Societăți secrete, loje și masonerii. Între mitul conspirației și construcția societății civile românești (sec. al XIX-lea)
Secret Societies, Lodges and Freemasons. Between the conspiracy myth and the construction of Romanian civil society (19th century)

Summary/Abstract: The last decades of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century were also marked in the Romanian space by the agglutination and crystallization of two apparently contradictory processes: the establishment of the Romanian national identity and the organization of the national struggle, and the organization of civil society, with the mission of democratizing and making the political life of society transparent. In order to dislodge the old political arrangements based on police control, censorship, etc., the national elites resorted to various forms and means of action; on the one hand, to the politics of conspiracy and plotting, after the Italian Carbonari model, or to masonic lodges and fraternities, i.e. secret associations and societies, fashionable throughout Europe. They replaced the political activity carried out in legal forms (the political opposition in the Public Assembly) because the civil society was in the process of being organized and was still proving fragile, and they offered their members (conspirators, conjurers, freemasons) a space of freedom and personal security, for the spread of new ideas and new programs for social and national emancipation. As such, although secret or discrete structures of a special nature, surrounded by an imaginary conspiratorial halo, secret societies, masonic lodges fortified civil society and contributed to the realization of the ideals of this time (the decades of the middle of the 19th century).

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