The cult of death and the celebration of martyrdom lay at the core of interwar fascist movements across the European continent. However, it was in the Romanian Legionary Movement (also known as the Iron Guard) that these were articulated into a full-fledged ideology of thanatic ultranationalism. In this article, I examine the spectacular fascist necropolitics staged as state-sponsored funeral performances during the short-lived National Legionary State (September 14, 1940–February 14, 1941). A detailed description of the massive campaign of exhumations and reburials of the so-called “legionary martyrs” carried out during this short time span, culminating with the grandiose ceremony organized for the reburial of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu on November 30, 1940, provides insight into the legionary thanatic worldview and ritual praxis. It also sheds light on the movement’s politics of commemoration, death, and afterlife and shows how these were embedded into a religious framework underpinned by theological concepts such as heroic martyrdom, vicarious atonement, and collective redemption.

The paper explores the radical morphing of Romanian patriotism in the aftermath of the Great War within the Legionary movement. It shows, first, how the war martialized the rhetoric of self-sacrificial patriotism articulated discursively during the second part of the long nineteenth century that accompanied the making of the Romanian national statehood. Second, the paper focuses on unraveling the postwar cultural matrix that made possible a radical, self-sacrificial, patriotism to emerge within the Romanian Iron Guard’s fascist worldview. Within the Legion’s redemptive political theology, the wartime national patriotism aiming at redeeming the nation by making the Greater Romania was rendered into a mystical self-sacrificial patriotism driven by a messianic thrust and infused with soteriological tropes and martyrological themes of Orthodox inspiration. The paper argues that an ethics of self-sacrificial patriotism with the cult of death at its centerpiece was instituted in the Legion’s conception of heroic martyrdom which corresponds to an ideology of thanatic ultra-nationalism.

Building on the basic premise that the attempt to create a New Man was one of fascism’s master-ideas, this article focuses on the feminine underside of this program of political anthropogenesis. The article centers on the image of the New Woman and the politics of womanhood within the Romanian Legionary movement. It argues that the Legion’s trademark rhetoric of martial heroism and martyrdom led to an essential tension between a virile model of womanhood (patterned upon the masculine ideal type of the martyr-hero) and a more conservative domestic model. A third, reconciliatory hybrid model, which mixed features borrowed from the two antagonistic types of Legionary womanhood was eventually developed to defuse this tension.

This paper aims at discerning the models of fascist femininity endorsed by the Romanian National Legionary State. It consists in a quantitative content analysis performed on articles published in the regime’s official newspaper, Cuvântul, in a permanent column addressed to women. The findings point out the prevalence of the traditional model of “domestic womanhood” over the masculinized model of “warrior femalehood.” This quantitative approach grounded on content analysis is complemented by a qualitative approach based on a visual analysis of women’s depiction in the Legion’s printed press. Visual commercials, product advertising featuring women and other depictions of female figures reveal a third, heterodox, type of womanhood that we suggest calling “Legionary chic.” Based on these findings, the study concludes by pointing out the heterogeneity of the National Legionary State’s politics of womanhood.

Starting from Oliver Jens Schmitt’s biography of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, this study engages into a wider reflection upon the interwar ultranationalist Romanian Legionary movement (also known as the Iron Guard). It starts by situating Schmitt’s work within the recent trend of de-orientalizing the Legion of Archangel Michael, after the latter has longtime been conceived of as an exotic incarnation of the generic model of fascism at the Europe’s Eastern hinterland. Engaging in a dialogue with the scholarship done in fascists studies in general and on the Legionary movement in particular, the study reflects upon the “fascisticity” of the latter. After arguing that the Legionary movement should be conceived of as a particular species of fascism, the study explores the movement’s fulminant rise in Romanian politics and society. This success is accounted within a structuralist framework which insists upon the structural features of Romanian interwar societies that made possible and facilitated the movement’s growth. Next, the paper focuses its analytical scope upon the role of Codreanu’s charisma in integrating an otherwise internally fractured political organization. Lastly, it concludes with some reflection on Codreanu and the Legion’s contested legacy in the heavily disputed politics of memory within contemporary Romania.