Cezar Bolliac

Cezar or Cesar Bolliac, also known as Boliac, Boliacu, Boliak and Boleac (transitional Cyrillic: ЧeсарȢ БoliaкȢ; 23 or 25 March 1813 – 25 February 1881), was a Wallachian and Romanian writer, scholar, and political figure. Although born to non-Romanian parents, he joined the local aristocracy, or boyardom, through adoption into the Pereț family. He was briefly a cadet in the Wallachian military forces, but harbored resentment toward the Russian Empire, which had brought Wallachia into its sphere of influence. Abandoning a military career, he took up writing and publishing and, for a time, edited a literary magazine called Curiosul, which bridged neoclassicism and romanticism. Like other Romanian liberals and Freemasons, Bolliac opposed the Russian constitutional arrangement known as the Regulamentul Organic, viewing it as a remnant of feudalism. He was therefore implicated in the anti-Russian conspiracy of 1840 and was detained on orders from Prince Alexandru II Ghica. He was ultimately released through the intervention of other members of the Ghica family, who remained his friends and protectors.

Upon his return, Bolliac continued to challenge censorship, inventing a style of social poetry that favored the exploited peasantry and expressed sympathy for the Romani underclass, which was enslaved by the boyars. He moved away from liberalism toward utopian socialism and then, briefly, toward a variant of communism; he combined these views with Romanian nationalism, shifting it from romantic to left-wing variants. Reaching out to fellow Romanian nationalists in Moldavia and throughout the Austrian Empire, he became involved in researching the origins of the Romanians, performing his first archeological digs along the Danube and in the Southern Carpathians. The landscape also provided him with inspiration for romantic elegies, which endure as some of his best works as a poet. Bolliac became an increasingly sarcastic critic of Westernization, earning praise for his journalistic wit, and a rediscoverer of Romanian folklore. He became convinced that the Romanians were primarily descendants of the Dacians, a romantic and post-romantic ideology later taken up by Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu and transformed into Dacianism. Under Prince Gheorghe Bibescu, who embraced nationalism, Bolliac served as a poet laureate and a public prosecutor. This did not prevent him from participating in the liberal conspiracy that ultimately became the Wallachian revolution of 1848. He entered the provisional government that toppled Bibescu, also serving the cause as a journalist and propagandist. Involved on the abolitionist side of revolutionary politics, he allegedly embezzled the financial contributions that formerly enslaves people owed upon their release.

In late 1848, the Ottoman Empire reasserted its control over Wallachia, arresting the rebels. Bolliac was deported with several colleagues to Orsova, from which they either escaped or were allowed to leave. He sought refuge among the Romanians of Austrian Transylvania; well into 1849, he supported forming a revolutionary alliance with the breakaway Hungarian State and, alongside his colleague Nicolae Bălcescu, approved of the Hungarian–Romanian pacification act. He fled the Russian invasion and reached Istanbul; once there, he came to be distrusted by both Romanian and Hungarian exiles—regarded as a fanatic by the former, and accused by the latter of having stolen diamonds obtained from the Zichy family.

Evading prosecution by the Ottomans and the Austrians, Bolliac spent the years 1850–1857 in Paris; there, he was converted to the cause of Moldo–Wallachian unionism as a preliminary step toward establishing a Greater Romanian, or "Dacian", state. He popularized this cause to an international audience during the Crimean War, returning to Wallachia shortly after the war had ended. He was involved in the creation of the United Principalities in 1859, proposing that Moldavia's Alexandru Ioan Cuza be selected as Domnitor. Bolliac also endorsed the more radical points on Cuza's agenda, including land reform, and, as head of the National Archives, collected documents that facilitated the secularization of monastery estates. He opposed both Cuza's other political stances, to the point of being imprisoned for lèse-majesté, and the "monstrous coalition" that formed against the Domnitor. He spent most of the 1860s involved in political quarrels, often pursued through his newspaper, Trompeta Carpaților. Discarding socialism in favor of economic nationalism, Bolliac also embraced violent antisemitism. He initially opposed the foreign-born ruler Carol of Hohenzollern, but later incorporated the monarchy into his political vision, drawing inspiration from Bonapartism. Though he made important discoveries at Zimnicea and elsewhere, he came to be widely ridiculed for his drift into pseudoarchaeology, and also publicly disgraced, though never prosecuted, as an alleged child sexual abuser. He died after a long struggle with paralysis, leaving a tarnished legacy. Although later regarded as a hero by the communist regime, particularly in the 1950s, this reassessment rested largely on his perceived compatibility with Marxism.