From this specimen we may understand how unintentionally cruel and how mournfully deceptive were those words of Alexander II.—‘All that my father did, he did well’—words which were also, at least, an unfortunate answer to that expression of European sympathy which had been checked at the threshold of this Congress of Paris in 1856. It has been the mistake of all Russian policy for the last thirty years, to believe that an absence of all law means order, and to suppose that the omnipotence of force is at once illimitable and undefined. No doubt for the moment such policy succeeds. It can command silence, it can veil difficulties, and adjourn the discussion of them to another day. But it brings affairs at last into that impossible situation, of which illegality is the essence, and where we find a new nation, independent of all organisation and of all hierarchies, rising in spite of a monstrous system of repression—a nation which, as M. Tymowski expresses it, ‘is undistrainable and yet ingenious in making arms for itself out of everything, even out of its own contempt of death.’ Poland, though beyond the bounds of the law, has a profound sense of law, and this M. Tymowski again acknowledges. Having no public representation she has arranged one for herself, for she had that Agricultural Society, which at a given day proved itself to be a sort of national representation. No regular outlet was provided for the utterance of her wishes, instincts, or wants, but she has thrown herself into a passionate worship of her traditions, her popular festivals, and religious rites. Indeed, the time has come in which she has occupied herself for a year in reviewing her anniversaries and her recollections. She could not, certainly, dream of engaging in an armed strife, but she retired into herself; she appealed to moral power, and opened her soul to the strangest of all sentiments—that of voluntary sacrifice—till a whole nation adopted that terrible argument in Descartes’ fashion, ‘we die, ergo, we live;’ and is it not a new and a surprising piece of reasoning, if we understand it aright? By all this Russia is placed in an extraordinary dilemma; this unexpected resurrection brings all her errors before her. She is obliged to punish a sedition which is not illegal, to make war upon peaceful manifestations, on religious services and hymns, on mourning apparel and inoffensive emblems; she has nothing to oppose to them but force, and feels therefore all the powerlessness of force itself. The same causes have impressed this movement: for though European events may have hastened it, though the accession of Alexander II. and the internal disorders of Russia may have favoured it, it is not less the result of a past of thirty years, not less the effect of a policy of which the whole fatality has not yet perhaps been exhausted.
The movement is extremely characteristic in this respect—that it is born in the heart of the country, and that it is independent alike of complicity with her emigrant children, or of any impulse from without. Immediately after the Congress of Paris, the Emperor Alexander held this language to the Polish nobility—‘No dreams, gentlemen! no dreams!’ and from that moment did the national sentiment of Poland begin gradually to expand, till it broke out in February 1861. Several symptoms indicated the unexpected awakening that was to follow. When the sovereigns met at Warsaw, in 1860, the Emperor Alexander, before returning to St. Petersburg, wished to show himself to the five German princes who accompanied him in all the brilliancy of Polish popularity. He was to be in Wilna. Now in Lithuania, the first manifestation for the enfranchisement of the serfs had taken place, and the Emperor had returned thanks for it to the Lithuanian nobility. These circumstances all seemed auspicious, and the Governor of Lithuania was ordered to get up a ball. It was, as far as its externals went, simply a ball; but no one knows what an official ball is to the Poles, where the splendour of the fête covers so many hurts, so many thousands of secret wounds. In his ‘Aieux,’ Mickiewicz has introduced an official ball into that circle of Hell in which he paints all the sufferings of the Poles. General Nazimof made the most heroic exertions, and spared no persuasions among the Lithuanian nobility; but nevertheless he completely failed. The ladies declined the invitations; the gentry said that, though willing to pay the expenses of this Russian festivity, they should not appear at it; and there was nothing left for the Emperor but to refuse to go to the ball upon which General Nazimof had lavished so much useless zeal; and he hardly made any stay in Wilna.
At Warsaw, where the three crowned heads held a meeting which seemed to personify all the disasters of the land, things looked even worse. It must be said that, to choose Warsaw as a place of meeting between these three masters of Poland—the Emperor of Russia, the Emperor of Austria, and the King of Prussia—and to choose it, too, just when all Europe was ringing with the enfranchisement of Italy, was to throw a challenge to our unhappy nation; nor was it long before popular feeling took up a challenge which was the second it had received from Alexander—his first having been that address to the nobility of Warsaw which he made after the Congress of Paris.
After this, demonstrations increased.
One religious service followed the other, in memory of the patriot-poets, Mickiewicz, Krasinski, and Slovaçki; and on November 29th, 1860, that song was heard, for the first time, which for a year has been the impassioned watchword of the multitude, which has echoes in cathedrals, and which has gone up from the humblest country churches—that ‘Boze cos Polske’—‘Give us our country! Oh, Lord! give us our liberty!’ In a short time, the whole face of affairs had changed, and an electric thrill ran through the country. Perhaps it ought to be called a revolution; it certainly was a moral revolution, and it revealed that which had hardly as yet been suspected—the existence of a nation, unimpaired by suffering and by trial. To be a revolution, it had a strange beginning. There was no violence, no bloody intentions, no insurrections; but there were psalms, and prayers, and manifestations, at once enthusiastic and regulated; and there was an outburst, as energetic as it was unexpected, of that irresistible force which is called the soul of a nation.
Everything converges to that month of February 1861; and then it was that this Polish insurrection really assumed the character of a passionate drama, full of startling originality. The 25th was the anniversary of that formidable battle of Grochow, in which the Poles, in 1831, disputed for the mastery with Russia during three whole days. Since the 21st, the Agricultural Society, founded by Count Andrew Zamoyski, and so rapidly popularised throughout the country, had held a session to deliberate on the definitive accession of the peasantry to property. From other quarters, the Polish students—who had come from Kiev, from Moscow, and from Dorpat, as to a secret rendezvous—might be heard agitating, and demanding a national university. To ask for a more liberal education, to effect the union of all classes by the abolition of the last vestiges of serfdom, and to commemorate mournful and patriotic anniversaries—these were the subjects which preoccupied all minds. No doubt other thoughts mingled with them. The idea of presenting an address to the Emperor asking for a constitution began to be ventilated; and, oddly enough, it was warmly advocated by a man who was soon to play a part in these events—the Marquis Wiélopolski. He became excessively excited, and went to Count Zamoyski to beg him to take the initiative in this manifestation; but Count Andrew refused. He was the firm and vigilant guide of his society, and he would not consent to alter its nature. Moreover, it was repugnant to him to place, as the Marquis proposed to do, the claims of his country under the auspices of the treaties of 1815.
What was Russia about all this time? Quite disconcerted, and more astonished than enlightened by what she saw happening under her eyes, she waited, and day by day the movement seemed to slip away from her. At that time she was represented in Warsaw by Prince Michael Gortchakof, the Lieutenant of the Tzar—a man who was a good soldier, and who had shown a great deal of vigour in the defence of Sebastopol. He had lived fear many years at Warsaw, when head of the Staff to Prince Paskievitch; he knew Poland, and he liked living in it. To his soldierly nature extreme measures of repression were repugnant, and it troubled him to have recourse to them. But unfortunately, in the heart of the administration of which he was the ostensible chief, one man was, under shelter of the Prince’s name, omnipotent—M. Muchanof, Minister of the Interior, of public instruction, and of religion. He was a Russian of the old school of Nicholas the Tzar—a vulgar instrument of that inflexible system which had no other object but the denationalisation of Poland. The dismissal of Count Skarbek, the Minister of Finance, had been effected by him, because the Count was an enlightened man, an author of celebrity, who had entertained the revolutionary notion of asking (as for a right) for a college at Warsaw. M. Muchanof was at war, in short, with everything that looked like an awakening or an act of individual life in the country—with Temperance Leagues, with the Agricultural Society, and with a taste for a more liberal style of education. The only exception he could make was in favour of the School of Arts. ‘Let them paint, by all means,’ he would say, ‘and then they will not think.’
Between the gradually excited population of Poland and Russia, when thus represented and thus divided in her councils, a dialogue was to be commenced, which, stretching over a year, was to be furnished with such bloody interludes that the very Russian generals themselves seemed to grow weary, and to feel a secret aversion to the parts given them to act.
Nothing, at such a conjuncture, was wanted but one spark. The morning of February 25th dawned dark and misty. They were to go that day to pray for the slain of the battle of Grochow, and, from an early hour, the populace, impelled by one spontaneous passion, thronged the streets. An immense procession was soon formed; they marched without disorder, and with torches in their hands. Before them went a banner, with the white eagle. As they walked they sang the hymn, ‘Swiety Boze’—‘Holy Lord God Almighty, have pity upon us; be pleased to give us back our own country. Holy Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, pray for us.’ Up to this time, the Government had done nothing to stop the manifestation (it had not even been prevented), when suddenly Colonel Trepow, the head of the Police, appeared, and threw two squadrons of the armed police upon this dense crowd. The multitude fell on their knees, and continued their psalm, while being cut down by the troops. More than forty persons were wounded. At this moment the Agricultural Society happened to be sitting, and a violent emotion was produced there by the intelligence that an inoffensive mob had been massacred. Count Zamoyski, the President, mastering his own emotion, endeavoured to preserve calmness, and, putting an end to the sitting, he repaired to Prince Gortchakof, who seemed surprised, and certainly showed conciliatory intentions. The Russian officers were indignant at the tasks assigned to them, and one of them, General Liprandi, went so far as to say that, as long as he commanded the infantry, he would not permit them to be marched upon unarmed men. The truth is, that one more such victory as that of February 25th would have made everything look very doubtful for Russia. The work of thirty years vanished, before the apparition of a people ready to die undefended. The whole town was in inexpressible anxiety, and on the following day mourning was worn for the victims of the previous day.
But it must not be supposed that any signs of weakness entered into the popular emotion. On the contrary, a curious excitement filled all hearts; and, by the 27th, arrangements were made for a new funeral service, in honour of some patriots hung by the Russians, and of Count Zawisza in particular. In the Church of the Carmelites and its vicinity more than 30,000 persons assembled; and, when mass was said, this immense procession unrolled and marched to the palace of the Agricultural Society, which, for the last two days, had been besought to sign an address to the Emperor. This Count Zamoyski always resisted; and he certainly showed more intelligent heroism, above all, more patriotic foresight, by this resistance, than by yielding to any premature haste. He did not wish to compromise an institution which might again do effectual service to the national cause, and which was the only representative body of his nation. So, on the approach of the crowd, Count Andrew took the plan of closing a session which had been so strangely agitated. But just round this point the whole affair centred, while, outside, squadrons of Cossacks drove the multitude before them at the point of their swords, and pursued them into the very churches. Hardly had the members of the Agricultural Society left their palace than a murderous fire was opened upon them; also a strange execution, for which the order had been given by General Zabolotsky, and in which there probably was no preconcerted design, since, in the Russian opposition of that day, every measure seemed disunited, and the work of chance. But the result of this attack was not the less fatal; ten persons were killed, and more than sixty were wounded.