Marghiloman becomes prime minister of Romania

On 18 March 1918 (5 March by the Julian calendar, which Romania used), King Ferdinand I entrusted the conservative Alexandru Marghiloman with the task of forming a government. Marghiloman arrived in Iași that day and was appointed at once. As the outgoing prime minister, General Alexandru Averescu, noted in his diary, the decree was brought to him for countersignature at six in the evening. The new prime minister also took the Ministry of the Interior, and the foreign affairs portfolio went to his party colleague Constantin Arion. A British chronology of the war records both appointments only under 21 March, but Romanian sources and Averescu’s diary point to 18 March.

Marghiloman, born in 1854 in Buzău, a lawyer educated in Paris, had sat in parliament for more than thirty years and had several times been a minister, among other posts Minister of the Interior in the government of Petre P. Carp in 1910–1912. From 1914 he led the Conservative Party, which traditionally favoured ties with Germany and Austria-Hungary. In 1914–1916 he argued for neutrality and did not join the government of Ion I. C. Brătianu when the latter was leading the country into the war on the side of the Entente. After the Central Powers’ troops took Bucharest in December 1916 he did not leave for Moldavia, but as president of the Romanian Red Cross acted as an intermediary between the occupation authorities and the population. In doing so he rejected German ideas of setting up in Bucharest a government to rival the king’s. Constantin Arion, of the same age as the prime minister, was a barrister and lecturer in law, and in 1900–1901 Minister of Education in Carp’s government. Until 1907 he belonged to the Liberals, then went over to the Conservatives.

This was exactly the kind of government the Central Powers wanted. The Austro-Hungarian foreign minister Ottokar Czernin had already indicated on 27 February, in a conversation with the king, that a Marghiloman cabinet would accept the peace terms. According to his memoirs, Marghiloman wanted to know the exact terms before agreeing. He considered the cession of the Dobruja unavoidable, knowing that Vienna and Berlin had bound themselves on this matter by a promise to Bulgaria. In return Czernin promised him to reduce the Austro-Hungarian frontier demands in the Carpathians by about half and to give up inhabited places such as Turnu Severin. Marghiloman also stipulated that he would not form a government if Germany insisted on its demand to occupy Wallachia for five or six years after the conclusion of peace. He took office only when Czernin assured him that the occupation problem would be resolved.

The change of government came at the last moment. On 19 March the armistice extended at Buftea was due to expire, and the Central Powers, alarmed by Averescu’s resignation, threatened to harden their terms or break off the talks. The Entente representatives received the appointment with reluctance. The French minister, Count de Saint-Aulaire, had assured Averescu even before it that he had nothing to do with “the Marghiloman affair” and could not look on it favourably. For many Romanians the new prime minister was “the Germans’ man”, while his supporters saw him rather as a politician taking upon himself the thankless task of saving the state.

Marghiloman’s government conducted the further negotiations with the Central Powers. On 7 May 1918 Marghiloman and Arion signed in Bucharest a peace treaty that King Ferdinand never ratified. In April, under Marghiloman’s government, Bessarabia joined Romania. The cabinet fell at the beginning of November 1918, when the defeat of the Central Powers was already certain.