page_title: Nicolae Fleva
section_title: Agriculture Minister
hierarchical_section_title: Nicolae Fleva / Biography / Agriculture Minister
caption_attribution_description: photograph of Bucharest Domains Ministry
context_page_description: Nicolae Fleva was a Wallachian, later Romanian politician, political journalist and lawyer. Known especially for his involvement in political incidents, and for a stated patriotism bordering on demagogy, he tested all political formulas that Romania's two-party system would allow. His activity in the public sphere brought a decades-long presence in the Assembly of Deputies and a mandate as Mayor of Bucharest between 1884 and 1886.
  After beginnings with the National Liberal Party, which he helped establish and represented in court, Fleva came to oppose its monopoly on power. He experimented with creating a third party, negotiated common platforms for the various opposition forces, including the Conservatives and the Junimea society, during contiguous National Liberal administrations. Fleva was notoriously involved in the major scandals of the 1880s, when his ridicule of National Liberal power generated street battles and sparked two separate shooting incidents. At the time, "Flevist" groups were seen as the leading voice of middle class discontent, and formed one of several currents pushing for the adoption of universal male suffrage.
context_section_description: The Conservative and Junimist factions preserved Fleva in their camp, making him more or less concrete promises about a return to high office. In their name, Fleva carried out street battles with the Sturdza party, and, with Maiorescu and others, established a "Committee of Resistance" (against the Strudza government). A classically trained scholar, Maiorescu expressed disdain for all the liberal subgroups, as sciolistic upstarts. In a letter of June 1898, he made special note of these developments: "All the Liberals, the Drapelul men and of course the Flevists too, are utterly ignorant (except for Sturdza and Beldiman [...]) and enrich themselves through politics. [...] Stătescu or Lascăr, or Costinescu, or Fleva [...] might even be looking to find Camões among their contemporaries". Historian Ion Bulei, who sees Maiorescu's text is a cruel satire, also writes that it addresses a deeper reality: "if the doctrinaire level of all Romanian politicians was rather base in what was Old Romania, the liberals' was yet more base. Between the practical accomplishments of the National Liberal Party and the level of its intellectual preoccupations, there was always disharmony."
  Reputedly, Fleva officially joined the Conservative Party in 1899, but, to the press, he was more a "national democrat" ally of the Conservative militants. On April 11 of that year, Premier Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino came to power after the fall of another Sturdza cabinet and four months of government crisis, placing Fleva in charge of the Ministry of Agriculture and Royal Domains. He would serve until June 7, 1900. The "Tribune" also received a ninth mandate in the Assembly during the elections of 1899, which confirmed the Conservative gains.
  However, the election itself dampened his ministerial ambitions: in Slatina, the peasant voters were allegedly instigated to rebel by the political boss Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești, leading to a massacre. Probably called upon as an arbiter by Bogdan-Pitești, Fleva visited the area and conducted an inquiry. As a consequence of the government's mistakes in handling the crisis, Fleva is said to have considered resigning.
  This new mandate was soon touched by another controversy involving fodder supplies. With drought on the horizon, Fleva again ordered imported hay, much more than was needed, and any excess amount was destroyed by rainfall. Fleva himself observed irregularities at the State Fisheries, but his move to depose their caretaker, Grigore Antipa, was resisted by other Conservatives. Another unusual and criticized decision taken by Fleva (in his secondary capacity as Minister of Industry and Commerce) was the abolition of virtually all patents, measures justified by his belief that intellectual property rights were holding back industrialization. This policy, backed by a sizable portion of the public, was only repealed in 1906, under continued pressure from the international arms industry.
caption: Palace of the Ministry of Agriculture and Royal Domains, photographed by Alexandru Antoniu in 1900
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