Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [86]
Brătianu warned that the Great Powers must settle Rumania’s claims before matters got out of hand and “serious developments” took place. “Roumania was in need of the moral support of the Allies, if she was to remain what she had been hitherto—a rallying point for Europe against Bolshevism.”8 This, of course, was a popular argument in Paris, but in the case of Rumania, which lay between the new Bolshevik Russia and revolutionary Hungary, a powerful one. Geography helped Rumania in another way: it was too far away for the Allies to enforce their will. Rumania had been an ally during the war, although a notoriously unreliable one, and promises, as awkward now as those to Italy, had been made by Britain and France.
The Rumania that Paris knew was the cultivated and worldly one of Princess Marthe Bibesco, whose salon was famous in Paris before the war, or of her beautiful young cousin, who married into an ancient French aristocratic family and as Anna de Noailles became one of the most famous poets of her generation. The Rumanian upper classes loved France: they bought educations in Paris for their children, and clothes and furniture for themselves. And the French reciprocated in their own offhand way; Rumania, it was said, was a fellow Latin country, the Rumanians descendants of Roman legionaries and Rumanian a Latin language. In the nineteenth century, France had supported the cause of Rumanian independence from the Ottomans; in 1919, the French government envisaged a strong Rumania as both a counterbalance against Germany and as a crucial link in the cordon sanitaire against Russian Bolshevism. The Rumanians themselves made much of their Western connections: they were the heirs of the Roman empire, part of Western civilization. Conveniently for the peace negotiations, they could argue that all the old Roman province of Dacia including part of Transylvania, which belonged to Hungary, should be restored to them.
There was another Rumania, though, with a more complicated history: the Rumania that had been invaded and settled over the centuries by peoples from the east; that had been divided up among the kingdoms that had come and gone in the center of Europe, and that, as Moldavia and Wallachia, had been under the sway of the Ottoman empire since the early sixteenth century. The Rumanian aristocrats who spoke such beautiful French and who came to Paris to buy their clothes had portraits of their grandparents in caftans and turbans.
Their society was deeply marked by the years under corrupt Ottoman rule. Rumanians had a saying: “The fish grows rotten from the head.” In Rumania almost everything was for sale: offices, licenses, passports. Indeed, a foreign journalist who once tried to change money legally instead of on the black market was thrown into jail by police who thought he must be involved in a particularly clever swindle. Every government contract produced its share of graft. Although Rumania was a wealthy country, rich in farmland and, by 1918, with a flourishing oil industry, it lacked roads, bridges and railways because the money allocated by government had been siphoned off into the hands of families such as Brătianu’s own. Rumanians tended to see intrigues everywhere. In Paris they hinted darkly that the Supreme Council had fallen under the sway of Bolshevism or, alternatively, that it had been bribed by sinister capitalist forces.9
Visitors to Rumania from Western Europe were struck by its exotic, even Oriental, flavor, from the onion domes of the Orthodox churches to which most of the inhabitants belonged, to the cabdrivers who wore blue velvet caftans and came from a sect