fascism 3 (2014) 117-151 brill.com/fasc Approaching the Social History of Romanian Fascism The Legionaries of Vâlcea County in the Interwar Period Oliver Jens Schmitt Professor, Institute of East European History, University of Vienna, Austria
[email protected] Abstract This article explores fascist mobilization in Romania on a regional and local level. Focusing on the south-western Romanian county of Rîmnicu Vâlcea it combines quali- tative analysis with the quantitative analysis of approximately 1,350 members of the Legionary Movement. Vâlcea provides an example of a district which was not a fascist stronghold: the fascist leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu failed to establish a stable orga- nizational network. Only when the local bishop actively supported small circles of young village intellectuals did fascist mobilization gain momentum. The overwhelm- ing peasant majority of members joined the movement rather late (1937). This article concludes that there were differences between village intellectuals who believed in an ideological community of creed and peasant members who strove for social revolution. Keywords fascism – Romania – Legionary Movement – social history – Vâlcea Comparative studies of European fascism in the interwar period have obtained an impressive level of sophistication. Over the last twenty years special atten- tion has been paid to the analysis of fascist ideology and to theoretical inter- pretations of ‘generic fascism’. The field of fascist studies is dominated by the * This article was supported by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the University of Vienna. © Oliver Jens Schmitt, 2014 | doi 10.1163/22116257-00302005 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License.