King Carol II [1930-1940]
Charles II was the most controversial of the four Kings of Romania. During the reign of Charles II were on the one hand, important economic growth, an intense cultural development, and on the other side the destruction of democratic political life and the rise of extremist ideologies. The depression of 1929-1933 caused social unrest and instability within the country and paved the way for Carol, King Ferdiand's son, who was in exile with Elena Lupescu, his mistress. Her unpopularity in Romania, no doubt due in large part to her having a Jewish father, was to be a millstone around Carol's neck for the rest of his reign, particularly because she was widely viewed as his closest advisor and confidante.
He ascended the throne in 1930, as Carol II, and brought Elena along. Until 1938, Romania's governments maintained the form, if not always the substance, of a liberal constitutional monarchy. The National Liberal Party, dominant in the years immediately after World War I, became increasingly clientelist and nationalist, and in 1927 was supplanted in power by the National Peasant Party.
A fascist movement was founded in 1927 by Corneliu Codreanu, who later renamed his followers the Iron Guard. The Iron Guard grew in strength during the 1930s, and King Carol had thousands of them imprisoned, and Codreanu shot. Between 1930 and 1940 there were over 25 separate governments; on several occasions in the last few years before World War II, conflict between the Iron Guard and other political groupings approached the level of a civil war. In 1938, King Carol II abolished the constitution and proclaimed a royal government.
The lack of external support on the part of the traditional allies of Romania, United Kingdom and United States of America, the beginning of the second world war and, in 1940, led to the erosion of the full political support for the regime of Charles II. On 6 September 1940, King Carol II was forced to abdicate. Charles II left the country together with Elena Lupescu and lived in the United States of America, Brazil and Portugal. He died on 4 April 1953, and was inmormantat in the chapel of the Kings of Portugal in Estoril.
The reign of King Charles II was marked with the consecration of numerous personalities of culture and science of 20th-century: Constantin Brancusi, George Enescu, b. Fondane, Nicolae Iorga, Nicolae Titulescu or Tristan Tzara, but also the appearance of the young generation who became famous during the period postbelica (Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade, Eugene Ionesco, jonel perlea, Elvira Popesco). Charles II was the promoter of a cult of personality that announced the totalitarian regimes that succeeded in Romania for decades.
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