May 1861.
POLAND
A CENTURY AFTER ITS DIVISION.
The world is full of victimised races, to whose ill-fortune it becomes almost reconciled, since the marvellous discovery has been made that, at some time or another, these people may have deserved their fate; as if the strong, for their part, did not also commit faults; and as if, too, Justice went evermore hand in hand with Fortune. But whence, then, those crises of anarchy which are apparent, not only in a solitary instance, but in the most general relations? Whence those convulsions which make us present, as it were, at a confused disorganisation of all political order, in one headlong annihilation of all combinations, and of all foregone conclusions? These take their rise, most frequently, in some original defect lying at the very roots of the situation, in some previous violations which, although they leave the people unarmed, do not the less affect the governments themselves—which compel the first to a system of indefatigable revolt, and the second to a system of repression, which is always fatally increasing in weight, till, at last, there ensues one of those struggles in which contend all the rights, principles, and accumulated wrongs—all the causes long thought to be dormant, but which, now reawakened, make their appeal to that public opinion which has started up as a new power. The whole history of Poland is before us, to prove how much violence it costs, how many perpetually recurring struggles it requires, to make the suppression of a whole race a public right, before the fact of its suppression can be forced into the vague and terrible list of ‘things that have been accomplished.’
It is now nearly a century since three Powers, united by the saddest and most dangerous of solidarities, laboured to this end. Frederick II. of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia rejoiced in the work as in an easy victory; but it carried remorse into the soul of Maria-Theresa of Austria, who called it ‘a blot upon her reign,’ to which she could not subscribe without casting a terrified glance into the future. Thrice was the partition renewed—in 1772, in 1793, and in 1795. It began by leaving us a shadow of independence, with the shadow of a king at Warsaw; and it finished by making everything disappear, even to the very name of Poland. At each dismemberment they believed that they had achieved success; each time, on the contrary, the injustice of the whole proceeding became more evident, till it was almost acknowledged to be so by the dividers themselves—each time the wound became more envenomed, and the struggle more serious between an always precarious domination, and the heroism of a race remodelled by misfortune. At the capital moment of the last dismemberment, in 1792, Poland did not yield without a struggle; she proclaimed her political aspirations in the Constitution of the 3rd of May 1791, and, led by Kosciusko, she reappeared upon the field of battle. The Polish hero was conquered at Macejowice, and the work, begun in 1772, seemed very nearly completed. Up to this time, however, it had only been an affair between Russia, Austria, and Prussia; and Europe had remained a stranger to this dismemberment of a nation.
At the end of the storms of the French Revolution, and of the Empire, in which the Poles had taken part with all their warlike humour, and during which, by the timid, ephemeral, and incomplete creation of a Grand-Duchy of Warsaw, they had for an instant believed that their country was reborn, the Congress of Vienna, after allowing hope to shine before the eyes of Poland, let her fall again under the triple yoke, and consecrated her dismemberment as an accomplished fact. This time, at least, success seemed sure—the partition had become a public right, and it formed a part of the constitution of Europe; yet, in reality, the question was very far from being set at rest. The treaties of 1815 only organised new strife, under new conditions; and a new weapon was placed in the hands of the Poles, by this species of homage paid to a nationality that no one ventured quite to kill, its titles being recognised, and stipulations being made in favour of its guarantees; while, at the same time, they dared not refuse its fragments to those who claimed them by right of prior occupation. The question, then, was so little settled, that at the first agitation it did not fail to come up again. In 1830, Poland made an immense effort for its own resurrection, an effort which for a moment sufficed to hold in check the power of Russia, and filled Europe with anxiety and emotion. Alone, and abandoned to her own resources, Poland must evidently succumb; she must sink under the weight of arms, still more under the weight of oppression. Then, surely, the last words had been said, the last resistance conquered, and all was really at an end. On the contrary, nothing was finished; and this is the curious point, the great moral, so to speak, of the events which for the last two months agitate Warsaw and all Polish countries. One hundred years after the first dismemberment, forty-five years after the treaties of 1815, thirty years after the revolution quelled at Warsaw by the arms of Russia, Poland rears her head, more agitated than ever, wounded but not tamed, and showing herself in two lights—the one, as regards her relations with the state of Europe; the other, as regards that internal labour, by which she has obstinately sought to remake for herself a moral life, and a new destiny, in spite of the darkest, and most painful trials.
What, then, really is the character of this situation, so suddenly revealed in Northern Europe by the strange drama of Warsaw, at the very moment when Italy has constituted herself anew, and when Hungary claims her old tradition of independence—when both in the West and in the East everything is in movement—when all questions of nationality, of public rights, and of universal balance, are making themselves heard at once? What is most strange in these events is, that all is spontaneous and unforeseen, though an eternal reason gives them being. This is the act of life in a people, which, finding itself one day united by one and the sane feeling, spreads itself peaceably through the town, and then demands, what even treaties have not denied to it, respect for its nationality, and its own religion, the guarantee of its existence in regular institutions, the preservation of its own language, the right of interesting itself in its own affairs, of occupying itself in agriculture, in the education of its own children; the right, it a word, to live and to breathe. Nothing assuredly can be more dramatic than the meeting which during the last two months has taken place in Warsaw. It is no longer one between two sovereigns, but between two nations, which for the first time for thirty years find themselves publicly face to face, which have suddenly brought their disagreement into the broad daylight of European conflict, and which are now interrogating each other in this mysterious pause; two peoples, of which the one has no arms but its rights and its prayers, and of which the other has no danger but in the very excess of its own powers.
This, then, really is the situation which has disclosed itself in the heart of Poland since the 25th of February, the day upon which this new, touching, and heroic adventure began for a population which, to a certain extent, thus returns to public life, and which goes out to pray for its country and its dead. At first, Russia appears to have been visibly surprised at this unexpected manifestation on the part of Poland, in which she believed, perhaps, that no such vitality existed, and she was divided between the inquietude caused by the movement, and by the sense that concessions must be made. She has not the gift of always making the happiest resolutions; she yields when it would be natural to resist, and resists when it would be just to yield. She begins by giving up some of those officials who are most compromised, and she ends in dissolving those popular corporations of which she not only herself sanctioned the existence, but of which she had availed herself for a month, in order to maintain order. This, by a series of enigmatical and contradictory acts, in which, doubtless, there is as much embarrassment as calculation, she sets all hopes and all fears fermenting together. Popular manifestations follow one after the other. The question assumes greater proportions, the movement becomes graved and more complicated, and in a short time the whole affair has changed its aspect. The pressure imposed becomes heavier than ever, when pitted against a moral agitation which has been throughout innocent of any violence, so that it requires but a few days and an evolution of Russian policy to bring the situation to one of those issues, which Prince Repnin characterised in his day with inexorable bluntness, when he said, ‘Unless we deny all sentiments of humanity, it is true that we cannot help recognising the right which the Poles have to complain. You would have full right to drive out the Russians, if you had the power; not having the power, you must submit.’
Such is the question truly stated by the victorious side, and certainly such is the question so often supposed to have been definitely settled, but which has never been resolved. After the bloody repression of the 8th of April, as after all those that went before, the problem of the destinies of Poland is not the less on foot. It springs out of these events, and is shaped by their character and their aims, in the midst of those conditions of universal transition in which the world of to-day finds itself placed.
What makes these new events so important, is that they form part of a European situation, at the same time that they are the outward and visible signs of a profound and inward work, of which Russian Poland is the centre (most active and most prominent at present), but which has also revealed, in the Grand Duchy of Posen, in Galicia, in short, everywhere, that, in spite of treaties and congresses, Polish feeling, the last and indestructible tie of a riven country, still lives. This question of Poland has its roots deep in the past, and I am not ignorant that it is so. Whether politically or diplomatically, it goes back, like so many more, to the transactions of 1815, and when the attempt is made to draw closer the knot of European affairs, whence come the crises of which this question has been the unhappy and the perennial source? Is it not because these treaties have manifestly been an immense and avowed violation of an imprescriptable right, or rather the fatal and complaisant consecration of all previous violations? One of the most essential causes of the tribulation and disorder in the politics of the time—a cause which now appears in all its distinctness—is the ever-growing contradiction between the dispositions of the solemn act of Vienna and the real state to which the different parts of Poland are reduced; so that, if there have been, if there shall again be, revolutionists, we must settle this in our minds, that it is not the Poles who are such. An example has been given them in this matter, and they have been left with this sad conviction, that, according to the rights of 1815, they have the right on their side. It is, indeed, a curious thing that the people of Poland have been the ‘last to step down into the arena of to-day at that name of “nationality” which serves as a watchword to all other revolting populations.’ Yet Poland was the first and the only country in whose favour such a word was hinted at by the Congress of Vienna, when it was inscribed in treaties, as if to render a marked homage to heroic misfortune, and, while tempering by guarantees the way in which Poland was abandoned, to maintain the mockery of an ideal ‘nationality,’ in spite of territorial division.