The fate of the exiles was less lurid but no more enviable. Some 8,000 senior officers, political figures, writers and artists found themselves consigned to a life of hopeless anticipation. Theirs was supposed to be a tactical withdrawal. To keep themselves in shape, many of the soldiers took service in the new Belgian army, and the French tried to pack as many as they could into a Foreign Legion created for the purpose. Others converged on Paris, which became a focal point of Polish political and cultural life. It was there, amid bitterness and mutual recrimination, that the next moves in the struggle to recapture Poland were planned and discussed.
Two principal groupings emerged: the Czartoryski party and the Polish Democratic Society. The first pinned its hopes on diplomacy. Adam Czartoryski, referred to even by his political opponents as the
The Democratic Society, whose nerve centre, the Centralizacja, was based at Versailles, was committed to starting a mass rising in Poland at the earliest possible moment. It also built up strong links with similar movements in other countries, such as Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy; like the French in the 1790s, the Poles had begun to see themselves as universal champions of freedom, obliged to assist sister nations in their struggles, and thousands of them conspired, fought and died for the causes of others.
In 1837 the Russians uncovered the network the Centralizacja had carefully organised throughout the Kingdom and Lithuania, and cut a swathe through it with shootings, hangings and deportations to Siberia. The Democrats then shifted their activities to the less perilous Austrian and Prussian sectors, where they agitated throughout the 1840s, often playing on anti-manor sentiments in order to gain support among the politically passive peasantry.
A peasant rising was planned in both Galicia and Poznania for 22 February 1846. But premature action alerted the Austrian authorities, which reacted with speed and perfidy. They appealed to the Galician peasantry, explaining that the Polish lords were plotting a rising which would enslave them and offering cash for every ‘conspirator’ brought in dead or alive. There followed three days of mob violence in which bands of peasants attacked some seven hundred country houses, killing about a thousand people, few of them conspirators. On 4 March Austrian and Russian troops crushed the Socialist Republic which had meanwhile been proclaimed in Kraków and abolished the free status of the city, which was incorporated into the Austrian Empire. In Poznania the Prussian authorities arrested the entire leadership before the planned local rising had time to break out.
The revolutionary ardour of the Poles revived in the ‘Springtime of the Nations’ of 1848. In February of that year the Paris mob overthrew the regime of Louis-Philippe; three weeks later the barricades went up in Vienna and Berlin; by the summer there was hardly a state in Europe that had not been affected by disturbances. Poles were involved in all of these, as well as in events taking place in Poland itself.
Kraków and Lwów rose and proclaimed provisional revolutionary committees designated by the Versailles Centralizacja, which presented a list of demands for autonomy and the emancipation of the peasants. In the desperate straits in which it found itself the Austrian government had no option but to accept the
The Berlin mob had released from prison all the Polish conspirators arrested in 1846, and they went to Poznań to take control of the National Committee which had already formed there. The Berlin government was prepared to concede almost anything to weather the storm and therefore sanctioned the committee, promising ‘national reorganisation’ of the Grand Duchy of Posen along Polish lines. Attention then switched to Frankfurt, where the all-German Parliament assembled in a mood of pan-European liberalism. The fear that Tsar Nicholas would send in his troops to restore order in Central Europe prompted much talk of a common crusade to liberate Russian Poland and roll back the boundaries of tsarist autocracy.
Poles from all over Europe flocked to Poznania. Even Adam Czartoryski arrived from Paris, greeted along the way like a future king. In Poznania the National Committee had by now some 20,000 men under arms, commanded by Ludwik Mierosławski, and proceeded with a programme of local reforms.