Poland

SIXTEEN

The Polish Question

The ‘Polish Question’ haunted nineteenth-century diplomacy like an uneasy conscience, inducing as much discomfort in Poland’s friends as in its enemies. Britain made many a diplomatic démarche on behalf of the Poles; Turkey never let an opportunity pass to show its disapproval of the partitions; the French Chamber of Deputies opened every session after 1830 with a solemn declaration of its wish for a free Poland. Yet they were all only too keen to bury the issue under a few pious phrases whenever it began to threaten the stability of Europe.

But as the tide of support for the Polish cause ebbed in the chancelleries it surged in other quarters. It was characteristic that a Polish commemorative meeting held in London in 1841 should have had as its principal speaker a black man from Haiti. As Engels pointed out, every workers’ movement of the nineteenth century only ventured beyond its own sphere of interests to make a gesture or a pronouncement on the Polish Question. In 1848 the Paris mob marched on the Hôtel de Ville to cries of ‘Vive la Pologne!’, and their sentiment was echoed by the Chartists in England, the Berlin workers who carried Mierosławski shoulder-high out of the Moabit jail, and by every Italian activist from Mazzini to Garibaldi. It was not gimmickry that put the slogan ‘For Your Freedom and Ours’ on the Polish standards in 1831; the Polish nation was the founder member of the internationale of peoples arrayed against the Holy Alliance of monarchs.

In the resolution he submitted to the Central Council of the First International, Karl Marx explained that the Poles’ struggle for freedom was carried on in the common interest, as without an independent Poland the whole of Europe was threatened by Russian autocracy, and what happened in Poland had an immediate and crucial bearing on the course of events elsewhere. In 1792 the Russian armies which Catherine had hoped to use against Revolutionary France were deployed instead in Poland. The same happened in 1830. As Lafayette explained to the French Chamber: ‘The war had been prepared against us…Poland was to form the vanguard: the vanguard has turned against the main body of the army.’ Had Poland regained her independence it would have been more difficult for Austria to maintain its hegemony in northern Italy, for Russia to expand its influence in the Balkans, and for Prussia to establish its ascendancy in Germany. At the same time, a Poland carved up between the three powers sealed their cooperation with the enduring bond of complicity and mutual self-interest which was the greatest impediment to change of any kind.

And the exclusion of Poles from active public life at home gave rise to a tribe of wanderers who had an impact elsewhere. Their presence was most noticeable in wars and revolutions. They fought in the French colonial wars and in the Spanish civil wars; they fought for Garibaldi and for the Paris Commune; they fought in the northern and southern hemispheres, and on both sides of the Atlantic. The Shah of Persia had two Polish regiments in his Imperial Guard. In America, the first officer to die for the Union in 1860 was a Captain Blandowski. Another 4,000 Poles fought for the Union, many in the 58th New York Infantry or Colonel Krzyżanowski’s United States Rifles, while a further 1,000 fought in the Confederate Army. It was in Ottoman service that such men found a lasting refuge, as staff officers, artillerymen, engineers, cartographers and surgeons. Poles could rise to high positions, provided they embraced Islam, which many did.

Typical is Aleksander Iliński, a wealthy nobleman who fought in the 1830 insurrection and then went into exile. He took service in the Polish legion organised by General Bem in the Portuguese army, then fought in the Spanish Civil War (developing a sideline as a successful bullfighter), and for the French in Algeria, winning the Légion d’Honneur in the process, followed by service in Afghanistan, India and China. In 1848 he was at General Bem’s side in Hungary, whence he made his way to Turkey. He converted to Islam and fought in the Crimean War as General Iskinder Pasha. He later became Turkish governor of Baghdad before dying in Istanbul in 1861.

Such a wide dispersal of the nation’s human resources raised the possibility of its extinction, particularly as the Polish nation had never been based on ethnic, territorial, religious or political affinities. When the state ceased to exist the diverse elements that made it up might have been expected to fly off like so many satellites deprived of the centre of their orbit. Yet, instead of disintegrating into its component parts, a Polish nation survived, albeit in a somewhat changed, and forever changing, form. ‘Polishness’ had become a condition which defined itself.

But given that the Commonwealth had excluded over ninetenths of the population from active participation, those who wished to promote the Polish national project needed to win over a sizeable proportion of the others. And they had to give it new form: to an age that viewed an efficient centralised state as desirable, the Commonwealth, like the recently defunct Holy Roman Empire, appeared anachronistic and deeply flawed. Its greatest achievement, a minimalist, multi-cultural democracy, was not one that appeared viable to the nineteenth-century mind. If the Polish patriots were to entice the passive and the peasants to embrace their cause, they would have to come up with a better project.

In this they were greatly aided by the incompetence of the occupying powers, particularly Russia. For while it would be too much to say that the new nation was forged in the struggle, the successive risings punctuated a process of thought and selfdiscovery which might otherwise have turned into meaningless waffle. They also tested theories and destroyed illusions.

The experience of 1794 made it clear that there was little national consciousness among the peasants. The military activity of 1797-1815 did involve greater numbers, at least a quarter of a million men, in a way that mixed aristocrats with peasants and initiated a significant number of people from the lower orders to the cult of the national cause. The events of 1830-31 showed up a divergence of interest in different social groups, which the risings of 1846 and 1848 were intended to remove by radicalising the issue. In the event, these two risings showed up the pointlessness of amateurs taking on empires with little more than slogans for ammunition. The rising of 1863 was marked by greater professionalism and tactical sense, as well as by large-scale participation of peasants, workers, Lithuanians, Belorussians and Jews, but it also revealed that warfare had taken a giant technological step forward.

Each of these struggles highlighted various implications of the Polish predicament, and their increasingly ruthless repression committed more people to participation in activities which they might have originally viewed as futile or even irresponsible. The minor szlachta, traditionally the most reactionary element in the population, were progressively turned into revolutionary extremists. By dispossessing landowners who were involved often very indirectly in resistance, the occupying powers forced the most docile members of the community into violent opposition. By penalising members of the aristocracy they forced even this into some measure of resistance. Families which in the 1820s saw their interest as lying in allegiance to St Petersburg or Vienna were otherwise convinced by the image of Prince Sanguszko walking to Siberia in a chain gang and by the Galician butchery of 1846. The old szlachta solidarity of shared privilege turned into one of shared wrong, and this embraced anyone who identified with Poland, opening up a new channel of inter-class dialogue. And this dialogue concerned two principal issues: where they had gone wrong, and how they should go about constructing a programme for the future.

The Czartoryski faction, the political descendant of the Familia and the Patriots of the Great Sejm, held that the constitution of 3 May would have cured the ailing Commonwealth. They believed that Poland’s eclipse was not the result of internal failure but the consequence of a breakdown in the proper functioning of diplomacy. Their efforts after 1831 were directed at convincing European statesmen of the desirability of restoring Poland to Europe in the interests of the balance of power.

The socialist elements among the émigrés were influenced by the works of the historian Joachim Lelewel, leader of the Patriotic Society and a member of the insurrectionary government in 1831. Lelewel had developed a theory that the social and political structure of ancient Slav societies in the pre-Christian era had been based on peasant communities. It was a vision of rural democracy later favoured by Russian historians and it held a strong attraction for many on the left of the political spectrum. According to Lelewel the constitution of 3 May was a piece of Western liberalism alien to the spirit of Polish society.

The manifesto of the Polish Democratic Society, published at Poitiers in 1836, rejected the liberal idea of giving the peasants their land—i.e. turning them into mini-capitalists. ‘The question of property is the question of our age,’ it proclaimed, in the conviction that ‘The land and its fruits are common to all.’ It therefore concluded that ‘Private property must be transformed into common property.’ The majority of the Democrats were minor szlachta who had lost everything. Offended by the prosperity and materialism they encountered in London and Paris, they yearned for revolution, spiritual as much as political.

The English section of the Democratic Society, founded at Portsmouth in 1834, gave rise the following year to a Community of the Polish People whose manifesto, written by Stanisław Worcell, a former member of the wealthy szlachta and son of a senator, contained the phrase: ‘Property is the root of all evil.’ It established settlements in Portsmouth and on the island of Jersey, agricultural communes consisting of peasants and penitent gentry who sought regeneration through work. Though most émigrés did not go to such extremes, they did live out theories and beliefs, in damp London basements and freezing Paris garrets, or in Tsarist chain gangs or Austrian gaols.

With the Poles divided between three empires and scattered in exile, the printed word assumed enormous significance, and the fact that this was an age rich in literary talent ensured that the men setting up communes in Portsmouth and Jersey were not cut off from their fellows who had remained in Poland to farm their estates.

The first traces of Romanticism in Polish literature appear in the 1790s. The heart began to rule the mind just as the ravished motherland was being enslaved; the Polish Romantic heart could beat for no other unattainable object of love. The poets of the day wrote of the expiring Commonwealth as lovers. Their successors sang the praises of her vanished accomplishments and would go on to give spiritual meaning to their own lives.

The greatest poet of the age, Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), was a case in point. A student at Wilno University, Mickiewicz had started out writing lyrical works. In 1822 he published Ballads and Romances, which earned him critical acclaim, and in the following year Grażyna and part of Forefathers’ Eve. The first is a tale of selfsacrifice and honour culled from historical folklore, the second a dramatic work based on the pagan Lithuanian custom of invoking the dead on All Souls’ Eve, which presents a series of tortured souls recounting their errors and sufferings. In the same year Mickiewicz was imprisoned. He was exiled to St Petersburg, and in 1825 to Odessa, where he wrote Crimean Sonnets. In Odessa he shared a mistress with the chief of police for southern Russia, who secured him a transfer back to Moscow. There he made friends with a number of Russian writers including Pushkin and came to understand, and to fear more than ever, the nature of the Russian state. It was in 1828 that he published, in Konrad Wallenrod, his first overtly political poem.

This historical tale about a Lithuanian child captured by the Teutonic Knights and brought up as one of them, rising to the Grand Mastership of the Order and then leading its armies to defeat at the hands of his own people, explores the idea of patriotic action through collaboration with the enemy. In the third part of Forefathers’ Eve (1832), Mickiewicz touched on the whole range of moral and ethical problems confronting the Poles in captivity, and on the questions of good and evil in political life.

In 1834 he published Pan Tadeusz, a mock-heroic evocation of country life in Lithuania. Written in Paris at a time when Mickiewicz had already condemned the values of the Commonwealth and was leaning heavily towards the left of émigré politics, it could hardly be more telling. As they searched for answers to present problems, such men could not avoid hankering for the past. The quest for the lost state of innocence, present in Polish literature from the sixteenth century, was becoming inextricably confused with the quest of the lost motherland, or rather, the state of being that had vanished with it. For the émigrés in particular, Arcadia became indistinguishable from Poland.

At the same time, Mickiewicz concerned himself with the plight of all those, languishing in prison or exile, who suffered for their cause in an apparently indifferent world. In The Books of the Polish Nation (1832) he suggested that Poland had been crucified in the cause of righteousness. The crucifixion would expiate the political sins of the world and lead to resurrection. This messianic image gave hope. Christ too had cried out on the Cross and had been answered with silence, but by His death He had conquered death itself. Through their sacrifice the Poles would conquer persecution.

Few were naive enough to take this literally, but at some level of the subconscious the messianic vision was a healing balm for every suffering Polish soul, which instinctively rejected a reality that excluded its aspirations. Nor were they exceptional in this: both Mazzini and the French historian Jules Michelet also developed visions of Italy and France respectively redeeming the world through their own crucifixion. It was not so much a question of escapism, as a search for a deeper truth.

The philosopher Bronisław Trentowski (1808-69), a pupil of Hegel, evolved a national philosophy of action and attempted to produce a practical programme for the ‘regeneration’ of Poland. Very close to him was the remarkable figure of Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński (1776-1853). Bafflingly, he fought for Kościuszko at Maciejowice, served on Suvorov’s staff and in Dąbrowski’s legions within the space of four years. He settled in France, where in 1804 he had a vision of ‘the absolute’, and published a vast corpus of work, some of it purely mathematical, but most of it devoted to restructuring the relationship between science and life. He tried to elaborate a system of history in which the fate of Poland played a seminal part.

In 1848 Mickiewicz went to Rome to raise a Polish legion, whose uniform was marked by a large cross. While it battled against the Austrians in Lombardy, he returned to Paris to edit the international socialist periodical La Tribune des Peuples. A devout if at times rebellious Christian, Mickiewicz kept trying to arrive at a synthesis of Christian Socialism and to construct a programme of action which fitted the historical moment.

By the late 1840s the thinking of people such as Mickiewicz and his colleague the poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809-49) was going round in diminishing circles, becoming almost pathological. This was inherent in the conundrum of their predicament, and partly the result of poverty and personal misery. Słowacki dying of tuberculosis in Paris and the poverty-stricken Mickiewicz supporting seven children and a wife who had lost her senses could not be expected to take anything but an embittered view.

More aristocratic Poles grouped around the Czartoryski faction, which functioned like a kind of court in the magnificent Hôtel Lambert in Paris, and those artists who, like Chopin, were able to find a place in the mainstream of European culture and social life, were spared such extremes of suffering, and were therefore able to take a more balanced position. Of the three major Romantic poets Zygmunt Krasiński (1812-59) stood out in this respect. He was christened Napoleon Stanisław Zygmunt by his father, a general in the Grande Armée, but the first of these names was dropped as the general became a prominent reactionary in the Congress Kingdom and a trusted servant of the Tsar. The boy’s life at school was marred by the unpopularity of his father, and he was eventually sent to complete his studies in Geneva. It was there that the outbreak of the 1830 rising found him. He was painfully torn between the desire to join his fellows in the rising and obedience to his father in St Petersburg, who forbade it.

While most Poles viewed the situation in terms of national oppression, and socialists as a struggle between revolution and reaction, Krasiński saw it in a different light. To him, the political status quo amounted to a dishonest and morally indefensible inversion of reality, which turned Russia into the guardian of legitimacy and lent Prussia a civilising mission to oppress Poland. The three powers had, by sleight of hand, turned the Polish cause into a revolutionary one, and the Austrian chancellor Metternich tried to convince the world that the Polish cause ‘does not declare war on the monarchies which possess Polish territory, it declares war on all existing institutions and proclaims the destruction of all the common foundations which form the basis of society’.

To Krasiński, the Russian system was, as he put it in a letter to Pope Pius IX, ‘a huge merciless machine, working by night and by day, crushing thousands of hearts and minds every minute…the irreconcilable enemy of all spiritual independence’. It was the bureaucratic apparatus of the police state that was the real enemy of European civilisation, and it was all the more dangerous for masquerading as its champion, since it perversely encouraged and strengthened the forces of revolution, which were equally destructive. He saw Poland as the only possible counterbalance to both. ‘To make Poland a free, constitutional, moderate state would be to save her, and with her the world,’ he explained in a letter to Louis-Philippe’s minister François Guizot. ‘It would at one stroke kill all the wild hopes of the Tsars and the destructive hopes of the demagogues, whose very real power is based on the profound and hideous injustice of the present European system.’

He was, ultimately, arguing the cause of the anti-statist values of the Commonwealth. In a remarkable play he wrote at this time, The Undivine Comedy, he foresaw that the current belief in the state over the individual would lead to greater repression and finally revolution, a revolution that would throw up demagogic tyrants. The character of the tyrant in his play is grimly prophetic of Stalin and Hitler.

If Krasiński’s perception was cooler than that of his peers, he lacked the conviction that sustained Mickiewicz to his bitter end, brought on by cholera in Turkey in 1855 while attempting to raise a Jewish force for the liberation of Palestine. Krasiński could see no promise in any programme. He too went through a phase of messianic exaltation: ‘Where there is pain, there is life, there is resurrection,’ he wrote to Słowacki. Ultimately, the poets and the philosophers had to admit that there was no answer to the Polish Question—no political answer and no spiritual answer. It remained a question of faith and hope. The only thing the Poles could do was to cling to their Polishness. Not their patriotism or their political hopes for the resurrection of Poland, but quite simply the state of mind of Polishness. As Krasiński exclaimed in his last major poem, The Dawn: ‘you are no longer just my country; a place, a home, a way of life; the death of a state or its birth; but a Faith—a Law!’