Together with its paramilitary wing, the Iron Guard, it grew into one of Europe’s more violent Fascist movements. In 1937 it secured a substantial share of a large right-radical vote, and in 1940–1, in alliance with General Antonescu’s army, it briefly commanded Romania’s ‘National Legionary State’. In February 1941, having rebelled against its military allies, it was suppressed. The Legion’s ideology expounded a peculiar variation on the theme of ‘Blood and Soil’, giving a special place to ‘the bones of the ancestors’. In resurrecting Romania’s fortunes it claimed to have created one national community of the quick and the dead. Party rituals centred on a death cult. Meetings began with a roll-call of fallen comrades, whose names were greeted with the shout of ‘Present’. Earth from the tombs of saints was mingled with the ‘blood-soaked soil’ of Party battlefields. Grandiose ceremonies attended the exhumation, cleaning, and reburial of the corpses of Party martyrs.
