28: The Congress Kingdom
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THE Grand Duchy of Warsaw perished with
the Grand Army in the retreat from Moscow in 1812. The Polish troops had taken a prominent
part in the invasion of Russia, and their share in the plundering of Smolensk and of
Moscow had intensified the racial hatred felt for them by the Russians. Those of them who
survived or escaped the disasters of the retreat fled before the tsar's army and followed
the fortunes of Napoleon in 1813 and 1814. The Russians occupied Warsaw on the 18th of
February 1813 and overran the grand duchy, which thus came into their possession by
conquest. Some of the Poles continued to hope that Alexander would remember his old favour
for them, and would restore their kingdom under his own rule. Nor was the tsar unwilling
to encourage their delusion. He himself cherished the desire to re-establish the kingdom
for his own advantage. As early as the 13th of January 1813 he wrote to assure his former
favourite and confidant, Prince Adam Czartoryski, that, "Whatever the Poles do now to
aid in my success, will at the same time serve to forward the realization of their
hopes." But the schemes of Alexander could be carried out only with the co-operation
of other powers. They refused to consent to the annexation of Saxony by Prussia, and other
territorial arrangements which would have enabled him to unite all Poland in his own hand.
By the final act of the Congress of Vienna, signed on the 9th of June 1815, Poland was
divided between Prussia, Austria and Russia, with one trifling exception; Cracow with its
population of 61,000 was erected into a republic embedded in Galicia. Posen and Gnesen,
with a population of 810,000, were left to Prussia. Austria remained in possession of
Galicia with its 1,500,000 inhabitants. Lithuania and the Ruthenian Palatinates, the spoil
of former partitions, continued to be incorporated with Russia. The remnant was
constituted as the so-called Congress Kingdom under the emperor of Russia as king (tsar)
of Poland. It had been stipulated by the Final Act that the Poles under foreign rule
should be endowed with institutions to preserve their national existence according to such
forms of political existence as the governments to which they belong shall think fit to
allow them.
Alexander, who had a sentimental regard for freedom, so long as
it was obedient to himself, had promised the Poles a constitution in April 1815 in a
letter to Ostrovskiy, the president of the senate at Warsaw. His promise was publicly
proclaimed on the 25th of May, and was reaffirmed in the Zamok or palace at Warsaw and the
cathedral of St John on the 20th of June. The constitution thus promised was duly drafted,
and was signed on the 30th of November. It contained 165 articles divided under seven
heads. The kingdom of Poland was declared to be united to Russia, in the person of the
tsar, as a separate political entity. The kingdom was the Congress Kingdom, for the vague
promises of an extension to the east which Alexander had made to the Poles were never
fulfilled. Lithuania and the Ruthenian Palatinates continued to be incorporated with
Russia as the Western Provinces and were divided from the Congress Kingdom by a customs
barrier till the reign of Nicholas I. The kingdom of Poland thus defined was to have at
its head a lieutenant of the emperor (namiestnik), who must be a member of the
imperial house or a Pole. The first holder of the office, General Zajonczek (1752-1826),
was a veteran who had served Napoleon. Roman Catholicism was recognized as the religion of
the state, but other religions were tolerated. Liberty of the press was promised subject
to the passing of a law to restrain its abuses. Individual liberty, the use of the Polish
language in the law courts, and the exclusive employment of Poles in the civil government
were secured by the constitution. The machinery of government was framed of a council of
state, at which the imperial government was represented by a commissioner plenipotentiary,
and a Diet divided into a senate composed of the princes of the blood, the palatines and
councillors named for life, and a house of nuntii elected for seven years, 77
chosen by the "dietines" of the nobles, and 51 by the commons. The Diet vas to
meet every other year for a session of thirty days, and was to be renewed by thirds every
two years. Poland retained its flag, and a national army based on that which had been
raised by and had fought for Napoleon. The command of the army was given to the emperor's
brother Constantine, a man of somewhat erratic character, who did much to offend the Poles
by violence, but also a good deal to please them by his marriage with Johanna Grudzinska,
a Polish lady afterwards created Princess Lowicz, for whose sake he renounced his right to
the throne of Russia.
The Diet met three times during the reign of Alexander, in 1818,
in 1820 and in 1825 and was on all three occasions opened by the tsar, who was compelled
to address his subjects in French, since he did not speak, and would not learn, their
language. It is highly doubtful whether, with the best efforts on both sides, a
constitutional government could have been worked by a Russian autocrat, and an assembly of
men who inherited the memories and characters of the Poles. In fact the tsar and the Diet
soon quarrelled. The Poles would not abolish the jury to please the tsar, nor conform as
he wished them to do to the Russian law of divorce. Opposition soon arose, and as
Alexander could not understand a freedom which differed from himself, and would not
condescend to the use of corruption, by which the ancient Polish Diets had been managed,
he was driven to use force. The third session of the Diet - 13th of May to 13th of June
1825 - was a mere formality. All publicity was suppressed, and one whole district was
disfranchised because it persisted in electing candidates who were disapproved of at
court. On the other hand the Poles were also to blame for the failure of constitutional
government. They would agitate by means of the so-called National Masonry, or National
Patriotic Society as it was afterwards called, for the restoration of the full kingdom of
Poland. The nobles who dominated the Diet did nothing to remove the most crying evil of
the country - the miserable state of the peasants, who had been freed from personal
serfdom by Napoleon in 1807 but were being steadily driven from their holdings by the
landlords. In spite of the general prosperity of the country due to peace, and the
execution of public works mostly at the expense of Russia, the state of the agricultural
class grew, if anything, worse.
Yet no open breach occurred during the reign of Alexander, nor
for five years after his death in 1825. The Decembrist movement in Russia had little or no
echo in Poland On the death of Zajonczek in 1826, the grand duke Constantine became
imperial lieutenant and his administration, though erratic, was not unfavourable to
displays of Polish nationality. The Polish army had no share in the Turkish War of 1829,
largely, it is said, at the request of Constantine, who loved parades and thought that war
was the ruin of soldiers. No attempt was made to profit by the embarrassments of the
Russians in their war with Turkey. A plot to murder Nicholas at his coronation on the 24th
of May 1829 was not carried out, and when he held the fourth Diet on the 30th of May 1830,
the Poles made an ostentatious show of their nationality which Nicholas was provoked to
describe as possibly patriotic but certainly not civil. Nevertheless, he respected the
settlement of 1815. In the meantime the Patriotic Society had divided into a White or
Moderate party and a Red or Extreme party, which was subdivided into the Academics or
Republicans and the Military or Terrorists. The latter were very busy and were supported
by the Roman Catholic Church, which did little for the Prussian Poles and nothing for the
Austrian Poles but was active in harassing the schismatical government of Russia.
The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1830 and the revolt of
Belgium produced a great effect in Poland. The spread of a belief, partly justified by the
language of Nicholas that the Polish army would be used to coerce the Belgians, caused
great irritation. At last, on the 29th of November 1830, a military revolt took place in
Warsaw accompanied by the murder of the minister of war, Hauke, himself a Pole, and other
loyal officers. The extraordinary weakness of the grand duke allowed the rising to gather
strength. He evacuated Warsaw and finally left the country, dying at Vitebsk on the 27th
of June 1831. The war lasted from January till September 1831. The fact that the Poles
possessed a well-drilled army of 23,800 foot, 6800 horse and 108 guns, which they were
able to recruit to a total strength of 80,821 men with 158 guns, gave solidity to the
rising. The Russians who had endeavoured to overawe Europe by the report of their immense
military power had the utmost difficulty in putting 114,000 men into the field, yet in
less than a year, under the leadership of Diebitsch, and then of Paskevich, they mastered
the Poles. On the political and administrative side the struggle of the Poles was weakened
by the faults which had been the ruin of their kingdom - faction pushed to the point of
anarchy, want of discipline, intrigue and violence as shown by the abominable massacre
which took place in Warsaw when the defeat of tie army was known. The Poles had begun by
protesting that they only wished to defend their rights against the tsar, but they soon
proceeded to proclaim his deposition. Their appeal to the powers of Europe for protection
was inevitably disregarded.
When the Congress Kingdom had been reconquered it was
immediately reduced to the position of a Russian province. No remnant of Poland's separate
political existence remained save the minute republic of Cracow. Unable to acquiesce
sincerely in its insignificance, and even unable to enforce its neutrality, Cracow was a
centre of disturbance, and, after Russia, Prussia, and Austria had in 1846 agreed to its
suppression, was finally occupied by Austria on the 6th of November 1848, as a consequence
of the troubles, more agrarian than political, which convulsed Galicia. The administration
established by Nicholas I. in Russian Poland was harsh and aimed avowedly at destroying
the nationality, and even the language of Poland. The Polish universities of Warsaw and
Vilna were suppressed, and the students compelled to go to Petrograd and Kiev. Polish
recruits were distributed in Russian regiments, and the use of the Russian language was
enforced as far as possible in the civil administration and in the law courts. The customs
barrier between Lithuania and the former Congress Kingdom was removed, in the hope that
the influence of Russia would spread more easily over Poland. A very hostile policy was
adopted against the Roman Catholic Church. But though these measures cowed the Poles, they
failed to achieve their main purpose. Polish national sentiment was not destroyed, but
intensified. It even spread to Lithuania. The failure of Nicholas was in good part due to
mistaken measures of what he hoped would be conciliation. He supported Polish students at
Russian universities on condition that they then spent a number of years in the public
service. It was the hope of the emperor that they would thus become united in interest
with the Russians. But these Polish officials made use of their positions to aid their
countrymen, and were grasping and corrupt with patriotic intentions. The Poles in Russia,
whether at the universities or in the public service, formed an element which refused to
assimilate with the Russians. In Poland itself the tsar left much of the current civil
administration in the hands of the nobles, whose power over their peasants was hardly
diminished and was misused as of old. The Polish exiles who filled Europe after 1830
intrigued from abroad, and maintained a constant agitation. The stern government of
Nicholas was, however, so far effective that Poland remained quiescent during the Crimean
War, in which many Polish soldiers fought in the Russian army. The Russian government felt
safe enough to reduce the garrison of Poland largely. It was not till 1863, eight years
after the death of the tsar in 1855, that the last attempt of the Poles to achieve
independence by arms was made.
The rising of 1863 may without injustice be said to be due to
the more humane policy of the tsar Alexander II. Exiles were allowed to return to Poland,
the Church was propitiated, the weight of the Russian administration was lightened, police
rules as to passports were relaxed, and the Poles were allowed to form an agricultural
society and to meet for a common purpose for the first time after many years. Poland in
short shared in the new era of milder rule which began in Russia. In April 1856 Alexander
II. was crowned king in the Roman Catholic cathedral of Warsaw, and addressed a flattering
speech to his Polish subjects in French, for he too could not speak their language. His
warning "No nonsense, gentlemen" (Point de rêveries, Messieurs), was
taken in very ill part, and it was perhaps naturally, but beyond question most unhappily,
the truth that the tsar's concessions only served to encourage the Poles to revolt, and to
produce a strong Russian reaction against his liberal policy. As the Poles could no longer
dispose of an army, they mere unable to assail Russia as openly as in 1830. They had
recourse to the so-called "unarmed agitation," which was in effect a policy of
constant provocation designed to bring on measures of repression to be represented to
Europe as examples of Russian brutality. They began in 1860 at the funeral of the widow of
General Sobinski, killed in 1830, and on the 27th of February 1861 they led to the
so-called Warsaw massacres, when the troops fired on a crowd which refused to disperse.
The history of the agitation which culminated in the disorderly rising of 1863 is one of
intrigue, secret agitation, and in the end of sheer terrorism by a secret society, which
organized political assassination. The weakness of the Russian governor, General
Gorchakov, in 1861 was a repetition of the feebleness of the Grand Duke Constantine in
1830. He allowed the Poles who organized the demonstration of the 27th of February to form
a kind of provisional government. Alongside of such want of firmness as this were,
however, to be found such measures of ill-timed repression as the order given in 1860 to
the agricultural society not to discuss the question of the settlement of the peasants on
the land. Concession and repression were employed alternately. The Poles, encouraged by
the one and exasperated by the other, finally broke into the partial revolt of 1863-1864.
It was a struggle of ill-armed partisans, who were never even numerous, against regular
troops, and was marked by no real battle. The suppression of the rising was followed by a
return to the hard methods of Nicholas. The Polish nobles, gentry and Church - the
educated classes generally - were crushed. It must, however, be noted that one class of
the measures taken to punish the old governing part of the population of Poland has been
very favourable to the majority. The peasants were freed in Lithuania, and in Poland
proper much was done to improve their position.
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