Romanian Front with Carol's encouragement. During the same time, Carol developed close contacts with Armand Călinescu, an ambitious National Peasant leader who founded a faction opposed to the leadership of Carol's archenemy Iuliu Maniu, and wanted the National Peasants to work with the Crown. In the same way, Carol encouraged the "Young Liberal" faction headed by Gheorghe Tătărescu as a way of weakening the power of the Brătianu family who dominated the National Liberals. Pointedly, Carol was willing to allow the "Young Liberal" faction under Tătărescu to come to power, but excluded the main National Liberal faction under the leadership of Dinu Brătianu from obtaining power; Carol had not forgotten how the Brătianus had excluded him from the succession in the 1920s. In February 1935, the Legion's leader,Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, who until then had been regarded as an ally of Carol, for the first time attacked the king directly, when he organized demonstrations outside of the royal palace attacking Carol after Dr. Dimitrie Gerota had been imprisoned for writing an article exposing the corrupt business dealings of Lupescu. Codreanu in his speech before the Royal Palace called Lupescu a "Jewish whore" who was robbing Romania blind, which led to an insulted Carol calling on one of the members of his camarilla, the Bucharest police prefect Gavrilă Marinescu, who sent the police out to break up the Iron Guard rally with much violence. The doubts about the French willingness to undertake an offensive against Germany were further reinforced by the Remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, which had the effect of allowing the Germans to start building the Siegfried line along the border with France, something that considerably lessened the prospect of a French offensive into western Germany, if the Reich should invade any of the states of the cordon sanitaire. A British Foreign Office memo from March 1936 stated that the only nations in the world that would apply sanctions on Germany for remilitarizing the Rhineland if the League of Nations should vote for such a step were Britain, France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and Romania. In the aftermath of the remilitarization of the Rhineland, and once it was clear that no sanctions were going to be applied against Germany, Carol started to voice his fears that the days of French influence in Eastern Europe were numbered and Romania might have to seek some understanding with Germany to