Cătălin Mihuleac

Against the backdrop of Franco-Romanian relations from the First World War to the early communist postwar period, Cătălin Mihuleac's "Les Demoiselles de Fontaine" unfolds the story of a cultural fraternization forged through education, language, and personal loyalties, ultimately shattered by political means. At its heart are the French officer and later university professor Marcel Fontaine, his Romanian companions, and especially those young women whose Francophilia is condemned as guilt under the communist regime. This review interprets the novel less as a historical narrative than as a European reflection on the fragility of cultural ties: France appears not primarily as a state, but as a projection screen for humanism, education, and universalist values, while Romania is portrayed as a space of appropriation, hope, and eventual disillusionment. Mihuleac demonstrates, the review argues, that while cultural transfer shapes identities and connects generations, it remains extremely vulnerable without institutional protection. What was considered moral capital in the interwar period was criminalized after 1947. The review further highlights the character Petru Negru, whose joyful engagement with folklore and ethnography appears not as regressive superstition, but as an alternative form of knowledge in which historical experience, collective memory, and a resistant understanding beyond official ideologies converge. By intertwining fairy tales, folklore, and historical chronicle, the novel paints a picture of a European promise that shatters not through individual failure, but through systemic change. The review therefore emphasizes the text as a literary monument to a failed, yet blameless, project: it is not the people who fail, but the political orders that cannot sustain cultural loyalties.