page_title: Bonifaciu Florescu
section_title: Clash with Junimea
hierarchical_section_title: Bonifaciu Florescu / Biography / Clash with Junimea
caption_attribution_description: English: Banchetul noueĭ direcţiĭ la borta rece patronat de Muerilă ("Banquet of the new direction at the cool hole, with Womanizer as its patron"), cartoon published in Ghimpele, the Romanian liberal magazine. The joke references Junimea, a literary society and conservative political club, whose program was a strong critique of liberal ideology. With this and other cartoons, Ghimpele picks up on rumors that Junimea meetings had degenerated into bacchanals. Junimea leader Titu Maiorescu, who served as Minister of Education, is the central figure; his Ministry is a giant barrel, with naked human legs and a stopper for a sex organ. Maiorescu, who distributes jugs of alcohol among his clients and the loose women entertaining them, is referred to as Muerilă ("Womanizer"), a reference to his involvement in several sex scandals. The "cool hole" is a reference to a famous restaurant in Iaşi city - known in reality as Bolta Rece ("The Cool Vault"), it was managed by Avram Amira and frequented by the Junimea men.
context_page_description: Bonifaciu Florescu was a Romanian polygraph, the illegitimate son of writer-revolutionary Nicolae Bălcescu. Born secretly outside his parents' native Wallachia, at Pest, he was taken by his aristocratic mother in France, growing up as an erudite Francophone and Francophile. Florescu graduated from the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the University of Rennes, returning home at age 25 to become a successful lecturer, polemicist, and historian of culture. Influenced by his father's politics, he was for a while a prominent figure on the far-left of Romanian liberalism and nationalism, which pitted him against the conservative society Junimea, and against his own conservative cousin, Prime Minister Ion Emanuel Florescu. The conflict led to his losing a professorship at Iași University and being sidelined when applying for chairs at the University of Bucharest. His critique of Junimist literature, structured around a classical defense of prosody, inspired a libel by Mihai Eminescu—famously depicting Florescu as a "homunculus".
  Florescu had significant success as a self-proclaimed irredentist, agitating for Romanian causes in disputed Bukovina and Transylvania.
context_section_description: In April 1874, a conservative coalition that included Junimea society of Iași formed the national government, with Lascăr Catargiu as Prime Minister. The cabinet had Bonifaciu's cousin, Ion Emanuel Florescu, for a Defense Minister—described by critics as authoritarian in his handling of political opposition. Bonifaciu himself was dismissed immediately by the new Education Minister, Junimist ideologue Titu Maiorescu, who "could not stand him." In his official report, Maiorescu noted that, although Florescu was an erudite, his peculiar teaching style was driving students away.
  This dispute doubled as a cultural conflict between liberals such as Florescu and Junimea. Florescu spent much of his time in polemics with the minister, and also with the Junimist poet Mihail Eminescu. The latter scandal began in January 1876 with Florescu's derisive note in Românul. Here, Florescu attacked Junimism (and implicitly Eminescu's work) as a "torrent of little poets"—although, in the same text, he praised Eminescu's lover Veronica Micle for her own "beautiful" verse. Declaring himself dissatisfied with the assonance of Junimist poetry, Florescu demanded a more thorough literary consonance. As noted later by the critic Perpessicius, this request was "bizarre" and "drunk on prosody", although Florescu had "his indisputable merits." Perpessicius also proposes that it formed part of a press campaign "in bad taste", "as vociferous as it was impotent", seeking to undermine Junimea's steady rise, with Florescu "in so very many ways, from the pestering to the inept, ready to censor Eminescu's budding oeuvre." Florescu's review was immediately challenged by Nicolae Scurtescu, who sent Românul a letter in which he expressed solidarity with Eminescu, and asked to be struck out from Florescu's list of "good poets", suggesting that Florescu had no qualification to compile such lists.
  Eminescu would also respond later in 1876 with the libel Epistolă deschisă homunculului Bonifaciu ("An Open Letter to Bonifaciu the Homunculus"). Its reference to a mysterious newspaper, Pruncul ("The Babe"), was later identified as a jibe at Românul, whose predecessor was an 1848 sheet, Pruncul Român ("The Romanian Infant"). The "letter", written in tones of "rising anger", reads:
  Călinescu finds the poem to be a "vigorous satire", its reference to "B. Florescu's 'oakum' brain [...] describing quite well a fibrous arrhythmic state". By 1880, the "homunculus" imagery was rehashed for the early draft of an ample poem, Scrisoarea II, part of which is specifically dedicated to ridiculing Eminescu's detractors. As noted by Perpessicius, Florescu, unlike Rosetti, was never mentioned in the more definitive satire, Scrisoarea III. This, he suggests, may be a sign of his relative insignificance among Eminescu's enemies.
caption: Cartoon in Ghimpele, the liberal magazine, depicting Titu Maiorescu and the "new direction" at Junimea (November 1875). The barrel ridden by Maiorescu is marked Instrucțiunea publică ("Public Instruction"), in reference to his job as Education Minister
exif: {}