on the Bărăgan". In the 1990s, during debates over the overall number of victims of the Communist regime between 1947 and 1964, Coposu spoke of 282,000 arrests and 190,000 deaths in custody. After his release, Coposu started work as an unskilled worker on various construction sites (given his status as a former prisoner, he was denied employment in any other field), and was subject to Securitate surveillance and regular interrogation. After the collapse of communism, Tudor Călin Zarojanu published large excerpts from the huge Securitate file on Corneliu Coposu, kept for decades by the secret communist political police His wife Arlette was also prosecuted in 1950 during a rigged espionage trial, and died in 1966, soon after her release, from an illness contracted in prison. Coposu managed to keep contact with PNȚ sympathisers, and re-established the party as a clandestine group during the 1980s, while imposing its affiliation to Christian Democracy and the Christian Democrat International. Post-communism On 22 December 1989, (during the Romanian Revolution), he and prominent members of the party issued a manifesto that confirmed the PNŢ's entry into legality, under the name Christian Democratic National Peasants' Party (PNȚ-CD). For the rest of his life, Coposu was the main voice of the opposition to the National Salvation Front (from 1992, the Democratic National Salvation Front). Present at his party's headquarters, he was targeted by during the January 1990 Mineriad (the first of the Mineriads) on 28 January 1990. The Prime Minister Petre Roman addressed the angry mob who wanted to lynch Coposu and the other leaders of the democratic opposition, pretending to mediate the conflict. In an attempt to create a resemblance between how the dictator Ceaușescu exited the armored vehicle before his trial and Coposu's flight, under the pretext of protecting Coposu from the angry crowd, Roman commissioned an armored vehicle to drive him to the headquarters of the Romanian National Television where Roman promised Coposu that he could make a statement which would be aired later that day. The statement was recorded but it did not air. No copy of the recording was ever found in the archives. Coposu successfully grouped various organizations into the Romanian Democratic Convention (CDR), of which he was the leader between 1991 and 1993. He was elected to the Senate of Romania in the 1992 general election. In 1995, the government of France granted him the Grand Officier de la Légion