And the exclusion of Poles from active public life at home gave rise to a tribe of wanderers who had an impact elsewhere. Their presence was most noticeable in wars and revolutions. They fought in the French colonial wars and in the Spanish civil wars; they fought for Garibaldi and for the Paris Commune; they fought in the northern and southern hemispheres, and on both sides of the Atlantic. The Shah of Persia had two Polish regiments in his Imperial Guard. In America, the first officer to die for the Union in 1860 was a Captain Blandowski. Another 4,000 Poles fought for the Union, many in the 58th New York Infantry or Colonel Krzyżanowski’s United States Rifles, while a further 1,000 fought in the Confederate Army. It was in Ottoman service that such men found a lasting refuge, as staff officers, artillerymen, engineers, cartographers and surgeons. Poles could rise to high positions, provided they embraced Islam, which many did.
Typical is Aleksander Iliński, a wealthy nobleman who fought in the 1830 insurrection and then went into exile. He took service in the Polish legion organised by General Bem in the Portuguese army, then fought in the Spanish Civil War (developing a sideline as a successful bullfighter), and for the French in Algeria, winning the Légion d’Honneur in the process, followed by service in Afghanistan, India and China. In 1848 he was at General Bem’s side in Hungary, whence he made his way to Turkey. He converted to Islam and fought in the Crimean War as General Iskinder Pasha. He later became Turkish governor of Baghdad before dying in Istanbul in 1861.
Such a wide dispersal of the nation’s human resources raised the possibility of its extinction, particularly as the Polish nation had never been based on ethnic, territorial, religious or political affinities. When the state ceased to exist the diverse elements that made it up might have been expected to fly off like so many satellites deprived of the centre of their orbit. Yet, instead of disintegrating into its component parts, a Polish nation survived, albeit in a somewhat changed, and forever changing, form. ‘Polishness’ had become a condition which defined itself.
But given that the Commonwealth had excluded over ninetenths of the population from active participation, those who wished to promote the Polish national project needed to win over a sizeable proportion of the others. And they had to give it new form: to an age that viewed an efficient centralised state as desirable, the Commonwealth, like the recently defunct Holy Roman Empire, appeared anachronistic and deeply flawed. Its greatest achievement, a minimalist, multi-cultural democracy, was not one that appeared viable to the nineteenth-century mind. If the Polish patriots were to entice the passive and the peasants to embrace their cause, they would have to come up with a better project.
In this they were greatly aided by the incompetence of the occupying powers, particularly Russia. For while it would be too much to say that the new nation was forged in the struggle, the successive risings punctuated a process of thought and selfdiscovery which might otherwise have turned into meaningless waffle. They also tested theories and destroyed illusions.
The experience of 1794 made it clear that there was little national consciousness among the peasants. The military activity of 1797-1815 did involve greater numbers, at least a quarter of a million men, in a way that mixed aristocrats with peasants and initiated a significant number of people from the lower orders to the cult of the national cause. The events of 1830-31 showed up a divergence of interest in different social groups, which the risings of 1846 and 1848 were intended to remove by radicalising the issue. In the event, these two risings showed up the pointlessness of amateurs taking on empires with little more than slogans for ammunition. The rising of 1863 was marked by greater professionalism and tactical sense, as well as by large-scale participation of peasants, workers, Lithuanians, Belorussians and Jews, but it also revealed that warfare had taken a giant technological step forward.