page_title: Carol II of Romania
section_title: Personality cult
hierarchical_section_title: Carol II of Romania / Personality cult
caption_attribution_description: English: King Carol II of Romania and Crown Prince Mihai (future King Mihai I of Romania) at Astra Congress, 20 September 1936, Blaj, Romania.
context_page_description: Carol II reigned as King of Romania from 8 June 1930 until his abdication on 6 September 1940.
  Carol was the eldest son of Ferdinand I and became crown prince upon the death of his grand-uncle, King Carol I in 1914. He was the first of the Hohenzollern kings of Romania to be born in the country; both of his predecessors had been born in Germany and only came to Romania as adults. As such, he was the first member of the Romanian branch of the Hohenzollerns who spoke Romanian as his first language, and was also the first member of the royal family to be raised in the Orthodox faith. Carol was also a fan of football, being the Romanian Football Federation's president for almost one year from 1924 until 1925.
  He possessed a hedonistic personality that contributed to the controversies marring his reign, and his life was marked by numerous scandals, among them marriages to Zizi Lambrino and Princess Helen of Greece and Denmark, daughter of King Constantine I of Greece. His continued affairs with Magda Lupescu obliged him to renounce his succession rights in 1925 and leave the country. Princess Helen eventually divorced him in 1928.
context_section_description: To compensate for his rather negative and well-deserved "playboy king" image, Carol created a lavish personality cult around himself that grew more extreme as his reign went on, which portrayed the king as a Christ-like being "chosen" by God to create a "new Romania". In the 1934 book The Three Kings by Cezar Petrescu, which was intended for a less educated audience, Carol was constantly described as being almost god-like, the "father of the villagers and workers of the land" and the "king of culture" who was the greatest of all the Hohenzollern kings, and whose return from exile from France via airplane in June 1930 was a "descent from the heavens". Petrescu depicted Carol's return as the beginning of his God-appointed task of becoming "the maker of eternal Romania", the start of a glorious golden age as Petrescu asserted that rule by monarchs was what God wanted for Romanians.
  Carol had little understanding or interest in economics, but his most influential economic advisor was Mihail Manoilescu who favored an etatist model of economic development with the state intervening in the economy to encourage growth. Carol was very active in the cultural realm, being a generous patron of the arts and actively supported the work of the Royal Foundation, an organisation with broad remit to promote and study Romanian culture in all fields. In particular, Carol supported the work of the sociologist Dimitrie Gusti of the Social Service of the Royal Foundation, who in the early 1930s started to bring social scientists from various discipliness like sociology, anthropology, ethnography, geography, musicology, medicine and biology to work together in a "science of the nation". Gusti took teams of professors from the various disciplines to the countryside to study an entire community from all vantage points every summer, who then produce a lengthy report about the community.
caption: King Carol II and Crown Prince Michael at Astra Congress, 20 September 1936, Blaj, Romania.
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