Photo:

Cartoon’s title: “Political drollery”
Comment: “The freedom of elections is guaranteed.”
Bobârnacul (The Flip), anul II, no. 19, 16 March 1879, by Vim or Vinu

Short abstract:

From the very onset of modern voting procedures in the 1850s in the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia / Romania, candidates, politicians, and voters alike strongly denounced irregularities, fraud, and interference in elections in this pre-democratic period of census-based voting. The aim of my research is to explain the paradox of the simultaneous strong normative condemnation and the systematic and recurring practice of electoral corruption by all the relevant historical actors from the 1850s up to 1914.  The ample political freedoms, including freedom of expression and of the press, were counterweighed by the restricted suffrage which allowed limited citizen access to politics and elections, and by low literacy levels. The period also marked a high point for both nation- and state-building.

My focus in this paper will be on the physical and rhetorical violence in electoral politics in the 1850s-1870s. I will discuss, first, electoral fraud and interreference – subsumed in the then (in)famous expression “moral influence” – that included a wide range of (physically) violent techniques of influence, control, mobilization, or dissuasion of voters, in the context of a fierce rivalry between the two main contenders, the Liberals and the Conservatives that dominated parliament and politics. Second, I will examine the polemical and violent vocabulary and rhetoric of excess and satire that permeated the press, occasional publications (such as pamphlets), the official documents, and the parliamentary debates, when historical actors condemned electoral interference and corruption.

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This event is organized within the ERC research project Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850) hosted by New Europe College.