On the night of 29 November 1830 a group of officer cadets broke into the Belvedere Palace to assassinate Grand Duke Constantine while another attacked a nearby Russian cavalry barracks. Everything went wrong. The Russians were alerted in time and the Grand Duke escaped the knives of the assassins. An attack on the Arsenal was more successful, with fatal consequences. Armed gangs roamed the streets lynching Russians and Polish collaborators, and, by mistake, two of the best Polish generals.
The Polish authorities moved swiftly to bring the situation under control and avoid confrontation with Russia. Prince Franciszek Ksawery Drucki-Lubecki, the Minister of Finance, took the initiative of coopting Czartoryski and other figures of standing to join him in a National Council. In an attempt to keep the army together and restore order the popular General Chłopicki was proclaimed Dictator on 5 December. He hoped to be able to deal with the whole matter as an internal Polish problem. He granted Constantine safe-conduct out of Warsaw, along with his court, his troops, even his police spies and political prisoners, and he despatched Lubecki to St Petersburg to negotiate.
But the Tsar refused to receive the Prince, and on 7 January 1831 sent him a note demanding unconditional surrender as a precondition to any negotiations. This inflamed patriotic fervour throughout the country. Talk of accommodation was branded as defeatist, and, seeing no other way out, Chłopicki resigned. The Sejm acknowledged a state of insurrection, and under pressure from below, on 25 January 1831 burnt its bridges by voting the dethronement of Nicholas as King of Poland. A new government was formed under Czartoryski with Michał Radziwiłł as commander-in-chief. The Kingdom of Poland had seceded from Russia.
In February a force of 115,000 Russian troops under General Diebitsch marched into Poland. The Polish army, consisting of 30,000 men, blocked his advance successfully at Grochów on 25 February. At the end of March General Jan Skrzynecki sallied forth and routed the Russian corps separately in the three battles of Wawer, Dębe Wielkie and Iganie, obliging Diebitsch to withdraw eastwards. The position of the Russian forces was parlous, with Diebitsch isolated and the Guard Corps on its way to reinforce him easy for the Poles to intercept. General Dwernicki had been sent with a small force to Volhynia to raise a revolt there, while Generals Chłapowski and Giełgud marched into Lithuania with the same intention. The Poles were well set to win the campaign. They called up reserves of 80,000, and with the Lithuanian and other contingents, they could count on up to 200,000 in total. The Russian forces in Poland numbered some 250,000, but the Polish soldier was more motivated and the officer corps more experienced. The insurrection also attracted valuable volunteers from abroad. Hundreds of Napoleonic officers took part, including General Ramorino, the son of Marshal Lannes (Marshal Grouchy wanted to come, but insisted on too high a rank). The next largest contingent were Germans, who also supplied over a hundred military surgeons, and there were volunteers from Hungary, Italy and Britain.
But none of those standing at the helm approved of the rising or believed in its chances of success. Czartoryski was convinced that the only solution was a diplomatic one. He sent missions to London, Paris and Vienna in order to secure support and finance, and to offer the throne of Poland to a Habsburg archduke or a member of the British royal family in return for assistance. The commander-in-chief, General Jan Skrzynecki, felt that the less blood was spilled before negotiations were resumed the better. He therefore dragged his heels and failed to intercept the Guard Corps. When this joined up with Diebitsch’s army, he was attacked and defeated on 26 May at Ostrołęka. Diebitsch died of the cholera epidemic raging in the Russian army, but Skrzynecki failed to exploit the situation. General Paskevich took over command of the Russian forces and prepared for a new advance.
In Paris, King Louis-Philippe made sonorous speeches hinting at French military support, and there was a moment when it looked as though Czartoryski’s diplomatic efforts might yield fruit. Events in Poland aroused strong international sympathy and engaged the poetic fancy. In Germany, this gave rise to a genre of Polenlieder. In America, Nathan Parker Willis wrote odes to Poland, while in England the young Tennyson wrote what he termed ‘a beautiful poem on Poland, hundreds of lines long’ (which was used by his housemaid to light the fire). In France, Delavigne, Béranger, Musset, Vigny, Lamartine and Hugo glorified the Poles’ struggle in verse. On 23 May 1831 the Aldermen and Council of New York made a strong declaration of support, while Boston offered standards for the Polish regiments. In Paris, James Fenimore Cooper started a Polish-American Committee to gather funds for the rising.
Given time, some of this feeling might have been brought to bear. But the lack of political determination at the top allowed Paskevich to seize the initiative. He marched westwards, bypassing Warsaw to the north, and swept round to attack it from its least defensible western side. Instead of delivering a flank attack on the moving Russian columns, Skrzynecki sent two army corps off in different directions to create diversions. On 6 September 1831 Paskevich attacked Warsaw. After two days of determined but costly fighting, the new commander General Krukowiecki capitulated and withdrew with the rest of his forces. The Poles still had some 70,000 troops in the field but these were dispersed around the country, and continued resistance seemed pointless. On 5 October the main army crossed the border into Prussia to avoid capture by the Russians, while other units sought refuge behind the Austrian cordon, followed by most of the political leadership.
Nicholas abolished the constitution of the Kingdom and closed down the universities of Wilno and Warsaw, along with the Warsaw Polytechnic, the Krzemieniec High School, the Society of Friends of Learning and other educational establishments. In exchange, Warsaw was endowed with a citadel from which Nicholas promised to bombard the city to rubble if there was any more trouble. General Paskevich was named Prince of Warsaw, and Russian generals and officials were given estates confiscated from Polish families.
Ten people, with Adam Czartoryski at the head of the list, were condemned to death by decapitation, and a further 350 to hanging (most of them had already left the country). While a generous amnesty was trumpeted to the world, 10,000 officers were sent off to hard labour or service as simple soldiers in Russian regiments in the Caucasus. Over eight hundred ‘orphans’ (children whose fathers had been killed or gone into exile) were taken from their mothers and given to Russian infantry regiments to bring up. In the Kingdom, countless families of minor szlachta were degraded and 3,176 had their estates confiscated. In the province of Podolia, 5,000 families of minor szlachta were dispossessed of everything, reduced to peasant status and transported to the Caucasus. A few years later 40,000 families of szlachta from Lithuania and Volhynia were conveyed to Siberia. Prince Roman Sanguszko, who was of Rurik’s royal blood and might have qualified for some respect, was sentenced to hard labour for life in Siberia and made to walk there chained to a gang of convicts. When his mother, a friend and former lady-in-waiting to the Empress, begged for leniency, she was told she could go too.
The fate of the exiles was less lurid but no more enviable. Some 8,000 senior officers, political figures, writers and artists found themselves consigned to a life of hopeless anticipation. Theirs was supposed to be a tactical withdrawal. To keep themselves in shape, many of the soldiers took service in the new Belgian army, and the French tried to pack as many as they could into a Foreign Legion created for the purpose. Others converged on Paris, which became a focal point of Polish political and cultural life. It was there, amid bitterness and mutual recrimination, that the next moves in the struggle to recapture Poland were planned and discussed.
Two principal groupings emerged: the Czartoryski party and the Polish Democratic Society. The first pinned its hopes on diplomacy. Adam Czartoryski, referred to even by his political opponents as the de facto king of Poland, lobbied British Members of Parliament and French Deputies, wrote memoranda and petitions, and maintained unofficial diplomatic relations with the Vatican and the Porte. He set up a network with offices in several capitals which sprang into frenetic activity whenever a crisis loomed in Europe.
The Democratic Society, whose nerve centre, the Centralizacja, was based at Versailles, was committed to starting a mass rising in Poland at the earliest possible moment. It also built up strong links with similar movements in other countries, such as Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy; like the French in the 1790s, the Poles had begun to see themselves as universal champions of freedom, obliged to assist sister nations in their struggles, and thousands of them conspired, fought and died for the causes of others.
In 1837 the Russians uncovered the network the Centralizacja had carefully organised throughout the Kingdom and Lithuania, and cut a swathe through it with shootings, hangings and deportations to Siberia. The Democrats then shifted their activities to the less perilous Austrian and Prussian sectors, where they agitated throughout the 1840s, often playing on anti-manor sentiments in order to gain support among the politically passive peasantry.
A peasant rising was planned in both Galicia and Poznania for 22 February 1846. But premature action alerted the Austrian authorities, which reacted with speed and perfidy. They appealed to the Galician peasantry, explaining that the Polish lords were plotting a rising which would enslave them and offering cash for every ‘conspirator’ brought in dead or alive. There followed three days of mob violence in which bands of peasants attacked some seven hundred country houses, killing about a thousand people, few of them conspirators. On 4 March Austrian and Russian troops crushed the Socialist Republic which had meanwhile been proclaimed in Kraków and abolished the free status of the city, which was incorporated into the Austrian Empire. In Poznania the Prussian authorities arrested the entire leadership before the planned local rising had time to break out.
The revolutionary ardour of the Poles revived in the ‘Springtime of the Nations’ of 1848. In February of that year the Paris mob overthrew the regime of Louis-Philippe; three weeks later the barricades went up in Vienna and Berlin; by the summer there was hardly a state in Europe that had not been affected by disturbances. Poles were involved in all of these, as well as in events taking place in Poland itself.
Kraków and Lwów rose and proclaimed provisional revolutionary committees designated by the Versailles Centralizacja, which presented a list of demands for autonomy and the emancipation of the peasants. In the desperate straits in which it found itself the Austrian government had no option but to accept the fait accompli.
The Berlin mob had released from prison all the Polish conspirators arrested in 1846, and they went to Poznań to take control of the National Committee which had already formed there. The Berlin government was prepared to concede almost anything to weather the storm and therefore sanctioned the committee, promising ‘national reorganisation’ of the Grand Duchy of Posen along Polish lines. Attention then switched to Frankfurt, where the all-German Parliament assembled in a mood of pan-European liberalism. The fear that Tsar Nicholas would send in his troops to restore order in Central Europe prompted much talk of a common crusade to liberate Russian Poland and roll back the boundaries of tsarist autocracy.
Poles from all over Europe flocked to Poznania. Even Adam Czartoryski arrived from Paris, greeted along the way like a future king. In Poznania the National Committee had by now some 20,000 men under arms, commanded by Ludwik Mierosławski, and proceeded with a programme of local reforms.
In the early summer the mood in Germany and in the Frankfurt Parliament began to veer away from internationalist liberalism, and deputies representing the German population of Poznania, Silesia and Pomerania began to voice anti-Polish sentiments. As the liberal ardour spent itself, the Berlin government began to contain the crisis. It promised to abide by its plan of ‘national reorganisation’ in Poznania, but insisted the Polish militias be disbanded. The National Committee tried to negotiate, but when Prussian forces attacked one of the Polish units the Poles fought back. They won two pitched battles against the Prussian army, at Milosław and Sokolowo, but were eventually bombarded into surrender with heavy artillery. Talk of reorganisation and autonomy was dropped, and in the end the Frankfurt Parliament voted to incorporate the Grand Duchy of Posen into Germany. As Friedrich Engels noted wryly: ‘Our enthusiasm for the Poles changed into shrapnel and caustic.’
In November, the Austrian army bombarded Kraków and then Lwów into submission. The ‘Springtime of the Nations’ had turned into another bleak winter for Polish patriots; far from benefiting their cause in any way, it had actually had the effect of liquidating the remaining privileges in the Republic of Kraków and the Grand Duchy of Posen.
The Poles had been among the first on the barricades of Vienna and Berlin; they fought in the Dresden rising; a Polish legion formed by the poet Adam Mickiewicz in Lombardy fought at Rome, Genoa, Milan and Florence; Mierosławski commanded the anti-Bourbon forces in Sicily and then the German revolutionaries in Baden; General Chrzanowski commanded the Piedmontese forces at Novara. Wherever there were Russians, Prussians, Austrians or their allies to be fought, there were Poles in the ranks. Their greatest contribution was to the Hungarian cause. General Bem, who had saved the day for the Poles at Ostrołęka in 1831, commanded the revolutionary forces in Vienna in 1848 and then Lajos Kossuth’s army in Transylvania. General Dembiński was the commander-inchief of the Hungarian forces. They and hundreds of Polish officers fought to the bloody end at Temesvar, while Czartoryski backed the Hungarians with diplomatic and material resources.
All this only served to associate the Polish cause with revolution in the European mind, and Europe was frightened by revolution. The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 should have been a godsend to the Poles, combining as it did both of the nations most sympathetic to their cause against the arch-enemy Russia. The former British Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister Lord Palmerston knew Czartoryski and had often made sympathetic pronouncements on the Polish question. Napoleon III inherited sympathy for the Polish cause with his political pedigree, and his Foreign Minister was Count Walewski, the half-Polish natural son of the first Napoleon. The Poles began to dream of a Franco-British expeditionary force landing in Lithuania, but Palmerston and Napoleon III buried the Polish issue in order to buy Austrian and Prussian neutrality in the conflict, and only allowed Polish units to be raised under the Turkish flag to fight the common enemy in the Caucasus and the Crimea.
The Russian defeat in the Crimea and the death of Tsar Nicholas in 1855 did, however, have an immediate effect on conditions in Poland itself. The new Tsar, Alexander II, visited Warsaw and expressed himself open to suggestions for reform, but warned against political illusion: ‘Point de rêveries, messieurs, point de rêveries!’ It was an idle taunt. Any attempt at improvement by the Poles was virtually bound to be seen in St Petersburg as ‘rêveries’, as the next few years were to demonstrate.
With cautious optimism, the Warsaw banker and industrialist Leopold Kronenberg and Andrzej Zamoyski of the Agricultural Society initiated a discussion of possible reforms. It was the area tackled by Zamoyski that absorbed most attention—the question of the peasants. By the late 1850s more than half of all peasant tenancies had been transformed into money-rents, mainly by voluntary commutation on the part of the landlord. But most small estates still operated on the old labour-rent system. In 1858 the Russian government asked the Agricultural Society to prepare a land reform project. Since discussions were going on in Russia on the subject of the emancipation of serfs, the matter began to assume starkly political overtones. It was a question of whether the Polish peasant would thank the Tsar or his Polish masters for his emancipation.
The Agricultural Society eventually settled on a project which commuted all labour-rents to money-rents with assured tenancy, to be followed by a conversion of tenancies into freeholds by negotiation between landlord and tenant. The country followed the course of the discussion and by 1860 the Agricultural Society had come to be regarded as the de facto Sejm, its meetings reported even by the London Times. It was soon caught between the admonitions of St Petersburg and the increasingly strident demands of the Warsaw radicals. St Petersburg’s strong man in this instance was not a Russian but a Pole, Aleksander Wielopolski, an intelligent, urbane aristocrat who had supported the 1830 rising but had since come to see the pointlessness of such heroics.
In 1860 Wielopolski came up with a plan acceptable to the Tsar which was, in essence, a cautious return to the principles of the Congress Kingdom of the 1820s. Russia would concede a measure of administrative reform in the government of the Kingdom and permit the creation of consultative bodies; the clampdown on education would be eased and the peasant question would be solved by Wielopolski, who in 1862 became head of the civil government. In replication of earlier arrangements, Alexander’s brother Constantine was sent to Poland as viceroy. For his part, Wielopolski undertook to maintain order and keep Polish political ambitions under control.
This would not be easy. Wielopolski was disliked for his arrogance and apparent subservience to Russia. His rival Andrzej Zamoyski was a man of lesser intelligence but greater popularity who was beginning to be propelled by pressures from below. When summoned by Grand Duke Constantine he refused to collaborate, preferring to remain in opposition. The promise of liberalisation had acted like a tonic on the more radical elements of the population. Meetings were held, discussions raged in word and print on every aspect of reform, emancipation and autonomy, and the conclusion was drawn more often than not that any accommodation with Russia was impossible. The police listened, people were investigated, and the cells of the Citadel began to fill up with hundreds, then thousands.
On 25 February 1861, a meeting commemorating the 1830 rising was dispersed by police. Two days later a religious procession was fired on, leaving five dead. On 8 April a similar demonstration resulted in over a hundred deaths. Disturbances recurred in Warsaw and other cities in a climate of mutual provocation. Martial law was decreed and on 15 October Russian troops broke into a couple of Warsaw churches in which demonstrators had sought sanctuary, and some 1,500 were carted off to the Citadel. All churches and synagogues in the country closed in protest, leading to the arrest of bishops, priests and rabbis.
A group of radicals known as ‘Reds’ had founded a secret Warsaw City Committee, and this set up a countrywide provisional government to coordinate a mass rising in 1862. The military weakness of Russia demonstrated by the Crimean War, as well as the recent successes of Garibaldi in Italy, suggested that it might succeed. While liberals saw a Polish Cavour in Czartoryski, radicals saw a Polish Garibaldi in Mierosławski, who was a friend of Prince Napoleon, nephew of the Emperor of the French. The military commander appointed by the City Committee, Jarosław Dąbrowski, made contact with officers, both Russian and Polish, throughout the Russian army in order to cripple the military response at the moment of outbreak. Plans were well advanced when, in the summer of 1862, the Russian police got wind of the preparations and arrested many of the officers, including Dąbrowski.
Meanwhile, Wielopolski was trying to impose his own solution to the peasant question, which was similar to Zamoyski’s proposals of 1859. By now, however, Zamoyski and the Agricultural Society had shifted their position. In an attempt to outbid the Reds they pressed for more radical measures. Zamoyski was summoned to St Petersburg where he was given a reprimand by the Tsar and sent into exile. The Agricultural Society was abolished and Kronenberg’s City Deputation dissolved. It was now the turn of the moderates, known as the ‘Whites’, to go underground and start plotting.
The Poles had learnt a great deal from their experiences and displayed remarkable professionalism in the art of subversive organisation. The City Committee became the Central National Committee under the chairmanship of Stefan Bobrowski. It had five ministries: a diplomatic service which travelled widely and freely on forged documents, gaining admittance to European chancelleries as well as Russian émigrés’ garrets; a treasury which collected donations from sympathisers and ‘taxes’ from the lukewarm, and even floated an international loan; a quartermastership which purchased and smuggled arms and supplies; a department of the interior which formulated policy on emancipation of the peasants and the Jews; and a department of justice complete with its own ‘stiletto police’. The intelligence department had men in every branch of the Russian army and civil service. The fighters trained and operated clandestinely in Warsaw under the noses of the Russian army encamped not only in the Citadel but in the squares and streets. The Russian General Berg, who had been instructed by the Grand Duke Constantine to investigate the conspiracy, reported back after some weeks that he had discovered ‘only one thing, namely that I don’t belong to it’. As an afterthought, he added: ‘And neither does Your Imperial Highness.’
Wielopolski still hoped to avert insurrection. He brought forward the annual selective conscription into the Russian army and excluded landowners and settled peasants from the lists. By concentrating the draft of more than 30,000 on the educated young and the cities he calculated that the majority of the conspirators would be caught in the net, while those who purposely avoided it would reveal their identity. In the event, the majority slipped away from home as the draft drew near. On 22 January 1863 the National Committee proclaimed the insurrection, and that night small units attacked Russian garrisons around the country.
The rising was doomed to failure. The insurgents numbered no more than about 20,000 ill-equipped men dispersed in bands of between fifty and five hundred. Their numbers grew periodically, and in all some 100,000 people would fight over the next eighteen months, but they were no match for the 300,000 Russian regulars concentrated against them. By virtue of good reconnaissance, timing, and an ability to melt away into the countryside, they managed to harass the Russian forces, cut supply lines, and occasionally defeat a column on the march, but they could not capture a town or take on a full division in pitched battle, as they had no artillery. Only in the remoter areas of Sandomierz, Podlasie and Kielce was it possible for units of more than 2,000 men to survive in the open. Nor was there any continuity of command. Ludwik Mierosławski, who was to take control, was defeated while moving in from Poznania. Marian Langiewicz did manage to assume overall command, but was soon defeated and forced to withdraw to Galicia.
World opinion was strongly pro-Polish, and while newspapers ranted against Russian injustice, young men flocked to Poland, from Ireland, England, France, Germany and, most of all, Italy. Garibaldi’s friend Francesco Nullo was one of several redshirts who fought and died in Poland. Remarkably, the largest non-Polish contingent was Russian.
Foreign governments were less eager to help. Bismarck made it clear that he would help Russia if the need arose. Austria turned a blind eye to the activity going on along its border, which was the only entry point for supplies. On 17 April 1863 Britain, France and Austria made a joint démarche in St Petersburg protesting at Russia’s violation of the Vienna settlement of 1815. Privately, Napoleon III and his ministers intimated that they would send arms and eventually troops, urging the Poles to hold on. It was largely as a result of this that the Whites, who were in close touch with their political siblings in Paris, decided in February to join the insurrection officially and to make a bid for control of the movement.
This changed hands more than once over the next months, and in October 1863 came to rest in those of Romuald Traugutt, a Lithuanian landowner. He was a devout, almost ascetic thirty-fiveyear-old father of two who had reached the rank of colonel in the Russian army and seen service in the Crimean War. He reorganised the National Committee and the military command, and it was largely owing to his leadership that the insurrection revived in the autumn of 1863 and expanded its area of operations.
It had been said that the boundaries of the putative future Poland would draw themselves with the blood of insurgents. Predictably, they did not stretch very far into Ukraine, where only groups of Polish szlachta came out. In Belorussia, they included much of the old Commonwealth, with not only the peasants, but also the Jews of towns such as Pińsk joining the cause. In Lithuania and even southern Livonia, they corresponded to the borders of 1772, with mass participation by all classes. It was a slap in the face to the Russian policy carried on in these areas since the first partition.
On 2 March 1864 the Tsar pulled the carpet from under the feet of the insurrectionary government by decreeing the emancipation of the peasants with full possession of land. In April Traugutt was arrested. Sporadic fighting went on for another six months, but the uprising was over. The Tsar issued a ukase changing the name of the Kingdom of Poland to the ‘Vistula Province’. All Polish institutions were abolished, and a period of intense repression began. General Muravyov, known in Russia as ‘Hangman’ Muravyov, scoured the Western Gubernias for signs of dissent and carried out a thorough purge. Brutality was meted out on a hitherto unknown scale, the path to Siberia was trodden by chain gangs numbering tens of thousands of young people who would never return, and the nation went into mourning.
It went into mourning not only for the failure of the insurrection, but for the whole tradition of insurgency. The 1863 rising was an uncommon achievement—it was no mean feat for 100,000 intellectuals, noblemen, workers and peasants to keep Europe’s largest military machine tied down for eighteen months. It had also proved that the szlachta were not alone, and the very last engagement was fought by a detachment of peasants. Nevertheless it was the end of an era in Polish history.