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

Sober minds well appreciated that the Kingdom did not need irresponsible patriotic antics but a period of calm. Particularly conscious of the need for political stability and economic consolidation within the strict limits of autonomy prescribed by St Petersburg was Prince Ksawery Lubecki, a former civil governor of Wilno and from 1821 to 1830 the Kingdom’s energetic and hard-headed finance minister. He balanced the Kingdom’s chaotic budget through rigorous taxation, initiated the creation of a land credit society and of the Bank of Poland, and even launched a modest programme of state-encouraged industrial development. This period also witnessed the emergence of Lodz as the centre of the Polish cotton industry, while a favourable tariff treaty with Russia in 1822 opened Russia’s vast markets to the Kingdom’s manufactures. Lubecki’s fiscal burdens were felt most keenly by the peasantry whose conditions did not improve in what continued to be a difficult period for agriculture. Little was done to endow peasants with leaseholdings on state lands and even less on privately owned estates, while the eviction of peasants by private landlords acquired alarming proportions, despite the examples set by Czartoryski, who introduced generous tenancy terms 011 his Konskowola estates, and by Staszic, who created a large peasant co-operative near Hrubieszow. Peasant discontent only grew as the number of landless peasants in the Congress Kingdom reached 800,000 by 1827, with obvious damage to the cause of national solidarity. There was likewise no Polish consensus for improving the status of the Kingdom’s 300,000 Jews, who continued to be deprived of full civic rights.

The other region of historic Poland endowed with extensive autonomy in 1815 was the small republic of Krakow, which obtained a liberal-aristocratic constitution and also retained the Napoleonic legal system. The three Protecting Powers interfered in the t82os in Krakow against liberal agitation and student conspiracies, but the republic managed to survive until 1846. The status of the republic’s peasantry was to be for many years the most advanced in all of historic Poland. Electoral rights and security of tenancy holdings did much to encourage early political and national consciousness of the rural population, in stark contrast with the peasants of Austrian Galicia. As a free-trade entrepot Krakow also benefited from commerce with Silesia and the Congress Kingdom and witnessed some early industrial activity on its territory; the first steam engine installed anywhere in Poland appeared here in 1817.

Prussia’s ex-Polish lands presented a more complex picture. Roughly equivalent in size to modern Belgium, the duchy of Posen had a mixed population of nearly 800,000 in 1815, of whom the Poles represented about two-thirds; in the city of Poznan the Polish and German elements were roughly even. Although the Prussian Landrecht replaced the Napoleonic Code, Polish was recognized as the main language in the administration, the courts and the schools, and Prince Antoni Radziwill was appointed viceroy. In practice, Poznania’s degree of autonomy remained limited but the Prussian authorities, well aware of the pull of the Congress Kingdom, avoided alienating the Poles and dealt leniently with illegal patriotic societies. In terms of rural property rights, the Prussian government brought Poznania in line with the land reform operational in the rest of the Prussian monarchy since 1811; the landed nobility retained most of the land, hut the process of creating a substantial class of prosperous peasant farmers was now set in motion.

Unlike in Poznania, no significant institutional or administrative concessions were made to the Polish nationality in West Prussia (formerly Polish Pomerania held by Berlin continuously since 1772), to which were added Danzig and Thorn. In West Prussia, Polish-speakers (including the Kashubians) equalled the Germans numerically, but the towns were predominantly German and the landed class was becoming increasingly so. In 1824 East and West Prussia were amalgamated into a single province, while the restoration of jVlarienburg (Malbork) castle, begun in the 1820s, was intended to express the ‘idea’ of the Teutonic Order and of German Prussia. There were even further intricacies on the linguistic and religious map of the eastern marches of the Hohenzollern state: the Protestant Masurians of East Prussia and much of the Roman Catholic country folk of Upper Silesia spoke Polish dialects yet their regions had never belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Both communities were to witness the gradual emergence of Polish national consciousness, of a highly distinct regional flavour, as the century wore on.