Ionescu's career peaked in 1876, when he was Minister of Foreign Affairs in the "Red" cabinet of Ion Brătianu, and began to separate himself from the Factionalists. He was deposed for his opposition to the war of independence, which also brought clashes between the PNL and the Faction over the issue of Jewish emancipation. In 1879, the Faction was narrowly prevented from forming the national government alongside conservative "Whites", after which it steadily declined in importance. In the early 1880s, after a brief alliance with the newly formed Conservative Party, most of the Faction dissolved into the PNL, which had emerged as the dominant "Red" group in the Kingdom of Romania. A Factionalist dissidence survived as part of the Conservative-ran Opposition Committees, but also lost members to the PNL; the last surviving Factionalist cell, formed around Holban, became a Conservative chapter in the 1890s. Some of the party tenets, in particular its antisemitism, were revived in the 1910s by A. C. Cuza and his Democratic Nationalists.