Codreanu, Corneliu

▪ Romanian political agitator

in full  Corneliu Zelea Codreanu 

born Sept. 13, 1899, Iaşi, Rom.

died Nov. 30, 1938, near Bucharest

      Romanian political agitator, founder and leader of the country's principal fascist movement, the Iron Guard.

      Early exposed to anti-Semitism, Codreanu participated widely in anticommunist and anti-Semitic activities during his university years at Iaşi (1919–22). In 1922 he helped found the Association of Christian Students, which, from 1923 to 1927, he affiliated with the League of National Christian Defense (LANC), headed by the anti-Semitic university professor A.C. Cuza. Codreanu was arrested and imprisoned in 1923 for threatening to kill “traitors”; arrested again on a murder charge in 1925, he was acquitted. In 1927 he broke with LANC to form his Legion of the Archangel Michael, which later called itself the Legion or Legionary Movement. He also established a military wing within this group called the Iron Guard (1930), the name which outsiders would eventually apply to the movement at large. In this movement against communism and Jewry, Codreanu built a mystical religious fervour and instilled in it a particular idealism that appealed to certain younger intellectuals. Despite official persecution and its own terror tactics, the Guard—now renamed the All for the Fatherland Party—had by 1937 become the third largest party in the state; but its electoral successes moved the dictatorial king Carol II to dissolve it (January 1938) and imprison Codreanu (April 1938). On Nov. 30, 1938, while in transit between prisons, he and 13 of his associates were first garroted and then shot, supposedly while trying to escape.

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