The hot period, preceding the Second World War, in which he attended university, influenced him whose education was in the spirit of "confidence in the Romanian nation, in its valences", causing him to take an active attitude, by participating in large-scale student demonstrations, such as the one in March 1944, in support of the efforts to regain Transylvania, in the anti-communist actions organized in the History Faculty by the National Peasants' Party, or in the tribute demonstrations of King Michael I in the Palace Square, on November 8, 1945, and May 10, 1946.

These activities during the student period, together with the collaboration in the elaboration of some protest memos addressed to the Ministry of National Education, as well as a denunciation, in which he was catalogued as an Iron Guard sympathizer and a member of the Iuliu Maniu's National Peasants' Party, led to his inclusion in the false political membership of an Iron Guard member and consequently, at his first arrest, on May 17, 1948, being incarcerated in the Galați Penitentiary.

The friendships cultivated during the first period of detention became the reason for the second arrest, on April 17, 1959, followed on August 27, 1959, by the sentence to 18 years of hard labour and incarceration in the Galați Penitentiary.

Spending about a decade in communist prisons (1948-1952 and 1958–1964) he met Valeriu Gafencu, Mircea Vulcănescu, Ernest Bernea, Radu Gyr, Petre Țuțea, Nichifor Crainic and many other important intellectuals, also victims of Stalinist policy.

After his retirement, academician Păltănea crossed the threshold of the library almost daily, but also of the State Archives branch, where his passion for the history of Galați attracted him.