A Failed Constitutional Experiment: The Monarchical Constitutionalism and the Organic Regulations of 1831-1832

Abstract

In this paper I intend to give a brief account of the context, causes, structure, aims and dynamic of what I decided to label the Romanian ‘monarchical constitutionalism without octroy’, as a subspecies of the monarchical constitutionalism. After a short account of the geopolitical, political, legal and social contexts specific to the Romanian Principalities at 1830, I shall address the provisions of the ORs against the accepted standards of the monarchical constitutionalism and follow their subsequent developments in the Romanian constitutional and political praxis. My core idea is that the Russians have borrowed from France and imposed the specific constitutional mechanisms of limited monarchy for geostrategic purposes, in a Romanian society organically incapable and, above all, having a political class manifesting very short interest in effectively applying them. At the end, the monarchical constitutionalism was a failed Russian experiment. At 1849, after the Wallachian Revolution of 1848, the Convention of Balta-Liman, concluded between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, has amended the ORs replacing the limited monarchy with a full-fledged monarchical absolutism.