ABSTRACT
The disappearance of the Polish state in 1795 led to a quest for restoration that lasted more than a century. Initially, the quest was carried out in diplomatic terms. Only gradually did the notion of Poland as a nation, entitled as such to the dignity of statehood, enter consciousness. This chapter traces the evolution of this idea in the thinking of the leader of the right-wing of the Polish emigration, Prince Adam Czartoryski, who never favored an insurrection in his native land but who eventually embraced the notion of Poland as a nation and therefore as a state, thereby abandoning former estate-based conceptions of Polishness for a vision compatible with modernity.
