George Bariţ (Hungarian: Báricz György, 1812 - May 2, 1893), often rendered as George Bariţiu, was a Romanian historian, philologist, playwright, politician, businessman and journalist, the founder of the Romanian language press in Transylvania.
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Born in Jucu de Jos, Jucu, Cluj County, he was the son of the Greek-Catholic priest Ioan Pop Bariţ, and of Ana Rafila. He attended school in Trascău (today Remetea, Alba County), and then highschool in Blaj and Cluj. Originally trained for priesthood, he decided instead to become a teacher at the Romanian language commercial school in Braşov.
In 1838 he founded in Braşov the first Romanian newspaper in his native region, and named it Gazeta de Transilvania. Politically active, he was an important personality in the revolution of 1848 in Transylvania, establishing connections with Romanian nationalists and radicals in Wallachia and Moldavia, and using Gazeta as one of the main political voices demanding equal rights for Romanians and Transylvanian Hungarians after the Hungarian nationalist revolutionary government began pressing for Transylvania to be removed from direct Austrian supervision.
After the revolutionary episode, in the period between the creation of an Austrian military government for the region and the Ausgleich, Bariţ returned to cultural and business activities. In 1861, alongside Andrei Şaguna, Timotei Cipariu, he founded Asociaţia Transilvană pentru Literatura Română şi Cultura Poporului Român (ASTRA). He was its first secretary, and subsequently became its president.
Between 1852-1872 Bariţ was the Commercial Director of one of the first manufacturing companies in Transylvania with Romanian private capital, the Fabrica de hârtie din Zărneşti (Pulp and paper factory in Zărneşti, located west of Braşov in central Romania). During the 1870s he also acted as an adviser to the Founder and the Board of Administration of the Banca Albina, the first bank with private Romanian capital in Transylvania.
As a result of the first free elections in Transylvania in the spring of 1863, following Austria's introduction by imperial decree of representative democracy in its territory in 1861, Bariţ became a Member of Parliament in the Dieta Transilvaniei (Transylvanian Parliament) where the ethnic Romanians formed the majority. After 1863, he participated as one of the twenty-six official parliamentary delegates of the Transylvanian Parliament in the second (1863–1864) and third (1864–1865) parliamentary sessions of the central Austrian Parliament (Reichsrat, now National Council of Austria) in Vienna. There, as a full Member of Parliament, a full Member of the Finance Committee and a full Member of the Committee for the Transylvanian Railway, he held several speeches on the imperial financial and trade policies, on foreign policy, on central policies of the government in Vienna towards the Romanian Church United with Rome, and promoted reforms of public finance in Transylvania, as well as specific local interests of Transylvania within the Austrian empire. After mid-1865 he did not continue to go to other sessions of the central Parliament in Vienna, since the political effects of the Ausgleich moved Transylvanian central representation from Vienna to Budapest.
In December 1866, following the beginnings of the Ausgleich, Bariţ initiated and drafted together with Dr. Ioan Raţiu (1828–1902), the first Memorandum of the Romanians of Transylvania, addressed directly to emperor Franz Josef I of Austria and signed by 1,493 Transylvanian intellectuals, asking for the maintenance of the administrative and political autonomy of Transylvania within the Austrian empire and within Austrian supervision. This Memorandum was submitted to the emperor in December 1866 and is a precursor of a second memorandum, the Transylvanian Memorandum, submitted in 1892.
Between 1884 and 1888, Bariţ served as president of the Romanian National Party in Transylvania and Banat.
When ASTRA began publishing the review Transilvania, Bariţ was the main person involved in its editorial ventures, and became one of the authors of the very first Romanian-language Encyclopaedia (published in Sibiu after his death, between 1898 and 1904). His main personal work, published between 1889 and 1891, was Părţi alese din Istoria Transilvaniei pre două sute de ani în urmă ("Selected Episodes of the Past Two Hundred Years in Transylvania's History").
Bariţ was a founding member of the Societatea Literară Română (1866), a precursor to the Romanian Academy. Of the latter he was elected in 1868 its head of the historical section, its vice-president in 1876 and its president in 1893. He died in Sibiu a couple of months after his election and is buried in the graveyard of the "Biserica dintre Brazi" church in Sibiu, along with other major Romanian Transylvanian leaders.