Realidad Problemática

SOCIAL GROUPS

NOTE : Distribution as given here is based on a total population figure of 8,545,000. According to recent research the figure was in fact over

10,000,000.

1

contemporary economic and social tendencies and the long-term trend which had taken hold of society; 'they mobilized the most active groups in an attempt to defend the country and rescue and regenerate its civilization.' The effect on Poland's neighbours, however, was to provoke interven-tion and thus to hasten the end; the last act of the drama of her obliterainterven-tion as a European state was now imminent.

Insurrection of a People

The Constitution of 3 May 1791 had been voted through, despite an official note from the Russian ambassador, Stackelberg, threatening puni-tive measures. The enthusiasm with which the Constitution was received in Warsaw and all the other Polish cities and towns, and which was a sign of nascent national unity, could not obscure for any length of time the hostility of the conservative magnates; invoking the spectre of a 'Jacobin' revolution, they dispatched Felix Potocki and the hetmans Branicki and Rzewuski to St Petersburg, where they asked Catherine n to give them funds and the support of her army. On 14 May 1792, with the help of their landless supporters of noble rank, they formed the Confederation of Targowica, which issued a manifesto calling on Poland to rise in defence of her faith and liberties, threatened by the 'crime' of 3 May. The Russians invaded Poland, occupied Warsaw, and forced the Polish army, in which, under the command of the patriotic Prince Joseph Poniatowski, General Thaddeus Kosciuszko was already covering himself with glory, to fall back behind the River Bug; meanwhile King Stanislas, out of opportunism and a concealed desire to restrict the extent of the defeat, had himself joined the Confederation. Prussia, for whom the defensive treaty of 1790 had no practi-cal meaning whatsoever, and who was alarmed by the threat presented to her expansionism by the Polish risorgimento, took advantage of the situation to thrust her troops into Great Poland, and occupy Danzig, in January 1793.

\ The Russian and Prussian governments, after consultation, proceeded to the second partition of Poland, on grounds of the imperative need to destroy 'the influence of the horrible tendencies of the abominable Parisian sect and of the spirit of the French demagogues, who have extended their dominion to the Republic and are menacing the peace of Europe'. An obliging Diet, assembled for the purpose at Gordon, where the Confeder-ates, who had no serious support in the country, had set up their head-quarters, had no choice, under the threat of reprisals by the Russian troops, but to sign the treaty of partition in July 1793 and accept its conditions without protest in September. Poland was reduced to its central provinces and their three and a half million inhabitants.

The national insurrection broke out at this juncture, and Thaddeus Kosciuszko took command of it. The appeal to the country which, despite the instances of Joseph Poniatowski, King Stanislas had been too politic, too shy of the prospect of action, to venture upon, was made by a group of Patriots with differing social backgrounds and in many cases with

conflict-lng opinions, who were nevertheless united in their enthusiastic passion to

228 MODERN STATES FROM GREATNESS TO DECLINE 229

defend Poland to the end and, if they could not gain the victory, at least to save their own and the national honour. Magnates of the patriotic party, officers and soldiers of the Polish army (whom the Russians dismissed as fast as they installed their own garrisons throughout the country), intel-lectuals, students and middle-class townsmen, were among the initiators of a broad movement which rapidly spread so far as to attract recruits even among the peasants, the majority of whom remained passive and unresponsive.

This desperate, romantic convulsion was incapable of saving the state, precisely because there was no state machinery to give it the means of fighting successfully. Another obstacle was the territorial insignificance of a Poland mutilated beyond hope of survival; and another, the presence of Russian troops in this shrunken territory, surrounded by powerful neigh-bours. But this final exertion, in which all classes took part, was to remain a symbol of national unity; it marked, in the words of Fabre, 'the end of a state, the birth of a people'. The rising provoked by the second partition was no mere simple plot on the part of a few enthusiastic extremists, it was a spontaneous outburst of patriotism which for the first time brought the poorer townsfolk and the most advanced peasants into partnership with the nobility and middle class.

The insurrection began in Cracow, where a cavalry raid forced the Russians to evacuate the city. In his famous vow, taken publicly in the Rynek Square, Kosciuszko called the nation to arms against the Russians and Prussians; and, gathering an army which included local peasants armed with scythes, routed a Russian column at Raclawice (4 April 1794), While a revolutionary committee was being formed in liberated Cracow, the Russians were pushed out of Warsaw by an attack from the Polish garrison, helped by the people, who had broken into the Arsenal (17 April).

Vilno was liberated on 23 April. By the end of the month the Russian troops had been pushed back to the new frontier.

These successes were fated not to last. In an admirable effort to unite the country, Kosciuszko did everything he could to stand up for the king, who was being virtually held prisoner in his castle in Warsaw; to attract the peasants to his cause by means of the manifesto of Polaniec, which pro-mised them personal liberty and a reduction of the corvee, with release from serfdom for any who took up arms; and to maintain his hold on the nobles, who were disturbed by the democratic complexion which the insurrection was assuming. The Supreme National Council which he instituted on 21 May in Warsaw, and in which, under Count Ignaz Potocki and Kollontaj, nobles and commoners sat together (including the shoemaker Kilinski, the hero of the rising in Warsaw), succeeded in raising 150,000 men in eight months, and was able to throw a force of between 70,000 and 80,000 troops into battle. This was far short of the general uprising which had been hoped for, but which was precluded by abstentions among the szlachta and by passivity among the peasants; and which would have been rendered impossible in any case by the lack of money and equipment. The sombre

future looming over the revolt, which was entirely unsupported from out-side, was another reason why a morally unanimous people was relatively unwilling to commit itself to the ultimate sacrifice.

, As early as 15 June, the Prussians broke the movement by taking Cracow. In August the Russians recaptured Vilno; on 10 October they overwhelmed Kosciuszko at Maciejowice and took him prisoner. General Suvorov appeared before Warsaw, and after taking its suburb of Praga, whose population were massacred, forced the city to surrender on 4 November. The king, placed under residential surveillance at Grodno, and persistently hoping that Catherine n would keep a Polish state in existence under a Russian prince, was reluctant to abdicate; when he finally did so, on 25 November 1795, Poland was no more. The third partition, in which Austria shared, amounted to complete liquidation. Austria, following an agreement concluded with Russia on 3 January 1795, acquired new terri-tory between the Bug and the Pilica, which included Cracow; Prussia obtained Mazovia, which included Warsaw. Russia took the rest of Volhynia and Lithuania (map 19, p. 339).

Survival of a Nation

'Finis Poloniae'! The obliteration of the state did not mean the extinction of Poland. The defeat of the insurgents, and the complete partition of the country by three foreign powers, caused an emigration which was the chief factor determining the character of the national movement until the middle of the nineteenth century. While those patriots who were unable to flee were, like Kollontaj, interned by the Austrians, or, like Kosciuszko, Count Ignaz Potocki and Kilinski, imprisoned by the Russians in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the officers who fled to Italy enlisted in the Polish Legions.

Founded on 29 January 1797 under the command of General Dombrowski, the Legions subsequently gave practical effect to the spirit of the

insurrec-\tion's leaders, by fighting side by side with the French army for the liberation of Poland.

During the immense upheaval in Europe, caused by the later activities of the French Revolution and the rise of the Empire, Poland's future seemed in fact to be once more at issue. The Polish patriots imprisoned by the Russians were released by Paul i in 1796; some of them joined the emigration, which was carried out under the moral leadership of Kosciuszko; and the Polish Legions, amounting to over 15,000 men by

18oi, took part in all the French army's Italian campaigns. The Treaty of Luneville in that year, and the disbandment of the Polish Legions, caused hopes to ebb; but they sprang up afresh in 1806, when Napoleon formed a Qew Legion to fight the Prussians, raised a revolt in Prussian Poland, and eventually created a duchy of Warsaw which, in 1809, after the defeat

°f the Austrians, included Galicia. This resurrection of the Polish state

as a satellite of French policy was not destined to survive Napoleon's downfall.

230 MODERN STATES

Meanwhile the permanence of Poland as a nation had already been as-serted, even before the creation of the duchy of Warsaw: abroad, the signs were the Polish army, and the courage displayed by the emigres in the battles in which they were gradually fighting their way back to their own country; at home, in the conquered territories, there was an intellectual and scientific life which went on in default of political activity, and which the conquerors could not easily extinguish. In this respect Russian Poland benefited from specially favourable treatment. Whereas Prussia and Austria put in colonists of their own on state lands, and German func-tionaries in the administration forbade the use of the Polish language, and the 'Principal School' of Cracow was turned into a Teutonic university, Alexander I's liberal policy allowed the eastern territories to retain virtual autonomy, under the general control of Russian governors.

The Polish nobility remained in charge of local affairs. The policy adopted in no way contradicted the existing traditions of colonization and absorption, and is further to be explained by the emperor's personal sym-pathy with Poland, by the community of attitude between the Russian and Polish aristocracy, by Russia's desire to have the Polish people on her side, and by the sentiment of Slav solidarity. Alexander invited Prince Adam George Czartoryski to become a member of his private committee (or unofficial committee, as it was sometimes called); the Prince also became Minister for Foreign Affairs and subsequently rector of the Principal School of Vilno, which had been converted into an Imperial University.

Vilno, a centre from which Polish influence radiated all over the territories annexed by Russia (and beyond them, to the Kiev region), welcomed scholars who had fled from Cracow, among them the brothers Sniadecki -Jan, rector of the university in 1807, well known for his astronomical re-search, and Jedrzej, a chemist and biologist who devoted much energy to securing Polish staff for the university and establishing the use of the Polish language in science. Conditions in Prussian Poland were less favourable;

nevertheless, the creation in 1800 of the Society of the Friends of the Sciences (the later Academy of Sciences) provided a rallying-point for men of talent who, under the leadership of Stanislas Staszic between 1808 and 1826, worked together to build up the economy and educational system of the temporary grand duchy.

A member of the Society, a Polonized Swede, Samuel Bogumil Linde, published a Dictionary of the Polish Language, of which the first volume ap-peared in 1807, and which contained all the words in use from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

The pro-Russian trend was strengthened by the return of a large number of emigre's to Russian Poland after 1801. But the emergence of a miniature Poland, created as a mercenary tool by Napoleon, placed the patriots in a dilemma whose drawbacks became apparent after the rupture of relations between France and Russia.

As long as the entente between the sovereigns lasted, the duchy of Warsaw, under the nominal authority of Frederick Augustus of Saxony,

FROM GREATNESS TO DECLINE ₂₃₁

organized its administration and army on the French model and, as a cog in the Napoleonic machine, devoted its energies to the service of France in the hope that the fortunes of war would eventually supply an opportunity for the total restoration of the Polish state. When hostilities broke out be-tween France and Austria in 1809 and the fighting spread to Polish soil, prince Joseph Poniatowski was enabled to make a liberator's entry into Lublin, Lwow and Cracow (18 July) and, after Napoleon's victory, to enlarge the duchy considerably; with a population of 4,000,000 (a homo-geneously Polish population, moreover), and a modern, experienced army, ducal Poland effectively embodied the national energies which remained undiminished through the ensuing ten years of dependence. Many of those who had striven to save their country during the glorious period of the Four Years' Diet now saw their efforts renewed in the activities of the younger generation, who entered the civil service or became volunteers in the Polish army.

But the military, bellicose side of the national movement once more gained the upper hand, smothering the democratic tendencies which had emerged during the insurrection, and whose representatives had been dubbed 'the Polish Jacobins'. The ducal government espoused the prudent policy which Kosciuszko himself had defended. The peasants were liber-ated anew but given no land, and the corvee was retained; the landlords, being hard up, worked their labour force as hard as they could, and the peasants were no better off than before. The agrarian problem was there-fore still a source of national weakness, a potential cause of disunity.

Though it lived under French protection and had cast in its lot with the fortunes of Napoleon, the ducal government shared the ever-present fears and uncertainties hanging over the future of Napoleonic Europe. A pro-Russian faction - representing, at bottom, Prince Adam George Czartoryski - pinned its hopes on the good intentions of Alexander, to whom Poland was simply a pawn in the struggle with France, as it was to Napoleon in his dealings with Russia. The campaign of 1812, in which Polish troops fought in the ranks of the Grande Armee, and Napoleon's defeat, placed Poland's fate in the hands of the Tsar. What he would have preferred w,as the restoration, under Russian protection, of the Poland of before 1772; but he was obliged to negotiate with the Allies a new parti-tion of Poland, sancparti-tioned in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, which was favourable to Poland's future at least to the extent that, on the country's Russian flank, the duchy of Warsaw and its capital were left intact, under the new guise of a kingdom. Prussia gained possession of Poznan and the surrounding region; Austria, of Galicia; and Cracow became a free city, which it remained until 1846.

DEPENDENT AND SUBJECT NATIONS ₂₃₃

9

Dependent and