Coandă resigns

The British chronology of the war records under 12 December 1918 the resignation of the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Romania, General Constantin Coandă, and under 14 December the appointment of Ion I. C. Brătianu in his place. Under 1 December it also states that Coandă became prime minister. In fact the general had headed the government since 6 November (24 October in the Julian calendar, which Romania still used at the time), when the king, under pressure from the Entente, dismissed the Marghiloman cabinet. Romanian lists of governments give the Coandă cabinet as in office until 11 December (28 November Old Style), and the Brătianu government as taking power on 12 December (29 November Old Style). The change thus took place on the day the chronology gives, and Brătianu’s appointment two days earlier than it records.

A caretaker government

The Coandă cabinet, made up mostly of generals and non-party experts, was regarded from the outset as a caretaker government meant to prepare the Liberals’ return to power. In five weeks it took Romania through its return to the war on 10 November, declared mobilisation, and its troops occupied Bukovina. By decrees of 19 November it dissolved the parliament elected under Marghiloman’s government, declared all its resolutions null and void, including the ratification of the Treaty of Bucharest, and announced elections by universal suffrage. At the end of November the government and the court returned from Iași to Bucharest. The former prime minister Alexandru Marghiloman considered the cabinet merely a “registry office” for Brătianu, who was really directing policy.

The change in Bucharest

On the morning of 12 December, as Marghiloman noted, the newspaper Izbânda carried on its front page the news of the general’s resignation and that Brătianu had been called upon to form a government, which was to be constituted that same day. One of the ministers, Oscar Kiriacescu, gave Marghiloman the official version of events: there had been no formal resignation; the king had consulted only Brătianu, who declared that he was ready to take power once Coandă had reported to the monarch that he had fulfilled the four points of his mission. The new cabinet was ready that same day. Of the former ministers, Coandă himself, the war minister General Eremia Grigorescu, the chemist Petru Poni and Alexandru Cottescu left. The war ministry was taken over by the previous interior minister, General Artur Văitoianu. The Liberal George Mârzescu became interior minister, and the government also included, among others, Mihail Pherekyde, who was to deputise for the prime minister during his stay in Paris, and Ion Gheorghe Duca. The finance minister Kiriacescu and the justice minister Dumitru Buzdugan stayed in the cabinet.

Brătianu, leader of the National Liberal Party, who in 1916 had brought Romania into the war on the side of the Entente, became prime minister for the fifth time and kept the foreign ministry for himself. The next day a delegation of Romanians from Transylvania arrived in Bucharest, with the bishops Miron Cristea and Iuliu Hossu, Vasile Goldiș and Alexandru Vaida-Voevod, and presented the king with the resolution of the assembly at Alba Iulia. Brătianu gave a dinner in its honour at the Hotel Boulevard.

Before the peace conference

The new prime minister at once began preparing for the peace conference. He headed the Romanian delegation himself, and in Paris he defended the treaty of 1916, which had promised Romania Transylvania, the Banat up to the Tisza and Bukovina. The great powers, however, refused to treat him as an equal ally, because in 1918 Romania had concluded a separate peace. The dispute over the Banat and over the minorities treaty led Brătianu to resign in September 1919. In December 1919, under the next government, Coandă signed the peace treaty with Austria at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on Romania’s behalf, and later joined the party of General Alexandru Averescu.