Bucharest at the Crossroads

When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, bucharest was called “little Paris,” the nickname implicitly measured the distance that Romania had covered on the road to modernization and westernization. The process was slow, because there were huge discrepancies between the efforts of a minority elite pushing for the entrance of the country “into Europe” and the indifference of a majority population with minimal standards of living. Despite important events favorable to the country's development—the union of the Romanian principalities (Moldavia and Walachia) in 1859 and its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878—Romania was, for most of the nineteenth century, still a province of the Ottoman Empire.