The voice of the journalist and human rights activist Monica Lovinescu in her regular Paris broadcasts to the people of Romania during the postwar decades became synonymous with freedom and was a lifeline for those listeners behind the Iron Curtain.

As a result she was severely beaten up on the orders of the communist authorities in Bucharest, and, in a vengeful act, her elderly mother was sent to prison, where she died.

Monica Lovinescu was born in 1923 in Bucharest, the daughter of a literary critic, Eugen Lovinescu, and Ecaterina Bàlàcioiu. She graduated with an MLitt in 1946 and after being granted a scholarship by the French Government she left for Paris in 1947. By the time Romania was declared a people’s republic and the Iron Curtain had come down, Lovinescu had been granted political asylum. As a literary critic and journalist surviving on the written word alone, she could not have anticipated the climate confronting Romanian exiles in postwar France, which she recalled in her memoirs: “The French intellectuals not only positioned themselves to the Left, but they were already mentally ‘sovietised’. Any attempt at opening the eyes of those intellectuals to make them more receptive to the plight of their fellow professionals in Eastern Europe was rejected as ‘fascist’ as soon as they declared themselves anti-communists.”

Such differences were the source of intellectual battles for the hearts and minds of French society in spite of the events in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Gdansk in 1981. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Eastern European exiles were still branded as “visceral anti-communists”, an indictment intended to silence through isolation. Yet in spite of such dictums as Jean-Paul Sartre’s “the anti-communist is a dog”, Lovinescu was not for turning. Instead she became a freelance translator, publishing in her adoptive country many Romanian novels including Virgil Gheorghiu’s bestseller La vingt-cinquième heure. Her translation was adapted for the big screen as The 25th Hour (1967) by Carlo Ponti, starring Anthony Quinn and Michael Redgrave.

Lovinescu also acted as an informal literary agent for her friend Eugène Ionesco, whose play The Bald Primadonna she recommended to the avant-garde theatre director Nicolas Bataille, introducing Ionesco as “a young playwright with a funny name”. Bataille instantly liked the play, which ends with the audience being “shot”, and although Lovinescu was a joint producer she insisted that her name be omitted from the posters. In her unassuming fashion, it was typical of Lovinescu to maintain that her contribution to Ionesco’s reputation was “inessential”. In retrospect, however, her vision was clear and her message forthright. Her persistence paid off and soon the play was winning the plaudits of such seasoned critics as André Breton, Raymond Queneau and Albert Camus. In the end the French public followed suit and the Theatre of the Absurd gained recognition.

Lovinescu always remained devoted to her circle of Romanian exiles, which included Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran, but increasingly grew weary of acting as an intermediary for other authors. Instead she decided to dedicate more time to broadcasting and journalism. She produced a huge number of articles in a myriad of cultural and political periodicals: East Europe, Kontinent, Preuves, L’Alternative, Les Cahiers de L’Est, Témoignages and La France Catholique; and in the Romanian press in exile: Luceàfarul, Caiete de Dor, Fiinta Româneascà, Ethos, Contrapunct, Dialog and Agora.

Most importantly Lovinescu’s broadcasting activities had a much wider international impact, especially in Romania, where her contributions to literary criticism, as much as to political analysis, were the subject of regular transmissions on Radiodiffusion Française and Radio Free Europe. Henceforth, hers became the voice of freedom for those deprived of alternative views. Lovinescu’s Thèses et Anti-Thèses and the Current Romanian Culture series would lift the smokescreen of communist propaganda.

This was particularly important at a time when Nicolae Ceausescu, the shoemaker dictator, became the “darling” of the West with his avowed “anti-Soviet” stance. By contrast, Lovinescu’s was a singular, if discordant, voice. She consistently resisted the psychological pressure of those “agents” which she perceived as a real threat to Western civilisation and which were bent on destroying it.

She could see clearly through Ceausescu’s own brand of national communism the myth of popular support he enjoyed at home and the “originality” of his ideas. Lovinescu dismissed such humbug, saying: “These lies are at the root of a suicidal complicity between the hangman and his victims . . . On that tragic Shakespearean stage all characters of prime stature had disappeared, leaving behind only the buffoons, whose ribaldry is hollow.”

Lovinescu’s tremendous media activities attracted the inevitable attention of the regime in Bucharest at a time when silencing the voices at home was defined by utmost brutality. In 1958 her 71-year-old mother was arrested, the family flat in Bucharest was ransacked and books and papers burnt or confiscated. Her mother was incarcerated and given an 18-year sentence for “undermining the state order and passing secrets to a foreign power”. The sentence was then, as was customary, bartered against her daughter’s return to Romania, a deal that her mother refused. She died shortly thereafter, only two years into her 18-year sentence, aged 72, having been refused all medical attention, her body thrown into an unmarked grave.

But this tragedy only steeled her daughter’s resolve to fight for human rights. In the 1970s and 1980s Ceausescu resorted to more brutal action abroad. Four of Lovinescu’s colleagues at Radio Free Europe in Munich were murdered or died in suspicious circumstances, and other prominent Romanian exiles received letter bombs. Ceausescu himself took control of the operations and Ilich Ramírez Sánches, Carlos the Jackal, was instructed to exact retribution.

According to General Ion Pacepa, the deputy chief of the Romanian foreign intelligence services and later a defector, Ceausescu was reputed to have instructed his henchmen: “Monica Lovinescu must be silenced, not killed. I do not need any uncomfortable French and American investigations . . . I want her to become a living corpse. Use foreign hands so that no evidence can turn up that could lead back to the Romanian connection.”

In 1977 Lovinescu was attacked by a hired PLO hit squad outside her Paris home. Luckily the assailants fled as neighbours were alerted, but she was left with severe head injuries. She recovered from a coma in hospital only to resume her crusade with a handful of Romanian friends including Ionesco’s daughter Marie-France Ionesco, Sanda Stolojan and Michel Foucault, the philosopher. They exposed Ceausescu’s attrocities at anti-totalitarian vigils in front of the Romanian Embassy in Paris.

Lovinescu outlived Ceausescu, whose exit culminated in his televised trial and execution in 1989. Ten years on, in recognition of her lifelong contribution to Romanian political and cultural life, she was awarded the Order of the Star of Romania.

Asked in April 2002 her opinion on the desirability of a Nuremberg-style trial of communism, she said that it “might have offered Romanian mentality a real chance for change. The handful of initiatives taken so far are built entirely on moving sands. We cannot consider a Nuremberg-style trial simply because that involves winners and losers. Or, in this particular instance, communism lost its own war: it simply imploded, not exploded. But one should consider at least a moral prosecution. It is impossible to contemplate the fact that torturers in Romania have not been yet morally indicted.”

Lovinescu was married to Virgil Ierunca, a fellow journalist, literary critic and political analyst, who died in 2006. They had no children.

Monica Lovinescu, journalist, broadcaster and activist, was born on November 19, 1923. She died on April 20, 2008, aged 84