Constantin Dobrescu-Argeș

Constantin I. Dobrescu-Argeș
Bust of Dobrescu in Curtea de Argeș, by Frederic Storck.
Member of the Romanian Assembly of Deputies
In office 1889–1898
Constituency	Argeș County
Personal details
Born	June 28, 1856 Mușătești, Wallachia
Died	December 10, 1903(1903-12-10) (aged 47) Mușătești, Kingdom of Romania
Nationality	Romanian
Political party	Peasants' Committee (1881–1888) Conservative Party (1888) Radical Party (1889) Partida Țărănească (1894–1899)
Relations	Alexandru Valescu (brother-in-law)
Profession	Schoolteacher, jurist, activist, cooperative organizer, playwright

Constantin I. Dobrescu, better known as Dobrescu-Argeș (June 28, 1856 – December 10, 1903), was a Romanian peasant activist and politician, also active as a teacher, journalist, and jurist. Active from his native Mușătești, in Argeș County, he established a regional, and finally national, base for agrarian politics. He is considered Romania's second agrarianist, after Ion Ionescu de la Brad, and, with Dincă Schileru, a revivalist of the peasant cause in the Romanian Kingdom era. Dobrescu was notoriously unpersuaded by agrarian socialism, preferring a mixture of communalism and Romanian nationalism, with some echoes of conservatism. Thus, he stopped short of advocating land reform, focusing his battles on democratization through universal suffrage, and on obtaining state support for the cooperative movement. He himself founded some of the Kingdom's first cooperatives, also setting up, model schools, the first rural theater, and the first village printing press—which put out his various periodicals.

Although well liked by cultural and political figures of all hues, with whom he collaborated on various projects, Dobrescu's clandestine support for the concept "Greater Romania" made him a political liability. Technicalities were invoked to block him out of the Assembly of Deputies, despite his repeatedly winning in elections. Eventually, he served four contiguous terms in the 1880s and '90s, moving from alliances with the Conservative and Radical Parties to the position of an isolated independent, and, in 1895, to leader of his own Partida Țărănească ("Peasants' Party").