Poland: Duchy of WarsawTerritory of the Polish state known as the Duchy of Warsaw, 1812.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Napoleon regarded the duchy as a French outpost in the east, which required the maintenance of a disproportionately large army. The costs of maintaining it, together with the adverse effects of the Continental System, brought the duchy’s economy to the brink of ruin. The emperor then took some Polish troops on his payroll, and they fought in Spain, where the charge of the light horse guards at Somosierra in 1808 passed into national legend.
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, in which nearly 100,000 Polish soldiers participated, seemed to promise the re-creation of Poland. Napoleon encouraged the Poles to proclaim the restoration of their country but did not commit himself to that goal. In reality, the emperor waged war not to destroy Russia but to force the tsar back into a policy of collaboration with France. Only in his exile at St. Helena did Napoleon speak of the key importance of Poland. His defeat in Russia brought the victorious Russian troops into the Duchy of Warsaw. While other allies of Napoleon were abandoning the sinking ship, Prince Józef Poniatowski, who commanded the Polish army, remained loyal and died fighting at the Battle of Leipzig (1813) as a marshal of France. From the Congress of Vienna to 1848
The victory of the anti-Napoleonic coalition led to a redrafting of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15). The Congress paid lip service to Poland by enjoining the partitioning powers to respect the national rights of their Polish subjects (insofar as was compatible with the partitioners’ state interests) and by providing for free trade and communications within the borders of the old Commonwealth. The latter turned out to be a dead letter. The territorial issue caused dissent among the powers, but eventually a compromise arrangement left the former Duchy of Warsaw, minus Poznania (which went to Prussia) and Kraków (made a free city), to Tsar Alexander under the name of the Kingdom of Poland. The tsar now controlled about two-thirds of the old Commonwealth—both the area commonly called Congress Kingdom, or Congress Poland, and the former Commonwealth (Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian) provinces that had been annexed during the partitions.
Congress Kingdom of PolandTerritory of the Russian-ruled Polish state known as the Congress Kingdom of Poland, 1815–74.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Early Russian rule
Endowed with a liberal constitution, which was increasingly violated in practice, the settlement satisfied neither the Poles nor the Russians. The former hoped for the kingdom to be united with the eastern “lost lands” and to become a junior partner of the empire. Alexander, who played with the idea, abandoned it under the pressure of Russian circles that were unwilling to give up any of the annexed provinces. The Wilno educational district, which comprised most of them, originally had been chaired by Czartoryski and had been seen as a model for educational reform in Russia. The university in Wilno was the largest in the empire. In 1823 it came under attack; students accused of sedition were jailed or exiled. One of the victims was the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. Thus, basic disagreement about the territorial question was augmented by the anomalous union of an autocratic empire with a liberal kingdom. In the long run a confrontation may have been inevitable, but it was hastened by a gradual deterioration of the position of the Poles.
Adam Mickiewicz, detail of an oil painting by Aleksander Kamiński, 1850.Courtesy of the Instytut Sztuki, Polska Akademia Nauk, Warsaw
The post of viceroy did not go to Prince Czartoryski, by then estranged from Alexander, but went to a servile political nonentity, General Józef Zajączek. The tsar’s brother Constantine, the brutal and neurotic grand duke, was made commander in chief. Together with a special representative of the tsar, the intriguing and unscrupulous Nikolay Novosiltsev, they dominated the kingdom while usually at odds with one another. Alexander, autocratic by temperament, was revolted by the phenomenon of a liberal opposition in the Sejm, which he regarded as ingratitude.
Out of Freemasonry, which the tsar at first patronized, there grew a secret Polish Patriotic Society whose aims could hardly be qualified as treason. Nevertheless, its leader, Major Walerian Łukasiński, became a national martyr when he was thrown into prison, where he languished half-forgotten for more than 40 years until his death. Other conspiracies of more radical character began to spread. The economy of the kingdom, however, developed, and its finances were put in order by the able though heavy-handed Prince Ksawery Drucki-Lubecki. He showed that Congress Poland was not a burden on the empire.
The Decembrist uprising in Russia in 1825, which accompanied the succession to the throne of Nicholas I, had repercussions in Congress Poland. A public trial exonerated the Polish leaders of complicity but made Russo-Polish relations tense. The outbreak of revolutions in Belgium and France in 1830 hastened the arrival of the November Insurrection. After its inception as a conspiratorial act at the cadet school in Warsaw (November 29, 1830), this uprising developed into a national revolt, marked by the dethronement of the Romanovs in Poland and the onset of a full-fledged Russo-Polish war. Hostilities spread into Lithuania and lasted until September 1831.
Russian victory was followed by severe reprisals, confiscations, arrests, and deportations. The kingdom’s constitution was suspended, which meant the end of a separate Polish Sejm, government, and army. The University of Warsaw (founded 1817) was closed, as was the University of Wilno. Cultural Russification in the empire’s former Polish provinces involved the liquidation of the Uniate church in 1839 and the abolition of the statute that had preserved the Lithuanian code of law. The Uniate church continued to exist only within the Congress Kingdom (until 1875) and in Galicia (until 1945). Emigration and revolt
Several thousand Poles, including the political and intellectual elite, emigrated. When they passed through Germany, these émigrés were hailed as champions of freedom, and many of them came to believe in the idea of the solidarity of nations. The émigrés, settling mainly in France, splintered into many factions but grouped mainly around two figures: the moderate conservatives followed Prince Czartoryski, and the leftists were led at first by the great historian Joachim Lelewel. Later these leftists took a more radical stance as the Polish Democratic Society. Czartoryski concentrated on seeking the support of Britain and France for the Polish cause against Russia. The democrats, distrusting governments and blaming the conservatives for the defeat of the November Insurrection, preached a national and social revolution in cooperation with other peoples that would emancipate the peasantry. The Polish Democratic Society, whose program was embodied in the Poitiers Manifesto of 1836, became the first democratically run, centralized, and disciplined political party of east-central Europe. Karl Marx regarded its concept of agrarian revolution as a major Polish contribution to European revolutionary thought.