VINTILĂ BRĂTIANU personalitatea şi activitatea sa

A book on Vintilă Brătianu’s personality and achievements is still missing in the Romanian historiography, although more than 80 years separate us from the times in which this name influenced national history. Friends and people who were closed to him wrote about him, but he was soon forgotten by contemporaries in the tumultuous and ever-changing years preceding the outbreak of World War II, while post-war historiography deliberately overlooked him until around the 1980’s, when it transiently mentioned him while conveniently cultivating idea of policy conducted by great Romanians in the interwar period. However, as Vintilă Brătianu was more involved in the sphere of economic policy, a closer, more particular look on his life and personality has not been recorded. It is true, following 1989, constraints regarding knowing important figures of our past disappeared, but Vintilă Brătianu was still waiting for the work he deserved. In addition to this expectation, historiographically speaking, a volume entirely dedicated to Vintilă Brătianu is more than welcome for several reasons. It is not only an important, essential, in fact, subject, linked to an unavoidable age, that of preparing the conditions for the realization of the Greater Romania. Vintilă Brătianu has every chance to return to the attention of Romanians nowadays to the extent that not only his work but his ideas as well start to acquire, by an apparent paradox, significant topicality and, why not, to inspire, in a certain measure. Accordingly, the present work deals, therefore, with an interesting topic, significant in many respects, which Corina Voiculescu aims to reveal and emphasize. The introduction clarifies the author’s intentions, of describing the work and merits of the greatest minister of finances Romania has ever had. Starting from the available bibliography, gathering new, original data from almost all the accessible sources, the present book is a synthesis and a portrait of not only Vintilă Brătianu but also of all the people of the age in which he lived and worked, of the real life with its hardships, problems, successes or failures. In that world, Vintilă Brătianu was a man who offered solutions, fought for them and applied most of them, proving that a real politician is one who had solutions for his country not one who acted as a more or less oratorical figurant. From this point of view, he always stood at the forefront of an active, creative elite, strongly animated by warm and wise nationalism. Vintilă Brătianu was also one of the few, if not the only mentor of the youth around him who shared and perpetuated his intense interests devoted to the economic and financial prosperity. We might assert that his political defeat towards the end of his life was not definitive, that life did him, in time, more justice. The present book does us a huge favour by recovering another great name of the gallery of incredibly remarkable people in Romania which ceased to exist after 1944.

Prof. Ion Stanciu, Ph.D.