page_title: Take Ionescu
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Take Ionescu / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: Monumentul lui Take Ionescu din Bucureşti, România. Pe un soclu cilindric înalt, Take Ionescu, reprodus în picioare, arată cu mâna dreaptă spre Ardeal. Mai jos, pe o platformă, doua nuduri uriaşe, răsturnate pe spate, simbolizeaza Nistrul şi Tisa.
context_page_description: Take or Tache Ionescu was a Romanian centrist politician, journalist, lawyer and diplomat, who also enjoyed reputation as a short story author. Starting his political career as a radical member of the National Liberal Party, he joined the Conservative Party in 1891, and became noted as a social conservative expressing support for several progressive and nationalist tenets. Ionescu is generally viewed as embodying the rise of middle-class politics inside the early 20th century Kingdom of Romania, and, throughout the period, promoted a project of Balkan alliances while calling for measures to incorporate the Romanian-inhabited Austro-Hungarian regions of Transylvania, Banat and Bukovina. Representing his own faction inside the Conservative Party, he clashed with the group's leadership in 1907–1908, and consequently created and led his own Conservative-Democratic Party.
  An Anglophile promoting an alliance with the Triple Entente, he rallied politicians and intellectuals in support for the idea of Romania entering World War I. When this was accomplished through the 1916–1918 campaign, Ionescu joined the Ion I. C. Brătianu government in Iași as Minister without portfolio.
context_section_description: Spiritele anului 3000, authored when Ionescu was just 17, is thought to be one of the first works of science fiction in Romanian literature. Written as a first-person narrative and dream sequence, it depicts its author and main character falling into slumber and awaking on the close of the 30th century. The world he encounters is peopled by humans of a small stature, who reach full maturity at the age of 15. Spiritele anului 3000 is part political satire and part political project. Humanity is unified into a single confederation of republics and administrated from Liberty (a completely new capital built up on an artificial island in the Mediterranean Sea), while monarchies and wars have disappeared altogether. Romania is set "in her natural borders" through the intervention of a Supreme Tribunal, while the Romanian language adopts a form to Ionescu's liking (having shunned the more artificial etymology favored by Transylvanian intellectuals and the Romanian Academy alike). The Romanian climate is improved by afforestation, the country is spanned by canals, and the garden-like Bucharest, over which the narrator and Aru, his friend from the future, fly in a moored balloon, no longer has any churches left standing.
  The Conservative-Democratic Party did not survive the death of its leader, and disbanded over the same year. According to his one-time political ally Octavian Goga, Ionescu "concentrated within him the character of improvised Muntenian bourgeoisie". Praising him for his qualities while also contending that his discourse "bordered on demagogy", Goga stated "I do not believe, though, that he could have ever gone as far in a Western country or in a balanced country such as England". He described their relationship thus: "He did all sorts of favors for me, he won me money loans, he promised me a ministry from the very beginning, he declared me «a genius» in his article for La Roumanie, — I nonetheless remained, in front of him, as I would remain in front of a woman who in vain tries to earn my love, as she does not project an image of moral responsibility".
  Writing on the nomenclature used in the works of Ion Luca Caragiale, the literary critic Garabet Ibrăileanu noted the use and special meaning of pet forms. Commenting, among others, on the banality of the names "Take"/"Tache" and "Ionescu", he contended that Ionescu had transported the moniker into general acceptance, out of the reach of its familiar connotations: "«Take Ionescu» is utterly banal [...], but this name, due to the person who bore it, has gained through association a special prestige. This is why, if we were to see it today being used by a common Ionescu, the occurrence would seem comical to us". Expanding on this issue, he noted that both the derisive tone in Caragiale's works and Ionescu's career reflected, each in its own way, the growth in importance of a single social class, the "national bourgeoisie".
  Take Ionescu's enduring admiration and support for countries in the Anglosphere and for the British Empire was reflected in contemporary popular culture. As Xeni indicated, Ionescu was depicted in satirical works either as an English "sportsman" or "an immense cylinder wrapped up in the stars of the American flag"). Ionescu's popularity before and during World War I also made him the center of a cultural trend, and the subject of imitation. According to Tudor Arghezi, he was personally responsible for raising the prestige of Ştefan Luchian, an impoverished painter, being among the first ever to purchase more than one of the latter's paintings.
  The friendship between Ionescu and Eleftherios Venizelos left behind its own artistic legacy: in late 1913 or early 1915, the Ionescu residence in Bucharest was decorated with a stone bas-relief of the goddess Athena, which was inlaid into the masonry. Additionally, after Take Ionescu's death, Venizelos donated a bloc of Parian marble to be used for the politician's bust (ultimately placed inside the Chamber quarters on Mitropoliei Hill), and another marble bloc to be used for his grave in Sinaia Monastery.
  
caption: Monument to Ionescu from 1931, by Ernest Henri Dubois
exif: {}