The Peasant and the autochthonist ideology

But why did it have to be so?

The fact that at the time the Romanian countries were mainly peasant societies is not a sufficient explanation. In Germany, the Volk was identified with the peasants in spite of the existence of an already large category of proletarians (Bausinger, op. cit.). Ideology was never limited by demography ? or the Peasant is an ideological fact.

It was ?a necessity for both the boyar class[5] and the peasant one ? Henri Stahl briefly explains ? to make the proof that the ?rumâni? are autochthons, direct hairs of the Romans, fallen in slavery only by accident and thus having the right to fight back for their autonomy? (Stahl, 2001: 30). The national elites had thus the urgent task of finding ?the arguments proving that the Romanian populations from all the three provinces, Transylvania, Moldavia and Walachia, are aboriginal, that they form a single people of Latin origin, and thus have at least equal rights with the populations that moved latter on in the space of former roman Dacia?[6] (idem: 26). Continuity and unity thus became the two complementary key words of what was almost an actual stake of political survival before being one of future nation-building and development. It is this double political claim that fueled a genuine autochthonist ideology and made it necessary.

The Peasant is the main personage of the ?great narration? Romanian elites elaborated in response to these historical constrains and in order to serve this political argumentation. He is the embodiment of Romanian autochthony, the representative Autochthon, i.e. he stays for the ab originem continuity of all Romanians on their own fatherland. He is thus the living argument of all these national claims. As such, he will hardly be a social actor, part of the current social life, but mainly an ideological character, object of political interest and spiritual devotion. In other words, the ideological model fitting the nation-building needs had to?and in fact did?prevail over the empirical image of the peasant and was used to describe him in all his acts and contexts. 

Before being an object for ethnology, the Peasant was thus a product of ideology.

[5]Especially after and because of the one century long Phanariot governance, when the local aristocracy (boierii de ţară) lost her hereditary rights, the Romanian boyars were interested in stressing a common autochthony with the peasants. It is not by accident that a main representative of this category as Alecu Russo, for instance, has worked out a historical narration of fundamental similarities between real boyars (i.e. the local ones) and ?real? peasants (the free ones, the răzeşi) (see Bîrlea, 1974).

[6]There are some similarities, in this respect, with the Greek case. ?By identifying with the absolute values of European romanticism, Greek scholars sought to gain admittance to Europe as cultural as well as political equals? - Michael Herzfeld explains (Herzfeld, 1987:52). The same was true with Romanians scholars playing the card of Roman origin, what Vasile Pârvan calls the founding ?myth of Rome? (Pârvan, 1921).