Iliescu wants to be exonerated by King Mihai from all the abusive, illegal acts and mystifications that he and his people committed against the royal family. Last Saturday, by an initiative which is already perceived as historic, Ion Iliescu addressed King Mihai the invitation to participate in the ceremony occasioned by the re-opening of the Romanian Art Gallery of the National Art Museum, located in the Royal Palace. The king refused to accept this "sign of reconciliation". Why? Because the "historic invitation" coming from the Cotroceni Palace was intended to make us perceive King Mihai as a grateful beneficiary of "the open perspective" promoted by the Bucharest authorities, and not as a historical character to whom IIiescu and the Romanian state owe not only apologies, but also the assuming of an entire anti-monarchical mystique, extremely rudimentary and aggressive, that they have been cultivating since 30 December 1947. There are a series of legal, moral and historical arguments which support the necessity of these apologies. An extreme legal argumentation could support the idea that the 30 January 1947 abdication act is null, since it was realized under the pressure of a very aggressive threat; at the same time, one may say that all the juridical acts related to the constitutional right which derive from this decision are null. The Romanian people had not been consulted previously in order to give legitimacy to such an act which is, as a matter of fact, derived from the political practice. After 1990, the communists' campaign, meant to denigrate the idea of monarchy, adjusted to the new political situation in Bucharest: the king became the head of the bourgeois' reactionary party, whose members wanted to become a ruling force again, in order to "drink the people's blood". By being repeatedly asked not to visit his own country, Mihai the Ist was humiliated in