The state formally known as ‘‘The Republic of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’’ (sometimes labeled the ‘‘Polish-Lithua-nian Commonwealth’’ in English-language texts) was once one of the largest countries in Europe, but by the eighteenth century its decentralized political system was unable to resist the expansionist ambitions of its more absolutist neighbors. The polity’s decline culminated in a series of diplomatic and military disasters known as the Partitions of Poland: three treaties (1772, 1793, and 1795) that carved up the country between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. After the third partition there was no longer a Polish state on the map, but in its place there had emerged a committed core of patriotic activists who were devoted to the restoration of independence.
Hardly had the post-partition boundaries been established when the Napoleonic Wars threw the entire international order into chaos. Many Polish national activists were enthusiastic about the transformative potential of the French Revolution, and a Polish legion was formed alongside the French army in 1797. Because of this, when Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1806 many hoped that he would sponsor a Polish restoration. This is not quite what happened. In 1807 he created a small, dependent puppet state called the Duchy of Warsaw, which encompassed only a fraction of the former republic’s territory. For all its limitations, the Duchy did revitalize Polish political life, and made it difficult to return to the status quo ante after Napoleon’s fall.
THE UPRISINGS
The Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) once again drew a space for Poland on the map, elevating its status to that of a ‘‘kingdom’’ with its own parliament, legal system, administrative autonomy, and army. But there was one stipulation: the Russian tsar would be ex officio king of Poland. This would ensure that Polish autonomy would be more nominal than real, and that the national movement would continue to grow. Under Alexander I (r. 1801-1825), the Polish kingdom did indeed enjoy some meaningful self-governance, but this quickly eroded under the more authoritarian
Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855). Opposition to his efforts to curtail Polish autonomy exploded in 1830 with the so-called November Uprising. The Polish parliament dethroned Nicholas and a brief war ensued, but the Poles stood little chance of success. After the suppression of the uprising, martial law was declared and Polish self-rule was effectively ended.
The defeat of the November Uprising forced thousands of Polish national activists to flee abroad in what came to be labeled the Great Emigration. Most of these exiles settled in France, where they continued to conspire against the partitioning powers. Many of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century Polish culture (nearly all of which were imbued with patriotic content) emerged from this context: the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), Juliusz Slowacki (1809-1849), and Zygmunt Krasiriski (1812-1859), and the music of Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), just to name a few. In the hothouse atmosphere of the Great Emigration, an idealistic brand of Polish patriotism emerged, committed not only to another insurrection but also to the subsequent creation of a new, more perfect Poland in which the mundane injustices of nineteenth-century Europe would be resolved. A number of ephemeral conspiracies were organized by these eimigres in the 1830s and 1840s, and one significant revolt was attempted in Cracow (Krakdw) in 1846, but all of these efforts failed. During the European-wide revolutionary year of 1848 the Russians managed to keep any unrest from breaking out in their partition, and although there were violent conflicts between Poles and Germans in the Prussian partition, nothing was accomplished to advance the Polish cause.
The culminating moment of conspiratorial Polish nationalism came with the January Uprising of 1863. After the reform-minded Alexander II became emperor in 1855, the restoration of some sort of Polish autonomy seemed possible. A handful of Polish aristocrats attempted to cooperate with the Russian authorities toward this end, but the pent-up ambitions and frustrations of the past decades soon exploded in a series of mass demonstrations. These were violently broken up by the Russians, which only further radicalized the Polish activists and spurred the development of an extensive patriotic conspiracy. On 22 January 1863 the leaders of this underground group launched a national uprising, and for more than a year a guerilla war raged throughout the Polish territories of the Russian Empire. Eventually this revolt failed as well, but not before thirty thousand rebels had been killed and thirty-eight thousand exiled to Siberia.
THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN NATIONALISM
In the aftermath of the January Uprising the tsarist authorities abolished all remnants of Polish autonomy and launched a campaign of Russification. A similar program was attempted in the newly created German Empire starting in the 1870s. Poles who advocated independence had long been targeted for repression in all three partitions, but there had been no real attempt to culturally transform the Poles into Germans or Russians. For the last third of the century, however, the Polish language was almost entirely pushed out of the educational system and the administrative structures of the German and Russian states. Only in Austria did the situation for the Poles improve: when the Habs-burg Empire was reorganized with the Ausgleich (compromise) of 1867, the Poles gained nearly full autonomy within the province of Galicia.
After the crushing defeat of 1863 most Polish activists turned to what they called ‘‘organic work’’: a program of economic and cultural development combined with an explicit repudiation of political conspiracies. Only in the 1880s did a few small nationalist organizations begin to take shape once again. At the time few Polish activists saw any contradiction between socialism and nationalism, but gradually the two paths started to diverge. Some nationalists argued that social justice had to be subordinated to the need for national solidarity, and while few socialists actually repudiated the cause of independence they did insist that it had to be accompanied by a radically new social order. These divisions were solidified with the creation of two rival organizations, the Polish Socialist Party (founded in 1892) and the National Democratic Movement (or Endecja, founded in 1893). Both groups emerged as mass movements at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1905, and by then their hostility toward each other was almost as intense as their opposition to the partitions.
When World War I broke out in 1914, the ‘‘Polish question’’ was as much a factor in European politics as ever. The Polish national movement had met with repeated failures during that long century, and the cost in lives and material destruction was great. On the other hand, the very persistence of the movement inspired all sides during World War I to attempt to win Polish support with promises of autonomy and eventually independence. There were many debates among the Poles about which side to join during the war, but in the end it did not matter: all three of the partitioning powers were destroyed by the conflict, and Polish independence was proclaimed on the very day of the armistice: 11 November 1918.
See also Endecja; Mickiewicz, Adam; Poland; Nationalism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hagen, William W. Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772-1914. Chicago, 1980.
Porter, Brian. When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland. New York, 2000.
Walicki, Andrzej. Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland. Oxford, U. K., 1982.
Wandycz, Piotr S. The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918. Seattle, 1974.
Brian Porter
POLITICAL CATHOLICISM. See Catholicism, Political.
POOR LAW. In Britain, the term poor law was commonly applied to various laws that provided for the sick, disabled, and unemployed. A body of legislation from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was known collectively as the Poor Law or, after 1834, the Old Poor Law. In that year the old legislation was superseded by the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), which became known as the New Poor Law.
Under the Old Poor Law, poor relief was managed at the parochial level by an annually appointed overseer of the poor. In the main, provisions consisted of what was called outdoor relief: supplemental payments made to individuals or families living in their homes, rather than in workhouses or debtors’ prisons. The Old Poor Law also included a series of acts of settlement designed to prevent vagrants and other outsiders from receiving the aid of the parish. The most significant of these was the Settlement Act of 1662, which facilitated the eviction of paupers, who were to be returned to the parishes of their birth.
The Old Poor Law was clearly designed to accommodate a society of small villages and limited mobility. Its provisions were by and large successful in such an environment, and the poor in England were generally regarded as being better off than their counterparts in the rest of Europe. But with demographic and other change in England, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, this increasingly failed to match reality.
In the face of inadequate wages and high food prices (exacerbated by the Napoleonic Wars), Speenhamland Parish in Berkshire experimented with a modified project of poor relief in 1795. The plan instituted a sliding-scale of outdoor relief, based on wages, number of dependents, and the current price of food. The scheme’s intent was charitable, but an unfortunate (if hardly unforeseeable) consequence was that unscrupulous wage-payers could become even more ruthless, on the grounds that if wages were not adjusted to reflect living costs, the parish authorities would meet the difference. In spite of its shortcomings, some variant of the Speenhamland system, as it was called, quickly spread to most of the southern counties of England, and the amount English parishes paid for poor relief skyrocketed. In 1785, English parishes paid out about ?2 million on poor relief. At its height, in 1818, English parishes provided ?7,871,000 in poor relief, and in the last decade of the Old Poor Law, outdoor relief averaged around ?7 million per year.
The abuses of the Speenhamland system, together with changing liberal attitudes regarding poverty and self-help, produced an environment that demanded reform. In 1832, the Whig government of Earl Grey (Charles Grey, 1764-1845) established a royal commission to investigate the workings of the Old Poor Law. Twenty-six commissioners visited about three thousand parishes, and filed their report in 1834. The government accepted its proposals and pushed through the Poor Law Amendment Act the same year. More commonly known simply as the New Poor Law, its major provisions included widespread establishment of workhouses and the curbing of outdoor relief. A workhouse was built for every parish or, in the case of small parishes, for a union of parishes. Outdoor relief was discontinued, so the able-bodied poor no longer received aid unless they agreed to live in the workhouses. To further discourage recourse to poor relief, workhouse inmates lived under extremely harsh conditions. (In the language of the Poor Law Amendment Act, conditions offered in a workhouse were to be ‘‘less desirable’’ than the poorest private dwelling.) A poor law commission was set up in London to supervise and support the work of parish poor law guardians, previously the sole responsibility of elected local officials.
In some respects, the New Poor Law was highly effective. From the point of view of expenditure, the poor rate dropped from about ?7 million per year from 1830 to 1834 to between ?4 and ?5 million annually thereafter. Ratepayers and others who were convinced the poor were simply lazy and had brought their troubles on themselves could rest assured that the ‘‘less desirable’’ clause of the act guaranteed in most cases that only those truly in need would apply for aid. Moreover, meager and unappealing though it was, the diet provided in the workhouse was probably more nourishing than what many low-paid workers could have afforded.
Nonetheless, there was widespread opposition to the implementation of the New Poor Law. Under the Old Poor Law, the ‘‘deserving’’ poor—the aged, sick, handicapped, or widowed— and their dependents had come to expect relief in the comfort and dignity of their own homes. Similarly, the families of the ‘‘able-bodied’’ poor had come to rely on the Speenhamland system or other projects. But with the termination of outdoor relief, a pauper had to enter a workhouse to be eligible for aid, and many poor families suffered. Furthermore, workhouse inmates were housed by sex and age, so husbands, wives, and children were separated. As well as a stark and unappealing diet, other ‘‘less desirable’’ conditions in a workhouse included harsh, menial, and monotonous tasks. The aloof oversight of the workhouses by the London-based Board of Guardians was another source of resentment.
Anger with the New Poor Law occasionally led to riots, abuse of poor law officials, and attacks on the workhouses, which were popularly derided as Bastilles, after the hated prison ofpre-Revolutionary Paris. Probably the most famous contemporary critic of the provisions of the New Poor Law was the novelist Charles Dickens who, in Oliver Twist (1838), aimed to arouse middle-class consciences. Indeed, it is chiefly through Dickens that the workhouse and the plight of the poor in nineteenth-century England remains part of current vocabulary and imagination.
Although amended repeatedly throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, vestiges of the New Poor Law persisted until 1929, when Public Assistance Committees (PACs) replaced the Board of Guardians.
See also Great Britain; Poverty; Welfare.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brundage, Anthony. The English Poor Laws, 1700-1930. New York, 2002.
Kidd, Alan J. State, Society, and the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England. New York, 1999.
Richard Floyd
World History
