NAPOLEONIC WARS - GRAND DUCHY OF WARSAW 1807

    Napoleon Buonaparte's meteoric rise in European politics caught the attention of Poles who saw it as a chance for regaining independence. The Polish Legion under General Dabrowski fought with Napoleon in his earliest campaigns. The charge of Polish cavalry played pivotal role in the victorious battle of Somosierra during Napoleon's Spanish campaign. It was during this exciting time that the words of the future Polish national anthem, the 'Mazurek Dabrowskiego' (Dabrowski Mazurka), were written. Originally a marching song, the anthem includes the line "Buonaparte has given us an example how to fight and win."

    Napoleon failed to appreciate the extent of the sacrifices made by the Poles on his behalf. After the defeat of Prussia in 1807, he created a small Grand Duchy of Warsaw from the areas around Poznan and Warsaw, formerly under Prussian partition. In 1809, when the Austrians, in their ongoing war with Napoleon, attacked the Grand Duchy, the tenacious Polish defense at the Battle of Raszyn convinced them to allow the tiny Polish army south-east passage, in exchange for the surrender of Warsaw. This brilliant maneuver allowed Polish army to overrun Austrian-occupied Poland while the Austrian army was tied up garrisoning Warsaw. After Napoleon won his campaign against the Austrians, the north-western part of the Austrian partition was incorporated into the Grand Duchy. This attempt to revive the Polish state, however, was ultimately doomed with the defeat of Buonaparte.

NOVEMBER UPRISING - 1830

    In 1815, diplomats from all over Europe gathered in Vienna at a famous Congress to decide what to do with the ruins of Napoleon's Empire. "The Polish Question" dominated discussions at the Congress. The Tsar wanted all of the historic Kingdom of Poland to be brought under his rule, but this was unacceptable to Prussia, Austria, and especially Britain. The final compromise established the divisions of partition which were to last (with some minor changes) until the regaining of Polish independence. The area around Poznan was returned to Prussia. The rest of the former Grand Duchy of Warsaw, called "the Congress Kingdom" or "the Kingdom of Poland", was given to the Russian Tsar. Austria retained the lands which it had seized in the First Partition, while Krakow was made into a "free city".

    In the beginning, the Congress Kingdom enjoyed limited autonomy under tsar Alexander I rule. It was granted a constitution, which allowed for separate army and self-government. For a while, there was hope that the tsar would allow some form of association with the Congress Kingdom of the Polish lands beyond the Bug (the river which marked Poland's eastern frontier). This hope died, however, when Tsar Nicholas I, the "gendarme of Europe," acceeded the throne. Russian rule became increasingly heavy-handed and on November 29, 1830, an uprising erupted, sparked by the Polish cadets. The uprising engulfed the Congress Kingdom and its finely trained army came over, almost in its entirety, to the rebels. In spite of a promising start, however, delaying the abolition of serfdom and serious mishandling of the military operations bungled the opportunity. The victorious Russians then began a campaign of bloody retribution, launching a period of vicious Russification that devastated Polish life in the Russian part of Poland.

JANUARY UPRISING - 1863

    In the aftermath of the November Uprising, Polish insurrectionists, which included among its members some of the most illustrious Poles, emigrated by the thousand to escape tsarist repression. As Poland groaned under the weight of Partitions, the construction of a new kind of Polish nationalism got underway. Leading exponents of this tendency were politician prince Adam Czartoryski, composer Frederick Chopin, the great Romantic poets Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki, and philosopher Cyprian K. Norwid.

    In 1846, this nationalism sparked a general uprising. Patriots seized control of the "Free City of Krakow" and advanced southward into the countryside. To their horror, the local Polish peasantry turned against them. To those who still clung to the ideals of the aristocracy, the massacre of the patriots sounded a clarion call that the old order was dead. After the uprising, Krakow was incorporated into the Austrian Partition of Galicia.

    Polish participation in the Revolutions of 1848 was muted, as it followed too closely in the wake of the ill-fated 1846 uprising. The Hungarian Uprising, in which Jozef Bem served as a general, was brutally crushed when Tsar Nicholas I sent 200,000 troops into Hungary to support the Austrian Empire.

    The January Uprising of 1863, launched against the Tsarist Imperial Russia was probably the most desperate. It began as a spontaneous protest of young Poles against the draft to tsarist army. As there was no regular Polish army of any sort, the group of hot headed young people was soon joined by various politicians and high ranking Polish officers from the tsarist army. The insurrectionists were forced to resort to guerrilla warfare tactics and clandestine structures. Throughout the campaign, not one major fortress city in Russian-occupied Poland was captured and, while the occupying armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands were harried, they were never driven out of the country. The uprising did, however, succeed in blunting the effect of the Tsar's abolition of serfdom in the Russian partition, which had been designed to win Polish peasants away from supporting the rest of the Polish nation. Severe reprisals against the Poles, such as public executions or deportations to Siberia, led many Poles to abandon armed struggle and turn instead to the idea of "organic work" - the economic and cultural self-improvement.

    After 1867 in the Austrian partition (Galicia), the Poles obtained a wide-ranging autonomy, including the right to conduct their government and run the education system in Polish language. This was part of the general transformation of the Austrian Empire into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Hungary finally received virtual independence. Many Polish intellectuals and artists left France and settled in Galicia. The role of cultural capital of Poland was passed back to Krakow. Until 1918 it was the only place in partitioned Poland where Polish cultural life flourished in all its aspects.

In contrast to Austro-Hungarian Empire, Russia and Prussia (soon to become the leading region of a unified Germany) banned the use of Polish in public affairs and everywhere in the education system - the teaching of Polish language, literature, and history had to be carried out on a virtually clandestine basis. The administration of the country in both areas, on practically every level, was almost completely in the hands of non-Poles.