CAROL II

born Oct. 15, 1893, Sinaia, Rom. died April 4, 1953, Estoril, Port. king of Romania (193040), whose controversial reign ultimately gave rise to a personal, corporatist dictatorship. The eldest son of King Ferdinand I, Carol became crown prince upon the death of his great uncle, King Carol I (October 1914). His domestic life was a constant source of scandal, marked as it was by a morganatic marriage with an officer's daughter, Zizi Lambrino; a second unhappy marriage to Helen, daughter of King Constantine I of Greece; and a continuing liaison with a Jewish adventuress, Magda Lupescuan affair that finally obliged him to renounce his rights to the throne and go into exile (1925). Although he was officially excluded from the Romanian succession by an act of January 1926, as well as by his father's will, he returned in 1930 and replaced the regency that had governed for his young son Michael, taking the royal oath on June 8, 1930. Flamboyant and energetic, an admirer of the authoritarian methods of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, he gradually undermined the already uncertain bases of Romanian democracy; and in February 1938, to counter the growing political menace of the chief national Fascist group, the Iron Guard, he proclaimed a corporatist dictatorship. In December 1938, to supplant the then disbanded political parties and provide a program of social reform, he established the Front of National Rebirth (Frontul Renasterii Nationale) with himself as head. After Romania was divested of territory in Transylvania, Dobrogea, Bukovina, and Bessarabia by the Axis powers and the Soviet Union during World War II, he was forced to abdicate (Sept. 6, 1940) in favour of his son Michael and once again seek exile. He married Lupescu in July 1947.