The Prison Notes is a short, posthumous volume of prison writings by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, founder of Romania’s Iron Guard, composed during his imprisonment in 1938 and published here in an English translation together with introductory material and Julius Evola’s writings on Codreanu and the Legionary Movement. It is not a sustained literary work but a fragmentary record—fewer than fifty pages of notes—in which a condemned political leader sets down his suffering, his Christian devotion, and his struggle against despair. The 2015 Logik Forlag edition presents it as essential reading for admirers of both Codreanu and Evola.
“The king merely manufactured a martyr.”
The Man Behind the Notes
Greg Johnson’s introduction establishes who Codreanu was and what the Iron Guard represented. Born in September 1899, Codreanu founded and led the Legion of the Archangel Michael, also called the Legionary Movement or the Iron Guard—a movement Johnson describes as fascist in all essentials: nationalist, racialist, traditionalist, authoritarian, aristocratic, militant, anti-capitalist, anti-communist, and anti-Semitic, promising national rebirth through the renewal of Romania’s deepest traditions.
Johnson frames the movement through Codreanu’s own claim that fascist movements defend three things: vital force, or race; form, meaning social and political order; and spirit. Where German National Socialism stressed race and Italian Fascism stressed political order, the Iron Guard stressed the spiritual. Johnson therefore calls it essentially an initiatic spiritual-military order that entered politics—ascetic in regimen, given to fasting, prayer, and military training, even including a battalion of Suicide troops sworn to celibacy, with the whole Legion emphasizing self-sacrifice for the common good. He reaches for analogies: the Iron Guard is somewhat like what the NSDAP would have been had it grown out of the SS rather than the reverse, but closer still to the Knights Templar or Teutonic Knights, because the Iron Guard was deeply and essentially Christian—Romanian Orthodox specifically. Yet something in it went beyond Christianity: the Legionaries were prepared to sacrifice their souls as well as their bodies, willing to incur the wrath of hell itself for their fatherland.
Codreanu’s political career began in 1923 in opposition to the emancipation of Romanian Jewry. In November 1927 he founded the Legion, a young group averaging twenty-seven years of age, drawn largely from college students and the peasantry.
The Editor’s Frame: Carol II and the Road to Prison
A second editorial introduction sketches the career that led to the prison notes. From the Legion’s founding, Codreanu’s life was ceaselessly active: community organizing and political action, including occasional assassination and pogrom—the editor likens the Legion to the Muslim mystical order of the Assassins. The Iron Guard was banned and legalized by turns; Codreanu and other Legion leaders were both imprisoned and invited into cabinets.
From 1930 his main opponent was King Carol II, called the “fascist” king—fascinating yet repugnant. In 1925 Carol had eloped with Magda Lupescu, daughter of a Jewish pharmacist, who became his third wife; consequently he was removed from the line of succession. When his father King Ferdinand died in 1927, the throne passed to Carol’s five-year-old son Michael under a regency. In 1930 Carol returned to Romania and effectively mounted a coup against his own son, installing himself as King Carol II and ruling not by right of succession or Romanian law but as a quasi-fascist dictator. After trying to co-opt and contain the Iron Guard, he decided to suppress it: in April 1938 he had Codreanu and other Legion leaders arrested. Codreanu was convicted of treason on fabricated evidence and sentenced to ten years of hard labor.
The prison notes come from this period. The editor is candid about their scale: under fifty pages, they do not stand alone as a literary work—little more than a footnote to Codreanu’s principal book, For My Legionaries—yet they remain powerful and necessary reading for admirers of the Capitanu and his cause.
Suffering, Small Creatures, and the Passion of Christ
What the notes themselves record is a man voicing his suffering, anguish, and outrage, and his struggles to keep despair at bay. The loneliness of confinement is underscored by touching stories of solicitude for a puppy, mice, and even a grasshopper, with which he shared his meager rations even as lice and fleas fed on his increasingly frail body. Though the church betrayed and condemned him, his notes give much room to intense Christian piety, particularly meditations on the passion of Jesus—rightly so, the editor observes, for the enemies of Christ and the lies and subterfuges they used were largely the same, as were the eventual outcomes.
Martyrdom, the Legion’s 131 Days, and the Case Against Monarchy
The volume’s closing argument follows the Iron Guard’s fate. As Hitler’s star rose, the Legion grew more militant, sensing power was near. Fearing deposition, King Carol ordered Codreanu and thirteen other Legion leaders murdered on the night of November 30, 1938; they were strangled and shot, their bodies drenched with acid and entombed under seven tons of concrete. The king merely manufactured a martyr: Codreanu became more powerful in death and the Legionaries more militant.
In 1940, after Carol II was forced to cede Romanian territory first to Stalin, then to Hungary and Bulgaria, he was deposed and exiled with Magda Lupescu, whom he eventually married in 1947. His son Michael returned to the throne, and the Iron Guard under Codreanu’s successor Horia Sima formed a National Legionary State in uneasy alliance with Marshal Ion Antonescu, head of the Army, appointed Prime Minister two days before Carol’s abdication. The Iron Guard used its power to settle accounts, rehabilitating Codreanu and assassinating his enemies; but when they tried to oust Antonescu they were defeated and their leaders exiled. In the end the Iron Guard ruled Romania only 131 days. In 1944 King Michael arrested Antonescu and handed him to the Soviets, who eventually put him to death; the King himself was deposed and exiled in 1947.
From this the text draws a pointed lesson: Hitler was surely relieved he had demurred on proposals to restore the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany after observing the treachery of their cousins in Romania in 1938 and 1944, not to mention the House of Savoy’s role in deposing Mussolini in 1943. Racial nationalists in Europe, the argument runs, are foolish to let historical sentiment and aristocratic principle bind them to the remnants of the old monarchies and aristocracies—a trans-national and anti-nationalist bunch of largely degenerate snobs who typically cannot suffer the necessary rise of a new aristocracy of blood and character. Such an aristocracy can incorporate the best elements of the old but should abolish their traditional status and prerogatives whenever feasible. These dynasties snuffed out rival dynasties out of mere ambition; deposing them for the good of the race is far gentler treatment than they meted out to their rivals.
What the Book Is Finally About
Read as a whole, the volume is less a memoir than a martyr’s fragment framed by admirers. Its center is the prison text itself: a record of squalor and loneliness transfigured by piety, in which a puppy, mice, and a grasshopper become companions and the passion of Christ becomes a template for present persecution. Around that center the introductions supply the political narrative—the founding of the Legion, the duel with Carol II, the fabricated treason conviction, the night of November 30, 1938—and the closing pages convert the story into an argument about legitimacy, monarchy, and the claims of a new aristocracy. The editor’s own assessment sets the scale: a document of under fifty pages, subordinate to Codreanu’s main book, yet charged with the suffering and conviction of a man who, in the volume’s telling, became more powerful in death than he had been in life.
