target liberal democracy, "that which has made kikes all-powerful". The LANC, he noted, had been too moderate, "demagogic and corrupt"; the Iron Guard would need to reemerge and "turn chaos to order". He nevertheless displayed his and his party's loyalty toward the king, explaining for Buna Vestire that "the monarch represents the supreme principle of order and the political hierarchy".

Braileanu eventually lost his Senate seat the establishment of a single-party regime, the National Renaissance Front (FRN), in February 1938. He withdrew from political life, while his Iconar disciples sought a rapprochement with the FRN chapter in Tinutul Suceava. He focused on a synthesis of his sociological theory, with Teoria Comunitatii Omenesti ("The Theory of Human Community"), published in 1939 by Editura Cugetarea (second edition 1941). The work also signified his distancing from both holism and the mainline, positivist, sociological school of Bucharest, turning to phenomenological sociology and pragmatism, with more or less explicit borrowings from Edmund Husserl and William James.

Iron Guard Minister

Due to the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in the summer of 1940, Braileanu was obliged to flee his home, and his entire personal library was lost. He then entered the University of Bucharest as a professor. From his new home in Bucharest, Braileanu was consulted by the FRN regime and Prime Minister Ion Gigurtu, helping them draft Romania's first set of antisemitic laws. A month later, the FRN dictatorship crumbled, and Carol II abdicated; the Guard seized the opportunity and proclaimed its National Legionary State, with Ion Antonescu as the Conducator. Braileanu took over two ministerial portfolios, fused into one: the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs and the Ministry of the Arts. His deputy was a Bucharest sociologist, Traian Herseni. The staff he appointed also included other Guard affiliates: Facaoaru, Haig Acterian, Vasile Bancila, Dan Botta, Eugen Chirnoaga, Vladimir Dumitrescu, and Radu Gyr.

After assuming office, Braileanu ordered changes in his ministry, but upheld and expanded upon the Gigurtu laws, equating interwar democracy with "the establishment of foreign and Kike rule". On his orders, Jewish students were expelled from Romanian high schools, excepting only those who could present proof that they were the direct descendants of war veterans; he allowed for the creation of a private-run, fully segregated, Jewish educational system. Speaking at the time, he intimated his goal of outlawing Judaism, and hinted at the possibility of destroying synagogues, finding that these were "too many, if compared to the number of kikes." One other decree issued during his term banned Romanian pupils from purchasing schoolbooks from Jewish-owned businesses, while another dismissed eleven Jewish high school teachers. Braileanu also went after one of his FRN predecessors, the left-wing sociologist Andrei, declaring him an undesirable, banned from teaching in all public schools. In October 1940, he countersigned the order to arrest Andrei, who was thus shamed into committing suicide.

Braileanu's decrees lifted academic freedom, allowing the Ministry to intervene in college policy, and prioritized the academic employment of people who, like himself, were known Guard members or had been jobless since the Soviet occupation. He disbanded the National Student Front, the sole student association established under the FRN, and lifted bans on other student associations. However, these were effectively centralized into the National Union of Christian Students, which answered directly to Braileanu, and the Student Front property was handed over to the Guard. Creating "review boards" presided over by Herseni, Chirnoaga and Facaoaru, Braileanu also presided over the purge of former FRN men, Jews, and known leftists, and personally stripped George Calinescu, Iorgu Iordan and Bazil Munteanu of their university chairs. He also ordered the immediate pensioning of all teachers aged 65 and over, a measure which targeted Iorga, by then a major adversary of the Guard.

Braileanu was applauded by Horia Sima, the Guard Commander, as a "doctrinaire of nationalism" and "one of the prime representatives of our race". Co-opted by Sima on the Guard's executive committee, or "Legionary Forum", he was still particularly interested in the creation of a new Guardist elite. Unlike Sima, he saw in it a conservative rather than revolutionary force, lecturing on the topic and having his ideas reprinted in Universul. He also attended to problems of school organization, took steps to enhance theological education, and envisaged a state-sponsored translation program of the classics. Like Sima and painter Alexandru Bassarab, he also promoted the ideal of a new "Legionary art", which advertised itself as the true representative of Romanian values. He described Sima's predecessor, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, as the national "educationist" and "great reformer of our times".

Downfall

Together with Sima and Herseni, Braileanu sought to establish full Guardist control over cultural institutes such as Accademia di Romania, but their moves were vetoed by Antonescu, who favored a more conservative approach. Braileanu had a tense relationship with another one of Antonescu's proteges, Sextil Puscariu, who led the Romanian Institute in Berlin and had been given discretionary powers. Antonescu also asked Braileanu to tone down his purge of academia, and the latter threatened with his resignation. Horrified by the Guard's assassinations of Iorga and Virgil Madgearu, in late November, he again tendered his resignation, but was persuaded to reverse his decision—allegedly, he agreed so that he could spare the country even greater chaos.

The Guard and Antonescu still clashed over issues of political control, until, in January 1941, tensions exploded as the Legionary rebellion. Arrested after the Antonescu counter-coup, the deposed Education Minister was jailed in a former Bucharest barracks. He was sought after as an expert in Nazi Germany: in May, Ernst Krieck, the racial scientist, invited him over as a visiting scholar. Braileanu was tried in June 1941 for "corrupting the youth" and, after acting as his own attorney, he was acquitted. A nephew of his, Virgil Procopovici, who had been visibly active in the Guard, was also detained at that time.

In December 1942, when rumors spread that Sima was preparing to return from exile with Nazi support, Braileanu was re-arrested, alongside some 1,500 other Guard figures, and interned at Targu Jiu. Unusually, he shared lodgings with a group of Jewish inmates such as Alexandru Albescu. Despite pleas from prominent members of the establishment, Braileanu was not released, whereas other detainees, including his Ministry subordinate Gyr, left in February 1943.

Braileanu was again freed in the spring of 1944 and repeatedly offered a chance to emigrate, which he declined. The year 1941 marked the end of Braileanu's teaching career; he was forced to retire following his acquittal. Meanwhile, he continued his studies from 1941 to 1945, especially working on translations. In 1944, the official publishing company, Casa Scoalelor, issued his Romanian version of the Nicomachean Ethics—according to literary critic Adrian Marino, it was a "failed attempt", and "downright impossible". Philosopher Cristian Ducu also notes Braileanu's inconsistent translation of the term ergon, which results in "grave errors at the conceptual level."

Postwar trial and death

Following the King Michael Coup of August 1944, General Nicolae Radescu, soon to become prime minister, pointed to Braileanu as among those guilty of the "national disaster" that had befallen the country. He was placed under house arrest, and was held under permanent watch in the room where he lay bedridden with a duodenal ulcer. In 1945, he was removed from his house, detained and taken to police headquarters. Hospitalized following a hemorrhage, he remained under medical care until his trial. This took place in May of the following year, when Braileanu and Antonescu were among the 24 politicians brought before Romanian People's Tribunals, collectively charged with "bringing disaster upon the country". At the time, the Communist Party organ, Scinteia, described Braileanu as "flushed out, disjointed, his baldness sowed with grey bristle hairs as on a worn-out brush, his mouth toothless, words emerging inconsistent, gelatinous". As argued by political scientist Ruxandra Cesereanu, such portrayals meant to induce the notion that Braileanu was already dead to the world, a "living corpse".

Braileanu was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment; another official jailed at the same trial was Ion Petrovici, a successor of his at the Education Ministry. First held at Vacaresti prison before being moved to Aiud prison, Braileanu continued working on translations of Aristotle, as well as on a memoir covering the early part of his life. In 1947, he developed a severe ulcer and, gravely ill, was taken to the Brasov prison hospital. In June, a committee of doctors decided he did not require a hospital stay, and he was returned to Aiud. He died there, most likely on October 3. Shortly before, the prison doctor had refused to send him for an operation, and he was not allowed to access a package his relatives had sent. His family managed to bring the body to Bucharest, where he was buried at an Orthodox ceremony. Others who occupy the same gravesite include his wife, who lived until 1972, and his father.

Publication and analysis of his works was entirely suppressed under the communist regime that followed his death. Some exceptions were made under the national communism of the 1980s, when Mihu Achim recovered him as a reference for "national sociology". By 1990, following the anticommunist Romanian Revolution, Braileanu's works were again the object of public scrutiny. Controversially, sociologist Dan Dungaciu published a piece honoring Braileanu and his theory of the elites in a May 1993 issue of Miscarea, the neo-fascist newspaper. In 1997, the Romanian Academy's sociological institute held a session dedicated to Braileanu. His ancestral home in Bilca was reopened as a local museum.

Braileanu's one daughter was married to his assistant Leon Topa (1912–1996). Late in his life, Topa was interviewed by Dungaciu, arguing that Braileanu should be understood as a sociologist, beyond his political commitments. Braileanu's nephew Virgil Procopovici survived both his jailing under Antonescu and a renewed communist imprisonment from 1948, and, in 1999, reemerged as a legatee of the Iron Guard, republishing Guardist literature that he had kept hidden for the previous 50 years.