Free and Independent Faction

Free and Independent Faction Fracțiunea Liberă și Independentă (Fracționiștii)
Personification of the Faction as a headless body (Ghimpele, February 1868)
Leader	Nicolae Ionescu (first) Dimitrie Tacu (last)
Founder	Simion Bărnuțiu
Founded	c. 1864
Dissolved	c. 1884
Merged into	National Liberal Party Conservative Party
Headquarters	Iași
Newspaper	Tribuna Română (1866) Dreptatea (1867–1870) D̦iorile (c. 1868) Uniunea Liberală (c. 1871–1873) Gazeta de Bacău (c. 1871) Mișcarea Națională (c. 1880)
Ideology	Ethnic nationalism (Romanian) National liberalism (Romanian) Republicanism Regionalism (Western Moldavian) Federalism Communalism Nativism Economic antisemitism Anti-Germanism
Political position	Center-left to far-left
National affiliation	Concordia (1867–1869) Unified Opposition Committees (1883)
Politics of Romania Political parties Elections

The Free and Independent Faction or Free and Independent Fraction (Romanian: Fracțiunea Liberă și Independentă, sometimes Fracțiunea Liberală și Independentă, "Independent Liberal Faction",^[1][2][3][4] commonly Fracționiștii, "The F(r)actionalists") was a nationalist and national liberal party in Romania, regionally centered on Western Moldavia. Originally informal, and defined by its adversaries, the Faction mainly comprised pupils and followers of the philosopher Simion Bărnuțiu. During most of its existence, it had as its recognized leader the academic and polemicist Nicolae Ionescu.

Consolidated during the election of Carol I as Domnitor, the Faction opposed his rule, favoring either an elective monarchy with a native prince or a republican system. Secondary Factionalist leaders included Dimitrie Tacu, Alecu D. Holban and Nicu Ceaur-Aslan, who had varying levels of involvement with Western Moldavian separatism in 1866. The group's nativism bordered on violent xenophobia, endorsing economic antisemitism and anti-Germanism. The party also stood for democratization, including radical land reform and a reshaping of the census suffrage, while its regional ethos resulted in support for federalism, then communalism.

Such stances created tension between the Factionalists and most other groups on the left-liberal fringe, making the Faction an uneasy partner in the "Red" government alliances of the 1860s and '70s. For pragmatic reasons, Ionescu and his followers defended Carol against the conspiratorial movement known as "Republic of Ploiești", but did not entirely reject its agenda. Soon after this incident, a conservative and monarchist movement emerged in Moldavia around Junimea club, with whom the Factionalists had a consuming rivalry. A Moderate Liberal Party, headed by Ionescu's rival Mihail Kogălniceanu, also drained the Faction of its votes after 1877. Prolonged controversies surrounded Factionalist participation in the local government of Iași city and Covurlui County. Within this setting, Factionalists participated in the effort to establish a National Liberal Party (PNL), but then withdrew from it.

Ionescu's career peaked in 1876, when he was Minister of Foreign Affairs in the "Red" cabinet of Ion Brătianu, and began to separate himself from the Factionalists. He was deposed for his opposition to the war of independence, which also brought clashes between the PNL and the Faction over the issue of Jewish emancipation. In 1879, the Faction was narrowly prevented from forming the national government alongside conservative "Whites", after which it steadily declined in importance. In the early 1880s, after a brief alliance with the newly formed Conservative Party, most of the Faction dissolved into the PNL, which had emerged as the dominant "Red" group in the Kingdom of Romania. A Factionalist dissidence survived as part of the Conservative-ran Opposition Committees, but also lost members to the PNL; the last surviving Factionalist cell, formed around Holban, became a Conservative chapter in the 1890s. Some of the party tenets, in particular its antisemitism, were revived in the 1910s by A. C. Cuza and his Democratic Nationalists.