“An Inborn Idea…to be Realised.” Imagining the Polish Nation within the Great Emigration in France, 1831-1846

In 1795, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist with the third and final partition of the country by Prussia, Russia, and Austria. The nobility had held a wide array of rights and privileges that included the electoral sovereignty to choose the Polish king. The partitions thus resulted in a loss of agency for this class and provoked questioning as to whether their “fatherland” was gone indefinitely. Instead, deprived of a state, those who still identified with the fallen polity were inspired to conceive and construct the outlines of a nation without territory. The dissertation begins by examining Polish national philosophies post-partition, up to and including the November Uprising of 1830-31. Alongside themes of loss and suffering, writings centred on de-coupling the ideas of nation and state and envisioning the nation as a non-material entity. The nation began to be conceived through the idea of entelechy: in a process of self-realisation from an inborn idea, usually by means of a national mission. The focus of the dissertation is on the national thought of the members of the Great Emigration who mostly settled in France after the Uprising. Their writings on the nation built on currents that had emerged post-partition, and were heavily reliant on religious language, metaphor, and biblical inspirations. By focusing on a spiritual body reminiscent of a corpus mysticum, nationalists sought to prove and maintain continuity with the past, without the intermediary of a physical body politic. Émigrés were still concerned with the physical embodiment of a future Poland: debating boundaries, ethnic composition, religious minorities, and social questions. Contending with a deep sense of personal loss and with hopes for return diminishing, many émigrés turned toward mystical currents that viewed Poland through a messianic lens. They imagined an ideal nation that through its suffering and mission would serve as an agent of universal moral transformation. The dissertation closes with the failed Krakow Uprising of 1846 and the Galician Slaughter, which forced exiles to confront their imagined nation with the failure of the peasants, often idealised as the wellspring of national identity, to identify with and join the Polish cause.

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