Diplomat Grigore Gafencu

The generation of those who fought in the trenches of WWI gave the 20th-century Romania Grigore Gafencu, a jurist, politician, diplomat, journalist and leader of the anti-communist exile after 1945.

Steliu Lambru, 28.02.2026, 14:00

Grigore Gafencu served his country without reservation and sought to promote its interests both in his official capacities and during his exile after 1945. He was born on January 30, 1892 and passed away on his birthday, in Paris, in 1957, at the age of 65. As a young lieutenant of 24, he took part in the battles during World War I as a pilot on the few airplanes at the time. After the war, he earned his PhD in law at the University of Bucharest and worked in the printed press. He entered politics and joined the National Peasant Party (PNT), was elected to parliament, and during the PNT government of 1928-1933 he was a senior official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1938 he joined the totalitarian party National Revival Front and, on the same year, was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Between 1940 and 1941 he served as ambassador to the USSR, and until 1944 he was exiled in Switzerland, in Geneva.

Grigore Gafencu was one of the defenders of the idea of ​​a united Europe and author of volumes. In 1944 his book “Preliminaries of the War in the East” was published, in which he proposed projects for the organization of post-war Europe in the form of sub-regional groups or confederations. In 1946 he published the volume “The Last Days of Europe”, which describes the travels he took in 1939 and 1940 in several European capitals continent. After the war, disappointed by the failure of the return to democracy in all of Europe, Gafencu became involved in the organizations of anti-communist Romanian exiles. He participated in the founding of the Free Europe Committee in New York, and was a member of the Romanian National Committee, the most important organization of Romanians in anti-communist exile. He was also one of the founders of the League of Free Romanians.

At the launch of Grigore Gafencu’s volume of parliamentary speeches, diplomat Dumitru Preda recalled his personality: “He was also a hero in the First World War, for which he received honorable distinctions, who knew what the battle for life and death meant, who had seen death with his own eyes. He was the one who had brought Victor Antonescu to solve the problem of Romania’s decision to re-enter the war, Victor Antonescu being at that time the Romanian minister in Paris, but who had a connection with the French allied government. All of this created not only diplomatic but also spiritual ties between the actors of those times. Gafencu, through his speeches, urges us to always find something more, an idea that leads to a step forward for humanity. If we do not have this trust in the creative human spirit, it means being defeatist, it means actually leaving ourselves empty in the face of forces that are anti-national, anti-human.”

In turn, historian Constantin Hlihor says that Gafencu can also be seen as an ordinary politician: “We are dealing with a politician in his entirety, because he is also an excellent connoisseur of domestic political life. These parliamentary speeches, few in number, if we consider the entire interwar period, have two layers: Grigore Gafencu’s parliamentary speech when he was on the ministerial bench or in the condition of being a parliamentarian and his speech as a parliamentarian when he was in opposition. When a politician is in opposition, he observes, criticizes everything that makes a political system not work. When he reaches government and has the laws at his disposal to administer the power given by the people for a limited time, he forgets all the limitations and all the flaws that that legislation has.”

But Gafencu was a politician sensitive to anything that would influence the big politics of his country. Constantin Hlihor: “What surprised me, and this shows us that we are dealing with a politician of great stature, was that in his interventions he did not leave out any of the problems that society needed a solution to. We will find here speeches on the legislation in the economic and financial fields. Of course, it is the perspective, it is his way of understanding the need for norms and rules in the administration of the country’s finances and the way in which society should manage the capital it had in order to create prosperity for everyone.”

Gafencu was, however, very attentive to the principles of democracy when the state was faced with challenges and the government was often forced to use the state of siege, a fact emphasized by Constantin Hlihor: “What is very interesting here, on the state of siege: he, at a certain point, makes a distinction between the need to defend the constitutional order, the state order. But it is very interesting that he says it is not the need to defend a political system. By this, he showed that when such laws and norms are taken by a government, that government must be careful not to bring society into a state of not being able to change political power through the consent and will of the voter.”

Grigore Gafencu, the man of the three worlds, the one before 1918, the one from the interwar period and the one after 1945, adapted and moved forward. And his ideas had to wait until 1989 to once again become the foundations of what he had wanted. (EE)