The violence done to the territory of the Commonwealth between 1792 and 1815, and the succession of governments to which its various parts had been subjected in the same period, had surprisingly little impact on the life of the nation. The frontiers themselves figured only as administrative impediments in the minds of most Poles, who referred to them as ‘the Austrian cordon’ or ‘the Prussian cordon’. A Pole travelling from Warsaw to Poznań or Wilno in the 1820s crossed into a different country, but as far as he or his hosts were concerned, he was still travelling around his own.
Similarly, people who had fought on opposing sides sat together in the Sejm and Senate. Alexander’s viceroy in Poland had started out as a Jacobin, fought in Kościuszko’s army in 1794, had commanded a Polish Legion in Italy, and been wounded fighting for Napoleon at Borodino. Adam Czartoryski, who had also fought with Kościuszko, was one of the pillars of the Congress Kingdom, although his father had presided over the provisional government set up by Napoleon in 1812. Stanisław Potocki, a prominent Patriot in the 1780s and a minister in the Duchy of Warsaw, was now Minister of Education. Even the chief censor appointed in 1819, Józef Kalasanty Szaniawski, had been a Jacobin in 1794.
In a sense, the Commonwealth continued to exist in defiance of political boundaries, and its traditions were carefully nurtured. The University of Wilno flourished under the direction of Adam Czartoryski and took over as the centre of academic life. New institutions such as the Krzemieniec High School, founded by Tadeusz Czacki, provided Polish education to a high standard. The Załuski library had been looted by the Russians, but in 1811 Stanisław Zamoyski opened his considerable library in Warsaw to the public. The Czartoryski historical museum at Pulawy recorded past glories, while its archive served historians. In 1817, the year the Austrian authorities founded a German university at Lemberg (as they had renamed Lwów), Józef Ossoliński opened a Polish archive and library in the city, the Ossolineum. In 1829 Edward Raczyński did the same in Poznań, which was also endowed with a museum by the MielŻyński family. Adam Tytus Działyński founded the Poznań Society of Friends of Learning, which began publishing manuscript sources in the 1840s from his library at Kórnik, which he had opened to the public in 1828. Everything, from old coins to folk songs, was collected, documented and studied.
The literary revival of the late eighteenth century continued to flourish with a new generation of poets. The same was true of the musical scene, which gave birth to the genius of Fryderyk Chopin. The architects fostered by Stanisław Augustus came to maturity at the beginning of the century and over the next three decades embellished Warsaw and dotted the countryside with elegant neo-classical houses. As a result, the Warsaw of the 1820s was an imposing and vibrant city, very much the capital of a Polish world still defined by the boundaries of the defunct Commonwealth.
But the post-Napoleonic generation was not temperamentally suited to compromise. There was much heated discussion among students, particularly at the University of Wilno, where secret societies burgeoned. It was all fairly harmless, but the Russian secret police has never been known to consider any discussion harmless, and when, in 1821, Major Walerian Łukasiński founded a Patriotic Society in Warsaw, it began to investigate further.
In 1823 the Professor of History at Wilno, Joachim Lelewel, was sacked and a number of students arrested. Other arrests followed, including that of a young poet, Adam Mickiewicz, a former student, now a teacher in Kowno, and the author of an