PENTRU O ISTORIE SOCIALĂ A PRIVIRII: ADNOTĂRI LA DOSARUL DE POLIȚIE AL LUI NICOLAE IORGA
FOR A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE LOOK: ANNOTATIONS TO THE POLICE FILE OF NICOLAE IORGA

Summary/Abstract: The importance of police documents during La Belle Époque does not reside only in the information provided; they also bring permanently into discussion familiar terms for historians: “event”, “context”, “causality”. It is well known that newspapers live off anything that contradicts the dullness of everyday life. However, Nicolae Iorga’s file thus acquired a shape, because a police taken by surprise fails to justify its existence. Nervous that a fact out of the ordinary may have occurred, the agents of Siguranța chose to deal with its symptoms, its premises. Not coinci-dentally, I have listed laconic, sometimes stereotypical reports, highly illustrative for a certain type of mindset: in the view of the police officer, a mere announcement could acquire at a certain point the value of a precedent. Hence, unlike the press, police practiced a type of lucidity that prevented the “event” from entering the semantic area of the word “notoriety”. The fact per se or its echoes were not important; they focused on conjecture, on the set of underlying causes, leading to some assassinate, to some suspension of diplomatic relations, to a government’s fall, etc. Without ignoring random interests and caprices or the ideas that we invoke to justify our options, the police file hereof teaches us that the event is some kind of plebiscite, some social test: by the degree of spontaneity in their reactions to it, people either come together or separate. The event is no longer necessarily the cause or effect of others; it is the condition of possibility for certain evolutions where continuity – namely the persistence of eternally similar acts – fears a potential continuation, one where the same transforms and becomes another; for history to choose a point from where to begin again.

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