There are few historical sources attesting to Nicolae Balcescu's membership as a member of Freemasonry in the pre-Pasoptist and Pasoptist periods, even though he is also recorded as Venerable Master of a Bucharest Masonic Lodge in 1847. Without finding any complementary archival sources, these few notes make Balcescu's Masonic activity remains shrouded in mystery.
However, we have more consistent data about his activity as a member of some secret carbon companies. Balcescu's first participation in a revolutionary movement was in 1840. In his writings he relates the involvement of a secret society in the plot, stating that the revolt "had been prepared both by occult propaganda and by open propaganda." Balcescu had been initiated into D. Filipescu's secret society by J. A. Vaillant. The mentor of the organization was considered to have been the mason Eftimie Murgu.
In 1843, together with Ion Ghica and others, he founded the Societatea Secreta Fratia, an organization of Carbonarian origin, with the motto "Justice ‑ Brotherhood", which secretly prepared the start of the revolution of 1848, in Wallachia. Two years later, in 1845, together with other patriots, he founded in Paris the Society of Romanian Students, a kind of external branch of the Secret Society Fratia, which will be recognized as a legal entity by the French authorities in 1847. ‑Philanthropic, the purpose of the association was to prepare the liberation of the Moldavian, Muntenian and Transylvanian Romanians from under the foreign yoke and the restoration of the old Dacia.
A member of the Provisional Government in 1848, Balcescu supported the reformist program, and after the defeat of the revolution went into exile, supporting the accession of the Romanian National Revolutionary Committee to the Central European Democratic Committee, founded by Mazzini in London in 1850. Balcescu's work in exile dedicated to the ruler Mihai Viteazu, symbolizes the very political-national ideology of the Pasoptist generation: Daco ‑ Romanism.
Much has been written about Balcescu's revolutionary activity, but we still know very little about his conspiratorial actions in secret societies. With a critical analysis of the sources and sources, the book of the historian Gheorghe Bichicean, seeks to reveal, at least in part, the mystery that still surrounds the personality of the illustrious Romanian patriot and his status in secret societies.
Arh. Bogdan Constantin Dogaru