53 Facts About Radu Rosetti

Radu Rosetti was a Moldavian, later Romanian, politician, historian, and novelist, father of General Radu R Rosetti, and a prominent member of the Rosetti family.

Also serving two terms in the Assembly of Deputies and briefly employed as general director of prisons, Rosetti adopted an anti-elitist and reformist discourse.

Radu Rosetti was financially ruined by his poor investments in the grain trade, and, from 1898, withdrew to secondary jobs in the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

The early stages of World War I, with Romania maintaining neutrality, saw Radu Rosetti campaigning for the Central Powers.

Radu Rosetti advised against any alliance with the Russian Empire, being fearful of Pan-Slavism and supportive of the Romanian claims in Bessarabia.

Radu Rosetti was disappointed when the country sided with Russia, and remained behind in Bucharest when it was occupied by the Central Powers; with Carp and other Conservatives, he organized a collaborationist bureaucracy, and served in it as Ephor of the Civilian Hospitals.

Radu Rosetti became a close friend and sponsor of Costache Negri, with whom he organized an 1847 protest against Prince Mihail Sturdza; that year, he adhered to a boyar project for the creation of a commercial bank.

Against traditionalists and elitists such as those from the Junimea school, Radu Rosetti Sr reportedly believed that boyar privilege was a bane, and insisted that aristocrats too should work for a living.

In June 1876, at Saint Spyridon Orthodox church in Iasi, Radu Rosetti married Henrieta Bogdan, the ultra-conservative granddaughter of poet Nicolae Dimache.

Radu Rosetti continued to pursue his agriculturalist dream, investing his settlement money to take up tenant farming in Urdesti, on land owned by George Diamandy.

From December 1888, encouraged by historians Ioan Bianu and Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, Radu Rosetti published his first works of genealogy and agrarian history in the periodical Revista Noua.

Radu Rosetti resigned after a fairly short interval, following Catargiu's deposition.

In January 1895, with Catargiu still prime minister, Radu Rosetti applied for a vacated government job, that of general director of prisons.

Radu Rosetti received his appointment and together with Vasilica Rosetti, attempted to reform the prison bureaucracy and clamp down on petty corruption.

At the time, the PNL newspaper Vointa Nationala ran a story according to which he had abusively chained the inmates of Margineni; Radu Rosetti denied the accusations.

In trouble because he lacked the means to live decently, and because his lack of a university degree meant he could not become a lawyer or a professor, Radu Rosetti sought a professional job relatively safe from the vicissitudes of politics.

Radu Rosetti applied there, and in April 1898, when Sturdza was both Prime and Foreign Minister, he was hired as the archivist's assistant, again helped by Bianu.

Radu Rosetti was living in Bucharest, where he first rented rooms in Olbricht House, Sfantul Ionica Street, then moved in with his wife and daughter on Mihai Voda Street, in Lipscani, and finally, in 1903, on Schitu Magureanu Boulevard.

Radu Rosetti was made head of special projects in April 1902, when he began surveying the border between Northern Dobruja and the Kingdom of Bulgaria.

Radu Rosetti returned to his studies of history, with a genealogy of the Ghica family, published in 1902 by Convorbiri Literare.

Radu Rosetti criticized the work as too scholarly and moderate, noting that it took official statistics at face value and, in doing so, underestimated the number of Jews actually residing in Romania.

Radu Rosetti expressed sympathy for Zionism, but mainly because he viewed it as a validation that Jews were unassimilable.

Rosetti was a widower from September 1905, but enjoyed the moral and material support of his grown sons: Radu Jr was an officer and Henri a jurist, while Eugene had quit school and was prospecting for Standard Oil.

Radu Rosetti himself supplemented his income as an insurance investigator, assessing damages caused by hail.

Radu Rosetti's thesis looked back on the sources of Vlach law, suggesting that ancient Romanians were all free men organized into obsti, that latifundia were imposed through boyar theft, and that serfdom was only cemented by the will of Michael the Brave in the late 16th century.

Radu Rosetti viewed initial Roman colonization as weak, and believed that the nation was created by the invading South Slavs and captives from the Diocese of Dacia.

Radu Rosetti put out his other key work of history later in 1907.

Radu Rosetti asserted that Rosetti had remained a boyar at heart, who dreamed of a Romanian "Junckerism" and rejected the notion of helping the peasants with affordable credits.

Similarly, Ornea notes that Radu Rosetti kept the "vain hope" that the land issue would be solved by King Carol I, and that he partly subscribed to the discredited theory according to which Jewish tenants, alongside socialists, were largely responsible for the "crisis".

Radu Rosetti had been co-opted by the Poporanists at Viata Romaneasca, which hosted his responses to critics, in particular George Panu.

Radu Rosetti resumed his literary activity by 1909, contributing to the weekly Minerva and then to Iorga's Samanatorul.

When his eldest son married Ioana Stirbey, Rosetti became in-laws with Ion I C Bratianu, who was now leader of the PNL, replacing Sturdza as head of government.

Readmitted into the Foreign Affairs Ministry in 1909, Radu Sr became department director under the Conservative Petre P Carp, but resigned again in 1912, when his rival Maiorescu took over as prime minister.

Radu Rosetti remained active as a scholar, publishing in 1909 two books on the 1806 war in Bessarabia and the Moldavian diplomatic efforts, as well as two other monographs on Moldavia and Wallachia during the same interval.

Radu Rosetti looked into the microhistory of property disputes, publishing his ancestors' ledger of land claims and, in 1910, a two-volume account of the 1850s conflict between the Moldavian government and Neamt Monastery.

The work is one of several in which Radu Rosetti describes an "utterly despicable" droit du seigneur, allegedly exercised by boyars against nubile Roma slaves.

Radu Rosetti maintained this stance during the early stages of World War I, when Romania kept neutral.

Radu Rosetti ended up accepting a more minor position under Lupu Kostaki, becoming Ephor of the Civilian Hospitals.

Radu Rosetti disliked Marghiloman, and immediately resigned from his administrative position, but nonetheless viewed this moment as a confirmation of his predictions, calling for Carp to replace Marghiloman and bring Romania into Germany's orbit.

Re-enrolled by the French Army as an adamant anti-German, Radu Rosetti Jr mediated between Ferdinand and the Army of the Orient.

Radu Rosetti then spent two years as a military attache in London.

Part of it doubled as oral history, collecting testimonies from Radu Rosetti's elders, including details of Jewish toleration and pogroms, as well as on the looting and raping by marauding Ottomans and the intermingling between Romanians and Roma slaves.

The modernist Felix Aderca, who paid a visit, recalls that "lily-white" Radu Rosetti was showing signs of senility, for describing medieval genealogies to a bindery foreman.

Also that year, Radu Rosetti indirectly contributed to the history of Romanian cinema, as one of his novellas became the basis for Alfred Halm's The Gypsy Girl at the Alcove.

Radu Rosetti's final scholarly work was a 1923 piece on medieval Moldavia from Latcu to Alexander I, followed in 1924 by a third edition of Cu palosul.

Radu Rosetti was instead turning to graphology, producing personality certificates for Sevastos' daughters, based on their handwriting.

Radu Rosetti had trouble climbing into Bucharest's trams, which often had to stop for him to recover from his palpitations.

Radu Rosetti died on February 12,1926, at a sanitarium in Bucharest.

Radu Rosetti's body was buried in Bellu Cemetery, Plot 97.

The historian's eldest son, from 1924 Brigadier General Radu Rosetti, continued his scholarly work and, in 1927, joined the Romanian Academy, presiding over the Academy Library in succession to Bianu.

Radu Rosetti was still ultimately sentenced to a two-years prison term, and died while in confinement at Vacaresti; he shares Radu Sr's grave at Bellu.

Magdalena Radu Rosetti-Beldiman lived through communist persecution, sheltering Bratianu's widow in her own apartment.

At the time, while still cited as an authority on agrarian mattes, Radu Rosetti Sr was formally designated "a historian of the bourgeoisie and landowners".