Re-Imagining Democracy in East Central Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century
25-6 April 2025, Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw
Friday (25 April)
LECTURE
Mark Philp (University of Warwick): Being a Democrat before Democracy
The lecture was directed not to democratic belief, but to the acting out of democratic identities. As a basis for exploring these, it reviewed some of the many ways in which people who identified as ‘democrats’ behaved in Germany in 1848 – from attending Democratic salons and clubs, reading particular newspapers, carrying red flags or wearing red ribbons in their buttonholes, etc. We can distinguish three strands of this behaviour, although the strands are also interwoven:
- Activity that people undertook that was instrumental to the pursuit of their ideals and objectives
- Things people did as a means of expressing their beliefs and commitments and signaling those beliefs to others
- Things people did in reaction to others and in ways that distinguished their actions and behavior, such that it was recognizable as ‘Democrat’ behavior in contrast to that to be looked for from other potential identities.
These strands encompassed a range of practices (which had their own local histories) and offered a ‘repertoire’ on which people drew. What makes a repertoire distinctly ‘democratic’ is context-specific; it depends in part on its differentiation from other positions favourable or critical of the status quo with which it is in contestation. It is less a case of particular ideas being made manifest than of a set of practices being combined to forge an identity in contestation with other identities.
Context matters greatly. Germany was not France (with its long history of revolutionary activity and with sharply defined identities and activities). In the German lands, there was extensive repression after 1815 and in most areas those critical of the status quo were subject to harassment and censorship and often hounded out of the region. So we have to think about the extent to which, in any given area, there were long-standing historical traditions of political organization and engagement in political debate and activity, as against paucity of traditions and practices available. And we need to look at the impact of censorship and prosecution and the extent to which the repetoires available are shaped by such forces. These affect both what the repertoire is, its salience, and the cost to individuals of adopting various elements.
Using this framework, two case studies were discussed. The first discussed Karl Marx’s years of exile (1843-1848) and then his year in Cologne. Marx was highly active in democratic organizations, especially the Fraternal Democrats in Brussels and London in the second half of the 1840s, and the Cologne Democratic Association and other affiliated bodies in 1848-9. Marx seems to have had no sense of contradiction between his status as a Democrat, and his writing the Communist Manifesto. His commitment to being a democrat is unquestionable in his early months in Cologne and the Rhineland, where his daily life testified to his activity as a democrat, his commitment organizationally and as a journalist and editor. Disillusion set in after 1849, when over a period of several months his participation was accompanied with an increasing distance from what he increasingly saw a bourgeois democratic movement – although the high point of his frustration and hostility towards democrats came after his return to London, and following the development of the Central European Democratic Committee [associated especially with Mazzini] from 1850. Much of Marx’s ‘democratic’ repertoire was transferred into his longer term support of a communist movement, in exile – but the performative aspects of his commitment assumed a less important place in his life, in contrast to his intellectual work, while the ‘democrats’ in exile were largely absorbed into other organizations and identities in the post-revolutionary decade. Exile was a place for experimentation – in relation to ideas, controversy and in expression of commitments. It gave Marx a repertoire that he transferred to Cologne, where he was however tipped into sudden crisis by developments in March 1848. For a period, Marx thought that a Democratic Association could provide an organization to bring about change in the Rhineland, but his hopes faded, and when driven from the region he ended by turning his back on the identity – and in retrospect represented it as a temporary and instrumental allegiance.
The second case explored was that of Kathynka Zitz-Halein – from Mainz, steeped in the historical memories of Mainz’s time as a Jacobin Republic, and then as a Rhineland territory [under Napoleon, and then at Vienna assigned to Hesse Darmstadt]. Her democratic identity was expressed in her writings and in her involvement with the press, as well as in more individual acts of homage, as in dressing the grave of Karl Sand, Kotzebue’s assassin. She had a short-lived marriage to Franz Zitz (distant cousin), who in the 1830s was a leading Mainz democrat, represented the city at Frankfurt, but was eventually forced into exile. She was involved in democratic circles and in 1848-9 set up the Humania Association, providing aid to exiled democrats; she was also charged with treason for ferrying papers and weapons under the guides of benevolent activity. Her gender complicated her ‘expressive’ repertoire (while also limiting her participatory opportunities), since she had to work out what she believed was compatible with her character as a woman – and she was hostile to many more active female ‘democrats’ who lectured or took up arms with their husbands. The availability in Mainz of the possibility of identifying with the French regime of 1793 and the subsequent Napoleonic rule, gave a tradition and set of practices to draw upon –but in assembling her repertoire of behaviours and commitments she had to make her choices in line with both her identity as a democrat and with her consciousness of herself as a woman. She stands for a range of women in 1848 who found a voice and sense of identity that could stand starkly against the regime, and in favour of the Democrats, who yet had a significantly more limited repertoire available to them.
Places were differentially wealthy in historical resources and traditions; their inhabitants faced different degrees of repression and hostility, and they were to different degrees open to insurgent activity. Following Chris Clark, we might note that Belgium and the Netherlands cracked down hard at the first sign of trouble in 1848 and effectively closed down space for democratic activity and identity. By contrast the Nordic states, with little in the way of past democratic history and practice, ended up with movements more oriented to local concerns and less associated with the French. Thus in Denmark people were able to establish a form of democratic politics with a very different orientation and more individual form of expression than elsewhere. Those differences shaped the formation and expression of democrat identities and everyday lives, and also remind us that such lives were very much in and of the moment. It is not that commitments necessarily evaporated (although some did), but the urgency of their expression and clarity of their differentiation from other identities was more evanescent.
Discussion
? not sure who With reference to Mark’s citation, as a democratic gesture, of Gustav von Struve’s flamboyant announcement that he was giving up his ‘von’ in October 1847: did democrats who gave up noble status stick by this in changing times? And how did political and religious radicals compare or interact: did they compete for the same space?
Radek: It appears that there is a similarity between the personae of early-modern religious radicals and of modern democrats. How did contemporary political and religious radicals compare or interact: did they compete for the same space?
? not sure who Does it make sense to differentiate between democrats, republicans, liberals and socialists? And what about being a nationalist? Wasn’t it normal for democrats also to be nationalists?
Mark thought the first question was primarily about continuity of commitments. Thought that many German democrats who went to the US did do this: fought on the Republican (anti-slavery) side in the civil war. He thought having adopted a lifestyle could help to consolidate a commitment. He thought that religious commitments could play a part in democrats’ mental repertoire, inform their commitments. In relation to the second question, he agreed that in 1848-9 identities were blurry. He agreed that democrats tended to be nationalists, but his focus was more on behaviour than belief, so what would be important to him would be how democrats expressed nationalist commitments, eg by emblems.
Francois noted that Ludwig Bamberger (also cited by Mark in his initial comments) was Jewish. He said that historians often associated radicalism in this period with secularisation, and wondered what Mark thought about that?
Stephen wondered if he was implying that being a ‘democrat’ was distinctive because it was an umbrella identity, comprehending several different positions?
Mark didn’t think secularisation was the right concept. He saw more sacralisation than secularisation.
INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT
Joanna Innes (University of Oxford), Introduction to the Re-imagining Democracy Project
She explained that the premise of the project was that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ‘democracy’ ceased to be associated primarily with the ancient world and seen as a primitive form, and came to be seen as possibly the natural form of government for the modern world. The question was, how did it undergo this surprising change? The answer seemed to be partly that political aspirations changed; partly that the meaning of the word changed. Though the same broad processes unfolded across Europe and the Americas, ways in which the word was applied to modern circumstances varied, not surprisingly since circumstances varied. Accordingly, they had organised their work regionally: each book focussed on a different region. The last book focussed on ‘central and northern Europe’, basically Germany and lands adjacent. The method of the project was to hold lots of workshops and do lots of talking, so that contributors wrote their chapters against a background of discussion with other experts and interested parties. The object of the current workshop was especially to aid and challenge Piotr in writing a chapter that would focus on Poland.
She reported some of the project’s findings about developments in the use of the word over time. Ancient ideas about democracy reached the period partly through medieval and early modern channels. It came down to the eighteenth century as a taxonomic term (derived ultimately from Aristotle) and as the name of a political phenomenon observable at certain times, eg during the last years of the Roman republic. Medieval and early modern Europeans applied the term to their own broadly ‘corporate’ political institutional forms: to parliaments and diets, and elements in self-governing urban and rural places. These older, corporate understandings of democracy continued to have some life during the nineteenth century, especially in central and northern Europe, though the word was increasingly associated with new forms and ideas. Some early modern thinkers developed forms of democratic theory applicable to their own times. The word, originally best known in Latin, was from the seventeenth century increasingly vernacularised into modern European languages, and became part of the lexicon of a broad educated public – but not because it was seen as having important modern applications.
She argued that the French revolution provided an important hinge of change, giving the word important modern applications, and making it seem urgent to think about its potential for good and ill. The Revolution coloured ideas about the word perhaps less because of ways in which it was applied by revolutionaries themselves (they more often talked in terms of popular sovereignty, nation, republics, rights and equality) but because French institutions and practices shaped later understandings of what democracy entailed. It came to connote an attack on privilege (indeed, on some old corporate forms previously seen as democratic), at least potentially radical versions of equality, extending even to women, blacks and slaves, representative government (previously often contrasted with ancient direct democracy), and, at least in Europe, centralisation – whereas in the Americas it more often connoted federalism. The ancient idea that democracy was likely to be succeeded by the rise of strong men was given new life by the rise of Napoleon. Napoleon did not disown democracy, but the word found less application under him. Liberalism rose as a word covering some of the same ground. Only in the 1830s, as liberals started to get a grip on power, did calls for democracy find new life as the name of a critique within or of liberalism.
Against this background, she turned to reflect on why the project focussed on the word. She suggested that though one can certainly alternatively write histories of institutions and practices that we associate with democracy, such as voting and popular participation, problems could arise if this polysemic, normative and contested term was used of the past. She argued that approaching democracy as a word represented a way of side-stepping problems that otherwise tended to arise – though it admittedly brought new ones in its wake, because there were elements of contingency in its use. There were precedents for approaching the history of democracy only as the history of a word. This project aimed to do more than that, however. It aimed to show not only what the word meant but also what it was used to do: how it was applied to past institutions and practices, and with what intentions. In this way, institutions and practices were brought back in.
Finally, she looked at some suggestions made in earlier books about distinctive features of uses made of the term in different regions. She suggested that in central and northern Europe, usage was shaped by the fact that much of it was a ‘German language zone’: many people spoke and at least the educated often had access to German, and their ideas were currently relatively likely to be coloured by German thinkers such as Kant and Hegel. Also relevant were the complex and ‘layered’ systems of rule which characterised much of the region: systems in which it was not easy to locate sovereignty, and in which putting into practice ‘popular sovereignty’ accordingly seemed especially challenging: older ‘corporate’ notions of democracy had found easier application. Seigneurialism persisted longer here than in most other parts of Europe, and was often challenged in revolutionary periods, such that one might wonder how ideas about ‘democracy’ were applied in relation to it. The region was certainly not uniform, and she suggested that very schematically one might distinguish a western zone, marked sometimes by republican traditions, and the presence of many historic ‘free cities’; also a region much of which came under some form of French rule during the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, from an eastern zone marked by princely rule. In the eastern zone, democratic ideas found relatively little application until the 1840s, when discourses associated with the ‘social question’ and then political upheavals around 1848 – some of the most extreme and destabilising in Europe – brought the term into unwonted use. Poland did not fit neatly into this scheme. She left it to Piotr to talk about the challenges involved in writing his chapter.
Piotr Kuligowski (Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences), Approaches to Writing a Chapter about Polish talk about Democracy, 1780–1870
The first challenge he identified was an abundance of sources. One couldn’t look at everything, so what to look at? And what should one be looking for: innovative uses or representative uses? Innovative uses might have few occurrences, but do more to shape debate than uses which followed accustomed patterns.
The second challenge was discontinuity in debates, associated with political upheavals and the partitioning of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Upheaval had implications for source survival. Some key sources had been lost – though it was possible to gain some insight into them from extensive quotations by historians who wrote when they still survived.
That Poland was partitioned posed the question, was there nonetheless a common Polish political imagination. That had been debated. At the time, the sense of unity among different parts of the country was emphasized; however, later historians have debated whether we should speak of one Polish history or several in the 19th century. (One of the more recent examples is the multi-volume series ‘Histories of Poland in the 19th Century’, whose title itself suggests the existence of multiple historical narratives). Historie Polski w XIX wieku pod red. Andrzeja Nowaka <br/> Tadeusz Epsztein, Magdalena Gawin, Bogusław Dopart, Kominy, ludzie i obłoki: modernizacja i kultura. Tom I – Wydawnictwo DiG His impression was that people talked in broadly similar ways about democracy across the partitions. There were more striking differences between usages in the territory and among exiles.
He did not see the book’s time frame, 1780-1870, as a problem: that worked quite well in the Polish case, picking up the crises that preceded and accompanied the final partitions on the one hand, and extending into the aftermath of the 1863 rising on the other. He thought that the greatest changes took place in the 1830-60 period. In the 1860s, the term may have come into wider use, even conservatives being prepared to use it to describe what by then were fairly mainstream forms of representative system.
That a variety of languages were in use in Polish lands, and by Poles living elsewhere was potentially an issue. There were important sources in French as well as Polish. One might ask whether there were different narratives in different languages. Command or lack of command of languages had implications for the spread of ideas. Some exiles found English hard. Many Poles lacked a confident command of Russian, which limited their exposure to Russian ideas.
One issue to be considered was the use of vernacular as against Latinate terminology. A common pattern was for vernacular analogues sometimes to be used to translate or gloss version of the Latin demokracja, but at other times such vernacular forms might take on different meanings. His impression was that vernacular forms tended to have narrower and more specific meanings.
A final problem was the opposite of the one he’d identified at the start: scarcity of sources. This related especially to certain kinds of source. Sources relating to ordinary people were especially scarce, though police sources and memoirs sometimes shed light. Historians of other places were able to use petitions to shed some light on the political vocabularies of ordinary people, but in Poland at this time petitioning seems to have been an elite practice. When sources which shed light on peasant approaches do survive, they tend to suggest a focus on the practicalities of everyday life.
In writing the chapter, he hoped to focus especially on foreign influences. Democracy was sometimes attacked as a foreign import, but he thought that nonetheless foreign influences played an important part in naturalising the term in Polish discourse. To model the relationship, one might think in terms of smugglers and customs officers. The relationship between these is not always confrontational. He thought it notable that during the period vernacular forms seemed to die away. That would change in the later nineteenth century. At that time, various political formations continued to want to invoke democracy as a reference point in terms of which to characterise themselves, and some made use of vernacular forms. Taking the later nineteenth century as a point of vantage, the question one might ask of the earlier period was how was the ground prepared for it to emerge as an important category of political identity.
Discussion
Cody wanted to hear more about what was said in non-Polish-language sources under the partitions. And if meanings of democracy shifted in the same ways in different parts, what did that imply about the democratic public sphere? Piotr said that for example there were multilingual journals in which the same text appeared in different languages. That kind of practice aided synchronicity.
Maciej wondered if in Poland uses of the word were coloured by estate politics. As in ‘noble democracy’. In relation to words and practices, he thought that democracy characteristically related not to a practice but to a bundle of practices. He thought that people continued to have a problem with imagining how democracy might be instituted in a large space. Kołłątai, for example, asked how one could have a huge republic? Of course one may suppose that after all a huge republic did exist in reality – the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, but the clue of Kołłątaj’s thinking was a political reform, of saving the old “republican” system, but making it viable and fitting the Enlightenment ideas about the modern state. That means the republic should combine liberty with effective governmental power. How this is possible? His answer to this question echoed the Federalist Papers answer: representation and federalism.
Aytas wanted to hear more about digital tools, and Piotr’s views on the pros and cons of using them. He also wondered how SE Europe fit into the book series.
Joanna said SE Europe figured in the ‘Mediterranean’ book – though it didn’t figure in the Ottoman chapter in that book, because the author had said that would be stretching his expertise too far. But it does figure in some of the thematic chapters. Maciej, she said that though corporate forms survived, they were decreasingly described as democratic – except perhaps in Switzerland where old and new versions of democracy faced off against eachother.
Piotr answered briefly in respect to digital tools: he had just used fairly standard ones such as tools offered by digital libraries. He said that claiming or attributing democratic identity was often a provocation and was seen as a foreign import
Stephen asked, in relation to regional characteristics, if there weren’t many different possible ways of defining sub-regions, eg ethnic, confessional, in terms of language. The region presented a complex series of overlapping patchworks. Joanna agreed that identifying sub-regions for the purposes of the book potentially helped to determine the results of the enquiry, and might mean some interesting topics were overlooked. But thematic chapters were not bound by those constraints, and might explore different patterns. She hoped that in the chapter she and Jean-Michel Johnston would write about the 1860s there would be scope to explore some competing versions of identity
THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Dorota Wiśniewska (University of Wrocław), Political Representation according to Polish Noblewomen in the Long 18th Century
She wanted to explore some aspects of the political culture of Polish noble women in the late eighteenth century. They thought of the polity in which they lived chiefly as a Rzeczpospolita, commonwealth or republic. Polish noble women had more confidence in themselves than one might have expected. It was important in that connection that, unlike French women, who in many contexts were represented by others, they more often represented themselves. They shared the privileges and responsibilities of other nobles and saw themselves as just as much citizens of the polity. They saw the Diet as representing them – even if those who did the representing were men.
Portraits show women together with their powerful political relatives, in a supportive position. In a 1693 portrait of Isabella Czartoryska Izabela Czartoryska – Wikipediawith her father, she is at his side, and raises a laurel wreath towards him Rigaud, Hyancinthe – Le comte Jan Andrzej Morszstyn et sa fille – Izabela Elżbieta Czartoryska – Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
Similarly Isabella Branicki nee Poniatowska, whose brother was elected king, was shown with his picture Izabella Poniatowska – Wikipedia. Women saw themselves as benefiting from the actions of public-spirited men.In a painting of the Great Sejm, which passed the 1791 constitution, women are shown in the gallery alongside men Great Sejm – Wikipedia
They were critical when they thought representatives weren’t doing a good job.
The books which Ludwika Zamoyskya Ludwika Maria Poniatowska – Wikipedia (sister of the king) took from her collection when she left Poland included books on antiquity, French history and universal history, as well as religion.
Women were acknowledged in the public sphere as bearing domestic responsibilities, and they responded positively to this.
The Sarmatian myth was central to their self-perception, as for male Polish nobles. Nobles were seen as equal with each other, and as having rights which they should treasure, but they were also responsible for showing care towards other estates.
Something changed in the 1780s, when the risk of war led some to argue the need to modify traditional values. More women than before favoured abolishing the liberum veto, introducing majority vote, and moving from an elective monarchy to a constitutional one. Still, some remained cautious. In that context Kossakowska Katarzyna Kossakowska – Wikipedia cited an adage of the leading sixteenth-century nobleman Jan Zamoyski: be a king, do not reign. Jan Zamoyski – Wikipedia. She defended republican values: the ‘golden freedom’ of noble citizens and their rights to rule the country to express the opposition to Stanisław August’s policy aiming at strengthening his position as a monarch
Women called themselves patriots or republicans. They believed in maintaining the power of the szlachta, the noble estate. They tended to regard democratic ideas with scepticism. Kossakowska, for example, said that if one chose by merit, then one might choose lots of sons without mothers. Including townspeople in the polity was the furthest they could imagine going. As Maria Radziwiłłowa put it, peasants were too stupid to be free.
Isabella Czartoryska was known for her kindness to the common people. She wrote a popular history book which was designed for peasants but in fact probably mainly read by nobles and townspeople. In this she advised her readers not to seek happiness beyond that which heaven has destined for you.
Radek Szymanski (University of Warsaw), Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland in the eyes of Michał Wielhorski.
Rousseau challenged the Aristotelian/Polybian approach to politics, in the context of questioning whether democratic politics could work in a large state.
Jerzy Michalski WA303_78371_JM_Michalski-eng.pdf discovered the account of the Polish constitution which Wielhorski sent to Rousseau. It became plain that Rousseau followed this closely in describing how the Polish constitution worked. Michalski however criticised Rousseau’s political vision as unrealistic. Samuel Moyn has shown that this was a common position among cold-war liberals. However, that view has now been challenged by Hont, Sonenscher and Celine Spector among others.
Rousseau tried in his vision for Poland to retain much that Wielhorski described. But he rejected his conceptualisation of the people and their relationship to sovereignty. Wielhorski drew on traditional ideas about mixed government – one of his sources for this probably being a volume then recently edited by Piarist scholars (a school spearheaded by Stanisław Konarski), who favoured this as a framework for thinking about options for Poland.
Rousseau dismissed this framing. He said that only one social group had power: the nobles. The bourgeois were nothing and the peasants less. He did not however suggest that these other groups should be represented by way of extrapolating the logic of a mixed constitution, as if in the Swedish model of an additional peasant estate constituted alongside the noble (and bourgeois) estate. Using Wielhorski’s own description of the Polish government, Rousseau argued that contrary to the widely-held account, as a matter of fact the Commonwealth did not have a mixed constitution, since all the legislative power already lay in noble hands: neither the king nor the senate played an important role in the legislative process. Sovereignty was therefore already unitary. Rather than seeking to divide it, the object should be to make it more inclusive. Mechanisms were needed to allow burghers and peasants to share in noble rights over time, all the while maintaining rather than compromising the extant unity of the collective sovereign.
He thought that a reformed Poland should still be monarchical – though the king should be reconceptualised as a chief magistrate, responsible for executing the laws. Sovereignty should lie rather with the (currently noble) nation. The nobles at large should continue to govern the conduct of their representatives via mandatory instructions issued by regional assemblies.
Wielhorski was prompted by his reading of Rousseau to rethink his own ideas. He suggested that the role of ‘estates’ within the Polish constitution had for long been misunderstood. Estates should properly be understood to mean regional assembles, sejmiki (or: dietines). It was these bodies that should share power with the national Sejm, in an effectively federal arrangement. And he saw this arrangement as ensuring the sovereignty of the people. [Though he didn’t say this in the presentation, in a written paper he makes clear, and it’s of interest, that when Wielhorski adopted a Rousseauian perspective he abandoned the language of ‘democracy’, which he had employed when he thought in mixed-constitutional terms.]
In these ideas about how Poland might progress we see outlined a set of ideas about how to get to democratic governance which differ from the English model.
Discussion
Piotr said that in the November (1830) uprising, women were again present in the galleries. He would be interested to know more about how her women reflected on the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and its aftermath.
Joanna asked Dorota about some ways in which women’s role might have been distinctively theorised. First, in education: was it argued that they needed to be politically literate, and generally well informed, in part so that they could bring up children to be good citizens – was this seen as an important and distinctively female role. Secondly, she wondered if women with bad fathers or husbands used political language to talk about their plight, eg talking about domestic tyranny. To Radek – by way of comment to which he could respond as he chose — she observed that whether you understood Poland as democratic or not seemed to depend partly on the weight you assigned to the legislature. If you valued executive power highly, emphasising Poland’s democratic habits didn’t obviously get you very far. She suggested that democratic theorists tend to struggle when it comes to theorising what a democratic executive should look like: that’s not the ground on which they’re most comfortable, finding it easiest to talk about how the executive should and might beheld in check.
Cody wondered whether Dorota could shed any light on the views of bourgeois women. He also wondered what Wielhorski thought of the imperative mandate: was that part of his vision of how a future Polish constitution should work?
Mark added to Joanna’s observation about the legislature that a feature of Rousseau’s theory was that he drew no distinction between the constituent and constituted power. The government was in effect always in the making.
Dorota said to Piotr that she thought there was more continuity than change. She thought women’s sense of having a political role or mission continued, and that Czartoryska illustrated that. She noted that at the end of the eighteenth century, about 25% of nobles lived in Warsaw. That made it possible for there to be a quite cohesive noble society. As to the bourgeoisie: there were some bourgeois, notably bankers and their wives, who could aspire to move in noble circles. The rest were not part of the conversation. To Joanna’s questions about women’s roles, certainly importance was attached to their educational role. Czartoryska wrote that women should be patriots and should teach their children Polish history. It was thought that women needed a command of foreign languages so that they could entertain guests: that had more to do with feudalism than democracy, she thought. Oginski Michał Kleofas Ogiński – Wikipedia, who’s best known now for his piano compositions, wrote letters to his daughters and son in which he said that it was especially important that his son should understand the old way of things. In relation to domestic tyranny, she said that Polish noblewomen separated from their husbands at a higher rate than in western Europe. It was widely argued that abusive husbands should be punished. She has found more examples of supportive husbands.
Radek said to Cody that both Rousseau and Wielhorski discussed and were broadly supportive of mandatory instructions. They thought moreover that legislative proposals should continue to be aired before dietines which, in conjunction with mandatory instructions, would meant that it is the dietines (and not the envoys at the central Diet) that discuss the proposals and make the decisions about them, which are then transmitted and tallied at the federal level. To Joanna and Mark he said that he agreed that accounts of government which emphasise the role of the legislature find it easier to accommodate the people. He said that Rousseau was clearly against constitutionalism insofar as it is premissed on binding the sovereign into the future: he didn’t think it right to ossify structures of government. Nonetheless, constitutionalism was by this time part of the Polish political reality. In 1767, the Russians imposed a form of ‘constitution’ (the so-called Cardinal Laws) which expressly placed the liberum veto as well as the perennial protectorate of Russia over the Commonwealth beyond repeal or reform, thus eroding the sovereignty of the Sejm. The crisis occasioned by these Cardinal Laws triggered the 1768-1772 civil war, which provided the immediate background against which Rousseau wrote.
Maciej noted, in relation to democratic theories of the executive, that Bagehot described the British government as a committee of the House of Commons. He said that was one possible model, whether or not it applied in the Polish case. In relation to women, he suggested that women had more independence in countries that drew on barbarian law traditions than in those which followed French civil law. He said that a Krakow historian, Władysław Konopczyński (1880-1952), who was imprisoned in Scahsenhausen concentration camp in 1939-1940, and during the rest of the war he did not have possibility of making researche, has written a short book on the role of women in Confederation of Bar, which he called in the introduction, half seriously, “a feminist history of the Bar Confederation”. It was written mostly from memory and notes he made before the war for his earlier works, but it is an interesting example of interest of an otherwise rather traditional historian in the history of women. imagination, without sources. In relation to whether entertaining guests should be seen as feudal, he suggested that it related rather to enlightenment sociability and the growth of the modern public sphere.
Oliver encouraged Dorota to extend her research into the early nineteenth century, based on sources he is familiar with—for example, the Czartoryski family correspondence from the period when Adam Jerzy was in Paris while his sister Maria was living in Vienna and serving as one of his key informants. He also suggested that the concept of Matka-Polka (Polish Mother) is worth exploring further. Although it is relatively well-known in the Polish context, there are still aspects that remain under-researched. He believed there was a political motivation for women to learn foreign languages. Many sources from the time of the Great Emigration confirm that Polish women (and Poles in general) were encouraged to study foreign languages, as this could support the national cause—“they will be able to understand their enemies.” Radek, responding to Maciej’s question about the merit of Jerzy Michalski’s negative assessment of the Considerations (namely, that Rousseau added fuel to the old Sarmatian conservatism which was increasingly out of touch with reality and therefore at odds with serious reform)said that he did not think Rousseau was unrealistic. He has also studied the correspondence that passed between a Pole and a Swiss who were royalists and pro Poniatowski. Their thinking was more similar to Rousseau’s than you might imagine. The two sides were not really very far apart in their thinkingDorota agreed that the idea of Matka Polska was relevant: she had forgotten to mention it. The Spartan mother also provided an interesting model. She has looked for sources on women beyond Warsaw, but has found more information about how they experienced politics than about how they acted, eg their experience of the partitions, their worries about their husbands. Since she was interested in women’s political agency, she had to focus on Warsaw
‘DEMOCRACY’ IN POLAND
Piotr Kuligowski (Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences), From Counter-Concepts to Reconciliations: Conceptual Variations of Polish Democracy in the 19th Century
He noted that democracy was sometimes paired with its counter-concepts: thus J.L. Talmon wrote about ‘totalitarian democracy’; now people talked about ‘authoritarian democracy’.
In working for his entry on democracy in the Polish History of Concepts, he had pursued the standard line of enquiry of identifying counter-concepts. He found democracy contrasted with anarchy, tyranny, aristocracy and monarchy. Later, the oppositions were often between syntagms: national democracy was contrasted with social democracy, and with empire. And then people’s democracy was contrasted with liberal democracy.
Absolutism was a negative category at the time: absolutum dominium was a negative phrase in the discourse of the period. Tyranny loomed large in republican discourse. After 1830, the contrast with aristocracy was fundamental. The relationship between the two was actively debated in the Warsaw Sejm 1831. One question was how to characterise the Polish political model: was it a republic or a democracy. Democracy was often contrasted with aristocracy. Constitutional monarchy was sometimes favoured over either. Similar debates were taking place in other parts of Europe at the same time. Thus in 1830 the French king said that the laws provided protection against turbulent democracy. In Brussels, democracy was also used as a negative term.
Some thinkers tried to reconcile aristocracy and democracy. Thus August Cieszkowski August Cieszkowski – Wikipedia coined the phrase democratic aristocracy. (He found that democracy was increasingly used adjectivally from this time). Cieszkowski was a Polish philosopher inspired by though critical of Hegelianism. He was associated with a current of so-called ‘national philosophy’, inspired by Hegelianism and romanticism. This was associated with an attempt to develop a distinctive philosophical language. Not all the terminology they developed has lasted. It has been seen as providing a link between Hegel and Marx. In his 1844 De la pairie et de l’aristocratie moderne De la pairie et de l’aristocratie moderne / par le comte Auguste Cieszkowski | Gallica Cieszkowski called the existence of the French Senate into question. He said that the revolution had broken their power. It was however possible to give the term new meaning. Cieszkowski drew on the ideas of the French Doctrinaires to propose a new model of senate and aristocracy – in which aristocracy was a reference not to birth but to merit. Contrary to Sieyes, he said that the third estate was not everything, but part of a broader society with a more complex social structure.
Mieroslawski Ludwik Mierosławski – Wikipedia – a Polish general who took part in various uprisings, and in the revolution in Baden and Sicily — talked about democratic absolutism. In 1843 he wrote in the periodical Demokrata Polski about preparations for the next war, which he thought should take the form of a coup. Henryk Kamienski Henryk Michał Kamieński – Wikipedia proposed instead that it should take the form of a people’s war. Soldiers should be considered citizens. It wasn’t enough just to have conspiratorial leaders: local activists were also needed. Mieroslawski was influenced by Jacobinism and Blanquism, also by Carlo Bianco, the theorist of national war. Carlo Angelo Bianco – Wikipedia On the national war of insurrection: Amazon.co.uk: Carlo Bianco of St Jorioz: 9789354787560: Books He believed that a centralised government was best for a nation in upheaval; a people’s war would in effect deliver hegemonic power to the nobility. He said that nothing is more democratic than a dictatorship, citing the Romans, the French Terror and Irish agitation. The point about a dictator was that his power was associated with an emergency; he should cede power when the emergency passed.
Those were his preliminary conclusions about democracy and its counter-concepts. As he saw it, counter-concepts were not just opposites. The pairing of democracy with a counter-concept took its meaning from a specific debate, and might reflect an interest in reconciling apparent opposites. This kind of exercise worked for readers only if both concepts were independently well-established. Then their interest could be effectively engaged.
Discussion
Stephen wondered whether digital tools suggested that a large proportion of references to democracy paired it with something else.
Piotr said that his impression was that in the early nineteenth century it was often used adjectivally, whereas later in the century its use as a noun became more common, as in such phrases as social democracy, national democracy.
Adrian said that he thought it was against the background of the Warsaw uprising that the democracy/aristocracy contrast became standard. Both terms were pejorative, or mocking.
François asked whether either Cieszkowski or Mieroslawski really grappled with the diversity of inhabitants in Polish lands. Did they consider whether forms of federalism might help to accommodate this?
Piotr said that he would have to think more about that. His immediate thought was that Mieroslawski was committed to restoring old boundaries, accepting that there would be diversity within them. He wasn’t sure that Cieszkowski gave much thought to the issue.
Radek wondered in relation to Cieszkowski how he mapped aristocracy on to a Hegelian notion of the ‘universal estate’, as its variant or its critique?. He also wondered about hiseconomic thought. He thought he was best known for his writing on credit and circulation – his book about them was admired in France. Did he think that public credit was providing the basis for a new aristocracy, for example? He added that he thought that the idea that an aristocracy might be elective was respectable in the eighteenth century. It wasn’t taken for granted that titles should be hereditary. People could think that there should be senators for life.
Piotr said that he did think a new economic model was emerging, and that there was some connection between that and the rethinking of aristocracy. Probably those who favoured an elective aristocracy in the nineteenth century built upon older theories.
Maciej thought that the credit book by Cieszkowski specifically reflected east European conditions. Lack of credit facilities was a serious problem in the region. Széchenyi also wrote about it credit, understanding it in a broader sense, as both finasial credit and social trust. . In relation to reconciling counter-concepts, he thought that some authors using the counter-concepts aimed at reconciling them and some others aimed to reconcile them, others to sharpen them. Cieszkowski was a reconciler, Mieroslawski a sharpener. As a more modern example of a reconciler he cited Kolakowski, who wrote about how to be a liberal-conservative-socialist.
Camille had a question about reception. It seemed that Cieszkowski was intervening in a French debate, about the role of the senate. Was his work taken up by French authors? Did Poles read it as being about them? At what public was it aimed?
Piotr said that it wasn’t translated into Polish until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century – though of course many educated Poles read French. He hadn’t found many references to it in French debate (short paragraph about it was published in ‘Le Correspondant’).
Camille said that she thought the Polish exiles sometimes tried to intervene in French debates, but she wasn’t sure that it ever worked.
Piotr said that he thought they sometimes succeeded. In 1848, the Polish question was debated on the streets in Paris, becoming a catchword during the demonstration on 15 May 1848
Tomasz cited Wojciech Jastrzębowski’s project for perpetual peace, in the form of a constitution for Europe, a funny utopian text from 1831, which favoured non-territorial state-like bodies, organised by language (English translation of a manuscript kept in the Warsaw central state archive: https://agad.gov.pl/WBJ_KdE/broszura_KonstytucjadlaEuropy_Jastrzebowski_EN_2.pdf; Polish original printed brochure: https://polona.pl/preview/eb9ee534-70b5-4652-9d27-6f5b92d108a4; there are some significant differences between them, eg the brochure has a clear statement: “There will be no more countries in Europe, only nations”) . He thought that it might be the first attempt to use that approach. But apparently no one read it. The author later had an academic career under the Russian government.
Cody wondered whether Cieszkowski’s ideas about senates were in any way influenced by American debates. It was a recurrent theme there, especially during the build-up to the Civil War. He also noted that the idea of democratic dictatorship by used by Lukacs, who linked it to people’s democracy, in another moment of crisis.
Marcin doubted Mieroslawski’s sincerity. He thought he was primarily interested in promoting himself.
Piotr agreed that he imagined himself filling the dictatorial role. To Cody, he said that the text referred to French experiences, to issues that had arisen since the French revolution; however comparisons to American and British institutions were also briefly provided.
Adrian wondered how dictatorship came into the picture. The risings of the mid 90s were planned by confederacies; there was rarely a distinctive leader. He wondered if there was more need for a dictator in the context of more expansive ideas about democracy.
Radek said that the older notion of a confederacy was that it might deal with something like an interregnum. The use of the confederacy to organise and legitimate a rising was new.
Joanna said she wanted to pursue the theme of the location of certain kinds of conceptualisation in time. She thought – but this was an impression only, and she might be wrong — that the democratic/aristocratic binary was more standard in the eighteenth than in the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century there was some interest in rethinking aristocracy as a designation for new elites; in the later nineteenth century there was less interest in the creation of aristocracies, but also less sense that nobilities should have any kind of special role in government. Upper chambers became less likely to have a formal hereditary element. The importance attached to the democratic/aristocratic binary in Poland in and after the 1830s may have been unusual in its time. Conversely, the association between democracy and strong one-man rule might seem to look forward to the age of Napoleon III and Bismarck, but Buonarottists argued that a revolution needed to be followed by a period of dictatorial rule by a ‘provisional government’ to consolidate social and political change. However, it wasn’t always useful to think of concepts as having lives over time. Though there were traditions of thought about democracy (eg on the part of Doctrinaires), formulations could also be just of the moment.
Piotr said that during the 1830 uprising they had both a dictator and a provisional government. The appointment of a dictator solved a constitutional problem: only the king could summon a legitimate meeting of the Sejm.
Mark said that he agreed with Piotr that the development of counter-concepts relied on the initial concept having a certain solidity. One might need to dig deeper into what democracy meant in any given case to see what those who wanted to blend it wanted to conserve.
Dorota said that in the early nineteenth century there was much discussion along the lines of Who is to blame for the partitions? Often the aristocracy was blamed – not the nobility in general but the magnates in particular. The democrats contrasted with them were middling gentry.
Tomasz said that that kind of discussion was already taking place under the Four-Year Sejm.
Joanna said that in the 80s and 90s there was much discussion of democracy/aristocracy throughout Europe. RR Palmer, in his Age of Democratic Revolution, suggested that was the chief counter-concept (though he didn’t use that term).
François said that when in the late eighteenth century the aristocracy were said to have betrayed the nation they were often said to have done that in the context of doing business with Jews. He asked about how the term ‘społeczność’ (society) functioned, and whether it played an important role in conceptualisations.
Piotr said he thought ‘people’ was a more important concept. Społeczeństwo was relatively unusual. Towarzystwo meant both a political organisation and polite society.
Oliver on the theme of how sharply distinct apparently different positions were said it wasn’t unusual for emigres to change their allegiance. We shouldn’t overstate differences between different positions.
IDEAS
Adrian Wesołowski (Jagiellonian University in Cracow) Popular Means Democratic: On the Semantic Connections Between Popularity, Revolution, and Democracy During the November Uprising
He said he would start not with a text but with a situation. The November 1830 uprising started just as an episode of disorder. That proved pivotal once the government admitted some popular personalities, so-called, to the administrative council. What did ‘popular’ mean in this context? The rebellion was directed against Russia, but was also full of internal conflicts. Popular did not mean just ‘well-liked’. Popularista[?] meant democrat, but those admitted were aristocrats who were well-liked and well known among the common people. Constantine, who fled, protested at their appointment, but was told that they would support the government, but he said it amounted to revolutionising or popularising the council. Lubetski[?] later repeated these phrases. There was perhaps some convergence between some of these meanings: a popular figure could be both with and for [?] the people.
The word popular appears man times in the discourse of the November rising. His question was why? What did it mean? Conservatives associated popularity with mob rule, with those in the streets choosing a leader. For example, with the priest Pulaski, a famous agitator in Warsaw, who initially helped to organise crowds and subsequently radical politics when that emerged. He was called a drunk, a monster, a bad priest, dirty, disgusting, and was said to be liked by similar people: he represented the mob in a very direct sense. Popularity in this case was a social phenomenon.
There was an infrastructure behind popularity, in the form especially of newspapers.
Fame and political legitimacy were divergent concepts. Popular figures could be contrasted with historic names, acclaimed because they were prepared to sacrifice themselves for their country. Radicals had different ideas about legitimacy, associating it with those who gave voice to the sentiments of the crowd. They thought people should not be trusted just because they bore historic names. Power should instead go to people who showed merit and ability – this is what for example the newspaper Nova Polska argued.
That popularity acquired a political value is a mark of the democratisation of culture.
Discussion
Joanna asked if the term demagogue was much used.
Adrian said yes, very widely. It was a wholly negative term; there was no attempt to reclaim it for positive use.
Mark wanted to know more about how elections worked, and in that connection at how leader figures emerged. Were there traditional routes, and did they change?
Adrian said that gaining legitimacy by status was the older pattern; popularity was new.
Stephen wondered how this related to the aristocracy vs democracy contrast. Was shifting away from an honour-based system what anti-aristocratic sentiment entailed as a political practice?
Adrian thought the two words were at this time essentially rhetorical tools, not easily mapped on to political practice. Concrete proposals as to how government might work weren’t obviously debated on the streets.
Oliver Zajac (Slovak Academy of Sciences) Hesitant Democrat? Czartoryski’s Views on Political Representation and Reform
Oliver said that there were many grounds for arguing that Czartoryski was not a democrat. Nonetheless, he wanted to ask whether there was any basis for seeing him as one—whether Czartoryski displayed any democratic attributes.
His lifetime, 1770–1861, was a very unstable period. Despite this, certain consistencies in Czartoryski’s positions can be observed. He came from a highly influential family and was a child of the Enlightenment. As a young man, he visited Britain and France. His heroes included Mirabeau and, especially, Charles James Fox. He was involved in freemasonry, and in his diary, he referred to himself as a liberal. He drew on freemasonic ideas to imagine a European moral order. Between 1815 and 1830, he shifted toward a more moderate-conservative stance.
The November Uprising marked a radical rupture for him: he became involved in the highest tier of politics as the Prime Minister of the National Government. After the uprising failed, he was forced into emigration.
In exile, his top priority was the restoration of Poland as an independent state. He was not committed to insisting that the state conform to any one blueprint, although there were discussions in his circle about what form the future Polish state should take. For him, the Constitution of 3 May 1791 remained the guiding light. At the Hôtel Lambert, his base in Paris, both 29 November and 3 May were commemorated annually. He did not see the need for an alternative constitutional blueprint. Czartoryski favoured rights for all, the abolition of serfdom, the transfer of land to peasants, and a constitutional monarchy. He believed that a monarch should protect the lower classes as they progressed. He maintained connections with liberal circles in both the United Kingdom and France.
The journal 3 May, closely associated with the Hôtel Lambert, declared in 1845 that its aim was to “defend the monarchy with the strength of democracy.” Czartoryski’s milieu was reluctant to surrender the word democracy to the democrats. They were essentially constitutional monarchists who viewed the monarchy’s role as one of safeguarding the wider population and regarded the people as subjects of civic and social engagement. The term democracy was ambiguous, as it could mean “by the people” or “for the people.” His circle opposed government by the people, arguing that the masses were driven by emotion and would not choose a path that truly benefited the nation. However, they did favour government for the people and saw this as a necessary feature of a restored Polish state.
Ironically, his opponents in exile viewed him as conservative—although many among the émigrés were far more conservative themselves—while many aristocrats in the partitioned Polish lands saw him as a dangerous liberal, fearing the impact of his activities in exile on their own positions.
Discussion
Maciej said that he had never studied Czartoryski’s biography in detail, but he would argue generally against trying to label people: he thought this wasn’t profitable or truly historical. We should instead try to see people in their whole complexity. Historians did sometimes call Czartoryski a liberal; sometimes the called him conservative, but the historian of ideas Andrzej Walicki has seen as him as a revolutionary, in that he aimed to destroy the Vienna settlement (according to Walicki he can be called “rightist” only in the sense of right wing of revolutionary movement, as the whole Polish emigration was by default revolutionary). Looking at Czartoryski’s Essai sur la diplomatie, (written in the 1820s), Walicki sas strong elmenets of romantic nationalism in this text. In 1845 Czartoryski favoured the abolition of serfdom, which might seem to align him with the radical left: in that context, nobles started to distrust him. Jan Czynski, who was not a noble, looked to Czartoryski to guard against domination by the nobility.
Oliver said that he largely agreed with the position. He could be seen in many different ways, all with some basis..
Piotr noted that the Hotel Lambert extended help to all kinds of Poles, even very radical ones: they all knew it was somewhere to which they could turn.
Oliver added that democrats knew that if they wanted support from the French government their only route to doing that was through him – and he was willing to help them.
Tomasz Hen-Konarski (Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences), Imagining Revolution in Habsburg Galicia: Michał Suchorowski’s 1832 Pastiche of La Muette de Portici in the Broader Context of Vormärz Politics
He wanted to develop a new approach to establishing how people imagined a word with many different possible meanings: revolution. According to Samuel Linde’s dictionary (Warsaw, 1807–1814) , it signified either a major change in government or a commotion of the nation. To learn more we can look at the writings of thinkers, or at popular culture. He thought that the latter had the advantage of bringing us closer to the masses. Second and third-rate authors are interesting because they show us what it was possible to imagine, even if the work in question had no influence.
Operas are an interesting source because at this time they were blockbusters. The genre of grand opera was established from 1828. These were often spectacular in presentation. Fragments from them were quickly translated into Polish. The opera which triggered the Belgian revolution was authored by Daniel Auber (music) and Germain Delavigne (libretto). The latter’s brother Casimir Delavigne was the author of La Varsovienne of 1831, one of the most popular Polish revolutionary songs.
The opera in question, La Muette de Portici, was set in the context of the popular rising in Naples in the 1640s. In the opera, the mute, Fenella, was seduced by the son of the viceroy. Her brother Masaniello, was shown as having been distressed when the revolution (in which he played a leading part) turned ugly. He was killed and Fenella killed herself. This was a very dramatic opera, with lots of bare bodies on display, which ended with a volcanic eruption. The authors depicted revolution as highly disruptive. The fact that the opera helped to spark the Belgian revolution shows that there can be a gap between authorial intention and reception.
He was interested in a much less well known play, Wanda Potocka, clearly inspired by La Muette, published in Lviv in 1832, but he thought never staged. The author was marginal and weird: a lawyer with a degree from Padua. He was both a Habsburg loyalist and a Slavophile. He invented his own orthography, and tried to avoid using words of foreign origin. He was also a convicted murderer: he killed someone in the street for money.
His play was set in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1769 before the first partition against the background of the Confederation of Bar. It also featured Ukrainian peasants, Haydamaki – colourful brigands, primitive rebels. Again, the revolution was presented as evil, but in this case, there was no tragic conflict. The Haidamaky were shown as having real grievances, but also as being ridiculous, defeated by a group of women mobilised by Wanda who was a daughter of an elite house, together with a commoner, Jagusia, a flirtatious milkmaid. It’s interesting that it was presented against the background of the Confederation of Bar. It can be read as a critique of Polish republican conspiracies.
Both the opera and the play show that it’s possible to hate both the conservative order and revolution. The politics of the play might ultimately be called liberal.
Discussion
Cody asked how this kind of narrative might have been understood in the Polish-language public sphere in Galicia.
Tomasz said that the play operated with an expansive conception of Polishness. Haidamaky were understood as Polish rebels.
Joanna suggested that the play was anti-politics, rather than liberal.
Tomasz argued that on the contrary, it was in effect pro-civic engagement. Women who stood up against the Haidamaky were favourably presented as a sort of prefiguration of 1848 National Guards, composed of respectable bourgeois. In his view, wanting change without wanting revolution was a liberal position.
Joanna said she was happy to abandon her account in favour of his, except that she still questioned whether this was enough to qualify something as liberal. She did however welcome the piece as highlighting the slippery nature of words and for the use of a range of sources that are not usually discussed.
François wondered if anyone had undertaken a study of political drama around 1830, citing as another work of interest the contemporaneous play (equally never staged) ‘Le Roi des Paysans’ by Jan Czyński.
Camille said that she was reading a chapter of a dissertation about opera at that time.
Tomasz said that unfortunately literary studies tended to focus on canonical works. He said that there had been more work on opera than on theatre.
Oliver said that Axel Körner was working on opera. Maciej referenced some existing studies.
Cody thought that opera was a fruitful topic. In Ljubljana, Figaro was translated into the vernacular, but it was censored and banned, and performed only in 1848.
The discussion was then opened up to comment on any or all papers.
Cody asked when popular became a positive word.
Adrian thought that the modern idea of popularity was distinct from usage in this period, and emerged only later.
He said to Oliver that Czartoryski’s family supported Koscuisko in the 1790s. Why would a conservative family have supported a democratic dictator figure?
Oliver said that Adam Czartoryski himself didn’t play a significant role at that time, as he was still too young. He had fought in the preceding war but was then sent to St. Petersburg (along with his younger brother) to secure the family estates. However, he was more democratic in his youth than he became later. Generally speaking, it is highly questionable to label the Czartoryski family – Adam Jerzy’s
Saturday (26 April)
CHANGING POLITICAL CULTURES
François Guesnet (University College London), Renegotiating Jewish Freedoms in the Kingdom of Poland
François explained that he and Adam Sutcliffe would jointly write a chapter on Jews in the next Re-imagining Democracy volume. Adam knew more about western Europe, regions where some Jews saw reason to aim at full and equal citizenship, and threw in their lot with the democrats. He knew more about Polish lands, places where Jews were present in the greatest numbers, and where they tended to focus rather on defending their traditional self-governing institutions.
By ‘Jewish freedoms’ in his title he meant freedoms in a traditional sense: privileges (Hebr. heruyot). A system of ideas about these provided the legal basis for Jewish diasporic existence over many centuries.
After the partitions, the Council of Four Lands was abolished. Tax reforms changed the position of Jews. The partitioning powers reviewed the place of Jews and Jewish communities, and attacked the role of the kahal, community board.
In 1851, Warsaw was emerging as one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, with some 50,000 registered Jewish households (until it was overtaken by New York, c1900
Before the partitions, power had been vested in a few influential men. Warsaw city authorities planned to change procedures for the election of the kahal. In 1830, a special arrangement was made for the city. There were about 100 Jewish congregations. Each identified three electors, who voted among candidates named on the day of election. Only those who were trustees of government-approved charities held passive electoral rights: that is, were eligible to be elected. Not by coincidence, all such people were members of the integrationist elite. Members of the wider community protested. They wanted the right to vote freely. They argued that laws on religious freedom should have guaranteed their freedom and dignity, their right under divine law.
Shifts in political culture are reflected in the fact that this case was made in a letter with signatures, implicitly making an argument from numbers rather than status. This challenge to the authorities demonstrated a degree of courage. The context was conservative, in the sense that they invoked traditional ideas – but with the object of defending democratic self-governance.
Mathias Rosen Rosen, Mathias – YIVO Encyclopedia provides an example of someone who sought integration. He was a banker. He was a member of the Polish-Jewish Brotherhood before participating in the 1863 rising. He was involved with the Reform synagogue. In 1830 he was already active as a member of the Polish national guard; he was involved in events in Warsaw 1861-2. He advocated moderate political reform. In 1862 he was part of a group preparing for the emancipation of the Jews.
He showed a picture Fijalkowski, Antoni Melchior, 3.1.1778 – 3.10.1861, Archbishop of Warsaw 1856 – 1861, death, funeral cortege, Warsaw, 10.10.1861, contemporaneous wood engraving Stock Photo – Alamy [though not this one] of the funeral procession of archbishop Fijałkowski Antoni Melchior Fijałkowski – Wikipediakowski. Jews took part in the procession, as contemporary accounts often noted.
Those involved with democrats who left the country included Lewis Lubliner, who participated in the 1830 rising. He wrote a book about Jews in Poland Des juifs en Pologne – Google Books. He called on the liberal movement not to forget about issues associated with Jews in Poland. But the book wasn’t published in Poland. He called on Jews to join the patriotic movement – but they mostly didn’t respond to his call either.
Jan Czyński Czyński, Jan – YIVO Encyclopedia is another example. He was descended from a prominent Frankist family: so raised as a Christian but with a Jewish background. His Le roi des paysans Le roi des paysans / par Jean Czynski et Madame Gatti de Gamond | Book | Jan Czynski 1801-1867 (Gatti de Gamond, Zoe Charlotte de Gamond ) | Gatti de Gamond, Zoe Charlotte de Gamond | The National Library of Israel is a fantasy about Jews allying with Poles: it runs to 300 pages, but is only volume one of a supposed play that was presumably never performed. In it, the king is good, the aristocracy clearly evil. Jews are armed to form an alliance with the king – an instance of the classic ‘royal alliance’, about which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote. It had some impact in that it was written up in a key newspaper; its plot was also stolen as the basis for an 1881 novel, The Peasant King.
Another candidate for a Jewish democrat that he’s found is Ludwig Kalisch who was active in Mainz and Halle and edited a satirical newspaper. He was denounced by Kathynka Zitz-Halein
The landscape in this period, before 1870, differs from that which developed later, when Zionists and Social Democrats competed for Jewish support.
Maciej Janowski (Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences), The Transfer of Political Practices from the Nobility to the Peasantry in the 18th and 19th Century Poland
He said that there were some parallels between François’ account of Jews and what he would have to say about the peasantry – on which he was by no means an expert. His recent work on the Carpathians (where he had long loved walking) had inspired his interest in peasants.
He had been particularly struck by the world revealed by rural court books, some of which have been published (he passed one around). The books were not kept by peasants, who were largely illiterate, but he thinks they must have had confidence in what was written in them, because they were a repository of information about all-important property rights.
A particularly fascinating feature of the books were the by-laws, enacted by the authority of the landlord. The by-laws reflect landlords’ desire that there should be order in villages. Harsh penalties were prescribed for those who breached laws. Many were concerned with practicalities, such as what kinds of fishing were allowed when. But some expressed a political ideology. Thus for example the rural laws of the Szeklers (Hungarian minority amidst largely Romanian Transylvanian peasant population). Living as they did in mountain borderlands they were, like many populations in such sensitive locales, granted special privileges in return for protecting the border, and against that background passed their own laws, the subject of a book by István Imreh, A törvényhozó székely falu, Bukarest 1983, Kriterion Könyvkiadó.
Inhabitants of normal peasant villages that were privately owned couldn’t appeal to the royal courts. They weren’t free, but they were not really slaves (as some historians claim). Roman law drew a sharp distinction between slavery and liberty; Germanic/Slavic law recognised a gradation. In the court books they were called subjects, and he think this was no random name. Fabrice Mouthon has written an ‘alternative political history’ of medieval peasant villages Les communautés rurales en Europe au Moyen Âge: Une autre histoire politique du Moyen Âge: PUR, Fabrice: 9782753529274: Amazon.com: Books which explores their institutions, practices and ideas in ways that can also be applied to more recent periods.
He wanted to stress things that struck him from the court books. The first was the importance of honour as a social category in the peasant world. In this regard, they were not so different from the petty nobility. Extended family ties were very important, and wrongs to relatives had to be avenged. The second was the extent to which authority was delegated, such that peasants were left to manage their own affairs. Rural officials were formally nominated by landlords, but in practice peasants were usually left to choose them: it was in the lord’s interest that the position should be held by someone whose authority was accepted. Similarly, landlords tended to leave the running of the rural court mainly to the peasants, accepting even verdicts in some very minor cases against the manor delivered in the court – given that it was in his interest that there should be a legal order. Laws were supposed to be passed unanimously. Thirdly, he was struck by the language used. So when the court convened, the official invoked God, the king and a whole chain of authority down to the level of his own. In addressing jurymen, he invoked the Holy Spirit, who was asked to guide their decisions. The village was described as a republic or commonwealth. Phrases were used such as ‘with our free voices’, libera voce, we choose so-and-so to hold office, because no republic can be well-governed without lawyers. Republic was taken to be the appropriate word for any political assembly. The term citizen was also used.
The court books relate to the early modern period. He wondered in conclusion if these practices and ways of talking survived into the nineteenth century, and influenced the later peasant movement?
He noted that most such books that have been found derive from southern Poland – which was also where the peasant movement started. Another context for that was that the Habsburgs allowed peasants more liberty. Possibly these practices survived for longer there – or it may just be that records from this region have been better preserved.
Discussion
Stephen asked François whether what he had been describing applied beyond Warsaw – that is, an attachment to traditional privileges prompting resort to more innovative forms of action. In the Russian empire, something similar happened with nobles. To Maciej, he noted that the Mouthon book didn’t focus on any specific region, and what Maciej had described didn’t sound to him all that different from the kind of thing one might find in a Russian serf village. He thought that peasants were often quite good at picking up on political languages around in their environment. He wondered if it was possible to distinguish between regions where such practices could and could not be found.
Cody said he had a question for both, which was about the missing link between self-government and democracy so-conceived.
Radek asked Maciej if peasants formulate laws – or just agree them? And how did new laws promulgated by the central institutions of the state affect the lives of the members of the village community and their legal culture?
François said that he thought Warsaw was special because of the size of the community, but not entirely unique. Rhetoric about lost privileges was certainly found elsewhere.
Maciej said he couldn’t answer the question about boundaries. It was a general problem that in order to get a good grasp on anything one had first to study everything else. He would suppose that these peasant liberties are perhaps stronger in the mountains than elsewhere – but he is not sure. As regards Radek’s question the only regione where the peasanst were formulating their by-law themselves was the Szekler region in Transylvania. It was, as far as he knows, not the case in Poland.
Camille had a comment arising from Cody’s question, on the general issue of whether and in what ways medieval and early modern practices of self-government survived into modern times. Her sense was that in the early modern period many of these practices disappeared, such that there was a gap before analogues were invented.
Joanna said that rather than positing traditions surviving or not we might want to look at consistent popular ingenuity in picking up on useful elements from the political culture of the day (which Stephen had already noted).
François said it was a pity that the indexes to the court books were proper name indexes only – such that it wasn’t possible to look up Jews, though on a quick flick through he saw several references to Jews. Given that it was hard to find information about peasant-Jewish interaction, they were potentially a very promising source. He had also been very interested to see in the book circulated a reference to Ugoda, i.e. legal arrangement, compromise, because it seemed that this was a key element in shaping Jewish-non-Jewish relations in the early modern period (see Guesnet, Ugody, in Jewish History 24 (2010), and H.Węgrzynek, Ugody, in Polin vol. 34 _2022).
Joanna said one chapter that they would have liked to include in the book, had they been able to find a suitable author, would have been one on self-government. Discussion at this session reinforced her view that it would have been a good topic to cover (though it may be possible to say something about peasant self-government in the ‘rural society’ chapter).
Mark said he thought that it would be worth thinking about how the state intervened in these apparently self-contained worlds, eg to levy soldiers or raise taxes. Interventions of those kinds might have a part to play in a story of transition.
François said that the military recruitment of Jews was another important topic. Nicholas I introduced a system of general recruitment – but it didn’t apply to Polish lands until 1874.
DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATION IN AN URBAN CONTEXT
Kamil Śmiechowski (University of Łódź) How Did Democracy Reach Urban Discourse in Poland?
He said that after 1863, municipalities in Russian Poland were governed directly from the centre. In 1870, self government was introduced in Russia, but not in the kingdom of Poland. During the 1905 revolution, political autonomy and local self-government were both goals. But Galicia was different. In 1867, the province gained a measure of autonomy and self-government.
The Polish word samorzad means self-government or self-administration. Before the nineteenth-century, samorzad had meant autocracy: government by an individual. wasn’t obvious to him how the concepts of autonomy (autonomia) and self-government/self-administration were thought to relate – either in the kingdom of Poland or in German-speaking areas. Lawyers, some of them educated in Germany, distinguished the two Thus Aleksander Rembowski (1847-1906) a pioneer of administrative law – who didn’t write about autonomy but did write about self-government in relation to local interests – seeing it as a natural entailment from the nature of the community. Lorenz von Stein (who had studied administrative law in Germany) made the distinction. Poles came to associate samorzad especially with municipal administration. A conservative newspaper which in 1905 asked What is self-government? cited von Stein.
Self-government was understood to be a very English concept. The fact that the Polish word they used had a very different heritage was not usually emphasised. It corresponded more closely to the German Selbstverwaltung. Verwaltung means administration, not precisely government. Samorzad was in wide use from c1870. Lawyer Feliks Ochimowski proposed to use the another word – samozarząd, which was more precise translation of Selbsverwaltung than samorząd. However, after 40 years of usage in Galicja samorząd was grounded in Polish so much that samozarząd never became widely used.
In this context, he finds democracy invoked chiefly from 1905, to criticise the existing system of samorzad – especially its curial base: the distinction of voters and their representatives by class or nationality (separating out the Jews was a particular concern). Critics said that the system should rest on a democratic basis, like four-point election law
Kseniya Tserashkova (Vilnius University), Urban commoners (meshchanie) self-government in the Russian Empire and its features in the Belarusian-Lithuanian provinces
[Polish mieszczanin (“burgher, townsman”) derives from miasto (“town”). It was borrowed into Russian to designate an estate made up of the urban lower middle class or petty bourgeois – people who were not nobles, civil servants or merchants. For an introduction to the Russian social estate system, Social estates in the Russian Empire – Wikipedia]
She was focussing on the Belarusian-Lithuanian provinces of former Poland-Lithuania which were governed as part of the Russian empire..
In the 1830s, the meshchanie, urban commoners, were designated a social estate. They fell within a larger estate of urban dwellers, gorodskiye obyvateli, which also included (merchants kuptsy and guild craftspeople remeslenniki. Unlike these others, membership in their group was inherited and did not depend on the fulfillment of certain conditions
According to data from 1858, there were 662,723 meshchane in these provinces, amounting to 12.3% of the total population. They increased more rapidly than the population as a whole.
In any given town, they formed a corporation, which was collectively responsible for their tax payments. Some nobles were recategorized as meshchanie. Members of this estate were miscellaneous. One could enrol in the estate, or be assigned to it by the fiscal chamber.
It was possible to form separate corporations for Christians and Jews. Jewish societies also possessed Kahals, who played a key role in their functioning and made them effectively distinct.
There was a headman, a starosta, who had to compile lists and issue certificates. in the cities of the Vilno, Grodno, Kovno and Minsk provinces. meshchanie deputies had the power to issue public decrees
The city regulation of 1875 established local self-government the meshchanie gained organs of self government: meshchanskaya uprava , which were collegial. Also, at their assembly, sobraniye, meshchane assigned to the city who had the right to vote, discussed current community affairs, approved community budgets and other proposals, and elected officials to manage the community, subject to the overarching control of state administrative bodies: provincial boards and the governor himself. The headman, their assistants and hired employees of the administration received a salary established by the meshchane corporation of each city.
The right to vote was given to men who had reached the age of 25 and had capital that brought in at least 15 rubles of annual income – though in smaller towns this requirement might be lowered or even abandoned.
The system was further modified in 1892.
At this level, many practical matters were dealt with, such as the issuing of passports, distribution of taxes and dutiesOne of the most important tasks was to provide assistance to the needy − issuing various allowances for treatment, education, raising children, one-time payments to the poor, etc. Often, meshchane turned to the board to resolve conflicts, property disputes and even disputes arising in connection with inheritance. The competence of these bodies extended to the establishment of guardianship over the property of minor children, and oversight of community members leading an “anti-social lifestyle”. If the repeatedly violated public order, they could be excluded from the corporation.
These institutions are better understood as part of the bureaucracy than as civic bodies.
Discussion
Stephen asked Kseniya if there were significant differences between the system in the western provinces and that which operated elsewhere in Russia. Did they talk about self-government and if so how did they conceptualise it? How can we get at the mentalities of people who didn’t put their thoughts on paper?
François thought that the papers raised interesting new questions about local self-government and how that was conceptualised in relation to autocracy and democracy. To Kamil, he noted that he hadn’t mentioned the municipal councils established in 1862 in the kingdom of Poland (aborted in 1863). He thought they represented an interesting innovation. Jews were among those who stood as candidates for them. To Kseniya, he noted that Jews pushed into new official structures might resist and instead establish informal structures of self-government. Possibly there were differences between places where there were and weren’t traditions of Jewish self-government.
Kamil noted that the 1862 municipal councils were established in only a few cities.
Kseniya said to Stephen that the main documents include administrative, reporting documentation and business correspondence. They don’t illuminate how self-government was understood. But from appeals to the courts, when people did not agree with the decisions of the self-government bodies, it is clear that they fostered initiative and promoted activity. Marcin said that he thought traditional Polish sejmiki, dietines, survived until the 1830s, and wondered if older institutions also persisted in a municipal context.
Cody said that in Galicia there were two systems. In cities, officials were appointed. By contrast, in townships and villages, there was self-government. He wondered, given this clear distinction, how the vocabulary that Kamil had been exploring was applied? From what Kseniya said, he had the impression that there was also uniformity of structure across different size entities in the western provinces. Also, he wondered if the institutions, even if they were intended to perform tasks for government, were ever in practice responsive to impulses from below.
Joanna noted – as possibly of interest, given the way that English practice was often taken by contemporaries to be exemplary in this context – that the term ‘self-government’ was used in relation to community self-management in England only from the 1830s. Before then, it meant government of the self, self-discipline [except that it was used in a political sense of large entities such as Ireland, the Canadas. In relation to community institutions, people either talked in very general terms of ‘inferior parts of government’ or used specific names such as county magistrates, corporation, parish]. The phrase was born in contention – because it was used first in relation to innovations in local institutions, which were contested by people who wanted to defend older institutions, such as parishes, as representing true self-government. [The Prussian Gneist celebrated older English arrangements and joined with critics of the new] Only from about the 1860s and 70s did there come to be convergence around the view that England had an age-old and enduring tradition of self-government, the whole of which was worthy of celebration. John Stuart Mill then theorised a new understanding of what its modern form consisted in and why it should be valued in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), and that was widely read and cited beyond England. She did not think that the term ‘democracy’ was commonly applied in relation to local institutions – though possibly it was at the end of the nineteenth century.
Kamil said to Cody that Lviv was the largest single city governed by Poles, and made a good point of reference. In the kingdom of Poland, there were rural councillors in villages from the 1860s, but not in the cities. [In 1870s there was a huge dispute about differences between autonomy and self-government. Finally, it became clear that autonomy refers to region (with own parliament, but appointed governor), while self-government refers to rural and urban communities, with elected councillors and mayors.To Joanna he said that the transfer of knowledge was always fraught. John Stuart Mill especially influenced so-called Polish positivists.
Kseniya said that local self-government by meshchanie was underresearched. Her work focussed on later nineteenth-century cities. She didn’t know about small towns. On the question of impulses from below, she said that this might have affected the distribution of social support, for which capacity was quite limited. Also she thought that moves to exclude the anti-social were driven from below.
Radek wondered if and how the early modern notion of ‘police’, in the sense of administration, was applied in any of these contexts. It’s sometimes said that it meant something less than law, more ad hoc. Or: whether the early theorists of administrative law expressed ideas as to their subject matter which we could consider analogous (i.e. something handily less than civil or criminal law)
Kamil thought that was an interesting question, but couldn’t answer it.
STATES AND NATIONS
Gennadii Korolov (Mieroszewski Centre), Federalism and the Shadow of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Ukrainian Intellectuals on Imperial Transformation and Democratic Ideals (1831–1918).
He would distinguish three phases of Ukrainian thinking about federalism.
In the early nineteenth century, federalism was seen as an alternative to (especially Russian) imperial structures. It was associated with the desire for civic participation, and decentralisation.
In the later nineteenth century and especially after 1863, it was associated with the desire to give a political form to the Ukrainian nation, and was directed against both Russia and Poland. Intellectuals drew on ideas of historical continuity, with Kyivan Rus. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was understood as having been oppressive, and to have dismantled federal structures eg Cossack self-government. Federalism was treated as a device for converting the Russian empire into a constitutional state.
Ideas about how federalism took three different forms in Ukrainian thought in the long nineteenth century Transformative federalism – a federalism that might transform the existing system of states, inspired by the examples of the US and Switzerland; National federalism: in which Ukraine might be envisioned as a state that would frame a united and autonomous nation; and Defensive geopolitical federalism – a third notion was that there might be a federation of Slavic peoples led by Ukraine, in the context of a general recognition of the sovereignty and autonomy by all component states.
In the 1880s, there was a wider vision of a possible Eurasian federation among Ukrainian intellectuals. In the late 19th century Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko supported a federative union between Russia and Ukraine on the grounds that only Russia could safeguard Ukraine’s independence . The object was to reinforce and defend national sovereignty. One vision of how this might be done was by a Black Sea Federation which would unite states between the Baltic and Black Seas.
Debate on federalism was not systematic. No clear distinction was drawn between term “federation” and “confederation”. Generally such arrangements were seen as democratic, enabling participation and as a means to improve government.
To sum up, federalism was more often deployed rhetorically, as the name for a possible, different future, than to frame well-thought through blueprints for a new order.
Marcin Jarząbek (Jagiellonian University in Cracow), Democratic and Independent Poland: How the Concept of State Independence aligned with Democratic Ideals in the Second Half of the 19th Century.
He was doing to talk about another play, Democrats and Aristocrats, in 5 Acts, set against the background of a meeting to elect a deputy, and revolving around the tension between a young good character (a ‘democrat’) and a bad old prince and his wife (‘aristocrats’). The play was published in Poznan in 1858. The words democracy and aristocracy appeared only rarely in it. Aristocrats (shown unfavourably) were distinguished from democrats not by social location, but by virtue; in fact all democrats in the play were nobles.. The issue of independence was implied.
The author was Stefan Buszczyński, 1821-92f. It was premiered in 1870 and republished 2 years later under the title The Mitre and the Cross. Buszczyński was an ‘old democrat’, activist of the Polish Democratic society and participant of the uprising of 1863 who, at the same time, criticised both the Krakow Historical School and more radical fractions.
The point of the example was to show how context- and time-related was the notion of democracy in the Polish 19th c. political milieu.
At the beginning (1830s-1850s) democrat could mean a revolutionary, or proponent of some form of political radicalism, socialism or communism. Later until mid-1880s it still was a broad category, especially before the formation of parties in the early 1890s. It might be linked specifically to the insurgent tradition, or with enduring human values, such as solidarity and equality – it might be seen as an ethical tradition, rather than implying a theory about institutions. It was associated with the people, and it wasn’t clear where that left the nobility. Nevertheless, is was obvious that democratic ideals included an idea of the independent Poland. For democrats, state independence comes with democracy (or vice versa – that was not always clear): often through mass mobilisation of the people/peasants (fighting) for the independence. Past/future Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian Commonwealth was for the ideal of a democratic state, though with loosely outlined/no borders. Since democracy as understood predominantly an ethical principle, democrats presupposed that an interest of an individual and community will become congruent and democratic spirit of Poles will lead to democratic Poland. As long as someone underlined social solidarity and equality of the people and did not reject the idea of Polish independence, one could be called (him/herself) a democrat. For a long while many different concepts functioned under the label ‘democratic’, even if eventually they parted ways.
Examples of the might be three key figures of Polish democrats from the 2nd half of the 19th c.: Zygmunt Milkowski[1824-1915] (Wikipedia)and Bolesław Limanowski (1835-1935)- Wikipedia. Both admired the legacy of the Polish Democratic Society (not necessarily Mierosławski himself). Limanowski though that democrats would become socialists (if they take seriously the idea of equality), Milkowski thought that democracy must rest on a federal basis and the legacy of the Commonwealth, Limanowski claimed that socialism and independence must come together.
Finally Aleksander Swietochowski Aleksander Świętochowski – Wikipedia who was a key figure of Warsaw positivism[In 1905, he founded the Progressive-Democratic Party] was also in a way supportive of democracy, seeing democratisation as an inevitable process. He said that democracy must triumph everywhere. Unlike Miłkowski and Limanowski, however, Świętochowski argue that for a while external self-reliance [samoistność zewnętrzna] should give way to efforts for internal self-dependence [samodzielność wewnętrzna] – meaning positivistic oranisation and modernisation of the society.
Those contradictions were spotted by Ludwik Krzywicki Ludwik Krzywicki – Wikipedia who said already in the 1880s that the Polish democratic milieu included ideas contradictory to themselves, which he said reflected Poland’s social immaturity. Therefore, in the twentieth century both Polish socialists and nationalists (national democrats) could claim to have roots in democratic traditions.
As a post script: Limanowski lived to serve as a socialist deputy in the Senate in the 1920s where he – symbolically as an old democrat – defended basic democratic principles against the authoritarian state .
Cody Inglis (Central European University), Their Freedom and Ours: Hungarian Views on the Polish Revolt of 1863
He explained that his title played with a slogan from the January uprising: Our freedom and yours
He cited some sources which shed light on Hungarian attitudes to the rising. A satirical text included a joke about a journalist who disparages everything, but has now emerged as a patriot A poem listed all the nations doing nothing, each stanza ending And Poland’s blood flows.
There was some evident Polonophilia, but also a tactical anxiety not to upset other neighbours. The reading public was quite small. Sympathisers were perhaps upper class romantic nationalists. Eg Julius Magaraevits (1844-1865) a law studentThere are some views from lower down: one student went off to fight, and was seriously wounded. Some miners wanted to go and support, but were stopped by police.
It’s easiest to trace the reactions of the liberal gentry (for example Zsigmond Kemény (1814-1875) (wikipedia). Key words in their utterances were revolution/uprising (or alternatively revolt/chaos – terms also used with reference to France); independence and freedom. He had found no mention of democracy.
Kossuth in his Historical Studies of 1880 looked back on the Polish rising of 1863. He talked about it primarily in terms of independence and national freedom. He mentioned the Polish Democratic Society, but didn’t talk about democracy.
He supplied two epilogues. Polish refugees passed through Hungary heading for Paris. Their passage is documented in police records. They were tolerated.
Wacław Przybylski (1828 – 1872)was a Polish refugee who found his way to Hungary in 1864.
A Croatian, Eugen Kvaternik Eugen Kvaternik – Wikipedia who moved in Italian-Polish émigré circles in the 1860s thought that the Poles provided a possible model for Croatians, but that didn’t go anywhere. He tried to instigate a Croatian revolution in 1871, but was shot and killed.
In conclusion he noted that there were people who didn’t contest Magyarisation but did favour Polish independence. But they didn’t talk about democracy. Hungarians were generally more interested in themes of national liberation and freedom. Some, including Kossuth, were interested in the idea of a Danubian federation. Democracy didn’t become a keyword in such discourses until after the 1860s.
Discussion
Joanna said she would like to ask Cody an unfair question (because beyond the scope of his paper): could he say anything about the view from Romania?
François thanked Gennadi for his typology of federalisms. He wondered what place was given to Jews in federalist thinking?
Mark said to Marcin that he noticed from the slides that some of the people he had discussed talked about social equality as a precondition for independence. He wondered how widespread that was.
Cody said to Joanna that the Romanian public sphere was very fragmented. It was more developed in Transylvania (then still part of Hungary) than elsewhere. He thought one might find more talk about democracy there.
Oliver said that there was a book on Polish-Romanian cooperation during the 19th century – Krzysztof Dach. Polsko-rumuńska współpraca polityczna w latach 1831-1852. Warszawa, 1981. Gennadi said to François that the question of whether autonomy needed to be territorial was interesting. After the Russian revolution the Ukrainian Khruschevsky championed national personal autonomy, that is, individuals could band together with others of their nationality even if not territorially concentrated – and thought that the principle could extend to ethnic or religious groups, including Mennonites. It was however more common in the twentieth century to think that the affiliation of districts should be determined by the identity of the majority group.
Marcin said that positivists were more interested in social preconditions. Their sense was that society had also gone a long way towards equality, but a bit more progress in that direction was still needed.
Piotr said to Marcin that one possible line of descent was national democrat -> right wing. They liked vernacular keywords. One of their ideas was that if a parliament turned out unable to communicate effectively with the nation, the national will should prevail.
Maciej thought that the question of who inherited the Polish Democratic tradition was important and underexplored. He thought that a key feature of that tradition was that it was oriented to the west and valued modernity. To Cody, he said he thought Hungarian sympathy for Poles might be less sentiment than Realpolitik (what weakens Russia is good for us). But also they could see the Poles as living through what they lived in 1848.
Marcin said he hadn’t meant to imply that socialists were the tradition’s only heirs. Limanowski, who represented the socialist strand, was just long-lived, but didn’t represent a punch line.
Cody agreed that Kossuth and others could be seen as trying to keep alive a romantic idea.
Joanna asked Gennadi what reference points his Ukrainian federalists used.
Gennadii said that they sometimes invoked Proudhon and Bakunin: the tradition of anarcho-federalism. They also sometimes cited ethno-national writers, such as German legal scholar Georg Jellinek In the 1920s, Hruchevskyi backed the idea of a united states of Ukraine. Paderewski floated the idea of a united states of Poland in 1917 United States of Poland – Wikipedia
FINAL THOUGHTS
Mark said that what had struck him about this workshop as compared to earlier workshops in this phase is that on this occasion people were more inclined to talk about theorists – and about local theorists. Not so much about Constant, Tocqueville or the Doctrinaires. He thought that this was the case because speakers wanted to reflect on national traditions, but he also noted that the focus had been less on ideas about movements than on movements and what they did.
Joanna said it had been a good workshop, and the scale and range of discussion had been an especially good feature. It had been useful to hear Piotr outline some of his thoughts about his chapter; also to hear from François, and to see in his case how a ‘corporatist’ theme which was likely to run through the volume provided a helpful framing for his work. Among topics of transnational interest the workshop had highlighted, one was ‘local government’, on which we’d heard useful contributions.
Maciej commented on the challenge of writing intellectual history of eastern Europe. There were no Aristotle/Machiavelli equivalents, in power or influence, and it was a mistake to look for them. So how could one approach intellectual history in that context? He thought there were worthwhile things to be said about the reception of ideas. In certain sense, sometimes the ideas ath the receiver’s end can be as interesting for the historian as the ideas in the place of their origin, The transformation of ideas by their recipients tells us something about these ideas as such not just about the process of reception. In relation to Limanowski, he noted that he had written a history of Polish democracy (first published in 1901, last re-edition: Bolesław LIMANOWSKI, Historia demokracji polskiej w epoce porozbiorowej, Warsaw 1983, PWN, 930 pp), and was therefore in certain sense our predecessor.
Piotr said that he liked the idea of a localized history of ideas. He thought that perhaps more should have been said about empire – which had provided the organising framework for another workshop, that Joanna had also attended, in January. Empire as a political structure was perceived in Polish political tradition as non-democratic, a view that became particularly prominent during World War II, when various politicians (including those from the left) accused the Western ‘big’ democracies of betrayal.
François thought that the diversity of contexts complicated thinking about equality, representation and participation. In that context, thinking about concepts that bridged different worlds (such as ugoda, on which he’d commented earlier) was important. It would also be important to look more at those who fight against democracy to get a fuller sense of how it was understood and contested.
Camille welcomed the broadening of the canvas of intellectual history.
Stephen said that perhaps the moment of East European thinkers had not arrived yet. Understandings of the history of the modern world had been built around nation states, but that might not last.
PARTICIPANT BIOS
Bartłomiej Błesznowski Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw, He is is Assistant Professor of Sociology and the author of several articles and books about the intellectual history of Polish cooperativism, including Cooperativism and Democracy. Selected Works of Polish Thinkers.
Camille Creyghton is assistant professor of Political History at Utrecht University. She researches and publishes within the domains of intellectual history, history of political culture and cultural history from the end of the 18th until the first half of the 20th century. Currently, she is working on a research project on the transfer of ideas among political exiles from various national backgrounds in Paris, Brussels and London in the period 1830-1848. Before coming to Utrecht University, she did a PhD in French cultural and political history at the University of Amsterdam and was a postdoc at the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought of Queen Mary, University of London. She studied history and philosophy at the University of Leuven and the EHESS (Paris) and stayed for short research periods at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) and the Leibniz Institute of European History (Mainz).
François Guesnet is Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London. He holds a PhD in Modern History from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau, and specializes in the early modern and 19th century history of Eastern European, and more specifically, Polish Jews. He is co-chair of the editorial board of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, chairman of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies (IPJS) and serves on the Executive Committee of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS). He held research fellowships and visiting teaching positions at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, Leipzig University, the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Potsdam University, the University of Oxford, and at Dartmouth College, and had short-term teaching engagements at the Jagiellonian University and Vilnius University.
His book publications include Polnische Juden im 19. Jahrhundert: Lebensbedingungen, Rechtsnormen und Organisation im Wandel (1998), Der Fremde als Nachbar. Polnische Positionen zur jüdischen Präsenz in Polen. Texte seit 1800 (2009), and, with Gwenyth Jones, Antisemitism in an Era of Transition: The Case of Post-Communist Eastern Central Europe (2014). Together with Glenn Dynner he published Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis. Studies in Honor of the 70th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky (2015, paperback 2017) and the volume Negotiating Religion. Cross-disciplinary perspectives, co-edited with Cécile Laborde and Lois Lee (2017). He contributed numerous articles to the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe and chapters to the Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. VII (2018) and to vol. 3 of Polen in der europäischen Geschichte. He co-edited vols. 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, and 37 of Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry. Most recently, he co-edited vol. 34 on Jewish Self-Government in Eastern Europe (with Antony Polonsky, Liverpool UP 2022) and the collected volume Sources on Jewish Self-Government in the Polish Lands from its Inception to the Present (with Jerzy Tomaszewski, Brill Academic Publishers 2022).
Tomasz Hen-Konarski is a full-time researcher at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (IH PAN). He holds an MA degree from the University of Warsaw and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (2017). Apart from Florence and Warsaw, he either studied or taught in Bielefeld, Budapest, London, Lviv, and Vienna. His research interests include: Polish and Ukrainian nation building in Galicia, Catholic Enlightenment, Romantic politics, and the Greek Catholic Church as a political institution of the Austrian Monarchy.
Cody James Inglis is a Doctoral Candidate in Comparative History at Central European University (Vienna) and Research Affiliate at the CEU Democracy Institute (Budapest). He works on different themes and problems in the intellectual history of modern Central and Southeastern Europe, particularly in the Habsburg Empire and its successor states. His dissertation is entitled “Between Freedom and Constraint: The Republican Left in Hungary and Yugoslavia, 1917–1948,” and is a study of the republicanism(s) articulated by the Hungarian and South Slavic Lefts between the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the establishment of state socialist regimes in Central and Southeastern Europe after the Second World War.
Joanna Innes retired from her posts as Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford and Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford in 2018. She has worked extensively on English social policy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in British and European context and more broadly on British political culture; some of her work on these themes was collected in Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Britain 1688-1800 (2009). As an example of her broader work on British political culture, see ed. with Arthur Burns, Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780-1850 (2003). She has co-organised the Re-imagining Democracy project with Mark Philp since 2004.
Maciej Janowski – Director of the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Head of the Department of the History of Ideas and the History of the Intelligentsia in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Marcin Jarząbek is an assistant professor at the Department of Historical Anthropology and History Theory at the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University, Krakow and a member of the research group working on the history of Polish socio-political concepts 18th-20th c. at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (on eg concepts of ‘heritage’, ‘language’, ‘work’ and ‘property’). I hold a PhD in history from the Jagiellonian University and MA in Central European History from the Central European University in Budapest. My research focuses also on oral history, the collective memory of the First World War veterans and the social history of the railway. I authored the book “Legioniści i inni. Pamięć zbiorowa weteranów I wojny światowej w Polsce i Czechosłowacji okresu międzywojennego” [The Legionnaries and the Others. The collective memory of the First World Veterans in interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia] (2017) and A Handbook for Oral History (2024).
Gennadii Korolov – PhD with habilitation, associate professor, senior research fellow at the Mieroszewski Center for Dialogue (Warsaw), and associate at the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv. His research focuses on the history of the federalist idea in East Central Europe, the history of the First World War and the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921, and the history of Polish-Ukrainian relations
Piotr Kuligowski is the leader of a project financed by the National Science Centre, Poland, and is employed at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. In 2019, he defended his PhD thesis in history at the Faculty of History, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. He has been a visiting fellow at various academic institutions in Belgium, Finland, France, and Germany. He is the author of books and research articles in English, French, and Polish.
Stephen Lovell is Professor of Modern History at King’s College London. His main publications include Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 (2003), Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919-1970 (2015) and How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860-1930 (2020). His research interests have tended to centre on the history of communications but are now moving towards the history of political representation in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. He is currently working on a history of voting from Catherine the Great to Putin.
Mark Philp is Professor of History and Politics at the University of Warwick, and an Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He has worked extensively in the field of political corruption and realist political theory as well as in the history of political thought, and late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century European history. His books include Political Conduct (2007), Reforming Political Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the shadow of the French Revolution (2013); and Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London 1789-1815 (2020), and editions of J. S. Mill’s essays and his Autobiography. He was the originator, with Joanna Innes, of the Re-imagining Democracy project.
Kamil Śmiechowski, born 1985, historian, Phd in history of Poland, associate professor in the Institute of history, university of Łódź. his research interests are focused on urban theory, analyses of press discourse, processes of modernization in the 19th- and 20th-cen-tury Poland, and history of Łódź. recently, he has concluded a post-doc research project on urban discourse in the Kingdom of Poland at the turn of the 20th century, supported by the national science center in Poland.
Radoslaw Szymanski is a research assistant at the Centre for French Culture and Francophone Studies at the University of Warsaw. His research interests include the political and moral thought of the Enlightenment, as well as its XIXth and XXth century legacies; federalism; history of international law, of the law of nations and of natural jurisprudence. He holds a PhD in history at the University of Lausanne, where he defended a dissertation on the pedagogy and political science of Elie Bertrand, a Swiss political reformer of the Polish-Lithuanian state in the age of Enlightenment. Before coming to Warsaw, he worked on a research project on Enlightenment Agrarian Republics carried out at the University of Lausanne. He studied at the University of St Andrews, Ecole Normale Superieure, EHESS Paris and the College of Europe. He had previously published on Bertrand, Physiocracy and Emer de Vattel.
Kseniya Tserashkova defended the doctoral dissertation “The meshchanie in the context of social and economic development of Belarus (1861-1914)” at the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (2016). She is the author of research publications, including the individual monograph “The meshchanie in the context of social and economic development of Belarusian-Lithuanian provinces (1861-1914)” (Minsk, 2018) and co-author of a collective monograph “Social economic development of Belarus (late 18th – early 20th century)” (Minsk, 2020).Dr. Tserashkova underwent internship programmes at the Research Center for Memory Cultures at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, 2023-2024) and the Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow, 2024). Since 2024 Kseniya Tserashkova has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of History of Vilnius University. The project “Pauperization of Europe’s population in the late 18th – early 20th century: Reasons, process and impact to societies” has received funding from the Economic Recovery and Resilience Plan “New Generation Lithuania” under grant agreement No. 10-036-T-0006.
Adrian Wesołowski is a cultural historian and Research Adjunct at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. His research centres on European modernity, historical comparisons, and historical methodology. His recent book, “Philanthropic Celebrity in the Age of Sensibility: A Historical-Comparative Study of the British, French, and Polish Examples, c. 1770-1830”, offers insight into the origins of the European perception of philanthropists as public figures. Currently, he is exploring the cultural history of the public sphere in post-partition Poland, with particular attention given to the topics of fame, visibility, and civic identity.
Dorota Wiśniewska: I am an assistant professor at the Institute of History, University of Wrocław, Poland. My teaching and research focus on the European Enlightenment, especially women’s history from a comparative perspective, history education, and public history. My research has been published by Routledge (*Public in Public History* and *History in Public Space*, co-edited with Joanna Wojdon), *Gender & History*, *Revue historique*, and *Historical Encounters* (co-authored with Joanna Wojdon). Currently, I am writing a book on elite women in the political life of England, France, and Poland-Lithuania between 1750 and 1830.
Aytac Yurukcu. I am currently a PhD. Candidate/Researcher at the University of Eastern Finalnd. I focused on War Correspondence, Diaries and Reminiscences at the end of the 19th Century. Also my research area includes intellectual history, the history of ideas, cultural history, the culture of remembrance, and the protection of cultural heritage.
Oliver Zajac, PhD, is a researcher at the Institute of History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. His work focuses on the political and social history of the 19th century, with a particular interest in the Polish Great Emigration and its various attributes. His first monograph, Hôtel Lambert and the Austrian Empire, 1831–1846, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2024. He has undertaken research stays at leading universities and academic institutions in France, Germany, Austria, Poland, and Slovenia, and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw from 2021 to 2022.
Re-imagining Democracy 