Abstract The scholarship on fascism has routinely explored the relationship between anti‐Enlightenment critiques of liberal modernity and democracy and the emergence of concepts of cultural, political and biological regeneration before the First World War. This is powerfully illustrated by Roger Griffin’s recent book on modernity and fascism. This article applies Griffin’s conceptual framework to ideas of conservative palingenesis and cultural modernist critiques of modernity developed in early‐twentieth century‐Romania by a handful of Romanian authors, in an attempt to understand the intellectual sources of the programme of national regeneration which Romanian fascists positioned at the centre of their revolutionary project during the interwar period