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5 In Search of the Perfect Citizen 69

fellow citizens in need and to run throughout the world to help other people. Therefore, religion should cooperate with the other social and political inStitutions in order to animate the christians through its holy teachings to love with preference their fatherland and their fellow citizens” ³*. We can notice that Aaron Florian hesitated to draw the conseąuences from this potential contradiction and tried to say that there was no real conflict at all. Morę comfortable, the speakers avoided in their school speeches the whole subject and tried not to think that christianity and patriotism might sometimes not go together.

The word llomanian is often used in the discourses, but it is not yet connected with characteristics which should confer to the Romanian a spe-cific identity. The good Romanian is a normal good Christian and a good Citizen, whose only distinction from other nations was that he spoke Romanian. Language became thus the main characteristics of nationality, a fea-ture quite common in East-Central Europę ¹⁸. This explains all the strug-gles of intellectu ais for education in Romanian and not in French or in other languages.

In comparison with the problem of language, the other elements cha-racterising a nation and giving identity to it (a historical mythology, national symbols and ceremonies etc.) are less stressed officially, although sometimes the speakers try to strengthen the pride of being Romanian. The appeal to history is most often very generał, and the attitudes of the speakers towards the past are not homogenous. Most of them try only to magnify the achie-vements of the present or of the near past, insisting on the worthiness of their teachers, sometimes of their late benefactors, and especially on the une-ąualled ąualities of the reigning prince, while only few try to describe some period in the past as being remarkable and to stimulate thus their contem-poraries to strive to equal the praiseworthy ancestors. Wben tryingto locate these exemplary ancestors in the past, the speakers seem to encounter some difficulties due to their and/or their audience’s scanty knowledge about Roumanian history. Therefore, I. Codru-Dragusanu tries to use as exam-ple the ancient Romans ¹⁸, while other speakers apply for the same purpose to some of the Romanian medieval princes. The use of such medieval historical characters is not yet homogenous. There is no stable list of princes men-tioned by morę than one speaker.Usually, the speakers appeal tooneor another of the princes, according morę to local traditions than to the releyance of the historical character to the subject they are discussing. A good example of the local affiliations is Negru-Voda, the mythical founder of the Wallachian State, who appears only in two discourses from our sample, both held in the city of C&mpulung, the first residence of the Wallachian princes²⁰. Other princes

¹⁷    Aaron Florian, Patria, patriotul si patriotismul, Bucurefti, [1843], p. 46 — 47.

¹⁸    Leslie Laszlo, Nationality and Religion in Hangary (1867—1918), in "East Euro-pean Quarterly”, 1983, XVII, no. 1, p. 43. See also: Andró Mirambel, La litterałure et la langue, vecteurs de la conscience nationale chez les petiples du sud-est europeen, in, Les lumtires et la formation de la conscience nationale chez les petiples du sud-est europłen, Bucureęti, 1970, p. 17-20.

¹⁸ I. Codru-Drlgusanu, Cuventu scolasticu pronuntiatu tn 15 Nouembrie 1847 cu occasiu-nea deschiderii scóluleroru tn Ploiesci, in '‘Universul”, 1848, IV, no. 1, p. 5.

²⁰ See in "Muzeul Naponal”, 1836, I, no. 31, p. 254 [122] D. Jianu's discourse and also CuoSutul Dlui I. Brezoianu, rostit cu prilejul vizitdrii 1. Sale Domnultii Tdrii, in “Foaie pentru minte, inimi si literaturl”, 1844, no. 41, p. 324.