(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

Krakow was turned into a German-Latin institution. On the other hand, sentiments of loyalty to the Habsburg emperors were encouraged among the peasants of the two Galicias by the easing of labour burdens and the granting to the serfs of some property rights. Although all three partitioning powers imposed a twenty-year period of military service on their serf conscripts (a burden that had not existed in the largely demilitarized Polish-I.ithuanian Commonwealth), Austrian military discipline was the least harsh.

The three partitioning governments placed the Roman Catholic Church under tight state supervision. Nor did they spare the large Jewish population from heavy taxation and bureaucratic controls: in Galicia, for instance, the Jews were obliged to adopt German surnames, while in Russia (which had acquired half of the Commonwealth’s Jewry) they were confined to their area of settlement, the so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement, and were later subject to a misguided and ultimately unsuccessful physiocratic policy to force them out of their artisanal and innkeeping trades into farming. Many of Poland’s towns were also afflicted by the economic dislocation brought about by arbitrary frontier changes; after a period of vibrant growth in the 1770s and 1780s, when its population reached 100,000, Warsaw now found itself reduced to a half-deserted Prussian frontier town.

Despite the shock of the final Partition and the resignation of many aristocrats and notables in favour of a quiet life, 1795 proved not to be the end of Polish yearnings for independence. The long legacy of nobiliary republicanism contrasted starkly with the absolutism of Poland’s conquerors, and the national awakening of the reign of Stanislaw August Poniatowski could not simply be obliterated from the minds of Poland’s elite. The presence across the length and breadth of the former Commonwealth of hundreds of thousands of petty noblemen, many unsophisticated yet fiercely proud of their former status as free citizens, was also to provide a reservoir of future freedom fighters - soon to be exposed to the intoxicating message of Romantic nationalism. The long period of continuous international instability generated by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars also provided many Polish patriots with opportunities to challenge the post-partition status quo in their homeland.

Initially Polish national aspirations were kept alive mainly by exiled patriots, many radically minded, who sought the assistance of the French Republic for their cause. About 20,000 Poles, many of them Austrian conscripts taken prisoner by the French, were to serve in the Polish legions formed in Italy under French aegis and commanded in a spirit of egalitarianism by Generals Henryk Dąbrowski and Karol Kniaziewicz. The legend of their exploits against the Austrians and Russians between 1 797 and 1800 was to inspire many future Polish generations, while their hymn ‘Poland has not perished while we live’, a mazurka with Jozef Wybicki’s words of defiance against Poland’s oppressors, eventually established itself as the modern Polish national anthem. The radicals also launched several clandestine organizations in Poland itself, such as the Society of Polish Republicans, which linked the cause of national independence with that of serf emancipation and dreamt of introducing a French-style constitution in a restored Poland.

In the immediate term the radical patriotic cause was a failure. The Polish exiles in Paris were divided, the conspirators at home lacked wide support, while the French Republic under the Directorate lost its initial revolutionary ardour. Bonaparte’s rise to power dismayed Košciuszko and other Polish democrats. The Polish legionaries’ dream of marching through Austria to liberate Poland was finally shattered when France concluded peace with Austria and Russia in 1801, and when Bonaparte cvnically dispatched

5,000 Polish legionaries to reconquer Haiti. The freedom fighters had been transformed into an instrument of colonial repression; few of them were ever to see Europe again. Košeiuszko’s proposal of 1800 for waging a peasant-backed guerrilla war in Poland, without any foreign aid, against the armies of Austria, Prussia and Russia was, in the circumstances, sheer quixotic fantasy.