Nicolae Iorga
Nicolae Iorga (or Nicolas Jorga ) is a Rumanian historian born the January 17th 1871 with Botoşani and died the November 27th 1940 with Strejnic (Prahova).
Iorga, Rumanian Michelet?
Nicolas Iorga is undoubtedly the largest Rumanian historian, by the repercussion which its ideas as much as by scientific qualities of its works had. After studies in Romania, Iorga supplemented its training of historian in the years 1890 by accomplishing two stays abroad, in Paris (thesis on Philippe de Maizière) and in Leipzig. Iorga could thus compare two historiographic schools which were opposed in the more total context of the Franco-German competition of the time. After its studies, Iorga started to teach at the university of Bucharest and to publish its first works.
Romania then has just reached independence (1881) and still asserts the provinces of Transylvania and respectively occupied Bessarabia by the Austria-Hungary and the Russia. Iorga will be an untiring propagandist of the return of these areas in the bosom of the Rumanian nation, while endeavouring for example to prove antériotié of the Rumanian settlement compared to the Hungarian settlement in Transylvania. Its writings of the time are often violently anti-Hungarian.
Iorga is in any case clearly a nationalist historian: not more than the Hungarians, the Russians nor the Bulgarian ones do not find thanks to its eyes. Iorga was also Antisémite, but that appears more in its political dicours or its declarations that in its historical writings.
Nicoalae Iorga was anxious to diffuse its design of the Rumanian nation widely and to learn to the Roumanians their history by publishing works intended for the general public and while organizing from 1908 from the popular universities in its residence from Valenii de Munte. Its role in the formation of the Rumanian national conscience can objectively be compared with the role held by Jules Michelet in the diffusion in France of the republican ideas: for this reason, he not only wrote but also made the history.
Contributions of the work of Iorga
One should not conclude from what precedes that Nicolae Iorga was only one banal propagandist of the national idea of his country. It was a historian of great value, which counted among the large European intellectuals of its time. Large traveller and polyglot, it was named Honorary doctor larger European universities. Its principal contribution with historical science is undoubtedly its history of the Ottoman Empire published in German in 1905. For the first time, in this one, a Balkan historian does not consider the Othoman occupation under his purely negative aspect and underlines his positive effects. He thus opens the way with historical criticism in Romania and in Balkans.
The politician
Nicolae Iorga was also a politician and a member of Parliament, minister and briefly Prime Minister (1931-1932). Although deeply nationalist, it opposed since 1933 Hitler. One could however see in 1999 in his museum with Valenii de Munte a photograph the representative in company of Benito Mussolini. Iorga was assassinated the November 27th 1940 by a group of commandos of the Garde of iron which regarded it as person in charge of dead into 1938 of their leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.
The writer and the playwright
Nicolas Iorga was also writer and playwright. Its literary works did not leave an imperishable memory to the historians of the literature and often take again broad topics of the Rumanian history.
External bonds
- Nicolae Iorga - History of the relations between France and the Roumanians
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