Les élites et la modernisation de la société roumaine au XIXe siècle.

If in the previous periods the boyars had been the only Romanian social category likely to provide an elite, after the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) and especially during the second half of the century we witness the emergence of the bourgeois class, whose interested are reflected by the new institutions, inspired by the West and criticized by many as "forms without substance" unsuitable for Romania. The century of modernization was also the time of a major ideological clash between conservatives and liberals, and between two cultural models--French revolutionarism and German evolutionism. The liberal reforms implemented at the end of the First World War (agricultural and electoral) marked the end of the historical mission of the boyars, of the great landowners, and the disappearance from political life of the Conservative Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]