villages—in November, schoolteacher Constantin Tănase of Olt was under surveillance for having collected signatures in support of the National Party agenda. In September, Alexandru's nephew, Beizadea Dimitrie Ghica, who had kept a low profile ever since 1848, publicized his own manifesto, which offered a crossover of liberal and conservative doctrines, chiding youth for the Talleyrand incident. This younger Ghica did not oppose union with Moldavia, but advised its partisans not to draw too much attention to their project. This revival failed to impress the returning exiles, with Serrurie writing in November that boyardom needed to be "burned alive and its ashes scattered". Heliade's conservatives, who maintained some links with the Ghicas, also began reorganizing themselves into a more cohesive group: by November, Heliade and his associate Niculae Rusu Locusteanu were putting out their own newspaper, Conservatorul, from exile in Bellinzona. It published political essays critical of other emergent factions, and praised the Caimacam as a balanced reformist. They differed from all other factions in their solution to the peasant issue, advocating collective farming and utopian socialism, and even suggesting the violent expropriation of boyar estates; Bolintineanu described their agenda as "something out of a madman's brain". Election firman After consultations with Western plenipotentiaries, the Sultan took the initiative and, on January 13, 1857, issued a firman sanctioning elections. This was read out publicly in Bucharest in March, and signed into law by Ghica in April. It set the voting age at 30, while splitting the electoral corps into five classes of voters, with massive enfranchisement. There were 10,141 qualified electors in Wallachia, as opposed to only 2,954 in Moldavia. At core, the Divans would still preserve corporatism as the electoral principle, retaining a characteristic of its 1840s predecessors; however, the firman introduced radically new divisions of the body politic, such as recognizing the political importance of liberal professions. Although, in the 1850s, guilds "no longer controlled production", they maintained some local importance as "professional and fiscal organizations", and were still assigned an electoral function. The document was also expressly against the political enfranchisement of Romanies who had been enslaved until 1856. Overall, there were 94 to 100 deputies. Accounts differ because of the unspecified number of supplementary seats for the Wallachian clergy, which now enfranchised priests and stareți. The bishops were members by right; clergy also elected 6 or 10 deputies altogether—4 of which represented the high clergy. Outside the