CHAPTER XII - THE PARTITIONS OF POLAND

Summary

Voyez ce qu'ont fait les encyclopédistes; de francs ignorants les rois sont devenus des menteurs moraux. On partage savamment les royaumes, comme autrefois on divisait les sermons, et Ton massacre le peuple avec autant de sang-froid qu'on les ennuyait. Voila un siécle de lumiéres!

HORACE WALPOLE to Madame du Deffand, 13 April 1773

No sooner were the partitions of Poland accomplished than political thinkers and historians began to investigate the circumstances that had brought them about. The accounts and aspersions of eye-witnesses and contemporaries were followed in the next generation by rueful tales of misgovernment and, after the failure of the uprising of 1830–1, the whole question of national existence was sublimated and poeticised. The messianic hopes of the romantic poets were dashed by a series of setbacks beginning with the Galician massacre of 1846 and ending with the disastrous uprising of 1863. Thereafter, as Romanticism finally ceased to be the stuff of poetry, history became the object of serious academic study. Already in 1862 a chair of Polish history had been established in Warsaw, the universities of Cracow and of Lvov followed suit in 1869 and 1882. In 1880 Szujski, who occupied the chair at Cracow, expressed the opinion that if a nation failed to maintain law and order within its frontiers and to defend itself from external aggression, it was bound to become incapable of further evolution and to lose its independence. Poland's downfall had been caused by the Poles' own guilt of several centuries' standing. Szujski was apparently influenced by Darwin, though by no means exclusively so, since this thesis—a theological rather than a zoological concept—had first been adumbrated by the precursor of the 'Cracow school', Kalinka. Having set out to estimate the moral worth of Poland in the reign of its last king, Kalinka reached the conclusion (in 1868) that it was the Poles themselves who caused their country's downfall and that the misfortunes that had since afflicted them were a well-deserved penance