Editing Carol II of Romania (section)

==Personality cult==
{{main|Carol II of Romania's cult of personality}}
[[File:Regele Carol II si Mihai 20 septembrie 1936 (Viata ilustrată).jpg|thumb|King Carol II and Crown Prince Michael at Astra Congress, 20 September 1936, Blaj, Romania]]

To compensate for his rather negative and well-deserved "playboy king" image, Carol created a lavish [[Carol II of Romania's cult of personality|personality cult]] around himself that grew more extreme as his reign went on, which portrayed the king as a Christ-like being "chosen" by God to create a "new Romania".<ref name="Boia" /> In the 1934 book ''The Three Kings'' by [[Cezar Petrescu]], which was intended for a less educated audience, Carol was constantly described as being almost god-like, the "father of the villagers and workers of the land" and the "king of culture" who was the greatest of all the Hohenzollern kings and whose return from exile from France via airplane in June 1930 was a "descent from the heavens".<ref name="Boia" /> Petrescu depicted Carol's return as the beginning of his God-appointed task of becoming "the maker of eternal Romania", the start of a glorious golden age as Petrescu asserted that rule by monarchs was what God wanted for Romanians.<ref name="Boia" />

Carol had little understanding of or interest in economics, but his most influential economic advisor was [[Mihail Manoilescu]] who favored a statist model of economic development with the state intervening in the economy to encourage growth.{{sfn|Bucur|2007|p=113}} Carol was very active in the cultural realm, being a generous patron of the arts and actively supporting the work of the Royal Foundation, an organization with a broad mandate to promote and study Romanian culture in all fields.{{sfn|Bucur|2007|p=115}} In particular, Carol supported the work of the sociologist [[Dimitrie Gusti]] of the Social Service of the Royal Foundation, who in the early 1930s started to bring social scientists from various disciplines like sociology, anthropology, ethnography, geography, musicology, medicine, and biology together in a "science of the nation".{{sfn|Bucur|2007|pp=115–116}} Gusti took teams of professors from various disciplines to the countryside to study an entire community from all vantage points every summer, who then produce a lengthy report about the community.{{sfn|Bucur|2007|p=116}}