The profound social and political transformations Romania underwent in the aftermath of World War I provided a favourable backdrop for the rise of the Iron Guard movement led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Famous thinkers such as Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran crossed paths with this movement. The Iron Guard continues to influence far-right movements with the symbols they use. We spoke to Roland Clark about Codreanu and the Iron Guard.
What sociopolitical context led to the emergence of the Iron Guard?
The Iron Guard emerged in a country that was primarily agricultural, with low literacy rates, terrible healthcare, and a small but energetic urban elite obsessed with nation-building (and with building their own careers within the nation). Two things in particular triggered the rise of fascism in Romania. One was the introduction of universal male suffrage after the First World War. Elections were notoriously corrupt, and had been since 1866. An interim government appointed by the king would organise the elections, and always did so in a way that guaranteed that they would win. The new wave of democracy and nation-building that came in after the war told people that they were now in control of their own country, and when people found that the same old political class was still running the country in its own interests they started to turn to anti-system parties like the fascists.
The second factor was the dramatic expansion of the country’s borders in 1918. Romania incorported much of Tranyslvania, Bessarabia, Bucovina, Dobruja and the Banat. Some of these regions had a lot of non-Romanians living in them, including Germans, Hungarians, Jews, Roma and Ukrainians. The Romanian state put effort into “Romanianizing” these new territories, both through official policies and by encouraging ethnic Romanians to assert their “rights” as the country’s new privileged group. These sorts of racist state policies helped to legitimize fascist parties and to normalize their way of seeing the world.
The far right received a major boost in 1922 when antisemitic student riots engulfed the country’s universities, just as they were plaguing univerity campuses across Europe. Established antisemitic politicians such as A. C. Cuza took advantage of these riots to create a new party called the National Christian Defence League (LANC). Members of this party engaged in political murder and other publicity stunts but repeatedly avoided being punished for it because of how profoundly antisemitic and nationlist the judicial system was. In 1927, a group of young fascists led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu broke away from Cuza to form a new party they called the Legion of the Archangel Michael. In 1932 they established a paramilitary wing called the Iron Guard. That group was quickly banned, but the name stuck and people still use the Legion and the Iron Guard interchangably to refer to this group.
Why was Codreanu against democracy and royalty?
Codreanu claimed that democracy just involved talking and party politics instead of action. He celebrated “deeds” over “words” and argued that in a democracy politicians put the interests of their party over that of the nation. He was not actually against a monarchy as long as that monarch did not stand in his way. In 1930s Romania, however, King Carol II actively meddled in politics and did not want Codreanu in power because he could not control him. Carol also had a Jewish mistress, Elena Lupescu, which the fascists thought was unacceptable.
Considering the economic, social, and political conditions in Romania during the 1920s and 1930s, what were the similarities and differences between the Iron Guard and other fascist movements?
The Iron Guard was quite similar to most other fascist movements in Europe at this time. They wore uniforms, marched, sang together, assaulted Jews, engaged in street fights with other fascists, as well as several assassination attempts, including murdering the prime minister in December 1933. They also praised Mussolini and Hitler and held them up as role models for their own movement. One thing that made them particularly unique was the large numbers of peasants involved in the movement, which put a lot of effort into carrying out propaganda in isolated rural areas. They also made extensive use of Christian rhetoric and symbols. This was not at all unusual among European fascist movements, but whereas most fascist movements elsewhere drew on Catholicism, the Romanians were mostly Orthodox Christians
Where the Iron Guard stood out was in comparison to other right-wing movements in Romania. Most of those movements were led by established politicians who used the trappings of fascism to broaden their own support base. These parties became particularly popular from 1935 onwards, once Hitler’s success had become obvious. Whereas those parties still relied on traditional mass mobilization techniques such as expensive rallies and major newspapers, members of the Iron Guard did the work themselves, recuiting through person-to-person propaganda and without the sorts of financial resources available to the others.
What ideological, organizational, and propaganda methods did it employ to influence the masses?
When the Iron Guard was established in 1927 it still relied almost exclusively on the rabid antisemitism that LANC promoted, but it LANC had already cornered the market in antisemitism and the Iron Guard wasn’t able to win in the electorates that LANC controlled. Instead, they targeted small rural electorates that none of the other major parties were interested in during by-elections. In 1933 they ran a major campaign for the national elections on an anti-corruption platform. They argued that the country’s politicians were all corrupted by Jews, and that only young people could restore the country’s fortunes. They lost that election because of government repression, and responded by assassinating the prime minister. There were widespread arrests of Iron Guard leaders after this, and the organisation was tainted with the reputation of being thugs and terrorists. They solved this problem in 1935 by emphasizing the idea of “creating new men” through voluntary work camps that they ran during the summer building churches, roads and wells in the countryside. By 1937 they were also running their own businesses, which were set up not to make a profit, but to drive nearby Jewish shops out of business.
The Iron Guard’s leader, Codreanu, was arrested then killed by police in 1938, and the movement turned back to terrorist tactics for the next couple of years while the main leadership fled to Germany. They returned in September 1940 and took part in a coup that put them in power together with General Ion Antonescu. This regime focused on celebrating Codreanu and the Iron Guard as if they had been saints, while also stealing extensively from Jews and from the state, allowing individual legionaries to enrich themselves. It all came to a head in January 1941 when the Legion rebelled against Antonescu and was crushed. Most legionaries survived the rebellion, with many of them joining the army and taking part in the invasion of Russia and the genocidal mass murder of Jews in eastern Romania and Ukraine.
How did Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s fusion of Orthodox Christianity and Romanian nationalism contribute to creating a ‘mystical’ dimension within the Iron Guard’s ideology?
During the early 1920s Codreanu and others talked about themselves as “Christians” to distinguish themselves from “Jews”, and when they created the Legion in 1927, they took the Archangel Michael as their patron saint. The Archangel Michael commands the angelic armies in heaven, and so they used him to say that they were combatting evil Jews in the same ways that Michael fought against Satan and his demons. They repeatedly called this a “spiritual” battle, and distinguished what they were doing from Cuza’s antisemitism by accusing Cuza of having become a “politician”. A large number of intellectuals joined the movement in 1933, and they began to emphasize that this was a “mystical” movement, drawing on anti-modern intellectual currents popular across Europe. Codreanu reinforced this language in his 1935 book, but it reached a peak in 1937 after two legionaries were killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The Iron Guard claimed that they were martyrs in the battle against Satan, and had sacrificed themself for the nation. The National Legionary State further presented Codreanu’s Legion as having been a mystical movement once they came to power in 1940, and the idea that the Iron Guard was a religious movement was solidified during the Cold War from two different angles. First, in the 1950s both liberal emigre historians and the Romanian Communist Party tried to explain the Iron Guard’s success by blaming “superstitious peasants”, and then legionaries living in Spain and Germany reframed their movement for the Cold War as one based on anti-communism and Christianity, ignoring the antisemitism that had actually animated it during the 1930s. It’s important to realise that during the 1930s the movement was still driven much more by antisemitism and day-to-day politics than by any sort of Orthodox Christianity. It is only retrospectively that a consensus has emerged that it was a “mystical” movement.
How did figures like Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran become involved with the Iron Guard?
A significant group of young intellectuals became involved with the Iron Guard in late 1932 and 1933, under the influence of right-wing publicists such as Nae Ionescu and Nichifor Crainic. These two men acted as mentors to these young intellectuals, including giving them jobs writing for or editing newspapers. Mircea Eliade was still a student during these years, and had been an enthusiastic supporter of the antisemitic student movement since at least 1927. He officially affiliated himself with the Iron Guard in 1937, and refused to distance himself from them even when he was imprisoned in 1938. He then worked as a diplomat for the National Legionary State and for Antonescu’s genocidal regime before moving first to Paris and then to Chicago after the Second World War. Eliade was a celebrated rising start in Bucharest’s intellectual world of the 1930s, but it was not until he moved to the United States that he became world-renowned for his expertise in the study of comparative religion.
Emil Cioran’s relationship to fascism is more complex. He was attracted by Hitler and Nazism while studying in Berlin in 1933, and several of his books from the mid-1930s celebrated fascism as the only solution for Romania. He never officially joined the Iron Guard though, and moved to France in 1937. He wrote a lot less about fascism once he arrived in France, and later in life said that he regretted having promoted it so fervently.
What sort of impact did the movement have on these intellectuals, and what were the long-term consequences of this interaction for Romanian thought?
The first thing that the movement gave these intellectuals was the feeling that they were part of something bigger than themselves. They had the opportunity to write ideology on behalf of the movement and to edit newspapers or publish books that promoted the movement. In a world where young intellectuals struggled to find stable jobs and to have their ideas heard, this was a major opportunity for them. Intellectually, it encouraged them to embrace the pseudo-mystical, anti-modern tendencies that were already present in their thought and to align themselves with these currents in continental philosophy. It also meant that they increasingly distanced themselves from their left-wing or Jewish friends. Whereas most of these intellectuals were quite cosmopolitan before they encountered the Iron Guard, once they became involved with fascism they were increasingly sectarian and isolated.
The fact that they allied themselves with fascism also made it difficult for them to continue working once the Romanian Communist Party came to power after the war. It meant that a whole generation of otherwise promising intellectuals were blacklisted or forced to work in not-very-significant positions when they should have been at the height of their careers.
In the intellectual climate of the time, how were Codreanu’s ideas debated and discussed?
It is important to keep in mind that Codreanu did not have very many ideas, and that they weren’t very profound. The idea that drove him for most of his career was that Jews were the enemy of Romania and that they had corrupted Romania’s political class. Following this, he also emphasized the need for “new men” and “youth” who could replace the existing political class in order to create a renewed Romania. Legionaries discussed these ideas extensively within their weekly meetings, and the group of intellectuals in Bucharest elaborated on them in their newspapers, making them seem more intellectually legitimate. The vast majority of people completely ignored Codreanu’s ideas though. They saw him as a political figure leading yet another political party, albeit one that was unusually violent and aggressive. He was not seen as a thinker during his lifetime, and it was only much later that neo-fascists like Julius Evola took Codreanu’s writings and tried to make them into an intellectual system.
To what extent does the ideology of Codreanu and the Iron Guard resonate with or reemerge in contemporary conservative, nationalist, and far-right movements?
Thanks mostly to the way that Italians such as Julius Evola and Claudio Mutti tried to reinterpret Codreanu’s writings as spiritual texts during the Cold War, Codreanu has been picked up by right-wing extremists in the United States and elsewhere in the twenty-first century. You see his face and Iron Guard symbols on t-shirts at far right protests and snippets of his writings are quoted on blogs and extremist websites by people completely unconnected to Romania and with little knowledge of who Codreanu actually was. The ideology they associate him with is one of spiritual and national rebirth. He did indeed use these terms, but he was first and foremost concerned with antisemitism and did not understand his movement as a force of religious renewal in the ways that the far right today portray him.
How do far-right groups in Central and Eastern Europe interpret the legacy of the Iron Guard?
The Iron Guard has also served as an inspiration for far-right groups inside Romania itself. In the early 2000s the right-wing populist politician Gigi Becali made use of legionary slogans in his own campaigns, and more recently the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR) party has done the same. AUR have actually worked closely with a historian, Sorin Lavric, to reproduce many of the same theatrical stunts and grandstanding that Codreanu himself used. Finally, Călin Georgescu, a right-wing populist who did spectacularly well in the annulled 2024 presidential elections has also praised Codreanu, Antonescu and Hitler as role models, showing that fascists are no longer people to be ashamed of for Romanian politicians. These recent politicians are evoking Codreanu’s legacy, but they are fighting very different battles to him. Whereas Codreanu was interested in driving Jews out of the country and of replacing the political class, twenty-first century populists are campaigning on anti-LGBTQI platforms, opposing vaccines, and praising Vladimir Putin – all things that Codreanu would either not have understood or would have been shocked by.