NEUSTERN is a project exploring how the Austrian government enabled the emergence of a new intellectual elite among the Greek Catholic clergy in Galicia and the impact of this process on the Crownland’s Ruthenian community as a whole.
On 5 April 2022, NEUSTERN’s Tomasz Hen-Konarski will give a talk within the framework of the Open Seminar convened at the National Library in Warsaw. The presentation will be devoted to the role of pastoral theology in the eighteenth-century Austrian state building.
For details (in Polish) click here.
On 11 March 1882, exactly 140 years ago, Ernest Renan, a renowned French oriental scholar, delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne which was to go down in history under the title Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? or What is a nation? in English. 1 This extraordinary text has aged surprisingly well and remains indispensable reading for anybody involved in the study of nationalisms and nation building. Renan’s most famous line from this talk has been repeated so many times that it is now a dreary platitude: a nation’s existence is a daily referendum (un plébiscite de tous les jours). Today, the Ukrainian society gives us an exceptionally dramatic example of how such a referendum works. Even though many Ukrainians are native speakers of Russian and often have relatives in Russia, they nevertheless fight fiercely to fend off the aggression of the Russian state. They choose to be Ukrainians and pay the highest price for this. Unfortunately, the Kremlin decision makers do not seem to be able to understand this simple truth. Today’s champions of Russian domination over Ukraine profess an essentialistic understanding of nationality. They construe nations as primordial and organic communities whose essence is enchanted in their language (unsurprisingly, they dismiss the Ukrainian language as a Souhern Russian dialect). From this perspective, Renan’s plébiscite de tous les jours is an absurd idea: contingent historical developments and choices of individual human beings are completely irrelevant, as the only thing that matters is the mystical community cemented by the unique national language and endowed with a lofty historical mission.
On 5 March 1883, almost exactly a year after Renan’s lecture in Paris, another intellectual gave a talk in Lviv, the capital of the Austrian Crownland of Galicia and Lodomeria (and today a regional centre in Western Ukraine). The Lviv speaker addressed the same problem in his presentation: What is a nation? Which groups can legitimately claim to be nations? What criteria need to be fulfilled? Which national characteristics are merely accidental and can be dispensed with?
The speaker in question was Walerian Kalinka, one of the most independent voices present in the Polish-language public sphere in the nineteenth century. An ultramontane conservative, Kalinka was perhaps the first Polish intellectual to systematically assault what he considered to be the excesses of the Polish-Lithuanian nobiliary republicanism of the period before 1795 and the armed struggle for independence after the collapse of the early modern Commonwealth. As such, he is credited as one of the founders of the so-called Cracow historical school.
This is no place to recount Kalinka’s colourful life and enumerate his diverse activities. What matters here is that at the beginning of the 1880s he was the most prominent member of the Resurrectionist Congregation resident in Galicia; in this capacity he was responsible for the establishment and management of the new boarding house (internat in Polish) for Ruthenian Greek Catholic schoolboys that opened in Lviv in September 1881. It was located in the former monastery of Franciscan Sisters on the Pekars’ka Street in the neighbourhood of Lychakiv (the building still exists and houses a Pentecostal church). The goal of this institution, as formulated by Pope Leo XIII and supported by Emperor Francis Joseph, was to provide its pupils with a quality education that would solidify their Catholic faith without undermining their Ruthenian (Galician Ukrainian) nationality. Lviv Resurrectionists housed, fed, and supervised their boarders, but it was not their intention to school them in isolation from the outside world. All but the youngest pupils attended the Ruthenian-language Gymnasium run by the Austrian government.
The Resurrectionists were a predominantly Latin Catholic congregation established in the late 1830s by Polish political exiles in Rome. Half a century later, Poles still formed the bulk of its membership, so it could seem quite unusual that they started an institution in Lviv to support the education of Greek Catholic youths qua Ruthenians and not for the purpose of imbuing them with the Polish national allegiance as gente Rutheni natione Poloni. 2 Many members of Galicia’s Polish elite denounced this initiative as squandering limited national resources for the sake of Poland’s avowed enemies. Kalinka’s speech of March 1883 offered a compte rendu of the boarding house’s short existence and attempted to answer such accusations, in order to soothe its Polish benefactors. This explains the resolutely Polish vantage point of Kalinka’s speech. His collective „we” usually referred to the Polish nation.
As is well known, Hans Kohn, one of the most influential twentieth-century theorists of nationalism, distinguished between civic and ethnic nationalisms. He claimed that the former emerged in Western European societies living in relatively uniform nation states, whereas the latter flourished in outdated polyethnic empires of Eastern Europe. 3 There are many problems with this dichotomy, but there is no need to explore them in detail here. Even if Kohn’s opposition is mostly wrong on the empirical level (especially its East-West dynamic), it can still serve as a handy point of reference.
Contrary to Kohn’s expectations, Walerian Kalinka resolutely rejects the identification of nations with language groups. At the same time, he testifies that many in the nineteenth-century Polish-speaking society think in that way. We have no reason to suspect that Kalinka knew Ernest Renan’s 1882 lecture on nations (although he criticised Renan in another context, so he was aware of his work). 4 Kalinka, however, did not need Renan to understand that nations were not always uniform ethno-linguistic units. In fact, the non-ethnic understanding of nationhood was quite common in the Polish-language public sphere in the nineteenth century, although not necessarily dominant. Many adherents of the Polish national cause insisted that the independent Poland of the future would have a valid claim to all the territories of the pre-1772 Commonwealth, because the Polish nation, as they imagined it, could not be reduced to the Polish-speaking Latin Catholics. They believed that millions of German-, Lithuanian- and Ruthenian-speakers, to name only the most prominent groups, were Poles, even if not always aware of this crucial fact. As a result, the Polish state would necessarily encompass vast swathes of land inhabited by them. What makes Kalinka truly original is the fact that he has the intellectual courage to turn this way of arguing on its head and use it to defend the Ruthenians’ right to national self-determination. True, the Ruthenian elite in Galicia remains predominantly Polish-speaking. But if there are Ruthenian-speaking Poles and English-speaking Irish, why not Polish-speaking Ruthenians?
I have chosen to translate only some more general reflections on the problem of nationality, leaving out Kalinka’s immediately political arguments, even though they are of utmost interest. Almost a century ahead of Giedroyc and Mieroszewski, Kalinka concludes that the independent Ruthenian nationality could debilitate the Russian imperial project and thus contribute to Poland’s security. 5 As if anticipating Dmowski’s Darwinistic demand that Polish elites be tough on the Ruthenian national activists, as the latter could only prove the long-term viability of their national aspirations by resisting external oppression, Kalinka notes that any Polish dreams of subjugating or assimilating Ruthenians are completely unrealistic: if the Polish elites had not managed to absorb this community for several centuries in much more favourable circumstances, how could they fantasise about stifling its independent development in the late nineteenth century when the situation was so much more complicated? 6 These are only two striking examples of the perspicacity of this most unusual mind.
Kalinka’s thoughts might not be as original and universally applicable as those of Ernest Renan. In stark contrast to the Frenchman’s voluntarism, his understanding of nation remains essentialistic. He just does not identify national essence with language or race, as many people still do, but with the historically shaped national character and argues that Ukrainians (whom he calls Ruthenians) differ in this respect from both Poles and Russians. Yet, compared with Hans Kohn, Roman Dmowski, or Vladimir Putin for that matter, Kalinka’s reflections on the nature of modern nationality prove astonishingly sober and refreshing.
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»’But why do you send your pupils to the Ruthenian Gymnasium?’ The answer is simple: because we want them to remain Ruthenians, we want them to learn, to speak, and to think in Ruthenian, although at the same time, they all learn Polish and they all need to master this language. And here we encounter another accusation: ‘Ruthenian language in your boarding house scandalises many people.’ ‘Ruthenia does not exist,’ they tell us. ‘Today’s Ruthenian pariotism is a symptom of the debilitation of the Polish spirit, it is an apostasy from Polishness. Sowed by Stadion, it grows thanks to the Russian treachery. 7 Can Polish priests support such work? The simple folk may remain Ruthenian, as it has always been, but anybody willing to join the upper spheres must become either a Pole or a Russian: there can be no middle way here. Hence, it is an inescapable conclusion that if you refuse to bring your pupils up as Poles and you teach in them in Ruthenian, then you must end up producing Muscovites and you will see that you have used the Polish effort and resources to rear the enemies of the Fatherland and of the Church, especially dangerous ones thanks to their thorough education.’
Before we answer this accusation, let us first address some ideas and prejudices regarding the language question. They are very widespread and they cause a lot of confusion. Do not people ascribe too much and too exclusive importance to language divisions? Nobody would suspect us of not loving our mother tongue, of not wanting it to be respected, developed, and widespread. Nobody can suppose that we are indifferent to whether the Poles care about their language, whether they know it, whether they protect it not only in public but also in their private lives (which can still prove even more difficult in some social spheres), in their everyday interactions. Having made this disclaimer, we affirm that it would be a grave and pernicious error to take language as the exclusive characteristic and basis of nationality, as many opinion makers, politicians, and scholars do nowadays. Such a shallow and one-sided approach allows us to overlook many other elements and factors that characterise nations. It accepts as the complete expression of nationality what is only one of its traits, not the most relevant one and in fact dispensable in some nations. For we all know that there is in Europe a nation that proved its attachment to the fatherland on several occasions: it defended it bravely and is still ready to do so. I am speaking about the Swiss who do not have their own language and speak in three foreign ones: in Italian, in German, and in French. 8 And although there is no Swiss language, nobody would claim that the Swiss do not exist, nobody will deny that they are a separate, distinguished, and unyielding nation. A Swiss differs from a German, a Frenchman, and an Italian as much as each of the three does from the remaining two.
We know also that the Jews forgot their language over twenty centuries ago and that they use all the languages of the world; and yet it would be difficult to say that they are not a separate nationality that immediately stands out in every country and that is so stubborn and vivid in every Jew that, except for the religious conversion, nothing can change it or break it. On the contrary, we see three populations: English, Irish, and that of the United States, all of them using the same English language. Despite this language uniformity, nobody will dare to claim that they are one and the same nation. Everyone will admit that these nations differ from each other, both in their internal disposition and in their external situation, even though all three speak English. These examples, and we could give you more of them, they prove clearly that the language alone does not constitute nationality, that you need for it other conditions. Nationality is shaped by history, it is shaped by centuries and by centuries-old common traditions, mores, appropriate character, and stable interests. Neither will language divisions shatter a national unity shaped by the past, nor will language unity remove national differences where they already exist and separate people from each other. A Samogitian does not speak Polish and yet he loves Poland and considers himself a Pole; an Irishman knows only the English language and still he hates England and would never call himself an Englishman. 9 It is not just the language but other higher powers that determine the case. Similarly, a Ruthenian may love or hate Poles, no matter what language he speaks, Polish or Ruthenian. A dozen years ago, Polish was the dominant language among educated Ruthenians. Did they all love us because of this? If you know the works of Harasiewicz, Zubrzycki, and others, which were written at the time when the Ruthenian priests spoke Polish and yet teem with hatred of all things Polish, you must agree that the Polish language will not guarantee us the friendship of the Ruthenians. 10 This means that the Ruthenian language will not be an obstacle to that friendship either. In other words, this or that tongue, as a separate factor, does not determine anything in our relationship with the Ruthenians.« 11
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1 Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris, 1882).
2 Gente Rutheni natione Poloni (people of Ruthenian stock but Polish by nationality) was an idea, according to which the Ruthenians of Galicia could preserve their specificity as an ethnic variety of the Polish nation. It did actually work for several individuals active in the nineteenth-century Polish politics, including Piotr Semenenko, the leader of the Resurrectionists, but most Galician Ruthenians deemed it unsatisfactory, as they strove for a recognition as a separate nation on par with the Poles. See Adam Świątek, Gente Rutheni, natione Poloni: z dziejów Rusinów narodowości polskiej w Galicji (Cracow, 2014).
3 Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York, 1945).
4 Walerian Kalinka, Przegrana Francyi i przyszłość Europy (Cracow, 1871), 7.
5 Jerzy Giedroyc and Juliusz Mieroszewski were Polish émigré intellectuals active in the second half of the twentieth century. They formulated the so-called ULB doctrine, according to which strong and independent Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine would form a bulwark against the Russian expansion and thus contribute to Poland’s security.
6 Roman Dmowski (1864-1939) was a Polish intellectual and one of the founders of the right-wing political current known as the endecja (ND or National Democracy). For his Darwinistic treatment of Ruthenians see his Myśli nowoczesnego Polaka (Lviv, 1904), 100-101.
7 Count Franz Stadion was an Austrian statesman who served as governor of Galicia in 1848. Many Polish politicians accused him of having “invented” the Ruthenian nationality, in order to weaken the Polish revolutionary movement during the Springtime of Peoples.
8 Nowadays, there are four national languages in Switzerland: French, German, Italian, and Rumantsch.
9 Samogitia (Žemaitija in Lithuanian or Żmudź in Polish) is a region in Western Lithuania. During the January Uprising of 1863 the Lithuanian-speaking peasants of that area actively supported Polish insurrectionists in their struggle against the Russian authorities, but Kalinka’s assessment of Samogitians’ national choices is not necessarily accurate for the 1880s.
10 Mykhailo Harasevych and Denys Zubryts’kyi were Galician Ruthenian historians active in the first half of the nineteenth century. They published their works in German, Latin, or Polish. Towards the end of his life, Zubryts’kyi switched to Russian and iazychiie.
11 Walerian Kalinka, Pisma pomniejsze. Część IV (Cracow, 1902), 42-44. I would like to thank Jared Warren for his useful comments.
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This is not an academic text sensu stricto. Its goal is to disseminate knowledge and to stimulate public interest in our field. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of either PAN or NCN.
Ukraine is fighting against a full-scale invasion carried out by the military of the Russian Federation. Within the framework of cooperation with the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the Polish Academy of Sciences has introduced a new tool supporting cooperation with Ukrainian researchers.
Learn more here.
In the six sessions of this seminar series, scholars specialised in different periods and regions will discuss the history of various Eastern Catholic communities from the Middle Ages until today.
Please register here.
Three online panels on the Uniates are taking place within the framework of the ongoing ASEEES convention. Neustern’s Tomasz Hen-Konarski will speak about Mykhailo and Ivan Harasevych at one of them: „Contested Loyalties, Dynamic Subjectivities: Uniate Clergymen of the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Nineteenth Century” on Wednesday, December 1, at 12:00 to 2:30pm CST (7:00 to 9:30pm CET). This panel includes also Marc Raeff Prize Award Celebration for Andrey Ivanov’s A Spiritual Revolution The Impact of Reformation and Enlightenment in Orthodox Russia.
Learn more here.
A lecture by Serhii Plokhy opens another round of the Ukrainian Studies Online Colloquium convened by the Chair of Entangled History of Ukraine (European University Viadrina).
You can watch all the papers on the Youtube channel “Entangled History of Ukraine / PRISMA UKRAЇNA”.
For more details click here.
In the 1790s Mykhailo Harasevych, the patron saint of this research project, was involved in the publication of Galicia’s first political daily, the Dziennik Patriotycznych Polityków (Journal of Patriotic Politicians, henceforth DPP), allegedly a mouthpiece of the eponymous Towarzystwo Patriotycznych Polityków (Society of Patriotic Politicians). 1 Of the latter we know close to nothing (were they really a group of people or just a literary device?). The exact scope and nature of Harasevych’s contribution is yet to be ascertained, but it seems justifiable to assume that the ideological positions presented by the anonymous author(s) of this paper could not be very far from his own at that time. In any case, articles in the DPP show us what Galician elites knew about and understood from the European politics of the Age of Revolution and how they positioned themselves in regard to them as both the Austrian subjects and the former citizens of the still existing Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 2 I have resolved to translate some interesting excerpts from the DPP as an illustration of the ideological horizon of Galician elites, be they Greek or Latin Catholic.
In the second issue of the DPP, released on September 13, 1792, we find an allegorical essay on anarchy, introduced as a discussion that allegedly took place at a meeting of the Society of Patriotic Politicians. The subject of anarchy was especially relevant in the early 1790s, as many enlightened Europeans observed the violent breakdown of the French monarchy with horror. Indeed, the very first issue of the DPP related in detail la journée du 10 août, when the republican fédérés stormed the Tuileries Palace, effectively ending the royal power. 3 However, the author of the DPP essay on anarchy chooses to articulate his reflection in a bipolar field. Along the rather obvious French context, the other crucial point of reference is the political scene of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: the conflict over the May Constitution of 1791 ending with Russian intervention and the creation of a reactionary government dominated by the so-called Targowica Confederation. 4
The text contains several interesting moments, but I would only like to draw readers’ attention to three points here. First of all, the participants in the discussion related in the essay do not hesitate to identify the inhabitants of Poland-Lithuania as their compatriots (Polish współziomkowie), yet they do not reveal any sense of special solidarity resulting from this fact. Although the Patriotic Politicians are visibly concerned about the fate of the Commonwealth, one can also sense a sort of satisfaction at Galicia’s splendid isolation from the chaotic Polish-Lithuanian factionalism. Secondly, the critique of the violence and instability allegedly inherent in republican politics, be it French or Polish-Lithuanian, is completely divorced from Catholic orthodoxy. 5 Some images seem to be inspired by the apocalyptic visions of the Francophone Counter-Enlightenment, but others come from the Masonic repertoire. As a whole, the argumentation in the essay is purely pragmatic and secular (or deistic, to be precise). The authors of the DPP do not align themselves with the radical enemies of the Revolution, but rather assume the position of a moderate conservative Enlightenment, not unlike the luminaries of the Austrian legalistic monarchism such as Leopold II himself, Joseph von Sonnenfels, or Karl Anton von Martini. 6 Lastly, it is striking that the authors’ political concerns are so much in line with those of their contemporaries from other parts of Europe. If not for the explicit references to Poland-Lithuania, one might not guess that this text was written and published in a country located to the east of the river Elbe. There is nothing fundamentally East European about its form and content.
Galician Patriotic Politicians prove to be keen observers of the European politics. They successfully synthesise their knowledge of Western and Eastern European developments into a coherent, if not very original, diagnosis of contemporary ideological conflicts. English civil wars, the French Revolution, May Constitution, and the Targowica Confederation are presented as items of the same series that could be captioned ‘republican disorders’. In this way, the Patriotic Politicians define their own location in a Lviv suspended between Paris, Vienna, and Warsaw. One cannot resist noticing that they seem to be quite satisfied that the House of Austria potects their Galician patria from the vicissitudes of republican factionalism. Here, we can see how a section of the Enlightened Polish-speaking elite of that Habsburg crownland, a country just twenty-years old at the moment, comes to terms with the dynamic realities of their time and thus contributes to the collective effort of inventing Galicia, a process analysed among others by Larry Wolff and Miloš Řezník. 7
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ANARCHY
A quarrel over the meaning of this word in the Society of Patriotic Politicians
Monstrum horendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademtum.
Virg. 8
As is widely known, in accordance with the regulations adopted once and for all in our society, each member cum voce activa is responsible for one kingdom and has to faithfully gather news from that state, add his remarks, and pronounce his opinion during sessions in pleno, after which everybody is allowed to reveal their thoughts and say whatever they like. 9
When the reading of news at our last session was over, Mr. Zawieruchowski, 10 rapporteur of tidings from Poland, rose and spoke from the depths of his heart:
‘Thank God that peace has been restored in Poland. The way in which the unrest was quelled was onerous indeed, but as there was no other, they had to resort to this one. It is enough that the country is peaceful, that the war is over.’ 11
‘I am happy for you, sir,’ responded Mr. Mędrski, the serious president of our society, 12 ‘but I am still concerned about the future.’
‘But why?’ said Mr. Zawieruchowski. ‘Do you, sir, want the war to last longer?’
‘I despise the spilling of innocent blood, but…’
‘What are you afraid then? And what is the cause of your fear?’
‘Knowing how restless the minds of our compatriots are, do not I have legitimate reasons for concern about the future?’
‘It has always been this way: dilemmas, dissensions, hatreds often prove beneficial for a free country. Otherwise, would the Englishmen have brought their affairs to the present state?’
‘English history is full of dreadful periods. Moreover, do you deem, gentlemen, that Poles are Englishmen?’ 13
‘Why not? But this is a topic for another occasion. Now, sir, please tell us why you fear about the future.’
‘This is why: the sympathisers of the May 3 Constitution have not abandoned their hopes. Gentlemen, you heard recently that the number of the discontented is substantial and that the Friends of the Constitution will find supporters and backing for their endeavours.’ 14
‘So what?’
‘The General Confederation and its Protectress will not make any concessions.’ 15
‘What then?’
‘A civil war.’
‘And the outcome?’
‘The lot of Poland is pretty similar to that of France: anarchy! Oh, my beloved gentlemen, this word is dreadful, but its consequences are even worse: disgusting devastations!’
‘Please instruct me what this anarchy means. I hear this word a lot, but each person explains it in a different way.’
‘Sir, think about France and you will have a vivid representation of anarchy. All civic bonds are torn, government – toppled, laws – disrespected. Superiors are powerless, courts of law – deprived of authority, virtuous citizens – either murdered or moaning in dungeons, government – in the hands of the dissolute populace. A couple of days ago, after having read a lot about the current revolution in France, I fell soundly asleep and just before the dawn I had the following dream, as if I had been awake:
DREAM
I was near Paris, on Montmartre hill. 16 The land was covered in thick darkness and there was no light except for the moon beams. Suddenly, I noticed some divine figure approaching me from the east. It was adorned with brightness and the whole world was depicted on its vestments. From its pleasant face I recognised that this was Oromazdes (principium boni) floating on clouds above the unfortunate France. 17 When he came closer, I heard these words come out from his mouth: “The French nation is numerous, manly, industrious, and valiant, but lest it waste these rare gifts, I shall create a powerful genius to watch over its prosperity.” Then, he said: “Let it be so!” and immediately a female figure of such beauty appeared that I had never before seen an equal. Then, he took from the mass of farmers, artisans, and merchants and used this material to mould this woman’s breasts, which produced ambrosia instead of milk. Next, he took from the mass of learned men, statesmen, lawyers, and sages and having created a brain out of it he put it in her head, after which her eyes started to radiate with bright rays. Eventually, he took from the mass of kings and put it right in the middle of her brain saying: “This will be the centre where all the powers animating the limbs meet.” Immediately, the goddess began to move and act as a protectress of France. Oromazdes flew towards the west and I prostrated myself, piously adoring the omnipotence of gods.
Then, having heard the murmur of thunders in the distant north, I bounced to my feet. Again, there was a thick darkness interrupted by occasional lightnings. Trembling with fear I recognised the approach of Ahriman (principium mali), thunderbolts still in his hand. 18 “Hah,” he shouted in a tremendous voice. “The destroyer of my projects, that friend of good order, was here. I can see the traces of his actions. You, woman, are a work of his hands. True, you are powerful, but you will not be stronger than I am. Become what I want you to be!” Having said that, he threw a thunderbolt with his right hand and hit her right in her head: her eyes dimmed, her brain leaked, her breasts dried, and her limbs fell off. The whole body melted into an amorphous lump, which, too feeble to stand on its own, fell upon France. Her breasts teemed with worms and vipers; spears, swords, and daggers punctured her belly; and terrifying flames gushed from her intestines as if from a bottomless abyss. Having concluded this terrible work, Ahriman roared in the air: “Anarchy!” and flew back towards the north, whereas the terror woke me up.’
The whole society agreed to publish this dream in our journal. 19
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1 See Maurycy Dzieduszycki, “Przeszłowieczny dziennik lwowski,” Przewodnik Naukowy i Literacki, Year 3 (1875), 33-51 and Halina Kozłowska, “Lwowski »Dziennik Patriotycznych Polityków« (1792-1798),” Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego. Prace Historyczne, No 55 (1976), 79-111.
2 Galicia was created as a result of the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772. The latter survived as a separate polity until the third partition in 1795. For 23 years the Commonwealth was Galicia’s northern neighbour and many noble landowners would have their land estates on both sides of the border as the so called sujets mixtes with the right to vote in the diets of both countries.
3 On August 2, 1792, radical republican militants, mostly the federés volunteers, stormed the Tuileries Palace, the Parisian residence of the royal family. This event resulted in the de facto end of constitutional monarchy in France (although the Republic was not officially proclaimed until the second half of September). In the following month French political scene became especially brutal and volatile, which is sometimes characterised as the First Terror. These events were widely publicised all over Europe, usually in a negative light.
4 In the eighteenth century the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth languished under Russian protectorate, as St Petersburg blocked any attempts at substantial political reform. The situation changed in 1787, when the Ottoman Empire declared war against Russia. Forced to focus on the military actions in the Black Sea region, Empress Catherine II was no longer able to control the Polish-Lithuanian politics so closely. As a result, years 1788-1792 saw intense political reforms in Poland-Lithuania, culminating with the Enlightened Constitution of May 3, 1791. However, many conservative republicans were unhappy with the new form of government: they deemed that it deprived them of their liberties for the sake of orderly administration. These malcontents formed in 1792 an oppositional union which went down in history as the Confederation of Targowica, named so after the town of Torhovytsia in central Ukraine, where its manifesto was allegedly penned and published. At the same time, Catherine signed a satisfactory peace treaty with the Ottomans and directed her gaze towards the Commonwealth. Thus, the Targowica leaders obtained the Russian military support necessary to overthrow the reformist government in Warsaw. The Russian invasion in the summer of 1792 brought an abrupt end to the period of Enlightened reform in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and accelerated the eventual collapse of this polity. The name of Targowica remains a byword for high treason in contemporary Polish.
5 For the Counter-Enlightenment see Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001) and Martyna Deszczyńska, Polskie kontroświecenie (Warsaw, 2011).
6 See Teodora Shek Bernardić, “Modalities Of Enlightened Monarchical Patriotism In The Mid-Eighteenth Century Habsburg Monarchy,” in Balazs Trencsenyi and Márton Zászkaliczky, eds, Whose Love of Which Country? Composite States, National Histories and Patriotic Discourses in Early Modern East Central Europe (Leiden, 2010), 629-661.
7 Miloš Řezník, Neuorientierung einer Elite: Aristokratie, Ständewesen und Loyalität in Galizien (1772-1795) (Frankfurt am Main, 2016) and Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, 2010).
8 A corrupted quote from Virgil’s Æneid. The correct version is Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum, meaning: “A monster frightful, formless, immense, with sight removed.” It is a description of cyclops who were presented as quintessentially irrational and cruel brutes in the Greco-Roman poetry. Here, it serves as a metaphor of mob rule.
9 Cum voce activa literally means “with active suffrage,” but here it is probably intended to describe full suffrage. Sessions in pleno are general meetings, which all the members of the society are encouraged or even required to attend.
10 Mr. Zawieruchowski is a meaningful name derived from the Polish noun zawierucha, meaning storm, turmoil, chaos.
11 At the end of July 1792, in the face of overwhelming Russian might, Poland-Lithuania’s pro-reform king chose to surrender and accept the repeal of the 1791 Constitution. Targowica leaders took up the reins of government and started to persecute their enemies. In 1793, they had to swallow the second partition of the Commonwealth by Prussia and Russia, but until the outbreak of the Kościuszko Uprising in 1794 one could also credit them with providing a modicum of stability.
12 Mr. Mędrski is another meaningful name, this time derived from the Polish adjective mądry, meaning wise.
13 The authors mean here the British Civil Wars of 1638-1652 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1691.
14 By Friends of the Constitution the author may mean the members of the Assembly of Friends of the Government Constitution “Let there be Light” (in Polish Zgromadzenie Przyjaciół Konstytucji Rządowej “Fiat Lux”), sometimes credited as the first modern political party in Poland-Lithuania. More broadly, the author can describe in this way any supporters of the 1791 Constitution or in fact any enemies of the Targowica regime established thanks to the Russian invasion of 1792.
15 The General Confederation stands here for Targowica. Obviously, its protectress was the Empress Catherine II of Russia.
16 The hill of Montmartre remained outside the city limits until 1860.
17 In the Zoroastrian tradition Oromazdes (or Ahura Mazda) is the benevolent creator god, lord of wisdom and order, the hypostasis of good, rendered here in Latin as principium boni. Zoroastrian-inspired symbols were present in the Masonic rituals and, as a result, in the wider cultural sphere of the eighteenth-century Europe: see for example Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera Zoroastre (1756) about the struggle of good and evil spirits and their human followers.
18 In the Zoroastrian tradition Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu) is the hypostasis of evil, rendered here in Latin as principium mali, the destructive and chaos-sowing opponent of Oromazdes.
19 I would like to thank Jared Warren for his careful reading of the first draft of this translation and his useful editing suggestions.
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This is not an academic text sensu stricto. Its goal is to disseminate knowledge and to stimulate public interest in our field. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of either PAN or NCN.
