Czartoryski next took up residence at the Hôtel Lambert, the centre of the Polish emigration in Paris and in many ways the seat of the unofficial government of Poland in exile. The Hôtel Lambert group kept alive the constitutional beliefs and culture of the émigrés who gathered there, among them the poet Adam Mickiewicz and the composer Frédéric Chopin. Czartoryski maintained close relations with British diplomats and politicians calling for a war against Russia. He developed a strong friendship with Stratford Canning, in particular, and no doubt influenced his increasingly Russophobic views during the 1830s and 1840s. Czartoryski’s chief agent in London, Władisław Zamoyski, a former aide-de-camp to the Grand Duke Constantine who had played a leading part in the Polish uprising, kept good ties to Ponsonby and the Urquhart camp – he even helped to finance the Vixen adventure. Through Stratford Canning and Zamoyski, there is no doubt that Czartoryski exercised a major influence on the evolution of Palmerston’s thinking during the 1830s and 1840s, when the future British Crimean War leader gradually came round to the idea of a European alliance against Russia. Czartoryski also cultivated close relations with the liberal leaders of the July Monarchy in France, in particular with Adolphe Thiers, the Prime Minister of 1836–9, and François Guizot, the Foreign Minister of the 1840s and last Prime Minister of the July Monarchy, from 1847 to 1848. Both French statesmen realized the value of the Polish émigré as a friendly link to the British government and public opinion, which at that time were cool in their relations towards France. In this sense, through his exertions in London and Paris, Czartoryski was to play a signficant part in bringing about the Anglo-French alliance that would go to war with Russia in 1854.
Czartoryski and the Polish exiles of the Hôtel Lambert group also played a significant role in the rise of French Russophobia, which gained strength in the two decades before the Crimean War. Until 1830, French views of Russia were relatively moderate. Enough Frenchmen had been to Russia with Napoleon and returned with favourable impressions of its people’s character to counteract the writings of Russophobes, such as the Catholic publicist and statesman François-Marie de Froment, who warned against the dangers of Russian expansionism in Observations sur la Russie (1817), or the priest and politician Dominique-Georges-Frédéric de Pradt, who represented Russia as the ‘Asiatic enemy of liberty in Europe’ in his best-selling polemic Parallèle de la puissance anglaise et russe relativement à l’Europe (1823).24 But the Tsar’s opposition to the July 1830 Revolution had made him hated by the liberals and the Left, while Russia’s traditional allies, the legitimist supporters of the Bourbon dynasty, had strong Catholic opinions, which alienated them from the Russians on the question of Poland.
The image of Poland as a martyred nation was firmly established in the French Catholic imagination by a series of works on Polish history and culture in the 1830s, none more influential than Mickiewicz’s Livre des pèlerins polonais (Book of Polish Pilgrims), translated from the Polish with a preface by the extreme Catholic publicist Charles Montalembert, and published with the addition of a ‘Hymn to Poland’ by the priest and writer Félicité de Lamennais.25 French support for Poland’s national liberation was strongly reinforced by religious solidarity, which extended to the Ruthenian (Uniate) Catholics of Belarus and western Ukraine, territories once dominated by Poland, where Catholics were forcibly converted to the Russian Church after 1831. The religious persecution of the Ruthenians attracted little attention in France during the 1830s, but when that persecution spread to Congress Poland in the early 1840s Catholic opinion was outraged. Pamphlets called for a holy war to defend the ‘five million’ Polish Catholics forced by Russia to renounce their faith. Encouraged by a papal manifesto – ‘On the Persecution of the Catholic Religion in the Russian Empire and Poland’ – in 1842, the French press joined in condemnations of Russia. ‘Since today all that remains of Poland is its Catholicism, the Tsar Nicholas has picked on it,’ declared the influential Journal des débats in an editorial in October 1842. ‘He wants to destroy the Catholic religion as the last and strongest principle of Polish nationality, as the last freedom and sign of independence that this unhappy people has, and as the last obstacle to the establishment in his vast empire of a unity of laws and morals, of ideas and faith.’26
