Each of these struggles highlighted various implications of the Polish predicament, and their increasingly ruthless repression committed more people to participation in activities which they might have originally viewed as futile or even irresponsible. The minor szlachta, traditionally the most reactionary element in the population, were progressively turned into revolutionary extremists. By dispossessing landowners who were involved often very indirectly in resistance, the occupying powers forced the most docile members of the community into violent opposition. By penalising members of the aristocracy they forced even this into some measure of resistance. Families which in the 1820s saw their interest as lying in allegiance to St Petersburg or Vienna were otherwise convinced by the image of Prince Sanguszko walking to Siberia in a chain gang and by the Galician butchery of 1846. The old szlachta solidarity of shared privilege turned into one of shared wrong, and this embraced anyone who identified with Poland, opening up a new channel of inter-class dialogue. And this dialogue concerned two principal issues: where they had gone wrong, and how they should go about constructing a programme for the future.
The Czartoryski faction, the political descendant of the Familia and the Patriots of the Great Sejm, held that the constitution of 3 May would have cured the ailing Commonwealth. They believed that Poland’s eclipse was not the result of internal failure but the consequence of a breakdown in the proper functioning of diplomacy. Their efforts after 1831 were directed at convincing European statesmen of the desirability of restoring Poland to Europe in the interests of the balance of power.
The socialist elements among the émigrés were influenced by the works of the historian Joachim Lelewel, leader of the Patriotic Society and a member of the insurrectionary government in 1831. Lelewel had developed a theory that the social and political structure of ancient Slav societies in the pre-Christian era had been based on peasant communities. It was a vision of rural democracy later favoured by Russian historians and it held a strong attraction for many on the left of the political spectrum. According to Lelewel the constitution of 3 May was a piece of Western liberalism alien to the spirit of Polish society.
The manifesto of the Polish Democratic Society, published at Poitiers in 1836, rejected the liberal idea of giving the peasants their land—i.e. turning them into mini-capitalists. ‘The question of property is the question of our age,’ it proclaimed, in the conviction that ‘The land and its fruits are common to all.’ It therefore concluded that ‘Private property must be transformed into common property.’ The majority of the Democrats were minor szlachta who had lost everything. Offended by the prosperity and materialism they encountered in London and Paris, they yearned for revolution, spiritual as much as political.
The English section of the Democratic Society, founded at Portsmouth in 1834, gave rise the following year to a Community of the Polish People whose manifesto, written by Stanisław Worcell, a former member of the wealthy szlachta and son of a senator, contained the phrase: ‘Property is the root of all evil.’ It established settlements in Portsmouth and on the island of Jersey, agricultural communes consisting of peasants and penitent gentry who sought regeneration through work. Though most émigrés did not go to such extremes, they did live out theories and beliefs, in damp London basements and freezing Paris garrets, or in Tsarist chain gangs or Austrian gaols.
With the Poles divided between three empires and scattered in exile, the printed word assumed enormous significance, and the fact that this was an age rich in literary talent ensured that the men setting up communes in Portsmouth and Jersey were not cut off from their fellows who had remained in Poland to farm their estates.
The first traces of Romanticism in Polish literature appear in the 1790s. The heart began to rule the mind just as the ravished motherland was being enslaved; the Polish Romantic heart could beat for no other unattainable object of love. The poets of the day wrote of the expiring Commonwealth as lovers. Their successors sang the praises of her vanished accomplishments and would go on to give spiritual meaning to their own lives.