Exilul şi moartea: povestea celui plecat în imaginarul celor rămaşi acasă. Cazul Al. I. Cuza
Exile and death: the story of the gone in the imaginary of those who stayed. Alexandru Ioan Cuza’s case

Summary/Abstract: The paper does not deal with the self-projections of the exiled, but with the evolution of his memory in the society that had first excluded him, and then tried to get him back, especially in his posthumous period, when he does not make a threat any more. As a defining case study for the relation between memory and oblivion, the author puts forward Alexandru Ioan Cuza’s story, the first prince of the United Principalities of Romania (Moldavia and Wallachia), from 1859 to 1866. Dethroned after a coup d’état on the 11th February 1866, he left for exile passing through Vienna, Paris, Florence, Heidelberg, etc. Untimely deceased, on the 3rd May 1873, he was brought back home the same month, in a mortuary train, to be solemnly buried in the yard of his residence of Ruginoasa. Although he had been expelled from the country under the accusations of authoritarianism and corruption, Cuza entered the country, after seven years of exile, as a hero and father of modern Romania. Somewhere between vagrancy and holiday, exile stimulated both the accounts of the exiled and the evocations of those who had remained home. Obviously, when the repatriation occurred after death, this was not the exile who made the account any more, but those who, eventually, were accepting the outcast to return into his motherland. Moreover, the funerary context was a good pretext to reiterate the whole biography of the rehabilitated. It was thus reintegrated into the collective history, and the fellows re-appropriated it, tardily, but as pompously as possible, to compensate, somehow, the initial injustice. It was not the traveller coming back home who had the last word now, but those who were waiting for him; not the one who moved, but the ones who stayed. The former was making a last trip, the latter were accepting a first remembering. Under the effect of remorse, a certain empathy with the exile’s sufferance appeared; the society showed signs that by commemoration, it wanted to symbolically accompany him in all his peregrinations, wandering, post factum, by his side. The physical distance between a different person and us makes us re-evaluate, once he/she is dead, the time we had spent with him/her. Thus, temporary distance from those that were declared unwanted changes our perceptions, mitigates aversion; the distance towards such characters does not result in the outcasts’ oblivion, but on the contrary, in their monumentalization.

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