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

The creation of a de facto Polish government with a regular conscripted army (numbering over 30,000 men by June 1807) in western Poland was an accomplished fact, but its future prospects depended entirely on the outcome of the war. The battle of Fried-land on 14 June 1807 finally established French superiority and obliged Alexander I to sign a compromise peace treaty with Napoleon at Tilsit on 7 July. Most of Prussia’s Polish lands went to form the so-called ’duchy of Warsaw’; Russia annexed the district of Bialystok and undertook to join the Continental System against Britain; and Danzig was restored as a free city. In October 1 809, following a brief war between France and Austria, in which the Polish army gave a good account of itself, the duchy was enlarged at Austria’s expense: Vienna had to surrender about half of its gains in the partitions, including Krakow and Lublin.

The duchy of Warsaw was undeniably a French satellite, harnessed to and exploited by the Napoleonic war machine; 20,000 of

23 Napoleon bestowing a constitution on the duchy of Warsaw. This allegorical painting by Marceli Bacciarelli (173 j-1818) depicts the event which occurred on 22 July т 807 in Dresden where the emperor had summoned leading Polish notables, including the venerable Stanislaw Malachowski (sixth from the left), the former speaker of the Great Sejm of 1 788-92. Napoleon ignored the proposals brought by the Polish delegation and proceeded to dictate his own version in one hour. The constitution w as nonetheless an effective adaptation of the French model to Polish realities. Bacciarelli was court painter to Stanislaw August Poniatowski and remained active in Polish cultural life to his death.

its troops participated in Napoleon’s inglorious attempt to subjugate Spain, and nearly 100,000 Polish soldiers accompanied the Grande Armėe into Russia in 1812. The duchy had to accept a constitution dictated bv Napoleon, a French-style centralized administrative system staffed by professional bureaucrats, and the Napoleonic legal code. On the other hand the duchy’s creation shattered the mould of the partition treaties and reawakened hopes of national revival. Although it comprised a mere fifth of old Poland and only per cent of its population, the duchy did contain within its post-1809 borders the Polish heartland: Poznania, the cradle of Poland’s medieval statehood with the ecclesiastical centre of Gniezno, and the two historic capitals of Warsaw and Krakow. The elevation to the ducal title of King Frederick Augustus of Saxony, the nephew of Augustus III of Poland, and the restoration of a bicameral Sejm and provincial dietines (seįniiki) represented a gesture to Polish tradition. The duchy’s large army instilled civic virtues in its officers and soldiers, while its exploits revived military values in Polish society and inspired a cult of Napoleon that would survive in Poland into the twentieth century. The duchy’s uhlans, with their distinctive square caps (the czapka) and their red and white pennants, became a model for the lancer regiments of many European armies; and despite its appalling human losses in 1812, the duchy’s army had the satisfaction of returning from Russia with all its standards and artillery pieces intact.

The Napoleonic regime, backed by the duchy’s rationalist aristocracy, also injected modern elements into Polish society. The Napoleonic Code abolished serfdom, introduced legal equality and personal liberty for all inhabitants, and permitted civil marriage and divorce, to the horror of the episcopate. Some non-nobles could now vote, sit in the Sejm, and hold office, while the Voltairean education minister Stanislaw Kostka Potocki expanded elementary schooling. All this contributed to the growth of a professional intelligentsia and the narrowing of the gap between the szlachta and the urban middle class. But there were also compromises with Polish ‘feudal’ traditions: the landed nobility obtained full property rights to all manorial land and all former serf allotments, while the now ‘free’ peasants were reduced to a

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Map 6 The duchv of Warsaw, т 807-1 5.

landless class of tenants still obliged to perform the corvee. The Jews were barred from buying land and had their political rights suspended for ten years, on the grounds that they were not yet fully assimilated into Polish society.