Creating Romanestan: A Place to be a Gypsy in Post-Nazi Europe

In May 1959, several French newspapers reported the news that the Gypsies had chosen and crowned their supreme chief with the exotic title of Vaida Voevod III in Enghien-les-Bains, a small locality north of Paris.⁷ Journalists reported that, at the ceremony, ‘Ionel Rotaru exchanged his blood with Danila’, the heir to the Nicolici clan. Black and white photographs of certain scenes made it possible to imagine the colourful clothing of the main characters. Other details that could not be recorded, tagged as ‘mysterious and unknown’, were left to the reader’s imagination. So-called expert observers jumped in almost immediately to challenge the authenticity of the coronation, claiming that such a form of political organization was not characteristic of the Gypsies and that the enthronements were media events, fleeting news of no real significance.⁸

The French authorities would have wished it were so, particularly the Interministerial Commission for the Study of Questions Concerning Populations of Nomad Origin, a group of representatives from the Ministries of Social Affairs, the Interior, Industry, Economic Affairs and Finance, Education, and Justice, all considered to be involved in the ‘Gypsy problem’. Indeed, they called Rotaru a fantasist, an opportunist and a pathological liar. Le Monde published an article entitled ‘The Imposture of Vaida Voevod III’, aimed at undermining the protagonist’s efforts as just another episode in ‘the history of royal imposture in the nomadic world’.⁹ Nonetheless, there was something special about this case featuring a ‘very intelligent but lazy young man of dubious integrity’, as the French intelligence services referred to him in an internal note in 1961.¹⁰ After his enthronement was called into question, various reports by the Renseignements Généraux (RG), the French information services, show that Rotaru was closely watched until he was neutralized as a Romani leader.

The Ministry of the Interior documentation provides such detailed reasons for this reaction and its effects that the historian cannot help but examine the inquisitorial policing logic that drove the guardians of national security to such ends. Thanks to the RG, we know that Rotaru was born in Bessarabia in 1918 and entered France illegally in 1947, shortly after the war ended. An early investigation, dated 1959, provides only sketchy details of his journey and reasons for his arrival in France, but clearly describes the life of this ‘refugee’ once settled in the country.¹¹ Rotaru had been a sailor in Marseilles and a miner in Lens before reaching Paris, where he had various jobs, including as a porter in Les Halles market.

The RG also recorded his intellectual activities, acknowledging that he had ‘some literary and artistic talent’. Some informant must have read enough of his novel, La Rhapsodie Roumaine, to be able to summarize its subject: the hard life in a Bucharest ghetto.¹² The 1959 and 1961 reports show that the investigation noted the earnings reported by the publishing contract for this work, titles of earlier and planned books, and the score of paintings for an exhibition, as well as many other details of his daily life: dwelling, contacts, schedules, employers’ opinions, his wife’s monthly wages, and so on.¹³

The five-page 1959 document and later ones in 1961, 1962 and 1967 provide useful data for reconstructing the history that interests us, but they can also be read for the logical structures and cultural resources used to organize the discourse. At this deeper level, suspicions of communism and its dangers intersect with deep-seated anti-Gypsy sentiment in the dominant culture. The obsession with screening Rotaru for possible connections with spy networks from the Eastern bloc was prompted by the strong anti-communist impulse in the Western democracies at that time. His compatriots were scrutinized for possible pro-communist ideas and his contacts kept under surveillance (all to no avail).

Anti-Gypsy prejudices are less explicit since they are anchored in naturalized assumptions that apparently require no explanation, one of the most persistent being Gypsy idleness. This assumption originated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary characterizations and was fully defined by the industrializing societies of the nineteenth century where the otherness of Gypsies in terms of utility, productivity and labour discipline was invented.¹⁴ Within this framework of reference, the data has been deleted and interpretations imposed; a description – in the same report – of Rotaru’s difficult life in France and the constraints imposed by work permits and labour market conditions seem to have no value. The RG emphasize his instability and constant job changes, attributed to laziness and a kind of ‘atavistic’ difficulty in adapting to manual work.¹⁵ Given the stereotyped views of the observer, it was not inconsistent to add that he was better suited to independent jobs, even if the work was harder (such as, precisely, a market porter).

More incomprehensible from this perspective was the fact that the individual under surveillance had enjoyed a degree of intellectual and artistic success, even though he had stated that he came from a literate family environment: an engineer father, one brother an architect, the other a journalist, in other words, a bourgeois upbringing that was not uncommon among the Romani in a number of European countries between the wars, as we have already seen.¹⁶ It is true that there was no reason for the RG to be aware of a sociological reality that Nazism had practically eradicated, destroying a promising associative and cultural fabric. Nevertheless, the ‘Note de Renseignements Généraux sur le nommé Rotaru Yvan’ (January 1967) was accompanied by the following sneering comment: ‘Although almost illiterate, ROTARU calls himself a “Man of Letters”’.¹⁷ In the worldview of the informant, Gypsy and literate did not collocate.

So far, there is nothing extraordinary to report. The police surveillance in the 1959 report was entirely consistent with the universal suspicion of any refugee from Eastern Europe who arrived in conditions of hardship.¹⁸ Rotaru would have left little other documentary trace in the French Interior archives were it not for the fact that, after his enthronement in 1959, he devoted himself to new activities that were regarded as dangerous because of their political nature. As an informative note, dated 28 October 1961, explicitly acknowledges, it was Vaida Voevod III’s announcement of his intention to address the UN to ask for recognition of a ‘Gypsy state’ that sparked off the ‘Rotaru affair’.¹⁹

In the post-war decades, Montreuil-sous-Bois had a sizeable Roma (mainly Kalderash) population. During the 1960s, the Roma writer Matéo Maximoff went so far as to situate ‘the Roma capital of the whole world’ in this suburban slum east of Paris. It was a place undergoing transformation, since the Romani families who had settled there were gradually moving out of their tents and shacks into permanent dwellings and becoming part of the recently urbanized landscape and civilian population.²⁰ Here, Vaida Voevod III lived with his wife in a one-bedroom apartment ‘on the third floor of an old dilapidated house in a poor street’: 75 Rue Victor Hugo. According to the Dutch writer, Nico Rost, on the door with no bell, there was ‘a yellowed and almost illegible card: Communauté Mondiale Gitane’.²¹

Rotaru created various associations including Les Amis du Peuple Gitane, in 1960, and the twin organizations, the Communauté Mondiale Gitane (CMG) and the Organisation Nationale Gitane, in 1961, all legally registered complete with statutes and administrative address in the couple’s own home. From 1962, and with scant material resources, the associative network published a bulletin, La Voix Mondiale Tzigane (Mensuel de la vie des Communautés Gitanes). From this ambitious home-made platform, Vaida Voevod developed diverse representative activities. Using press releases and a few testimonies, Liégeois and Klímová reconstructed various aspects of his role in the birth of the Romani political movement. Along with the information from the Ministry of Interior, we gain a much better appreciation of the way in which this activist skilfully connected culture and politics to position himself in public space. The specific added value of the government documents comes not just from the extra information, but from seeing in close-up the reaction that Rotaru’s actions elicited. The reaction itself shows the threat that De Gaulle’s government perceived in the project of ethnic mobilization that Rotaru claimed to lead.

This particular king, who said he did not reign but ‘watched over’ (veiller) his subjects, was certainly active.²² Not content to speak only on behalf of the Roma who lived under French authority, he designed an associative transnational network. His contacts behind the Iron Curtain (Poland, where the next CMG office was established, and Yugoslavia, where he was remembered years after his eclipse) probably owe much to his origins and movements before settling in France. The comprehensive Romani associative network that had been developed between the wars, precisely in Romania,²³ probably served as a model for Rotaru. Nonetheless, Vaida Voevod quickly created links in the West. In the UK and Ireland, he took up the cause of the travellers and tinkers, and Ronald Lee, a young activist from Canada joined in enthusiastically. Other social branches of the CMG were established in Frankfurt and Vienna. La Voix Mondiale Tzigane emphasized that ‘now is the time to unite’ and appealed to Roms, Manush, Gitanos, Yenish and other subgroups stigmatized by their nomadic Gypsy way of life to collaborate.²⁴

The heart of this network in Paris was Rotaru’s home, a two-room flat in Montreuil where he received journalists and ‘subjects’, drafted statements and speeches, wrote letters to the UN, prepared proposals for the French government or formulated demands to the West German government. A young man with some legal education, whose Romani name was Vanko Rouda, and in French, Jacques Dauvergne, was His Majesty’s right-hand man. Frequently introduced as ‘cultural attaché’, he was a key element in Vaida Voevod’s government and responsible for editing La Voix. He too came under police surveillance, especially when this ‘government’ run from 75 rue Victor Hugo started to be recognized as an interlocutor.²⁵ It may have been a fictional government that did not comply with the formal political parameters of the context, but it was effective and achieved things.

Its achievements included persuading the French Ministry of Education to temporarily finance a special education plan for Romani children in the Paris slums. Rotaru imagined it as sowing the seeds of a future with an international dimension, with a group of those educated in France becoming schoolteachers in other countries, and even hinted at the possibility of French becoming the second language of a people as transnational as the Romani.²⁶ As he declared in another interview: ‘our children need schools, scholarships to pursue their studies. We need to train cadres, to create an elite’. Only when the young were trained would the curse be broken: ‘our children are victims of atavistic distrust of us; Gypsy always rhymes with chicken-stealer’.²⁷

Among the initiatives that upset the French government was one in which the President of the CMG (another of the monarch’s various titles) addressed UNESCO with two demands: first, institutional aid for the literacy of the Romani people in consideration of their educational exclusion, and second, international recognition for their cultural capital – from music to language – now an endangered treasure due to so much historical persecution. The Director of UNESCO, the Frenchman René Maheu, sought information from the French government on how to respond to these demands, although it was recognized in principle that both objectives were completely in accord with the purposes for which this international body had been founded following the Second World War.²⁸

Basically, the CMG was cleverly positioning the issue of the civil rights of the Romani minority on the French political agenda in such a way that it would prevent the political class from looking the other way and even force a re-examination of the ‘problème gitane’. A letter sent by the CMG to all members of the National Assembly set out the various battle fronts, tying them together under two main headings: the creation of spaces suitable for nomads to camp (including access to educational resources) and putting an end to anthropometric cards. The letter closed with an offer of collaboration and a clear message: if the money that the French government had so far spent on the ‘Gypsy question’ had been invested instead in the way that the CMG suggested, there would no longer be a ‘gypsy problem’ in France.²⁹

Camping permits – and improving campsites – pinpointed one of the everyday forms of social and legal abuse historically suffered by nomadic communities, mostly (though not only) Romani. In De Gaulle’s France, prohibitions on camping were common, generally the product of illegal, abusive, but electorally advantageous initiatives by mayors. As in Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, there was a steady trickle of fatalities due to forced evictions from campsites. A second, closely related question was the obligation to carry special identity cards. Their very nature and purpose treated nomads – even those predominantly of French nationality – as if they were offenders: full-face and profile photographs, abundant anthropometric measurements, entry and exit visas from each locality and punctilious police control. These legal measures that pre-emptively criminalized the Romani people were widespread in Europe between the wars and were retained after the Second World War.³⁰

In his letter to the Assembly and in press statements and speeches, Rotaru continued to point out everyday forms of rights violations so flagrant that part of the French citizenry could well have found them unacceptable, particularly if he had successfully connected them to the ‘just causes’ that Western society would add to its cultural agenda in the 1960s. The struggle against racism in the name of human rights was one of these causes. The UNESCO World Conference against Racism, Anti-Semitism and for Peace, for example, at which Vaida Voevod spoke on behalf of the CMG, concluded that ‘fighting racism is an urgent and sacred duty for every man’.³¹ In spite of the different interpretations applied on either side of the Iron Curtain, the reinvention of the notion of human rights after the Second World War provided activists on quite diverse fronts with a common language with which to claim rights on behalf of different groups. It was a powerful discourse, in terms of both its ability to reach public opinion and its institutional impact.³² In this context, infringement of the civil rights of the Romani minority was starting to be politically awkward for the French government, which had no other choice than to recognize it and try to ‘humanize’ the question with some draft bills in the mid-1960s proposing reforms on the question of rights and halting sites, identity cards and control of movement.

Until that point, the so-called ‘Gypsy problem’ in France had been the responsibility of the Interministerial Commission for Nomadic Peoples, presided over by Pierre Join-Lambert (1906–1983), who was also Councillor of State from 1931. The commission was set up in 1949 to define the policy to be followed with respect to the ‘Tsiganes’ and other populations who could be grouped together with them because of their nomadic way of life, and who had been interned and deported during the Nazi occupation. The collaboration of the French authorities not only posed a political problem but a historiographical one. As Fogg maintains, the practice of the Vichy regime, acting under German orders, of forcing nomads to live in circumscribed areas – regardless of the differences in the racial conceptions of the notion of Gypsies – was a continuation of the pattern of forced assimilation initiated by the 1912 law. This policy was still regarded favourably by the Minister of the Interior in 1946 when the war was over.³³ Either way, the effectiveness of the Interministerial Commission, created in 1949 and headed by Join-Lambert was questionable, to put it mildly, even for the French government. An internal ministerial note acknowledges that the commission ‘met only five or six times in almost twenty years. The last meeting was back in mid-1965 and did not reach any practical outcome’.³⁴ It was only after pressure from civil associations such as the CMG that a political process to review legislation affecting the Roma started to open up. This pressure, together with Rotaru’s individual capacity for staging demonstrations in public places with media impact, pushed the French government into regarding the Romani population of the country also as legal subjects.

Nonetheless, to the further irritation of Join-Lambert, the demand for recognition of the rights of the Romani people that Rotaru set in motion was not merely confined to the political framework of France. After receiving the title of Vaida Voevod, Rotaru declared that he would travel from Mexico to Australia to fulfil his mission of looking after millions of subjects scattered worldwide. We do not know whether he visited those two countries, but we do know that he paraded his position in many others, including the young State of Israel, where he attended the Eichmann trial to draw attention to the murder of European Gypsies under Nazism. One of the CMG’s most pressing demands was recognition of the Romani genocide, with an accompanying claim for compensation for survivors.

The Romani genocide, barely figures in landmark public speeches even today and is the subject of few studies compared with the Jewish Holocaust and the persecution of others by Nazism; in 1960, it was completely ignored. Henriette Asséo summarizes the situation of the Romani as one in which, for a long time, ‘victims were not listened to, and historiography had no interest in a people for whom 1945 did not mean an end to discrimination’. This situation only began to change after 1972.³⁵ At a time when there were neither statistics, nor even awareness that the Nazi regime had killed approximately half a million Romani (the figure, though not certain, is generally accepted nowadays), Rotaru set in motion one of the first efforts to collect documentary evidence with which to reconstruct the Romani genocide in Europe. Unlike earlier initiatives, such as the one promoted by the Association of Sinti in Germany (created in 1952), which sought compensation for survivors, the purpose of the initiative promoted in France was primarily political, since apart from trying to obtain compensation for those who had not been collectively recognized as victims of Nazism after the war, its aim was to turn the demand for recognition into a platform from which to call for a future civic space that would protect those historically persecuted for being Gypsies.³⁶

The German branch of the CMG gathered most of the data and documentation used to address requests for compensation to the Bonn government, which had consistently rejected the claims of the Romani victims arguing that they had been persecuted by the police for their ‘asociality’ or criminality, rather than for racial reasons. Most of Rotaru’s applications failed, which damaged his credibility; he was even accused of keeping money obtained from this source.³⁷ The idea behind Romanestan, however, had rather more to do with denouncing the oblivion to which these ‘second-class’ victims of the Third Reich had been condemned, and his protests were decisive in breaking the silence that weighed on those who had to live with the trauma of survival, aggravated by the daily experience of continued social and legal contempt. As Rotaru explained to anyone who would listen, the persecution of the Romani under Nazism should be understood as a large part of the great moral dilemma that knowledge of the Holocaust presented in post-war Europe. Few understood the need for this as much as Nico Rost, the anti-fascist militant and Dachau survivor who wrote down his own experience of the concentration camps as part of a commitment to preserving the memory of those murdered.³⁸

In 1963, Rost interviewed Vaida Voevod in Paris to obtain further details of the suffering of those the Nazis had labelled ‘Zigeuner’, publishing his impressions in a Dutch weekly. After reflecting on the profound injustice of some victims being remembered and recognized while others were forgotten, this sensitive interlocutor suggested that the right to political existence should be included as one of the Romani people’s rights. Indeed, Rost’s article echoed Rotaru’s bold initiative in addressing the UN to demand ‘a statute of legal existence’ for his people, because, as he asserted ‘the Tzigane people consider themselves to be a single people, despite the dispersion of their groups and the lack of uniformity of their customs’. According to Rotaru, the CMG could supply the minimum institutional structure needed, which was why the UN was also asked to recognize the ‘main CMG offices in Paris and Vienna (Austria) as part of the diplomatic framework, with its legal, national and international rights’.³⁹

The notion of Roma as a diaspora people with a remote common origin (philologically determined as India) and even a non-territorial nation that ought to have the state to which they were entitled to guarantee their interests, had precedents and continues today in Romani activism. By the turn of the twentieth century, various projects had aspirations to create a possible physical ‘place’ or homeland for Romanies. The most famous one was in Poland, led by the Kwiek family, which established a royal dynasty with some success.⁴⁰ When Vaida Voevod recover the Romanestan proposal after the Second World War and included it in the discourse of the CMG, he connected with these earlier models, but transformed the formula with the future in mind, given the recent background of Nazi genocide.

The time was propitious because the example of Israel was in everyone’s mind and the birth of new states was a real possibility, not only for peoples with their own territories, such as the recently emancipated colonies, but also for diaspora peoples who had suffered all over old Europe. Rotaru made great play of the Israeli model. Apart from his previously mentioned interest in the Eichmann trial, he frequently collaborated with associations and movements fighting anti-Semitism, which earned him an interview in La Terre Retrouvée, the organ of the Fonds National Juif, under the explicit title of ‘A Gypsy Zionism’.⁴¹ Some scholars have adopted this interpretation,⁴² but although the Zionist model is clearly present in the Romanestan imagined by Rotaru, my contention is that it functions more as an opportunity framework than as a political model per se.

For many observers, the project would never work. Dora Yates dismissed Rotaru’s Romanestan as the stuff of ‘fairy tales’. In the opinion of this representative of the Gypsy Lore Society, it was nothing but a political fantasy that should be separated from the supposed real lives of the Gypsies, ‘real’ according to the notion of Romani sociological reality invented by this society, which was instrumental in creating the image of the Gypsies as a subject of study.⁴³ There is indeed a good deal of fantasy in the CMG project, but fantasy in the best sense: the ability to create something new from the rubble and to conceive the object of desire as a possibility.

Rotaru devised a political construct based on ethnic identity that went beyond the conventional limits of the modern nation state formula and did not fall back on a reactive view of its cultural foundations. His political inventiveness is well conveyed in the key question of territory. In many press statements about Romanestan, the possible place of residence shifted constantly; sometimes he would point to Somalia or ‘some uninhabited place’ in the Indian Ocean near the land of their origins, sometimes he spoke of somewhere much closer, like an estate that some followers were managing near Lyon. Observers considered this volatility as evidence that the plan had little substance. Nevertheless, it may be considered that, unlike the case of traditional nation states, specifying a particular territory was – intentionally – not an integral detail of Rotaru’s project. His interview with Rost is illuminating here. Rotaru showed Rost the flag of the Romani people that had pride of place in his office, then added:

I would like to plant it somewhere, even on a small desert island (maybe you know of something for us in your country? To buy or rent?) and set up a small museum with a concert hall, where Romani could give violin concerts. If only to prove to the world: we, Romani, are still here, we are a people, in the end 12 million Romani are still spread over the world, they have not killed us all. And especially to prove that we also have a culture and something to offer the world.⁴⁴

A small desert island – that they did not even have to own – where the flag could be planted was a creative way of representing the headquarters of an internationally recognized organization from where the interests and rights of those it represented could be legally managed. Rost was surprised (‘A strange experience: a king of the Gypsies in a Paris suburb asks a Dutch journalist whether it might be possible to rent an uninhabited island in his country’), but quickly answered his own question with a why not? ‘Why should it not be possible to keep up cultural relations from a poor back room on the third floor, in the poor suburb of Montreuil, instead of a richly furnished Consulate?’

The essence of Vaida Voevod’s talent for dramatizing and representing Romanestan was his skilful choice of symbols and his ability to articulate a discourse that would rally people to his cause. He was unable to exploit this political capital himself, but it undoubtedly inspired others. One example, particularly interesting for understanding the territorial conception of Romanestan, was the urban utopia of New Babylon, designed by the architect Constant Nieuwenhuys as a comprehensive response to the disasters of contemporary capitalist society.⁴⁵ Understanding the revolutionary potential of the Gypsy way of life that resisted the possessive obsession with territory, Constant chose another of Rotaru’s apt phrases – taken precisely from Rost’s interview – as the motto for his own project:

We [the Romani people] are the symbols of a world without frontiers, of a free world, where weapons will be banned, where anyone can roam, without constraint, from the steppes of central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, from the high plateaux of South Africa to the forests of Finland.

New Babylon was designed as a mobile city (society), free of the imperatives of bourgeois morality and its lifestyle. Rotaru’s Romanestan was a political utopia that was also not tied to a territory, but crossed it. It was not necessary as an identitarian reference, because a transnational, nomadic people like the Roma historically lived and moved across a number of territories without needing to make a bounded physical space a distinctive element of the imaginary community. A lightweight organizational structure – similar to Constant’s aerial superstructures – consisting of the international network of CMG bases was enough. If the UN recognized them, they could provide enough leverage to raise a virtual but real Romani ‘place’. The question of passports allows us to understand how this political entelechy would work in practice and also to evaluate the practicability of a utopia whose space was a territory without borders, a world different in kind from the one made up of nation states.

In 1965, after several years of persecution, the French government declared the associations founded by Rotaru illegal, arguing that they were led by a foreigner, a ‘stateless person’. Nevertheless, Rotaru continued his activities under the aegis of CMG centres in other countries, notably Switzerland. This came to light and became a legal matter when two Polish Romani women were detained in Vannes, Brittany, in 1971. When the police asked for their passports, which the women had already used to cross several borders, they saw that the documents, although very similar to official passports, were actually the work of the CMG endorsed with the signature of their ‘Supreme Head’. Immediately, ‘an individual who called himself the king of the Gypsies’ and president of the CMG turned up at the scene of the crime to inquire after his subjects who had been detained and to explain that the passports were documents of an association which, although illegal in France, had continued to function lawfully via 45 other delegations across the world. ‘His Majesty’ assured them that the documents were issued to ‘Gentlemen’ and ‘Ladies’ belonging to an Order of Romani Templars, presided over by himself.⁴⁶ Eventually, Rotaru too was arrested. An informative note kept in the Ministry of the Interior recorded these events, the hunger strike that Rotaru initiated, and the arguments for the defence and prosecution at his trial in Paris.⁴⁷

The idea of the ‘Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem’ was branded ‘canular’ (a hoax) and ‘escroquerie’ (a fraud), as were dramatizations of his authority. The airs and graces of someone who called himself ‘Son Altesse’ or hobnobbed with important people like Hitchcock or the occasional Rothschild at social events were also criticized. He was accused of opportunism, and it was also said of him that he exploited the ‘natural’ credulity of the Gypsies for his own personal advancement. This discourse took academic form some years later in the description of the enthronement of Vaida Voevod used by the scholar, François de Vaux de Foletier, to discredit Romanestan: ‘The main claim to fame was the training of Esmeralda’s performing goat for a film about “Notre-Dame de Paris”. The rather burlesque ceremony was restarted every time a new wave of journalists and press photographers was beckoned’.⁴⁸

Nonetheless, it is worth reflecting with an open mind on the significance of the titles and his dramatization of authority in Romanestan: a king who used the title ‘His Highness’ on his visiting cards, yet literally laughed at the form of address; the president of an association whose office was his own apartment, yet who unselfconsciously hobnobbed with the jet-set; a ‘supreme leader’ who invented an Order of Templars to honour subjects living in slums. He was also someone who, in addition to gracing his appearances with the proper protocol, wore – and was on occasion was photographed – flaunting the symbols of his power: in one of several feature articles in which he appeared, he is dressed in a white cape and carries a sword in his hand, like the grand master of an ancient military order.⁴⁹ His insistence on these performative elements of authority deserves to be addressed from the perspective of their subversive content, rather than the delegitimizing standpoint of official discourse at that time. In European culture, kings, grand masters of ancient orders and supreme leaders are easily recognizable representations of power. Rotaru wanted to use the political capital of these symbols and their associated rituals in the name of the people most in want of recognition. The act makes use of and simultaneously subverts traditional political hierarchies by placing them at the service of those who have nothing. The image of Vaida Voevod attending to his Polish Ladies in the Vannes prison sums it up well. Seen in this light, Romanestan would be less a State than a political refuge, a radically deterritorialized, even delocalized, political entity that could be invoked by the ‘stateless’ of the world.

This was not necessarily a fairy tale, but could become reality if the informal transnational network created by the CMG were legally recognized. Indeed, the worldwide offices of the CMG became a central issue at Rotaru’s trial regarding the passports. His defence was based on the slim possibility that the CMG offices in other countries would be recognized as having legal existence (and rights). By involving Interpol, the prosecution succeeded in demonstrating that the offices did not physically exist, which left Rotaru without the protection of an association that had been made illegal in France six years earlier. Whether the police inquiries were fair or motivated by the desire to see the head of the king of the Gypsies roll once and for all is irrelevant now. Even if those 45 international CMG offices did not physically exist, Rotaru certainly had genuine contacts of cooperation and communication with real leaders and communities in other countries, from Turkey to Canada. It was a virtual network that could potentially be used to construct a common platform for the defence and representation of Romani interests.

Rotaru’s Romanestan clearly activated a process of raising ethnic awareness with political purposes in mind, by situating the subject of rights and sovereignty within what he referred to as ‘We, Roms’. The ethnicization process based collective identity on a series of typical cultural elements: music, represented by instruments, like the violin; a common language, Romanes; history, centuries of persecution as a people; memory, preserved in stories told by elders; and the green and blue symbol of the flag.⁵⁰ At the same time, Rotaru conceived this ethnic identity as compatible with universality, which was a basic component of his political culture. Like other activists of his generation, Rotaru believed in universal rights, their value, symbology and language.⁵¹ The Universal Declaration of Human Rights hung beside the Romani flag in his tiny office and appeared on the CMG-issued passports in the space reserved for the bearer’s country of origin. His imagined community had a transnational political framework highly consistent with that universalism: ‘Do not forget that, for us, the world is a single country’, he once told an interviewer. According to that account, the Roma would be the most universal people, because they had protected values as essential to humanity as freedom and love of peace in the tragic twentieth century. The Gypsies, therefore, could show the remainder of humanity, lost and divided by national conflicts, the way to the future.⁵² Conversely, but in the same vein, his expressions of love for France were neither instrumental nor opportunistic. When Rotaru commented that France was the most appropriate place for the birth of Romanestan, he was demonstrating his confidence in the universalism implicit in the slogan of its historic revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity.

The guardians of De Gaulle’s France did not, however, share the same version of the revolutionary motto. In a European context marked by rapprochement with West Germany, Rotaru’s activism and demand for Romani rights soon became a nuisance. Even before this, the French political scene was tense as a consequence of the war of independence in Algeria (where the Rouda family was from). Police repression of anyone considered ‘undesirable’ became more heavy-handed after the Paris massacre in 1961, with the Algerian conflict in general serving as a cause of tension.⁵³ Given this background, neutralizing Rotaru as a leader – the personal wish of Join-Lambert – would be seen as a logical choice. Apart from the associations that Rotaru promoted being made illegal, the smear campaign directed against him at the passport trial led to his demise as a public figure. After 1971, Vaida Voevod scarcely appears in the press and there is no trace of him even within the Romani movement itself.

The official reaction against Rotaru was a reaction against the possible development of a Romani ethnic consciousness that would remove the Gypsies from State control: the Interministerial Commission, social services and religious assistance. For politicians with official responsibilities, such as Join-Lambert, the attempt to promote a nationalist Gypsy movement had to be stopped by whatever means possible, including police harassment, political vacuums and co-optation of those ready to collaborate with the state project of ‘respectful assimilation’.⁵⁴ The Catholic Church also spoke out against Rotaru. Abbé André Barthélémy, Aumônier National des Gitans et des Tziganes, was categorical: Rotaru was a fraud, an impostor who exploited French Gypsies for personal benefit, and, apart from anything else, he was not even a Gypsy.⁵⁵

These arguments are inscribed within a long history of denial of ethnic identity in the case of the Roma. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, amanuenses in Spain who proposed solutions for the ‘Gypsy plague’ claimed that they were not a culturally distinct people from the Orient, but simply bands of common criminals who acted under that name. Likewise, the language of the Gypsies, caló, was not a different language from Spanish, but prison slang.⁵⁶ British Gypsiology was consolidated through the work of several generations of scholars who considered themselves qualified to define what characterized ‘true’ Gypsies as opposed to false or impure ones, using, precisely, language as the test of purity. Construction of the ‘True Gypsy’ as scientific object proceeded in parallel with George Borrow’s invention of ‘Romani Rye’, a rank which the most eminent Gypsylorists attributed to themselves. George Borrow, self-styled patron-cum-friend of the Gypsies, introduced himself as protector of and go-between with the Gadje world, based on his extensive knowledge of Romanes: a highly unequal relationship despite its mantle of romanticism.⁵⁷

A century later, the same logic of expert knowledge – whether from Church spokesmen or the French political authorities – would shape official discourse against Rotaru’s ethnic activism. Abbé Barthélémy denied the ‘Gypsy credentials’ of the defendant, citing as his authority his own knowledge ‘as an ethnologist and ecclesiastic’. Among other evidence, the assertion that Rotaru did not speak Romanes, whereas he did, and well, seemed to be especially conclusive. His statement discrediting the ethnicity of the individual was grounds for repudiating the collective political project. As this expert claimed to the newspaper, Le Figaro, ‘there is no Gypsy people or Gypsy nation’. As an ethnologist, he set out the reasons for the Gypsies’ alleged inability to organize themselves politically: ‘their lack of education, their spirit of independence, their nomadism prevent them from creating a homeland for themselves or accepting the authority of a leader’.⁵⁸

As political adviser for nomadic populations, Join-Lambert was aware of the value of expert knowledge and had in fact begun to play his cards in this game, even before the appearance of the ‘visionary fabulist’ (as he referred to Rotaru). In 1955, he used his position as a platform to create the association of Etudes Tziganes, which was crucial for the future development of Romani studies in France. Decades of studies – colloquia, publications, ‘tziganologues’ who collaborated with the administration, Romani writers like Maximoff contributing to the association’s journal – were assembled in the prestigious publication, Etudes Tziganes. In the journal’s tribute to Join-Lambert in 1983, one of the major experts, Vaux de Foletier, praised precisely his meticulous obsession for terminological detail, writing that he did not want to use the term peuple (people), but the word ‘population’ to refer to those Tziganes that he had helped so much.⁵⁹

The debate about Rotaru’s Gypsy status graphically illustrates the mechanisms used to operate the manoeuvres of denial, appropriation and neutralization of ethnic identity. In the crossfire of conflicting statements, Rotaru’s presentation of himself as a ‘Rom’ (‘because that is what we call ourselves’) and his efforts to invent symbols of Romani identity were publicly discredited whenever they confronted official discourse. This discourse, delivered from positions of political and cultural power, gobbled up even that narrow space from which the CMG and the idea of Romanestan had emerged. Denial of Rotaru’s credentials by Tzigane spokesmen ran parallel with rejections of his plan to promote a Gypsy state or country, which was considered unfeasible, not to say dangerous. Beyond this reaction, which bears some resemblance to the historical maturation of the Zionist project, modernization of the Romani political movement also involved the symbolic sacrifice of the figure of Vaida Voevod. The movement took a leap forward after 1970, propelled by Vanko Rouda, its former secretary,⁶⁰ who formed a new association (the Tzigane International Committee, later the Romani International Committee), which gathered together the remains of the shipwreck and deliberately sought to distance itself from the image of Rotaru and the most utopian part of his project, Romanestan.

Nevertheless, a utopia is not an illusion suspended in a vacuum of impracticability, but a political and aesthetic impulse aimed at action, which makes it possible to imagine the horizon of the future and advance towards it.⁶¹ Join-Lambert objected because Rotaru managed to achieve things, seemingly trivial things – like speaking at conferences on racism at the Sorbonne or organizing demonstrations outside the UNESCO headquarters – that unsettled him as guarantor of the ‘national interest’. And he was right. Rotaru’s initiatives concerning war reparations, passports and the right to education contributed decisively to putting the question of Romani marginalization on the political map of post-war Europe, as well as opening the door to an autonomous movement with supranational organization. Several of Rotaru’s ideas and initiatives concerning rights, symbols and instruments would be inherited by the International Romani Union (IRU). This association was set up in London in 1971 at a meeting in which the former secretary of the CMG and Rotaru’s right-hand man, Vanko Rouda, played an important role; his action was fundamental in the preparatory work that led to the conference held in London. This was a major breakthrough in the international organization of the Romani movement, in so far as the IRU achieved recognition by obtaining NGO observer status at the United Nations in 1979. ⁶²

In this context, Rotaru’s story reveals the value of utopia as a criticism of the present and an impulse towards the future. He contributed decisively to establishing the road map for a Romani movement based on ethnicity. Nonetheless, his concept of collective Romani identity as a transnational identity in which cultural particularism was compatible with political universalism had few chances of achieving success within the contemporary hegemonic framework of nationalism and resulting international relations. His utopian vision of the possible ‘place’ of the Roma in the world is the reason for his relevance, as well as his subsequent obscurity.

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I would like to acknowledge the funding of the HAR2015-64744-P Research Project (Gobierno de España).