ABSTRACT
In political terms the nineteenth century was based on firm reaction to a Napoleonic revolution that arose out of the Enlightenment and its increasingly liberal interpretations. Napoleon’s arrangements in Europe involved a French Empire extending way beyond ‘natural frontiers’ to include an Elbe-Baltic corridor (separating Denmark-Norway from the German ‘Rhine Confederation’), Tuscany, Illyria and northeastern Spain; with dependencies in western Germany (where the Rhine Confederation brought the Holy Roman Empire to an end), Italy, Naples, Poland (or the Grand Duchy of Warsaw) and Spain; rounded off by more or less unwilling allies in the Habsburg Empire and Prussia. The impact in ECE was most apparent in Illyria and Poland and it is fascinating to speculate on the consequences for the region had Napoleon’s intervention been durable enough to establish a Yugoslav piedmont at the head of the Adriatic and safeguard Poland’s integrity so as to establish an impetus for nation state development far ahead of the Balkan countries that emerged in the second half of the century. Following the disaster of the First Partition in 1773, Poland’s attempted recovery through a constitution grounded in Enlightenment merely provoked a Russian invasion of 1792 and a Second Partition in 1793, whereupon T.Kościuszko’s rebellion in 1794 against foreign overlords ended with the capitulation of Warsaw and the Third Partition in 1795. Under Adam Czartoryski the Poles then took advantage of Napoleonic pressure against Prussia to forge a pact with St Petersburg under the ‘Puławy Plan’ to restore Poland in union in Russia. But this ‘Slavic’ initiative was overtaken by Napoleon’s progress to the extent that the Grand Duchy of 1807 also recovered the territory taken by the Habsburg Empire and Prussia in the last two partitions (less Białystok). Following Tilsit, the arrangement was a ‘gift’ to the Poles for supporting Napoleon and there was always the hope that full independence might be restored in the future. The Poles persevered although the continental system meant they could not export for economic growth (while Britain’s embargo on the emigration of artisans slowed down attempts at adaptation). Instead they sent troops to assist Napoleon in Italy and Spain and shouldered the obligation of paying off a mortgage owed to Russia as the former partitioning power.
