In the early summer the mood in Germany and in the Frankfurt Parliament began to veer away from internationalist liberalism, and deputies representing the German population of Poznania, Silesia and Pomerania began to voice anti-Polish sentiments. As the liberal ardour spent itself, the Berlin government began to contain the crisis. It promised to abide by its plan of ‘national reorganisation’ in Poznania, but insisted the Polish militias be disbanded. The National Committee tried to negotiate, but when Prussian forces attacked one of the Polish units the Poles fought back. They won two pitched battles against the Prussian army, at Milosław and Sokolowo, but were eventually bombarded into surrender with heavy artillery. Talk of reorganisation and autonomy was dropped, and in the end the Frankfurt Parliament voted to incorporate the Grand Duchy of Posen into Germany. As Friedrich Engels noted wryly: ‘Our enthusiasm for the Poles changed into shrapnel and caustic.’
In November, the Austrian army bombarded Kraków and then Lwów into submission. The ‘Springtime of the Nations’ had turned into another bleak winter for Polish patriots; far from benefiting their cause in any way, it had actually had the effect of liquidating the remaining privileges in the Republic of Kraków and the Grand Duchy of Posen.
The Poles had been among the first on the barricades of Vienna and Berlin; they fought in the Dresden rising; a Polish legion formed by the poet Adam Mickiewicz in Lombardy fought at Rome, Genoa, Milan and Florence; Mierosławski commanded the anti-Bourbon forces in Sicily and then the German revolutionaries in Baden; General Chrzanowski commanded the Piedmontese forces at Novara. Wherever there were Russians, Prussians, Austrians or their allies to be fought, there were Poles in the ranks. Their greatest contribution was to the Hungarian cause. General Bem, who had saved the day for the Poles at Ostrołęka in 1831, commanded the revolutionary forces in Vienna in 1848 and then Lajos Kossuth’s army in Transylvania. General Dembiński was the commander-inchief of the Hungarian forces. They and hundreds of Polish officers fought to the bloody end at Temesvar, while Czartoryski backed the Hungarians with diplomatic and material resources.
All this only served to associate the Polish cause with revolution in the European mind, and Europe was frightened by revolution. The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853 should have been a godsend to the Poles, combining as it did both of the nations most sympathetic to their cause against the arch-enemy Russia. The former British Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister Lord Palmerston knew Czartoryski and had often made sympathetic pronouncements on the Polish question. Napoleon III inherited sympathy for the Polish cause with his political pedigree, and his Foreign Minister was Count Walewski, the half-Polish natural son of the first Napoleon. The Poles began to dream of a Franco-British expeditionary force landing in Lithuania, but Palmerston and Napoleon III buried the Polish issue in order to buy Austrian and Prussian neutrality in the conflict, and only allowed Polish units to be raised under the Turkish flag to fight the common enemy in the Caucasus and the Crimea.
The Russian defeat in the Crimea and the death of Tsar Nicholas in 1855 did, however, have an immediate effect on conditions in Poland itself. The new Tsar, Alexander II, visited Warsaw and expressed himself open to suggestions for reform, but warned against political illusion:
With cautious optimism, the Warsaw banker and industrialist Leopold Kronenberg and Andrzej Zamoyski of the Agricultural Society initiated a discussion of possible reforms. It was the area tackled by Zamoyski that absorbed most attention—the question of the peasants. By the late 1850s more than half of all peasant tenancies had been transformed into money-rents, mainly by voluntary commutation on the part of the landlord. But most small estates still operated on the old labour-rent system. In 1858 the Russian government asked the Agricultural Society to prepare a land reform project. Since discussions were going on in Russia on the subject of the emancipation of serfs, the matter began to assume starkly political overtones. It was a question of whether the Polish peasant would thank the Tsar or his Polish masters for his emancipation.