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The Congress Kingdom of Poland was created out of the Duchy of Warsaw, a French client state, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when the great powers reorganized Europe following the Napoleonic wars.
The Duchy of Warsaw (Polish: Księstwo Warszawskie; French: Duché de Varsovie; German: Herzogtum Warschau), also known as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw [1] and Napoleonic Poland, [2] was a French client state established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1807, during the Napoleonic Wars.
Congress Kingdom of Poland, Polish state created (May 3, 1815) by the Congress of Vienna as part of the political settlement at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It was ruled by the tsars of Russia until its loss in World War I.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Overview
- The legions and the Duchy of Warsaw
- From the Congress of Vienna to 1848
- The January 1863 uprising and its aftermath
- Accommodation with the ruling governments
The 123 years during which Poland existed only as a partitioned land had a profound impact on the Polish psyche. Moreover, major 19th-century developments such as industrialization and modernization were uneven in Poland and proved to be a mixed blessing. Growing Polish nationalism was by necessity that of an oppressed nation and displayed the tendency of “all or nothing.” Compromise became a dirty word, for it implied collaboration with the partitioners; a distrust of authority grew. The tradition of the Polish nobles’ republic militated against submission and engendered an attitude of revolutionary defiance.
Beginning with the Kościuszko Insurrection, the Poles staged uprisings in 1806, 1830, 1846, 1848, and 1863 and a revolution in 1905. Defeats were followed by “organic work” that aimed at strengthening the society and its economy by peaceful means. This other major trend of nationalist aspiration was linked with Positivism, while the insurrectionary tradition became closely connected with Romanticism, but it is an oversimplification to identify the former with realism and the latter with idealism.
The survival of the Polish nation, which during the 19th century absorbed the peasant masses, was due in no small degree to a culture that continued to be all-Polish and dedicated to the Roman Catholic Church, whose role in maintaining “Polishness” was very important. Numerous writers, from the Romantic poets to Henryk Sienkiewicz, winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize for Literature, shaped the Polish mentality. For a stateless nation, ideas and imponderables acquired special importance. A rebirth of statehood, however, could be achieved only under the conditions of a major European upheaval, which would mean a collapse of the partitioning powers; this did not happen until 1918.
Proud and politically conscious Poles never reconciled themselves to the loss of independence. Conspiracies and attempts to exploit the differences between the partitioning powers arose. Émigrés looked to Revolutionary France for assistance, and General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski succeeded in 1797 in persuading Napoleon Bonaparte, then waging his Italian campaign, to create auxiliary Polish legions. In their headquarters the future Polish national anthem—“Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła” (“Poland Has Not Yet Perished”)—was sung for the first time.
Hopes placed on a French victory over Austria that would open the Polish question were, however, quashed by the Treaty of Campo Formio. In subsequent struggles Polish legionnaires were employed to fight French battles in Germany and in Santo Domingo, but Poland gained no political commitments. Yet the Poles’ struggles did have a meaning in the long run, keeping a democratic Polish spirit alive and furnishing cadres to a future Polish army under Napoleon.
The pro-French military option had a counterpart in the ideas and policies of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. Appointed Russian foreign minister by Tsar Alexander I, the prince advocated redrawing the map of Europe to take into account national feelings and reconstitute Poland in union with Russia. This approach failed when Alexander committed himself to a struggle against France on the side of Prussia.
The 123 years during which Poland existed only as a partitioned land had a profound impact on the Polish psyche. Moreover, major 19th-century developments such as industrialization and modernization were uneven in Poland and proved to be a mixed blessing. Growing Polish nationalism was by necessity that of an oppressed nation and displayed the tendency of “all or nothing.” Compromise became a dirty word, for it implied collaboration with the partitioners; a distrust of authority grew. The tradition of the Polish nobles’ republic militated against submission and engendered an attitude of revolutionary defiance.
Beginning with the Kościuszko Insurrection, the Poles staged uprisings in 1806, 1830, 1846, 1848, and 1863 and a revolution in 1905. Defeats were followed by “organic work” that aimed at strengthening the society and its economy by peaceful means. This other major trend of nationalist aspiration was linked with Positivism, while the insurrectionary tradition became closely connected with Romanticism, but it is an oversimplification to identify the former with realism and the latter with idealism.
The survival of the Polish nation, which during the 19th century absorbed the peasant masses, was due in no small degree to a culture that continued to be all-Polish and dedicated to the Roman Catholic Church, whose role in maintaining “Polishness” was very important. Numerous writers, from the Romantic poets to Henryk Sienkiewicz, winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize for Literature, shaped the Polish mentality. For a stateless nation, ideas and imponderables acquired special importance. A rebirth of statehood, however, could be achieved only under the conditions of a major European upheaval, which would mean a collapse of the partitioning powers; this did not happen until 1918.
Proud and politically conscious Poles never reconciled themselves to the loss of independence. Conspiracies and attempts to exploit the differences between the partitioning powers arose. Émigrés looked to Revolutionary France for assistance, and General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski succeeded in 1797 in persuading Napoleon Bonaparte, then waging his Italian campaign, to create auxiliary Polish legions. In their headquarters the future Polish national anthem—“Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła” (“Poland Has Not Yet Perished”)—was sung for the first time.
Hopes placed on a French victory over Austria that would open the Polish question were, however, quashed by the Treaty of Campo Formio. In subsequent struggles Polish legionnaires were employed to fight French battles in Germany and in Santo Domingo, but Poland gained no political commitments. Yet the Poles’ struggles did have a meaning in the long run, keeping a democratic Polish spirit alive and furnishing cadres to a future Polish army under Napoleon.
The pro-French military option had a counterpart in the ideas and policies of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. Appointed Russian foreign minister by Tsar Alexander I, the prince advocated redrawing the map of Europe to take into account national feelings and reconstitute Poland in union with Russia. This approach failed when Alexander committed himself to a struggle against France on the side of Prussia.
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 t...
After humiliating defeats in the Crimean War, the Russian Empire under Tsar Alexander II embarked on major liberal reforms. For Congress Poland this meant political amnesty, conciliatory measures in cultural and religious matters, and the creation of the Agricultural Society to tackle the peasant question. Simultaneously, Alexander II warned the Poles against political “daydreaming.” The Agricultural Society, a union of reformist landowners headed by the popular Hrabia (count) Andrzej Zamoyski, debated changes in the agrarian sector but found it hard to avoid politics. A patriotic movement later known as the Whites grew around and partly out of the society. It included landowners and members of the bourgeoisie (often of German or Jewish origin), such as the banker Leopold Kronenberg. At this time a Polish-Jewish dialogue promoted close cooperation.
On the other side of the political spectrum, there developed a number of conspiratorial groups composed of students, younger army officers, artisans, and members of the lesser gentry. Subsequently called the Reds, these radicals acted as a pressure group on the Agricultural Society and staged demonstrations commemorating Polish patriots or historic events. In 1861, the year of the peasant emancipation decree in the Russian Empire, demonstrators in Warsaw clashed with Russian troops, and several were killed or wounded.
The Russians, determined to be firm with the radicals, sought a dialogue with the upper classes. But Zamoyski, worried lest he appear subservient to the Russians, demanded a return to the guarantees of the 1815 constitution. Such demands were rejected, and Zamoyski was eventually ordered to leave the country. The Russian viceroy turned to Zamoyski’s rival, Margrabia (margrave) Aleksander Wielopolski, whose program of limited concessions (Polonization of education, restoration of local self-government, transformation of the peasants into tenants, and emancipation of the Jews) was acceptable to St. Petersburg. Wielopolski’s contempt for public opinion and high-handed methods—especially the disbanding of the Agricultural Society and a showdown with the Roman Catholic Church—estranged him from the Poles. Tension grew after a massacre of demonstrators near the castle square.
Wielopolski, appointed the head of government in 1862, introduced reforms that were not insignificant but did not include peasant emancipation. He was viewed as an enemy by both the Reds, who created an underground National Committee, and the Whites, who also set up a clandestine organization. Wielopolski decided to break the Reds by drafting large numbers of them into the Russian army. In January 1863 the National Committee, left with no choice but to take up the challenge, called on the peoples of Poland, Lithuania, and Rus (Ukraine) to rise, decreed peasant emancipation, and appealed for support from the Jews (“Poles of Mosaic faith”).
Thousands responded to the call; however, because the insurgents had failed to capture any town or compact territory, the National Committee, transformed into the National Government, had to operate anonymously underground. In the spring the Whites joined the uprising, contributing finances and international contacts but also seeking to control the movement. Fighting extended into Lithuanian and Belarusian lands but not into Ukraine. In some instances the peasantry participated in the struggle, and in others they cooperated with the Russians. France proffered encouragement and hinted that the blood of the insurgents would mark the boundaries of an independent Poland. But in practice France, Britain, and Austria did not go beyond joint diplomatic démarches in St. Petersburg. Prussia sided with Russia. The insurgents, equipped with primitive weapons, fought doggedly as partisans in small detachments and succeeded in keeping the rising going until the autumn of 1864, when its last and most prominent leader, Romuald Traugutt, was captured and executed.
The decades that followed the January Insurrection opened a new phase in the history of partitioned Poland. Harsh reprisals in the kingdom—now called the Vistula Land—were designed to reduce it to a mere province of Russia, denied even the benefits of subsequent reforms in Russia proper. Large garrisons and emergency legislation kept the Poles down. Many individuals involved in the rising were executed or deported to Siberia; thousands of landed estates were confiscated. The Uniate church was abolished, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy was harassed. A huge Orthodox church emerged in the center of Warsaw.
Uprisings also were condemned as folly by conservatives in Galicia, where the Kraków historical school critically reinterpreted Poland’s history. The conservatives were willing to cooperate with Vienna in exchange for concessions, and, as the Habsburg monarchy transformed itself into a dual Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867, Galicia obtained local autonomy. From the 1860s the province was largely Polonized. Persecuted elsewhere, Polish culture could flourish there; the Universities of Kraków and Lwów (Lemberg) and the Academy of Arts and Sciences became cultural beacons radiating across the partition borders. There was less progress in the socioeconomic field. Ruled by conservative landowners, Galicia remained a poor and backward province. In its eastern part nascent Ukrainian nationalism clashed with that of the Poles.
The situation for Poles in Prussia at times appeared critical. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s anti-Polish policies culminated in the Kulturkampf, designed to strengthen the cohesion of the newly created German Empire. In addition, policies of cultural and linguistic Germanization and German settlement in the provinces continuously threatened the Polish and Roman Catholic character of Poznania and West Prussia. A colonization commission was set up in 1886. Eight years later a society for the promotion of German interests in the east came into being. The Poles called it Hakata, after the initials of its founders. The Polish response took the form of credit unions, cooperative associations, and self-help institutions. Showing great solidarity and organizational talents, working hard, and raising socioeconomic standards, Prussian Poles developed characteristics that distinguished them from their countrymen under Russian or Austrian rule.
In the post-1863 decades, prevailing political attitudes took the form of Triple Loyalism, the belief that material and cultural progress in each part of divided Poland was predicated on loyalty to the ruling governments. This policy seemed to produce beneficial results only under Austria. The pursuit of riches was being represented as essentially patriotic even if realized under the harsh conditions of early capitalism. For the masses, with their rapid population growth, living conditions were deplorable. This led to their radicalization on the one hand and to a sizable emigration on the other. In the period 1870–1914, about 3.6 million people, mostly peasants, emigrated from Polish lands to the United States.
A reaction to that situation developed in the 1890s that had both a nationalist and a socialist character. The National Democratic movement originated with a Polish League organized in Switzerland; by 1893 the organization had transformed into the clandestine National League, based in Warsaw. It stressed its all-Polish character, rejected loyalism, and promoted national resistance, even uprisings, when opportune. Its nationalist ideology tinged with populism gradually evolved into “integral” nationalism, which placed national interest and national egoism above everything else. Affected by social Darwinist theories of survival of the fittest and natural selection, Polish nationalism advocated a struggle not only against the partitioning powers but also against the Ukrainians and the Jews, whose interests were seen as opposed to those of the Poles. The father of this integral nationalism was Roman Dmowski, whose writings stressed the need to create a modern Polish nation deriving its strength from the ethnically Polish masses.
Polish socialism, which in its early manifestations was purely a class movement with an emphasis on internationalism, began by the 1890s to stress an indissoluble connection between social revolution and Poland’s independence. At a conference held in Paris in 1892, the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) came into existence. Illegal under Russian rule, it had a counterpart in Galicia in the Polish Social Democratic Party led by Ignacy Daszyński. The dominant figure in the PPS was Józef Piłsudski, who saw the historic role of socialism in Poland as that of a destroyer of reactionary tsardom.
Doubly oppressed (nationally and socially), the Polish proletariat was to be the force to carry the struggle for social justice and national liberation. Opposing such views was the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the forerunner of Polish communism. Its leading theorist, Rosa Luxemburg, argued that national independence would not promote the interests of the proletariat, who were integrated economically into the three partitioning states.
In the subsequent peace settlement of the Congress of Vienna, the victorious Austrians and Prussians swept away the Duchy of Warsaw and reconfirmed most of the terms of the final partition of Poland. Although brief, the Napoleonic period occupies an important place in Polish history.
The Duchy of Warsaw was replaced in 1815 with a new Kingdom of Poland, unofficially known as Congress Poland. The residual Polish kingdom was joined to the Russian Empire in a personal union under the Russian tsar and it was allowed its own constitution and military.
3 days ago · Congress Kingdom of Poland Territory of the Russian-ruled Polish state known as the Congress Kingdom of Poland, 1815–74. (more) The victory of the anti-Napoleonic coalition led to a redrafting of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15).
