The commander of the Paris Commune in its final stages was the Polish émigré Jarosław Dąbrowski, who had been the first military leader of the 1863 rising. As French government troops closed in on the communards, he rallied a group of sailors and led them in a heroic but suicidal attack. In another part of the city, another Polish émigré, Florian Trawiński, was surreptitiously draining paraffin from the barrels placed all over the Louvre by the Commune for the purpose of burning it down. Dąbrowski’s body lay in state at the Hôtel de Ville before being buried with full honours, and to this day he has streets named after him in every Polish town. Trawiński was subsequently appointed a director of the Louvre, awarded the Légion d’Honneur and ended up as Secrétaire Général des Musées de France.
By then, few in Poland would have felt any hesitation in deciding which of these two acts was of greater value. The self-evident pointlessness of all the revolutionary effort of 1848 and the failure of the 1863 insurrection provided powerful arguments to those opposed to armed struggle, and by that time a strong reaction had set in against romantic gesture and useless sacrifice.
This was underpinned intellectually from the mid-1860s by a group of historians at Kraków’s Jagiellon University who suggested that the Commonwealth’s downfall had not been a martyrdom of the innocent, but the deserved collapse of a state which had ceased to function because of the blindness of its citizens and the inefficiency of its political institutions. They saw the tradition of insurrection in the same light. It followed from this that the road to independence lay not through insurrection but through selfimprovement and societal progress.
This was not a new thought. In 1841, Karol Marcinkowski, a returned political émigré, set up a Society for Scientific Assistance in Poznań whose purpose was to provide grants for young Poles to go and study at the best universities of Germany. Two years later he established the Poznań Bazaar, a managerial school. He preached self-improvement and education to all classes, stressing that everyone could make a difference to their predicament.
Under the influence of people such as Marcinkowski, and with the active participation of parish clergy, the Polish inhabitants of Poznania had implemented a programme of ‘organic work’ through which to carry on the struggle for national survival; they would stand up to the Germans by keeping their houses cleaner, tending their livestock and crops with greater care, working harder and educating themselves and their children. But it was not until the latter part of the century that such ideas achieved the status of theory.
The works of Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin appeared to many to hold special relevance to the situation in Poland, and under their influence the Romantic concept of the nation as spirit gradually gave way to one of the nation as an organism. The high priest of this Positivist Movement (as it became known) was Aleksander Świętochowski, fittingly not a poet but a journalist. Throughout the 1880s he edited the Warsaw weekly
The dramatic works of Mickiewicz, Słowacki and Krasiński were not written for the stage, since there had been no theatre in which they could be performed. As they were taken up with ethical or political argument and relied heavily on symbolism, they took a fantastical, disembodied form unique in European drama. The new theatres which did spring up in the 1860s, in Poznań, Lwów, Kraków and later Warsaw, encouraged a more realistic dramatic tradition and dwelt on everyday matters.