Doina Cornea (; 30 May 1929 – 3 May 2018) was a Romanian human rights activist and French language professor. She was a dissident during the communist rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She was co-founder of the Democratic Anti-totalitarian Forum of Romania (Forumul Democrat Antitotalitar din România), as the first attempt to unify the democratic opposition to the post-communist government. This organization later transformed into the Romanian Democratic Convention (Convenția Democrată Română, CDR), which brought Emil Constantinescu to power. Early life Born in Brașov, Romania, Cornea began studying French and Italian at the University of Cluj in 1948. After graduation, she taught French at a secondary school in Zalău, where she married a local lawyer. She returned to Cluj in 1958, where she worked as an assistant professor at the Babeș-Bolyai University. Her first political engagements were made in 1965, when, she witnessed how a friend of hers was criticising Charles de Gaulle in Strasbourg, France. Whilst she was expecting the police to turn up and arrest the person, she was surprised when she saw that nobody came. Ashamed of the political constraints that were pressing against Romania at the time, she felt ashamed and this pushed her into starting political activism. Dissidence under communism In 1980 she published her first samizdat book, Încercarea Labirintului ("The Test of the Labyrinth") by Mircea Eliade translated by her from French; then four other samizdat translations followed. Protest letters She illegally sent the first letter to Radio Free Europe in 1982, the first in a series of texts and protests against Ceaușescu. She saw the crisis not just a material/economic one, but also a spiritual crisis, the Romanian people "a people fed solely on slogans", who value more material values rather than spiritual values, which she defined as the ones which "generated intelligence, ethics, culture, liberty and responsibility". At the end of her letter, she apologized for not revealing her name, but she signed the letter to show that it was authentic. Due to a misunderstanding, Radio Free Europe read the letter in full, including the name. On September 15, 1983, she was fired from the university because of her political activity, the official reason being that she gave her students to read the diary of Mircea Eliade. In the second letter which was published by BBC and Radio Free Europe, she protested against the restrictions that were put forward to the academia and