- 1 - Lecture 8 The Polish Question 1831-1863 (Part II. From 1848 to the January Uprising) I. Russian Poland from 1832 to 1856 1. Consequences of 1830 Uprising. Repression severe in Eastern provinces of Poland. Persons who had taken part in the rebellion held to be guilty of treason. Campaign against Polish influences in education and cultural life. Many Polish families deported to other parts of empire. In Congress Kingdom, policies milder. On 26 February 1832, Tsar signs Organic Statute. This bears some resemblance to constitution of 1815. Council of State remains, with Administration Council subordinate to it. This has three Commissions in place of five as previously, Finance, Justice, Interior. Statute provided for elected assemblies of the nobility at district and provincial levels, but these were never created. Sejm however abolished. Middle and lower ranks of civil service staffed by Poles. Senior posts held by Russians. Polish army ceases to exist. Ivan Paskievich becomes viceroy. His rule strict, but in some ways benevolent. Close friendship with Emperor helped Poles 2. Social changes On the surface, little seems to be happening between end of revolt and accession of - 2 - Alexander II in 1856. The Viceroy, Paskievich rules country with an iron hand and scant regard for wishes to szlachta. Polish political class expected to give unquestioning obedience to commands of administration. Yet these were years of far-reaching transformation of social conditions in Congress Kingdom. Population grows fairly fast, from 3.2 million in 1815 to 4.76 million in 1859 Of these 3.1 million Poles, 600,000 Jews, 250,000 Germans and 250,000 Lithuanians. By the mid-century, the urban population about 1.16 million, of whom 653,000 were Christians and 511,000 Jews Old structure of Polish society now starting to break up. Expansion of trade and industry beginning to produce more modern conditions. Economic developments in these years. One aspect of the evolution of the Kingdom of Poland which made it very different from the other areas of partitioned Poland was that in the nineteenth century it underwent something like an industrial revolution. By 1914, the two provinces of Warsaw and Piotrków were largely urban and among the more industrialized parts of Europe. Given the sharp discontinuities which characterize the political history of the area in the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that the development here of industry and the transformation of the agricultural system should have been characterized by a series of false starts and periods of stagnation. Under Prussian rule, the area’s agricultural character had been maintained, although the boom conditions caused by the Napoleonic wars benefited the landowners. Under the Duchy of Warsaw, the heavy Napoleonic exactions and the problems caused by the Continental System undermined the prosperity of agriculture. At the same time the period saw the emergence of a largely-Jewish group of army suppliers and the emergence of the finance - 3 - houses, under the control of such families as the Fraenkls, Epsteins, Laskis and Kronenbergs, which were to form the basis of Warsaw’s banking community. In the period between 1815 and 1830, the Minister of Finance in the government of the Kingdom of Poland attempted to foster the industrialization of the Kingdom, as has been described by Jerzy Jedlicki in an important book Nieudana próba kapitalistycznej industrializacji. It was he who encouraged the settlement of German weavers in the central part of the Kingdom, above all in the town of Łódź, which laid the foundation for the subsequent development of the textile industry. He also attempted to foster a metallurgical industry in Będzin, in that part of the Silesian industrial belt which lay within the Kingdom. The period also saw a further development of the Warsaw banking community, which was now involved also in supplying the bloated army of the Kingdom and which absorbed almost half the budget of the small state. In the words of the author of the main study of this problem: The greater part of this income [from the supply of the army] was scooped up by the great Warsaw trading bourgeoisie: Jakubowicz, the Sonnenbergs, Loebensteins, Epsteins, Trzcińskis and Bansmeróws; next came the capital’s financiers, such as the Epsteins, Samuel Leizor Kronenberg, Samuel Antoni Fraenkel.1 The crushing of the 1830 insurrection was followed by a period of economic stagnation. In order to punish the Poles for their rebelliousness, a high tariff barrier was now introduced between the Kingdom and the rest of the Tsarist Empire. As we have seen, nothing much was done to resolve the problem of unfree cultivation, although in June 1846 the Russian Viceroy of the Kingdom, Paskievich did modify the conditions under which peasants were obliged to perform labour tribute. From the early 1840s, the economy of the kingdom began to recover, stimulated by the beginnings of railway building, the opening of the Russian market through the abolition of - 4 - the tariff barrier in 1858 and the abolition of unfree cultivation in the Kingdom of Poland in 1864. The first major railway line to reach Warsaw was that from Vienna and Kraków, which was constructed between 1845 and 1848 and was financed by the bankers Antoni Fraenkel and Herman Epstein. It was followed by the completion in 1867 of a line from Warsaw to Saint Petersburg, via Białystok and Vilna. By now the two principal railway entrepreneurs in the Kingdom were Leopold Kronenberg, the model for the character Wallenberg in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Manor, who took control of the Vienna-Warsaw railway in 1862 and Jan Bogumil Bloch, who was married to Kronenberg’s niece. This relationship did not prevent the two men from becoming involved in a bitter commercial struggle over the building of the railway to Kiev and Odessa which was constructed between 1871 and 1873. These changes led to important social developments. One of these was the increasing pressure from the Jewish elite for civil rights. Polish attitudes on this issue varied from mild distrust to active dislike, but were beginning to change. The steady, though still not sensational, growth of industry and of urban population made the ‘Jewish Problem’ more acute. In Warsaw, for instance, 43,000 of the population of 161,000 were Jews. In smaller towns, the percentage was even higher – in Lublin 10,4000 of 18,300 and in Suwałki 7,500 of 11,900 The first indication of a changing attitude to the question of Jewish integration came in the uprising of 1830-31. This had seen the first significant involvement of Jews in Polish politics. The Warsaw bourgeoisie had been rather suspicious of the rebellion, sparked off by discontented cadets and students and marked as it was in its first days by looting and rioting. As in France at this time, they attempted to control popular violence by setting up a ‘National 1 Polonsky, 10, 159 - 5 - Guard’; this was to be made up of wealthier citizens, who would bear themselves the cost of their uniforms and equipment and who would maintain order in the capital. Among the more acculturated Jews, there was a fair number who wanted to join this body, both to demonstrate their solidarity with Polish patriots, and, by fulfilling their civil obligations, to justify their claim for civil rights. They included financiers, such as Samuel Kronenberg, Jakub Epstein and two Toeplitzes, the bookseller Merzbrand, a number of doctors and Antoni Eisenbaum, soon to be principal of the Rabbinic School. General Józef Chłopicki, commander-in-chief of the revolutionary forces, agreed, initially to their recruitment, although he was prepared to admit only those who were exempted from the exclusion of Jews from the residential restrictions in Warsaw and elsewhere. Governor Antoni Ostrowski, commander of the National Guard, was prepared to take a more liberal position, but he encountered resistance form the Christian members of the Guard. As a result, he agreed to a rather unsatisfactory compromise. Jews could enlist provided they shaved off their beards. Most of the Jews who wished to enlist were not prepared to take this step. Some were, and by the summer of 1831 betwee 300 and 400 had been enrolled in the National Guard. The remainder , numbering nearly 1000, were allowed to form a ‘Civil Guard’, in the words of Ostrowski, the commander of the National Guard, ‘preparatory and transitory, less honorific than the National Guard itself, but close to it. The revolutionary government did not introduce any changes in the status of the Jews. Nevertheless, the experience of serving in the National and Civil Guards greatly bouyed the confidence of those who underwent this experience. The impact of serving in these formations is characteristically described by the assimilitionist Jewish historian, Hilary Nussbaum: Having put on short jackets [instead of the long kapote of the Orthodox] although military ones, and having shaved off their beards and side curls, once their service in - 6 - the Guards was over they did not go back to wearing their former long coats, but detached themselves from their backward tribe. Dressed in the European fashion, they moved freely along all the main streets of the city, entered public gardens confidently, and, whether out for a stroll, at at meeting, or in any public place, they were not attacked by the Christian mob. The defeat of the uprising was followed by a generation of repression and the centre of Polish political life now moved into emigration, primarily in France. In the bitter debates over the reasons for the failure of the revolt, the left-wing of the Emigration criticized the conservatism of the revolutionary government and its failure to introduce measures which could have attracted the support of politically and socially disadvantaged groups like peasants and Jews.