Poland

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POLAND

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, once the largest country in Europe, entered the era of revolution in a wounded and weakened state. The nobility, long the political class, had hindered the development of the cities and opposed the creation of a centralized state. For much of the eighteenth century, the Commonwealth was in effect a Russian protectorate. In 1764 Catherine the Great placed her former lover, Stanis?aw Poniatowski, on the Polish-Lithuanian throne. Polish-Lithuanian nobles responded by forming the Confederation of Bar, directed against both royal authority and Russian power. After some five hundred engagements, the rebels were defeated, their leaders dispatched to Siberia. Poland-Lithuania's neighbor Prussia seized the opportunity to propose a new territorial settlement to Russia and Austria. In 1772 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned, each of the Commonwealth's three neighbors seizing a portion of its territory.

This external shock provided King Stani?aw with an argument for reform. Despite demands for loyalty from Catherine and insistence on the status quo from much of the nobility, Stani?aw forced through an impressive range of reforms over the next two decades. The Polish parliament, essentially dormant and decadent over the previous decades, began to act. Ministries of government met regularly in cabinet meetings, for the first time in living memory. Stani?aw created a unified system of administration, created a royal army worthy of the name, schooled officers in a military academy (whose uniform he himself favored), rebuilt Warsaw and cleaned and lit its streets, and sponsored translations of European scientific literature. He stood behind a project to map his domains, naming some localities himself. His Commission on National Education was the first ministry of education in European history. Its final goal was to replace church schooling (supplanting the Jesuits) with a unified public school system, with Polish as the language of instruction.

These reforms created the beginnings of a civil society, in the form of educated civil servants and a growing urban population. The educated classes took an enthusiastic part in constitutional debates that began in parliament in 1789. The constitution approved by the parliament on 3 May 1791, the first written constitution in Europe since antiquity, would have radically advanced Stani?aw's project of creating a reformed state. The Commonwealth would have been transformed from a republic of nobles to a constitutional monarchy. The nobility would have lost its traditional right to elect kings; dynasties rather than individuals would have been elected. This would have strengthened the connection of kings to the land they ruled. Nobles without land would have lost their political rights, while non-nobles with property would have entered the political community. The traditional problems of the political institutions, such as the right of veto by any noble voter and the right to confederate, would have been eliminated. Civil rights such as habeas corpus were extended to property owners and Jews. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, created in 1569 as the union of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, would have become a more unified state.

Noble opponents to reform, and above all noble lackeys of Russia, announced their opposition. They established the Confederation of Targowica and invited Russian military intervention; Russia explained that it would protect the traditional rights of the nobles. The Commonwealth was a multiconfessional country with a large Orthodox population; Russia justified its intervention as necessary to protect the Orthodox. The Polish parliament was forced to accept a second partition, this time by Russia and Prussia, in 1793. Whereas the first partition was a consequence of decadence, the second was a result of fears by neighbors that reform could succeed. In March 1794 Tadeusz Ko?ciuszko began a national uprising, promising equal rights to burghers and land to peasants. He routed the Targowicans and won some engagements with the Prussian and Russian armies. Catherine the Great was able to turn the bulk of her forces from the Ottoman to the Polish front later that year, and crushed the uprising. In the third partition (1795), Russia, Austria, and Prussia seized the remainder of the territory of the Commonwealth, which ceased to exist. All in all, Russia had taken about 62 percent of its territory, Prussia, 20 percent, and Austria, 18 percent.

Whereas the impulse for a constitutional revolution in Poland was quelled by Poland's neighbors, the revolutionary French state succeeded in bending its own neighbors to its will. As Napoleon ranged his armies against the European powers, hopeful Poles perceived a natural ally. Because Poles had lost their state, theirs was the only political class that stood to gain from a radical transformation of the map of Europe. During the twenty years between the third partition in 1795 and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Polish question seemed open. Some prominent Poles, among them Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, allied themselves with the reforming Russian Tsar Alexander I, in the hopes that he would one day crown himself king of a united Poland. In the meantime, Czartoryski rose to a position of enormous influence in the Russian court, and carried out educational reforms that preserved and probably spread Polish culture in Lithuania and Belarus. Thousands of Polish exiles sided with Napoleon in his Italian wars of 1797 to 1801, hoping that they would be rewarded in a peace settlement. These hopes were dashed.

When France brought its power to the edge of Russia by defeating Prussia in 1807, Napoleon and Alexander jointly addressed the Polish question. Alexander agreed that Napoleon would establish a Grand Duchy of Warsaw on territories seized from Prussia. In 1809, after Napoleon defeated Austria, Cracow was added to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Although the Grand Duchy was one of the constellation of puppet kingdoms and duchies that constituted Napoleon's European empire, it was nevertheless a fruitful institution, in its own way. The introduction of Napoleonic civil and commercial codes created durable precedents and practices. The use of Polish as the effective language of administration, and the training of Polish civil servants and military officers, created the appearance of something like a Polish state. It also gave rise to hopes that Napoleon would recreate Poland after defeating Russia. In June 1812 Napoleon began his eastward march, with some thirty thousand Poles in his armies. He met crushing defeat. Russian troops reached Warsaw in February 1813. They would remain for more than a century.

As part of the general European peace settlement, the Congress of Vienna settled the Polish question. The three partitioning powers accepted a new distribution of the territories of the old Commonwealth. The Grand Duchy of Warsaw was liquidated. Pozna? was returned to Prussia, where it was the capital of an autonomous Grand Duchy of Posen. Cracow was not restored to Austria, but made a free city under the common protection of the three powers. It became a tiny republic, uniting the city with three towns and some two hundred villages. Gda?sk, which had been a free city, was conceded to Prussia. Warsaw, which had been in Prussia before becoming the capital of the Grand Duchy, was added to Russia. Russia was now home to an absolute majority of the world's Poles. Since the old Commonwealth had been the center of Jewish life in Europe, the Russian Empire was also home to most of Europe's Jews. Austrian Galicia also was home to a large Jewish population.

After 1815 Warsaw became the center of a new kingdom of Poland, known as the Congress Kingdom, which Tsar Alexander was to rule as constitutional monarch. Here legislation was passed by a local parliament, the language of administration was Polish, and there was even a Polish military academy and army. The Congress Kingdom comprised only one-seventh of the territory and one-fifth of the population of the old Commonwealth, but between 1815 and 1830 it was nevertheless a reasonably close approximation of a Polish state. Precisely because it was a constitutional entity, it created expectations that, after the death of Alexander in 1825, were not met. The November Uprising of 1830 was intended to defend the Congress Kingdom's constitution. Because there was a Polish army at this time, of all the Polish uprisings this revolt most closely resembled a regular military campaign, and probably enjoyed the greatest chances of success. After Russia defeated the uprising in 1831, Tsar Nicholas I reestablished Russian rule in the Congress Kingdom on the basis of the Organic Statute of 1832. Further east, in historical Lithuania, the 1830s and 1840s saw the dissolution of remaining institutions of the old Commonwealth, such as the Uniate Church and the Lithuanian Statute.

The defeat of 1831 led to the Great Emigration, the departure of some ten thousand Poles from the Russian Empire to western Europe, especially France. The Great Emigration defined enduring trends of Polish intellectual and political life. Poles disagreed as to whether a monarchy or a republic would best shelter the nation, although a consensus emerged (among people who generally had lost their property) that some kind of land reform would be needed to bring the peasantry into the Polish nation. The monarchist trend was associated with Czartoryski, the republican with the historian Joachim Lelewel. The same period saw the development of Polish Romanticism, most fetchingly by Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz S?owacki. Less well known but important at the time were the Polish national philosophers, often students at German universities who also were familiar with French thought. August Cieszkowski, known by his German colleagues as a Left Hegelian, developed a theory of action.

Of the lands of the former Commonwealth, it was the Prussian territory that in the 1840s offered the most freedom of action. Especially after the ascension of Frederick William IV to the Prussian throne in 1840, Poles in Posnania exploited a certain liberalism of German rule. Their slogan was "organic work," which meant a concentration of economic organization and educational attainment. Nevertheless, Pozna? was also the center of planning for a general insurrection planned for all three partitions in 1846. After the Prussian police arrested the main organizers, sporadic and uncoordinated outbreaks followed. Polish rebels managed to defeat the Austrian garrison in Cracow and briefly hold the tiny republic. In Austria proper, the authorities exploited the hostility of the peasant population for Polish lords, and defeated the uprising. The Cracow Republic was annexed by Austria. Meanwhile, the trial of the Polish rebels in Prussia became a cause célèbre of German radicals, linking the Polish events of 1846 to the European revolutions of 1848. German liberals in 1848 were initially rather favorable to the demands of Poles, until they realized that Polish autonomy could lead to losses of German territory and would certainly provoke Russia. In the 1850s the distinct Grand Duchy of Posen was liquidated. Against the will of Poles, formerly Polish regions were incorporated into Otto von Bismarck's North German Confederation in 1867, and then into his German Empire in 1871. Poles had been a rather important population in Prussia; in a united Germany they were a small Catholic minority.

After the disaster of 1846, Polish nobles in Austrian Galicia were fairly easy to intimidate. The backward province was already proverbial in its misery. In its eastern half, the peasantry was not only alien to Polish nobles by social background but also by nationality and religion. Most of the population of eastern Galicia was Ruthenian and Uniate rather than Polish and Catholic. The European lesson of 1848, that the aims of liberal revolutionaries can be confounded by class and nation, had already been learned by Polish nobles in 1846, and a few reminders two years later was enough to teach them that other methods would be required to secure autonomy for Poles. Agenor Go?uchowski, the longtime governor of Galicia, was seen by many Poles as a traitor, but in fact he laid the foundations for important Polish gains in the province in the 1850s and 1860s. Like the Hungarian nobility, the Polish nobility exploited Austrian weakness after the military defeats of the 1860s to demand political concessions. Shortly after the Ausgleich of 1867 transformed the Habsburg domains into Austria-Hungary, Polish nobles secured for themselves de facto autonomy in Galicia. The schools, the judiciary, and the administration became Polish. A local parliament functioned in Lwów. Yet this was rather autonomy for traditional elites—Polish nobles—than it was home rule for the population as a whole. The cause of social and economic reform was essentially set aside, because traditional Polish elites secured for themselves an excellent arrangement.

In the early 1860s, many Poles believed that a wave of reform in the Russian Empire could be turned to their advantage. The abolition of serfdom in 1861 sparked an intense discussion of the land question; as ever, Polish nobles were confronted with the choice between (perhaps) gaining the loyalty of peasants by conceding land or (perhaps) preserving their own social position by insisting on the status quo. This question was never answered to anyone's satisfaction, but Poles did agree that there was a chance to revive local institutions. Andrzej Zamoyski, a leader of the Agricultural Society and the leading voice in this debate, spoke of a moral revolution: if Poles could reform themselves, political change would follow. His rival Aleksander Wielopolski, the leading Polish administrator in the Congress Kingdom, began rather from the premise that any reform in Polish lands had to begin with an explicit endorsement from Russia. Wielopolski did gain the tsar's approval for an institute of higher education in Warsaw, and for civil equality for the Jews (whom he regarded as the "third estate" of Polish society). As Russia struggled with the abolition of serfdom and radical ideas flowed from the east (as well as from the emigration, and increasingly from Polish society), conservative reforms backed by Russian force seemed unsatisfactory.

Wielopolski was aware that he was opposed by Polish radicals known as "Reds"; he had some of them hanged. To forestall their revolutionary threat, he ordered their conscription into the Russian army. This forced the Reds to revolt without due preparation. The moderate reformers, known as Whites, then generally felt obliged to join them in the field. The revolutionaries of 1863 established a short-lived National Government. It promised land to the peasants, but had mixed success in recruiting them to the Polish cause. The January Uprising of 1863 to 1864 was the high point of Polish-Jewish cooperation; many Jews fought and died for the cause,

especially in Warsaw. Unlike the uprising of 1830, this movement had no real chance of success. Although in reality less threatening than Polish participation in Napoleon's campaign of 1812 or the uprising of 1830, the November Uprising of 1830–1831 brought the harshest Russian response yet. A Russian political class beginning to understand the world in national terms was shocked by Polish perfidy. The Russification that began in 1864, while consistent with the general trend of Russian policy in its western lands, was particularly harsh in Polish lands.

A few hundred or perhaps a few thousand participants in the uprising were executed; several thousand more were exiled to Siberia. More than three thousand noble estates were confiscated, their land generally given to tsarist officials. Polish landowners were required to pay a massive indemnity in historic Lithuania as well as in the former Congress Kingdom. The name "Kingdom of Poland" was actually abolished at this time; Russian officials began referring to the "Vistula Land." From the 1870s the territories were ruled by governors-general with extensive executive and judicial powers; after 1879, for example, they could order that civilians be deported without trial. After 1831 these territories had lost the principle of constitutional rule; after 1864 they lost most of the institutional advantages they had enjoyed over the rest of the Russian Empire. The separate treasury and budget were eliminated, and the Polish Bank was subordinated to the Imperial Bank. Schooling was Russified. Basic reforms of the rest of the empire were not applied here. The former Congress Kingdom did not have trial by jury, for example, nor were its regions allowed to have local self-government by zemstvo. Land reform was carried out by the Russian state. Polish nobles had lost their chance to use this question to build a national community.

The failure of the January Uprising revealed the bankruptcy of Polish internationalism. Important political émigrés such as Czartoryski had tried for decades to exploit each international crisis to force the Polish question onto the negotiating table. His last real hope had been the Crimean War (1853–1856), which pitted the liberal powers of Britain and France against Russia, but the field of battle in the end was limited to Crimea itself. The Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz died trying to raise a battalion of volunteers to fight against Russia. Mickiewicz invented messianism, and the Polish cause was in some sense a Roman Catholic one, but Polish rebels never enjoyed the support of the Catholic Church. To say that Mickiewicz's religious views were heretical drastically understates the matter, and in any case the Vatican had no wish to upset the partitioning empires by raising the Polish question. Even so, the Catholic Church was punished in Poland after the uprising; by 1870 not a single bishop of 1863 remained in his diocese. The only state that offered even verbal support for the Polish cause was France; this ceased later when France and Russia allied.

The complete fiasco, domestic and international, forced Polish patriots to reconsider traditional approaches to the national question. The third quarter of the nineteenth century was the great era of faith in science, and in the Vistula Land Polish students and journalists developed their own school of "positivism." Although they took the term from the French philosopher Auguste Comte, they were more influenced by the English sociologist Herbert Spencer, believing in the possibility of evolutionary (as opposed to revolutionary) progress. They also accepted the organic metaphors whose use was widespread in the Europe of the 1880s, which allowed them to regard the intelligentsia as both a social class and as the mind of the nation. In this way the traditional role of the nobility as the leading class of the nation was claimed by a generation of educated Poles largely of noble (though sometimes of Jewish) origin. Warsaw positivists hoped that Polish society could be made to function as a self-sufficient organism, even though it lacked a Polish state: they drew the same kinds of libertarian conclusions from the English naturalist Charles Darwin as the social Darwinists did, although in a very different political context. They counted on industrialization to create a new Polish middle class. Their leading light, Aleksander ?wi?tochowski, spoke of "internal independence." When they spoke of society they meant the nation. They believed, in a word, in progress.

Industrialization was a reality; the lands of the former Congress Kingdom were among the most developed of the Russian Empire. A middle class and a working class did indeed emerge, especially in Warsaw and ?ód?. Yet progress was elusive. Russia could, and did, alter tariff and other economic policies in ways unfavorable to the Polish lands. New ideas presumed modern education, but Russian policies emphasized ancient languages and religion; for the natural sciences it was desirable and for the social sciences it was necessary to leave the Empire and study in western Europe. The most famous case of the resulting brain drain is Marie Curie (née Sk?odowska), the Nobel Prize–winning physicist. Men and women who came of age in the 1890s developed the positivists' scientific approach to society, while rejecting their more optimistic beliefs. The National Democrats also accepted Spencerian ideas, but emphasized competition between groups rather than organic harmony. The National Democrats also emphasized the entirety of Polish society rather than simply the nobility. Rather than counting on changes in Russian policy or a rising tide of general enlightenment, they organized conspiratorial national education on the scale of the entire country, in all three partitions. The Marxists, meanwhile, accepted the overall idea of progress, while maintaining that progress could result only from conflict between classes. Most of the Polish Marxists were allied with Rosa Luxemburg, who believed that the national question was a distraction from the general European revolution.

The main current of Polish socialism, however, was that of Józef Pi?sudski and his Polish Socialist Party. This party, although it included several Marxists and former Marxists, was essentially antiideological. Its leaders believed that national independence was a precondition for social justice, and generally that national independence was a good in itself. In the 1890s and the early part of the twentieth century, Pi?sudski's socialists were the main rival of the National Democrats, who were led by Roman Dmowski. Where Pi?sudski's party included many Jews and many Poles of eastern (Lithuanian, Belarusian, Ukrainian) background, Dmowski's party was more attractive to Poles from central

and western Poland. While Pi?sudski referred to the traditions of the former Commonwealth, Dmowski argued that excessive toleration had doomed that Polish-Lithuanian state. While Pi?sudski believed that a future Poland would and should emerge as a federation of peoples between Germany and Russia, Dmowski advanced the ideal of a national state. Pi?sudski and his followers treated the Russian Empire as the great threat to Poland; Dmowski placed Germans and increasingly Jews in this role. Pi?sudski saw the competition with Russia as essentially political and military; Dmowski perceived the competition with Germans and Jews as social and economic. In this way among others Dmowski's ideas were innovative; his influential 1903 essay was titled "Thoughts of a Modern Pole."

In some sense the Russian Revolution of 1905 offered the same kind of opportunity to Polish patriots as the instability of the early 1860s, and it provoked the same kinds of disagreements. Pi?sudski's socialists disagreed among themselves, some of them frightened that the mass character of the revolt of Polish workers had slipped free from their control, some wishing to push forward to revolution. Pi?sudski himself hoped to exploit the Russo-Japanese War to destroy the Russian Empire: he traveled to Tokyo to offer the help of his socialists to the Japanese, only to find that Dmowski had come to Japan to thwart his designs. Pi?sudski emerged from the revolution at the head of a new Revolutionary Fraction of the party, a group that had essentially abandoned politics in favor of military training in anticipation of a European war. Dmowski, by contrast, sought to play a role in the internal politics of Russia, and he and his National Democrats sought to play a role in the State Duma established by Tsar Nicholas II in 1905. Their only legislative victory was the return of the Polish language to Polish schools; this reform was rather soon undone. After 1907 Russian electoral law guaranteed the election of Dumas that were "Russian in spirit." Dmowski's bet on Russian reform failed, but his general program of education and agitation made his organization the most important Polish movement of the early twentieth century.

By the end of the nineteenth century, in all three partitions of Poland, the Polish question was posed as one of modern mass movements confronting more or less premodern political systems. In Austria, the free press and then (after 1907) suffrage for adult males created the conditions for an open political competition between Poles and Ukrainians. Polish nobles dominated the local administration, and democracy created threatening social movements, some of which were also national movements. In Germany the competition was between an industrializing state that wished to colonize its own eastern marches, and a strong Polish civil society that responded by its own initiatives. Bismarck's Kulturkampf of 1872 to 1887 was directed against the Roman Catholic Church, and thus de facto against most Poles who were German subjects. In 1872 German was made the only language of instruction in the Pozna? region, and in 1876 the use of Polish was banned in the administration and the courts. In the 1880s and 1890s official policies encouraged German colonization of Germany's eastern marches; Poles responded by establishing their own land banks and credit unions.

The history of Poland in the nineteenth century is one of variety, continuity, and anticipation. Despite the partitions, there were elements of Polish rule in one place or another for most of the years between the French Revolution and World War I. Polish society was transformed importantly by the policies of each partitioning power. Politics in Russia was most revolutionary, in Austria most conservative, and in Germany most keyed to economic life. Communication between Polish lands, despite incompatibilities of rail lines and political hindrances, was far easier in 1914 than in 1789. In all three partitions, the number of people who identified themselves as Poles certainly increased radically during this period. The important political movements, on the right as on the left, wished to reach mass society while anticipating another radical transformation of Europe. When that transformation came, with World War I (1914–1918), the opportunity was seized by those who had anticipated it. An independent Poland drawn from territories of all three partitioning powers was established in 1918.

See alsoChopin, Frédéric; Czartoryski, Adam; Endecja; Mickiewicz, Adam; Polish National Movement; Russia; Ukraine.