Although the territory of the Commonwealth had been repeatedly cut and pasted since 1772, with almost every part of it coming under the domination of more than one of its neighbours, and in the case of the area around Warsaw under all three and the French as well, an immaterial but nevertheless real Polish world remained in existence throughout the period of partition. And at some level, most people who thought of themselves as Poles identified with that, not with the state they paid taxes to. Yet they were obliged to accommodate themselves to that state, and most were naturally inclined to do so, as it is the prosaic activities such as eating, working and breeding rather than spiritual issues that preoccupy men’s minds for most of the time.
It was the inability of the three powers to provide a congenial framework for ordinary life and accommodate minimal cultural aspirations that kept their Polish provinces in an explosive condition. During a century when states such as Britain and France were able to control and exploit vast and populous colonies, the three greatest powers of the European mainland devoted incomparably greater resources in troops, funds and gigantic bureaucracies to policing a small, thinly populated and easily accessible country in their midst, with lamentable results. The only thing that made Poland a difficult country to colonise was that the legacy of the Commonwealth did not include a native civil service or police force. The entire apparatus of social control had to be imported, with the result that authority never lost its alien garb.
It was Prussia that gained most in real terms from the partitions, and it should have had little trouble in digesting its share.
This was not large, it was hemmed in on three sides by Prussian lands, and it contained a significant number of people of German origin. The area that had fallen to Prussia in the first partition had been integrated into the Prussian kingdom, while Wielkopolska with the city of Poznań was defined in 1815 as the Duchy of Posen, a semi-autonomous province with its own (largely symbolic) representative bodies and a viceroy in the shape of Antoni Radziwiłł. The Prussian administration was heavy-handed, but on the whole conciliatory towards local Polish elites.
This changed in 1830, as many young men crossed the border into the Kingdom to take part in the insurrection (including about 1,000 from the Prussian army). When units of the Polish army sought refuge on Prussian territory in 1831, they were warmly greeted by Germans and Poles alike, but the Prussian army illtreated the disarmed soldiers and either handed them back to the Russians or encouraged them to leave for France or Britain. The rising in the Kingdom had alarmed the Prussian authorities and the province lost some of its autonomy, along with its viceroy, and assimilation replaced conciliation as the underlying policy. But repressive measures associated with this were relaxed after the accession of Frederick William IV in 1840.
In 1848, however, the Germans of Poznania began to feel threatened by Polish aspirations, and their fears, couched in strident calls for the ‘defence of Germandom’, met with a response from the nascent nationalism in Germany. The Poles were branded as ‘a nation of lesser cultural content’ by one speaker at the Frankfurt Parliament, and henceforth the emphasis was shifted onto a policy of Germanisation (
The 1863 insurrection only confirmed the Prussian authorities in their view of the Poles as dangerous troublemakers. This was borne out further during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Although tens of thousands of Polish recruits fought in the Prussian ranks, the population staged pro-French demonstrations and failed to celebrate Prussia’s victory.
The unification of Germany and the promotion of the Prussian kings to the status of German emperors in 1871 placed the Poles in a curious and unenviable situation: from being foreign subjects of the King of Prussia they were suddenly transformed into members of an ethnic minority in an emphatically German Germany. At the same time, the incorporation of the former Polish provinces into the empire meant that Polish deputies were returned to the German Reichstag, in which they took some 5 per cent of the seats, giving them a far greater degree of representation than in the Prussian Landtag. What had been a marginal colonial question now became an internal issue of the empire.