Paul Morand et le groupe Criterion

Abstract. Paul Morand and the Criterion group. The nineteenth-century French traveler Paul Morand used to say that Bucharest was a meeting point more than a city: «Bucarest, un petit Paris au milieu d’un grand village». This paper focuses on the efforts of Mircea Eliade, Petru Comarnescu, Dan Botta, Mircea Vulcănescu, Mihail Sebastian, Eugen Ionescu, Emil Cioran and Constantin Noica to modernize Romanian culture during the 1930s following the Greek model of the ancient polis. Through conferences dedicated to Lenin, Mussolini, Freud, Greta Garbo, Gide, Valéry, Bergson, Krishnamurti, Gandhi, Charlot, Proust, members of the Criterion group brought world culture to Bucharest and delivered it to their fellow citizens in the form of a Platonic dialogue.