Assembly at Alba Iulia

On 1 December 1918 (18 November in the Julian calendar, which Romania still used at the time) there met in Alba Iulia the Great National Assembly of the Romanians of Transylvania, the Banat and other Hungarian lands. Its 1,228 delegates unanimously voted for “the union of these Romanians and of all the territories inhabited by them with Romania”. A crowd of many thousands gathered outside the town, about a hundred thousand people according to contemporary accounts and Romanian studies. The British chronology of the war records under this day that an assembly of Romanians from Transylvania, the Banat and other districts of Hungary proclaimed union with Romania. On the same day King Ferdinand I made his ceremonial entry into liberated Bucharest.

Romanians in the Kingdom of Hungary

Transylvania, together with the neighbouring regions of Crișana, Maramureș and the Banat, had for centuries belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary. Romanians, Hungarians, Székelys, Transylvanian Saxons, Swabians and Jews lived there side by side. In the lands that eventually passed to Romania, the Hungarian census of 1910 counted about 5.3 million inhabitants. Romanians made up 53.8 per cent, Hungarians 31.6 per cent (the census also counted most Hungarian-speaking Jews among them) and Germans 10.7 per cent. The Romanians were mostly peasants. The towns were mainly Hungarian and German, and the policy of Magyarisation and a narrow franchise meant that the Romanians had only a handful of deputies in the Budapest parliament. For decades the leaders of the Romanian National Party had demanded national rights within the monarchy. Romania entered the war in 1916 for Transylvania, and the Entente promised it these lands in a secret treaty. The Romanian offensive, however, ended in defeat and the occupation of most of the kingdom.

In the autumn of 1918 the Habsburg monarchy was falling apart. On 12 October in Oradea the executive committee of the National Party adopted a declaration invoking the right of every nation to decide its own fate. On 18 October the deputy Alexandru Vaida-Voevod read it out in parliament in Budapest. After the Aster Revolution at the turn of October and November, a Central Romanian National Council was formed. Made up of six representatives of the National Party and six Social Democrats, it soon moved to Arad, where it was chaired by the lawyer Ștefan Cicio Pop. In towns and villages local national councils and Romanian national guards sprang up and took over power from the collapsing Hungarian administration. Many Romanian soldiers from the disbanded Austro-Hungarian army returned home with their weapons.

Talks in Arad

On 9 November the National Council demanded that the government of Mihály Károlyi hand over full power to it in 26 counties of eastern Hungary. On 13 and 14 November the Hungarian minister for nationalities, Oszkár Jászi, negotiated with it in Arad. He proposed turning Hungary into a federation on the Swiss model, called an “Eastern Switzerland”: lands with a compact Romanian majority would have broad self-government, while a complex system of minority protection would apply in mixed districts. The Romanians rejected the proposal. According to Hungarian accounts of the talks, Iuliu Maniu, one of the leaders of the National Party, who in the last weeks of the war had organised Romanian soldiers in Vienna, replied briefly that the issue was “complete separation”. In the same days news arrived of the Belgrade convention, which left Hungary the administration of most of Transylvania but allowed the Allies to occupy designated areas.

The talks broke down. On 15 November the National Council decided to convene a great national assembly to decide the future of the Romanians of Hungary. Alba Iulia, Gyulafehérvár in Hungarian, was chosen as the venue. History argued for the choice: here in 1600 Michael the Brave had briefly united Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania under his rule, and in 1785 the leaders of the peasant uprising, Horea and Cloșca, had been executed on a nearby field. Practical considerations also counted: the town had a large railway station, barracks and fortress casemates in which the crowds arriving in the middle of winter could spend the night. The assembly was convened on 20 November. Within a dozen or so days five delegates were elected in each electoral district. Alongside them came to Alba Iulia, ex officio, the bishops of both Romanian churches, the Orthodox and the Greek Catholic, as well as representatives of the clergy, cultural societies, schools, women’s associations, national guards, craftsmen, students and Social Democratic trade unions.

The dispute over conditions

The preparatory session on 30 November was stormy. The draft resolution had been drawn up in Arad by the journalist and activist Vasile Goldiș. The Social Democrats, among them Ioan Flueraș and Iosif Jumanca, were wary of conditions in the Kingdom of Romania, where there was still no universal suffrage and the land belonged to the boyars. They demanded democratic guarantees and autonomy for Transylvania, and some of them a republic as well. Young activists and guests from Bukovina and Bessarabia wanted union without any conditions. In the end a compromise was adopted. The lands joining Romania were to keep provisional autonomy until a constituent assembly met, and the resolution was to contain the principles on which the new state should be based. Maniu explained that these were not conditions of union but a necessary transitional period, since “one cannot in a single day or a single hour set aside the old order and create a new one”. The text was approved around midnight.

1 December

On Sunday 1 December it snowed from the morning. Special trains pulled into the town, and peasants arrived by cart, on horseback and on foot, in their Sunday best, with Romanian tricolour flags and boards bearing the names of their villages. In the morning services were held in the Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches. The delegates gathered in the hall of the former military casino in the fortress, known from that day as the Hall of Union. The session was opened by Cicio Pop. The chair was taken by the aged leader of the National Party, George Pop de Băsești, together with the Orthodox Bishop of Arad, Ioan Papp, and the Greek Catholic Bishop of Oradea, Demetriu Radu. The main speech was given by Goldiș, who set out the history of the Romanians and the draft resolution. Maniu, Vaida-Voevod and the Social Democrat Jumanca, who announced the workers’ support for the union, also spoke.

The resolution was adopted unanimously. Its first point read: “The National Assembly of all the Romanians of Transylvania, the Banat and the Hungarian lands, gathered through their rightful representatives at Alba Iulia on 18 November / 1 December 1918, proclaims the union of these Romanians and of all the territories inhabited by them with Romania.” The assembly also proclaimed “the inalienable right of the Romanian nation to the whole of the Banat”, between the Mureș, the Tisza and the Danube. These lands were to keep provisional autonomy until a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage met.

The third point listed the principles on which the new Romanian state was to be based. First came “full national freedom for all the co-inhabiting peoples”: each was to be educated, governed and judged in its own language by people from its own ranks, and to have a share in the legislative bodies and the government proportional to its numbers. The resolution promised equal rights and autonomy for all denominations; universal, direct, equal and secret suffrage for both sexes from the age of 21; freedom of the press, association and assembly; “a radical land reform” that would allow every peasant to obtain as much land as he and his family could cultivate; and rights for workers such as they enjoyed in the most advanced industrial states of the West. Further points greeted the brethren of Bukovina, which a few days earlier had proclaimed union with Romania, and the liberated nations of the monarchy, paid tribute to the fallen and thanked the Allied powers. The last point set up the Great Romanian National Council, which was to represent the Romanian nation of these lands “always and everywhere before all the nations of the world” and to take all necessary decisions.

After the vote the resolution was read to the crowd gathered on the field below the fortress. One of the few surviving photographs shows the Greek Catholic bishop Iuliu Hossu reading it from the platform. Among the guests were representatives of Bukovina and of Bessarabia, which had joined Romania in April. Hungarian historians point out that the fate of the country was decided by an assembly of Romanians alone, without the participation of Hungarians, Saxons and Swabians, and that among the 1,228 delegates there were only a few dozen workers and craftsmen.

The Directing Council

The next morning the Great National Council, with about two hundred members, elected from its ranks a fifteen-member Directing Council (Consiliul Dirigent), which was to govern the country until final unification. Maniu was put at its head. Vaida-Voevod, Goldiș, Cicio Pop and Aurel Vlad became vice-presidents. The Council also included two Social Democrats, Flueraș and Jumanca. The Council divided itself into twelve departments, corresponding to ministries, and soon moved to Sibiu. On the same day the assembly appointed a delegation to take the resolution to the King in Bucharest. Its members included Goldiș, Vaida-Voevod, Hossu and the Orthodox Bishop of Caransebeș, Miron Cristea.

After the assembly

The Alba Iulia resolution did not yet settle who would rule Transylvania. Most of the country, including Cluj, Arad and Oradea, was still controlled by the Hungarian authorities, and the Banat was occupied by the Serbs. From mid-November, however, the Romanian army was advancing from the east, acting as an ally of the Entente by virtue of Romania’s re-entry into the war. It reached the line of the Mureș fixed in Belgrade. In the first days of December the commander of the French Army of the Danube, General Henri Berthelot, agreed that it could cross that line and occupy further towns. The Károlyi government protested against the Alba Iulia resolution, citing the Belgrade convention, which left the administration to Hungary. At a rally in Cluj on 22 December the Hungarians of Transylvania declared their loyalty to Hungary.

The Alba Iulia delegation presented the resolution to the King in mid-December. Ferdinand sanctioned the union by a decree signed on 24 December (11 December Old Style). On the same day Romanian troops entered Cluj. On 8 January 1919 an assembly of the Transylvanian Saxons at Mediaș endorsed union with Romania.

Significance

The Alba Iulia assembly closed a year in which Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transylvania joined the Kingdom of Romania one after another. A state that half a year earlier had been forced to sign a humiliating peace with the Central Powers more than doubled its territory and population. Romanians call these events the Great Union, and the resulting state Greater Romania. The border with Hungary was finally fixed, after the Hungarian–Romanian war of 1919, by the Treaty of Trianon, signed on 4 June 1920. The Banat was divided between Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Many of the Alba Iulia promises, above all those concerning self-government and the rights of national minorities, were not fulfilled in interwar Romania, and the Directing Council was dissolved as early as 1920. Since 1990, 1 December has been Romania’s national day.