In the Shadows of the Commonwealth: Catholicism,Religious Tolerance,and Nineteenth-Century Polish Independence

Abstract

Polish intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century defended Polish independence in the European public sphere through the conscious invention of a tradition of religious tolerance. Because defenses of Polish independence in this period were often designed for a European public, the multi-religious heritage of Poland-Lithuania’s past provided resources to shape Polish politics for a variety of audiences and their differing political and religious values. European and Polish publics saw the Russian empire as religiously intolerant, and therefore Poles crafted histories of Poland that offered an explicit counterpoint to this perception of Russia: a Polish tradition of religious co-existence. As long as these international geopolitical appeals remained a dominant part of their political imaginations, Polish intellectuals conceived of Poland in a multi-confessional manner. Polish intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century did not conflate Polish national identity with Roman Catholicism but framed their ideas against the multi-religious legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. However, by tying the question of Polish independence so strongly to the religious sphere, the figures in this article laid the groundwork for future developments in Polish nationalism in later (and more confessionally rigid) periods.

Introduction

When nineteenth-century intellectuals and politicians advocated for Polish independence, the geography of the state they aimed to restore was that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before the first Partition of 1772. ¹ This Poland-Lithuania was undeniably multi-religious. Advocates of Polish independence thus took for granted that a reconstituted Poland would be multi-confessional, and that this multi-confessionalism had something to do with the potential for restoring independence. Early nineteenth-century Polish writers of all religious affiliations—even pious Catholics—underlined the Polish lands’ multi-confessional population and its possibilities for peaceful co-existence in a reconstituted state.

This article examines the place of Poland’s historic multi-confessionalism in the writings of early nineteenth-century Polish intellectuals. Most of the figures discussed here were members of the post-1830 emigration; they were prominent in Polish circles and well-known for their writings in other European languages. In this period, the Catholic hierarchy stridently opposed the revolution, and Poland was closely associated with revolutionary politics across Europe. As a result, these individuals typically saw Catholicism as an antagonist to their political aims and opposed integrating Roman Catholicism into their patriotic politics. The poet Seweryn Goszczyński forcefully summarized this point of view in 1840, writing, “it is not possible at the same time to be a good Catholic and a good Pole.” ²

This at times outright antagonism notwithstanding, Catholicism later became an important vector of Polish self-understanding. Population demographics alone do not explain this transformation, as the independent political trajectories of Catholicism in France, Ireland, Italy, and the Czech lands (to name a few) suggest. Scholars have thus frequently sought to explain this perplexing and unexpected rise of a nationalized Catholicism in Poland, highlighting the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century as the moment of critical transformation. ³

Despite their reluctance to countenance direct political appeals to Catholicism, Polish patriots frequently gave religion (if rarely confessional politics) pride of place in their writings. Religion clearly had significant import. An examination of this seeming conundrum in light of these Poles’ European interlocutors sheds fresh light on the trajectory of religion in Polish political history. The men in these pages drew from a variety of religious ideas and representations of Poland’s early modern past to shape Polish politics for different European audiences and their differing political and religious values. They imagined that this domestication of the Polish cause abroad would strengthen support for international intervention. As long as these international geopolitical appeals remained a dominant part of their political framework, Polish intellectuals conceived of Poland in a myriad of religious ways. The publicists in these pages directed their readers to the history of Poland-Lithuania and consciously invented a tradition of Polish religious co-existence based on real and perceived legacies of the Commonwealth.

In the early nineteenth century, there were sharp debates across Europe about how best to administer religiously diverse populations and about the challenges and prospects of religious co-existence. These debates were fueled by a shift in the aftermath of the French Revolution from early modern conceptions of religious toleration toward a new framework of civic equality for members of various faiths. ⁴ Sundry European statesmen sought to harness religion for various state- and nation-building projects; Poles were not alone in their experimentation here. The broad European relevance of these issues, combined with the multi-confessional history of the Polish lands, gave Promethean material for Polish patriots to offer to different European publics. Framing the so-called “Polish question” through varied appeals to religious tolerance often required side-stepping Roman Catholicism, but it did forcefully and psychologically connect the question of Polish sovereignty to the religious sphere, with lasting ramifications.

By understanding the importance of Poland’s multi-confessional history in this period, we better understand the shifting religious terrain of nineteenth-century Polish nationalism. By re-situating nineteenth-century Polish intellectuals under the long shadows of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a new picture of Polish religion and cultural politics emerges. First of all, the history of Poland-Lithuania critically shaped the contours of early nineteenth-century Polish thought. Scholars of early modern Poland-Lithuania have long debated the history of religious difference, toleration, and violence in the Commonwealth. ⁵ These questions did not vanish with the Partitions. There was great interest in questions of religious rights and tolerance in the last decades of the Commonwealth’s existence and in its aftermath. ⁶ But because comparatively little scholarship transcends this chronological divide or studies the legacies of the Commonwealth in modern Poland, these historiographical questions largely disappear with the Partitions. ⁷ Thus, while Habsburg Galicia has been singled out as a “multicultured” place, this “multiculturalism” is depicted more in relationship to the Austrian empire and less often as a continuity with the Polish-Lithuanian past. ⁸ The Partitions did not end the region’s history as a multi-confessional and multi-linguistic space: the multi-religious and multi-linguistic populations of the Polish lands were part of multi-religious and multi-linguistic (imperial) states before and after the Partitions. ⁹

Secondly, because historical inquiry has traditionally asked how Eastern Europe transformed into twentieth-century nation-states, scholars often study the nineteenth-century roots of modern categories of identity more frequently than the early modern foundations of nineteenth-century history. As a result, efforts to understand the history of Roman Catholicism in Poland can relegate the stories of other religious groups to separate historiographies. ¹⁰ While scholars of Ukraine, for example, attend closely to the history of Uniate (or Greek) Catholicism, studies of Poland less frequently include space for the history of Greek Catholicism. ¹¹ Yet, when viewed together, the multi-confessional histories of the nineteenth-century Polish lands offer fresh insights. “Multi-confessionality” was not necessarily “a problem” for the “homogeneity” of the nineteenth-century nation, but it was a social and political reality that early nineteenth-century Polish patriots sought to exploit for their own goals. ¹²

Religion and the Polish Elite

In the early nineteenth century, Poles and their west European interlocutors took for granted that the populations of the Polish lands were multi-confessional, and they always pointed to this confessional diversity in their discussions of Polish history and politics. ¹³ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, members of the Polish political, cultural, and literary elite were often anticlerical and rarely especially pious. They viewed religious affairs as legitimate objects of state intervention more than as questions of personal commitment. ¹⁴ Across the Napoleonic period and the first years of the Kingdom of Poland’s existence, the traditional elite remained in power in Warsaw and sought to build state power through the management of religious confessions. ¹⁵ Even many Catholic noblemen among the bureaucratic elite saw their religion as “barely more than a stylistic prop.” ¹⁶ Because the critical question in this period (for the intellectual elite) was often about the effectiveness of state management of religious confessions, others even toyed with the idea that Protestants (seen as comparatively well-educated, less religiously irrational, and loyal to the state) made better subjects than members of other Christian confessions. ¹⁷

However, younger generations, born in the aftermath of the Partitions and coming of age during and after the Napoleonic wars, began to express greater interest in religion and in a new key. This emerging religious exploration typically occurred outside religious institutions within a rapidly shifting landscape of religious ideas. These interests were often deeply heterodox. They were inspired by a range of traditions—Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and pagan. Jan Potocki (1761–1815) drew from his reading of Islamic tales and Jewish kabbalah in his 1814 novel, Manuscript Found in Saragossa. ¹⁸ Adam Czarnocki (1784–1825) attempted to recreate pre-Christian Slavic folk beliefs by collecting fragments of songs and other information he found in his explorations of the Polish countryside. Using the pen name Zorian Dołęga Chodakowski, he published a book in 1818 that reconstructed a form of ancient Slavic paganism that he practiced himself. Interpreting Christianity as a force that destroyed the primeval unity of the Slavs, Chodakowski’s On Slavdom before Christianity argued that the advent of Christianity in Poland absorbed the Slavs into “the mutual hatred of the capitals of Christianity.” Christianity consequently had a “pernicious effect” on the Slavs, so Chodakowski sought to restore primeval Slavic unity through paganism. ¹⁹ The Protestant philosopher and University of Warsaw professor Krystyn Lach Szyrma similarly celebrated “the holy rites of ancient times” in an 1823 book; “the heathen song,” he wrote, could still be found “in those places in which political and spiritual power has been least oppressive.” ²⁰

Furthermore, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) famously explored the Slavic pagan legacy in his early works. His 1823 dramatic poem, Forefathers Eve, Part II (Dziady) was explicitly conceived as an exploration of contemporary peasant traditions that originated in the pagan past. The folk commemoration of ancestors (the Dziady “festivity”), he wrote, “derives its beginning from pagan times.” Therefore, “Our Dziady” were “pagan rites mixed with the concepts of the Christian religion.” ²¹ Writers like Chodakowski and Mickiewicz saw in Slavic paganism a tradition that united Poland with other Slavs and “distinguished [them] from the Germans, the Greeks and the Romans”; these writers celebrated the “gentleness, rusticity [sielskość], peaceful disposition, and above all hospitality” that they identified in Slavic paganism in contrast to the Greek and Roman pagan traditions that worshiped “bloody and vindictive deities.” ²² The introduction of religious themes into the works of Polish intellectuals in the 1820s could challenge orthodox Christian (and not merely Catholic) practice writ large.

In fact, the dogmatic aspects of Christianity hindered young intellectuals’ turn to religion. While traveling in Rome in late 1830 (not quite two weeks after the November Uprising had begun), the young poet Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859) underwent a spiritual renewal and found himself attracted to Catholicism. He highlighted his struggle with belief after reading a famous apology for Catholic faith: “I flinched, I paled, but I did not believe; and I fear, and I bow down, but I cannot believe,” he wrote to a friend. Despite his growing orientation toward Catholicism, Catholic “dogma” remained “the sole, but insurmountable, barrier” to faith. ²³ Scholars often identify Krasiński as the most orthodox and conservative of the three Polish Romantic “bards,” contrasting him with Mickiewicz’s heterodoxy and Juliusz Słowacki’s anticlericalism. ²⁴ Despite this reputation, Krasiński struggled to submit to the demands of Catholic teaching and he “quietly compos[ed]. . . heterodox religious philosophy” throughout his life. ²⁵ This struggle against orthodox religion reflected the broader orientation of the Polish elite and was of course typical of European Romanticism more broadly.

From the late 1820s, members of the Polish intellectual elite increasingly published texts in west European languages attempting to sway European public opinion in their favor, a trend exacerbated by the 1830–31 November Uprising in Russian Poland, which helped to create the Polish “question,” debated across Europe. ²⁶ As Poles defended Poland on the European stage, they sought to underscore Poland’s historic ties to Europe and to present Poland as a place worthy of political intervention. ²⁷ They began to appeal more to Poland’s various Christian denominations to link Poland with the concerns of other European audiences; the foundation for such politics had been laid by the increasingly religious frame of reference of members of the Holy Alliance and the Concert of Europe. ²⁸ As a result, agitation for Polish independence increasingly adopted a rhetorical space for Christian language and religious categories, even while Polish revolutionary activity maintained an uneasy relationship with Catholicism.

In the 1830s, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was overwhelmingly opposed to revolution, and not merely in Poland. Having undergone the traumatic experience of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, much of the Catholic hierarchy understood revolutionary nationalism as a threat to the Church. The presence of some members of the Polish clergy in the November Uprising pushed Pope Gregory XVI to issue his encyclical Cum Primum, which instructed Polish bishops to forbid revolution. Gregory reminded the clergy that “the princes,” not the revolutionaries, held the only “legitimate authority.” Polish Catholics were to respect the tsar’s authority. ²⁹ Gregory hoped that he and the Poles would thereby earn the tsar’s benevolence. The poet Goszczyński later explained that “priests, active in the uprising, appeared as Poles, not as Catholics.” In other words, they fought in precisely the same manner “as Polish Protestants, schismatics, Mahometans, and the like, under the inspiration of universal religion in Poland, under the inspiration of patriotism.” ³⁰ Polish revolutionaries and Catholic hierarchs had dramatically different priorities.

Within this context, Adam Mickiewicz’s famous 1832 Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage (published only shortly after Cum Primum) can be read as a rejoinder to Gregory’s opposition to revolution. The poet had an uneasy relationship with the Catholic Church, and while he did hope the pope might intervene on Poland’s behalf, like other Romantics he wrote about the need to create a new Christianity. His text fits neatly into the post-revolutionary period when European thinkers sought to build new (heterodox) religious movements that suited the political and emotional longings of many Europeans, and it can be seen as an assault on the intellectual domain of the Catholic Church. ³¹ Pope Gregory XVI unsurprisingly called the book “full of temerity and badness.” ³²

Although the text was intended for a Polish audience, Mickiewicz’s framing of the Polish cause appealed to many Europeans who used it as a template for their own revolutionary and nationalist agitation. ³³ An Italian edition of Mickiewicz’s text published in 1835 (the year after the founding of Mazzini’s Young Europe) argued that the book contained “wisdom” that deserved an audience beyond Poles; the poet’s ideas were “worthy of enlightening humankind across a wider space.” ³⁴ Two years after the publication of Mickiewicz’s Books, the French ultramontane priest Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais responded with his Words of a Believer, a text that echoed the Pole’s eschatological hopes in a more universalist and class-based language. ³⁵ One Polish poet described the French priest’s book as “an imitation of Mickiewicz’s with great plagiarism.” ³⁶ Lamennais’s democratic and socialist views caused him to be pushed out of the Church, demonstrating the threat this “universal religion” (to borrow Goszczyński’s language) offered to the Roman hierarchy. ³⁷

The context and reception of the Books of the Polish Nation make visible intellectual fights over the political uses of religious language in the 1830s. While deeply informed by Christian apocalyptic teaching, these religiously framed national ideas were at odds with Catholic teaching of submission to legitimate authorities. Mickiewicz’s text does not explain the later integration of Polish nationalism and Catholicism. Rather, that later integration has obscured the processes of the appropriation that entangled Mickiewicz in a nationalized Polish Catholicism. ³⁸ In this period, many Polish nationalists and histories saw the Catholic hierarchy as an opponent to their revolutionary goals. Understanding the rhetorical importance of religious co-existence in the European public sphere, many Poles attempted instead to craft a vision of Poland that marginalized Catholicism in order to paint a picture of Poland as a harmonious, multi-confessional society.

Imagining Multi-Confessional Poland

Polish historians often took the lead in crafting this vision of a multi-religious and tolerant Poland. In the aftermath of the November Uprising, they began to write more actively in west European languages to counter negative stereotypes of Poland. Claiming that west Europeans had previously written biased representations of Poland, the historian and cartographer Leonard Chodźko (1800–1871) claimed in 1829 that “indignation made me a historian.” ³⁹ Joachim Lelewel (1786–1861) similarly explained in 1833 that his histories aimed “to rectify the erroneous ideas that foreigners have formed on the social state of my fatherland, its laws, its institutions.” ⁴⁰

Scholars have long noted the centrality of history and the rise of the nineteenth-century historical profession to nineteenth-century nationalisms. ⁴¹ While national histories played a central role in the mobilization of the nation from within, national historians aimed to reach non-national audiences, too. Because Polish historians understood that the source of renewed Polish independence could come from an alliance of European powers, they wrote works for the consumption of European public spheres, hoping to sway those powers to their cause. These historians composed histories in multiple languages and sought to legitimize the Polish state and its claims to sovereignty for both domestic and European readers. In popular European depictions of Poland, Polish religious intolerance—part of Enlightenment stereotypes of Poland—was seen as a leading cause of Poland’s demise. ⁴² Early nineteenth-century historians attempted to offer the European public a more sympathetic portrait of Poland that countered European stereotypes of Polish intolerance.

Their argument about tolerance was a rhetorical device, a captatio benevolentiae designed to mold a foreign public’s opinion in favor of Poland. If Poland could be proven to be religiously tolerant, then the decline of Poland was not due to the oppressive influence of Polish Catholicism or the political failures of the Commonwealth (common criticisms from European politicians and scholars), but to the meddling of foreign powers (or foreign Jesuits) jealous of Polish liberties. When historians of the first generations after the Partitions looked to the Commonwealth, they saw a history that could be presented as a place of exceptional religious tolerance or as a place whose religious persecutions caused its downfall. Either way, this suggested that the path to a newly independent Poland was smoothed by religious co-existence. As Polish historians sought to legitimate their vision of a future, independent Poland through the reconstruction of the Polish-Lithuanian past, they consciously contrasted the religiously intolerant and autocratic history of Russia against a Poland they viewed as historically multi-religious and tolerant, but not confessionally Catholic.

The Polish past provided a specific set of challenges for the creation of this idealized vision of a tolerant Poland. While the Warsaw Confederation of 1573 legally enshrined religious toleration to an unprecedented extent during the Reformation, the extent of this toleration waned in the coming centuries. Wars, uprisings, and violence in the seventeenth century exacerbated confessional conflict, leaving the Catholic Church “beleaguered” well into the eighteenth century. ⁴³ In the final decades of the Commonwealth, Stanisław August (r. 1764–1795) dramatically reformed the Polish state, limiting the Catholic Church’s role in Polish politics. ⁴⁴ Many reforms pursued at the famous Four-Year Sejm targeted the Catholic Church, including taxation laws that increased the burden on clergy and monasteries and experimented with religious toleration. ⁴⁵

As historians defended Polish independence, they appealed to different aspects of this past, as suited their political convictions and desired audience. Walerian Krasiński (1795–1855), a distant cousin of the Romantic poet Zygmunt Krasiński, defended Polish independence in a series of publications about Polish religious history in Britain. A London-based diplomat during the November Uprising, turned refugee, he learned English “to address in it the public of great Britain in behalf of my native land little of which is known to this country except its sufferings.” ⁴⁶ From a Lithuanian Calvinist family, Krasiński emphasized the role of the Protestant Reformation in works published predominantly in the 1840s; he aimed to reach a predominantly Protestant British public sphere dominated by “a tradition of anti-Catholicism” and anxieties about recent Catholic emancipation (1829) and British rule in Ireland. ⁴⁷

During his long exile, Krasiński published extensively in English on Polish politics, the Polish Reformation, and Slavic Christianity. Together, these themes enabled the domestication and defense of a Polish political cause for the British public. He painted a picture of Poland as a tolerant society in the past and present, and he insisted that he had “never received [in Poland] the slightest act of unkindness on account of my religious persuasion.” ⁴⁸ The historian aimed above all to show a general historical rule (“that great truth”) that “intellectual and political development” came with the “progress. . . of scriptural religion.” ⁴⁹ This required casting all of Polish history in a Protestant light. Even the medieval (and pre-Reformation) Queen Jadwiga emerges as “a diligent reader of the Holy Scriptures.” ⁵⁰ Moreover, the fact of “a strong intellectual movement” among the contemporary Slavs pointed to the simultaneous potential for the growth of Protestantism in Poland. ⁵¹ If British critics of Poland had at times blamed the fall of Poland on its lack of Protestantism, Krasiński rendered this critique implausible, demonstrating that Poland had strong historic Protestant traditions, while a current renaissance in letters showed a Protestantizing Poland worthy of regeneration in the present. ⁵²

Yet, Krasiński’s Protestant Poland explicitly included other religious confessions, and religious liberty was central to his conception of a past and future Poland. He noted, for example, that Polish Orthodox in the Commonwealth (even “the most zealous followers of the Eastern Church”) fought for Poland against Russia because “they had liberties unknown to the subjects of their co-religionist, the tzar.” ⁵³ These liberties assured loyalty to the Polish state and would be a pillar of the political structure of a reconstituted Poland. In an 1854 proposal along these lines, he insisted that a future independent Poland would “insure complete religious and civil liberty to every inhabitant, and perfect equality in the eyes of the law.” ⁵⁴ In this regard, Poland offered precedent for the contemporary legal systems in the United States and Great Britain, where a “religious community” had the right to monitor its own affairs without there being “any civil consequences.” ⁵⁵ This separation of civil and religious affairs demonstrated “the high degree of intellectual and political development which our country [Poland] had attained in the sixteenth century,—a subject of which no Pole, to whatever religious creed he may belong, can think without a feeling of pride.” ⁵⁶ Krasiński presented Poland as a forerunner of Anglo-American republicanism, and thus no doubt (his reader could easily make the logical leap) a future ally of Britain. Not only did this provide an image of Poland that might appeal to a British reader, but it also explicitly flattered British pride, extolling religious freedoms shrouded in a Protestant aura.

Although Krasiński’s commercial success was not overwhelming, his books reached prominent members of European society, including a Welsh Anglican bishop and the English novelist Jane Porter. The French Protestant politician François Guizot read Krasiński’s study of the Polish Reformation with “lively interest,” recommending the book to “all the attentions of enlightened men.” ⁵⁷ Three times the Royal Literary Fund—an organization that required recipients to be upstanding contributors to British society—awarded him 50£ from a fund to support struggling authors. ⁵⁸ While Krasiński did not succeed in convincing Britain to intervene politically in Polish affairs, the historian’s defense of Polish Protestantism demonstrated the possibilities such a strategy could achieve.

The historian Jan Czyński (1801–1867) provided a radically different vision of religious tolerance for a Francophone and explicitly leftist audience. Born to a Catholic family of Frankist converts, Czyński was a committed socialist; his works argued for the expansion of civic equality in the Polish lands, including the emancipation of women. The history of Poland suggested this was both possible and desirable. ⁵⁹ Unlike Krasiński’s celebration of the current British order, Czyński’s writings have a utopian and emancipatory edge, not least in his 1839 History of Poland, which depicted the history of the Commonwealth as a dialectical struggle between tolerance and intolerance. As he put it in 1835, “Poland’s strength consisted in freeing the masses and in the widest religious tolerance.” ⁶⁰ This historical lesson provided a precedent for values that needed expansion in the present. Although this approach required a more critical stance toward the past than Walerian Krasiński’s and an explicit acknowledgment of moments of intolerance, Czyński argued that the root cause of violence in the Polish past stemmed from class, not religious, conflict. The nobility fomented religious discord to pursue wealth and power and bore the responsibility for alienating religious minorities. Therefore, noble greed, not religious difference, posed a serious threat to Polish social cohesion and supported leftist political conclusions. Despite these problems, “Catholics and schismatics lived together as brothers” alongside “Israelites” who found a “refuge and protection” in Poland that they had not discovered elsewhere. ⁶¹

Czyński’s willingness to criticize Poland was tied to his attempts to create a more just society in the present. After all, the extension of tolerance in the past repeatedly made the multi-religious inhabitants of the Commonwealth “peaceable and devoted subjects.” ⁶² That Poland had practiced these values in the past suggested that it would be natural for French socialists to support the Polish cause. A Fourierist “who backed direct action and creating exemplary communities,” Czyński painted a picture of a tolerant Poland that offered inspiration and lessons to those who wished to enact values of tolerance and equality in the present. ⁶³ These ideas were central to European socialists in the 1830s and 1840s. As a member of the left-wing Polish Democratic Society declared in 1838, “Tolerance, the freedom of opinion and conscience is also one of the strengths of the nation.” ⁶⁴ Czyński’s books—not least his pamphlet on women’s rights—also inspired the foundation of several Fourierist communities. ⁶⁵

Despite their divergent interpretations, Krasiński and Czyński agreed that religious tolerance was a central theme in the history of Poland and an important component of the contemporary debate to reestablish Poland. Both authors advocated the expansion of civic religious equality, but in frameworks offered to very different sets of readers. Czyński appealed to socialists to make Poland an active part of their broader search for equality, while Krasiński flattered the political status quo of the self-satisfied British elite. Their books were offered as publicity campaigns designed explicitly to sway public opinion in favor of the Polish cause. Walerian Krasiński’s dedication of an 1855 book “to the sovereigns and people of Great Britain and France, from whose happy union Poland expects her national independence” makes this clear. ⁶⁶ Despite differences in their political commitments, both Czyński and Krasiński placed religious tolerance at the center of their arguments for Polish independence. But not only historians took this approach.

Religious Visions of Polish Panslavs

In 1842, Walerian Krasiński described Panslavism as a “strong intellectual movement” that “may lead to the establishment of a powerful empire or confederation, composed of all the Slavonic nations.” Six years later, he argued that Austria should be transformed into a Panslavic state centered on Poland that would act as a counterweight to German and Russian power. ⁶⁷ This “political combination” would of course be multi-confessional, and he addressed the subject directly. ⁶⁸ Many other advocates of Polish Panslavism adopted the logic of religious tolerance to advocate Polish hegemony over the Slavs. Panslavism is often understood as fundamentally Russian (and Orthodox), where Catholicism and Russophobia prevented Poles from being Panslavs. ⁶⁹ This definition of Panslavism, however, ignores its many alternative nineteenth-century varieties. ⁷⁰ Competing visions of Panslavism were much debated particularly around 1848, as, for example, in the French Slavist Cyprien Robert’s 1847 pamphlet on The Two Panslavisms. ⁷¹

Poles worked hard to justify their variety of Panslavism, which centered their “belief in Slavic unity, and [their] desire to promote it” around Poland. This Polish Panslavism often took an explicit religious form. Advocates defended their bid for leadership by pointing not only to an ancient literary tradition and the plurality of Slavs historically under Polish rule, but also to Poland’s history of religious tolerance as outlined by Jan Czyński, Walerian Krasiński, and other prominent historians of the time. ⁷² As the Panslavic movement gained force in the 1840s, many Poles sought to position themselves as the face of what one Polish theologian later celebrated as a “holy Panslavism.” ⁷³

This holy Panslavism depended on the co-existence of Christianity in both Latin and Greek rites in the Polish lands, and this fact was used to defend Poland’s ability to unite all the Slavs regardless of confessional allegiance. What had been true in the past could once again be true in the future. The writer, politician, and general Ludwik Mierosławski (1814–1878) claimed that Poland, “at once Slavic and Latin,” had a “mediating mission” among the Slavs. Thanks to the cohabitation of different forms of Christianity, Poland was “the only possible common denominator between the two climates of the east and the west of the eastern region of Europe.” ⁷⁴ The French publicist and scholar Cyprien Robert (1807–?) picked up this idea, celebrating the “double character” of Christianity in Poland, where “two rival civilizations” co-existed and “the two Greek and Latin liturgies” were “providentially assembled.” This multiplicity of forms of Christianity was only possible because Poland, unlike Russia, had largely avoided succumbing to “shameful persecution” of religion. ⁷⁵

For many of these commentators, the question of confessional identity (Orthodoxy versus Catholicism) mattered less than the co-existence of Latin and Greek rites. It is true that very few Polish patriots felt comfortable cultivating explicit space for Orthodoxy within their dreams of a reconstituted Poland and that association with Orthodoxy could be seen as a betrayal of the Polish cause. ⁷⁶ However, they did point out, as Krasiński did above, that Orthodox Christians could be loyal to the Polish state. The anxieties about Orthodoxy stemmed not only from its association with Russian autocracy but also from stereotypes that the Orthodox were less well-educated than members of other Christian confessions. A member of the Polish Democratic Society, for instance, described a continuum of religious enlightenment. Higher levels of education made Protestants the best possible citizens, while Roman Catholics, Uniates, and then Orthodox were each progressively more disposed to religious “fanaticism.” For some, the political goal was to transform members of all confessions into better potential Poles; fanaticism made an individual less tolerant, while education could enable someone to be more tolerant. ⁷⁷

The harsh Russian treatment of the Uniate Church also strengthened Polish Panslavs’ ability to claim the moral high ground with regard to religious tolerance. In contrast to Russia’s ongoing and much-publicized persecution of the Uniate Church in the 1830s and 1840s, Polish Panslavs argued that Poland’s legacy of tolerance—as outlined by the historians above—made Poland the best candidate to lead the union of the Slavs, for the Poles could tolerate differences in a way the Russians could not. Since its founding in 1596 at the Union of Brest, the Uniate Church was an institution linked to the existence of Poland. Its survival after the Partitions was threatened when Catherine the Great forcibly “reunited” Uniate Catholics with the Russian Orthodox Church. Nicholas I continued her policy in the 1830s (although Paul I had taken a more irenic approach and reformed Uniate bishoprics in Brest and Lutsk), consolidating all Uniate Catholic parishes in the Russian lands of the former Commonwealth (excepting the territories within the Congress Kingdom of Poland) under the ecclesiastical authority of Moscow. ⁷⁸ This process was not peaceful, involved real coercion, and provoked outrage across Europe.

This “reunion” exacerbated pre-existing anxieties about Russian autocracy in western Europe. ⁷⁹ The 1843 publication of the Marquis Astolphe de Custine’s popular book La Russie en 1839 helped to cement the image of an autocratic Russian regime into mainstream European public opinion, providing Poles greater opportunity to make their rhetorical arguments about Polish tolerance. An anonymous pamphlet published in 1842 by a Polish exile, The Court of Rome and of Saint Petersburg, linked the functioning of the tsar’s autocracy (a threat to “humanity”) directly to “two questions”: Polish independence and the Uniate Church. ⁸⁰ In 1846, Makryna Mieczysławska published a (supposedly) firsthand account of the Russian suppression of her Basilian convent in Minsk. Her horrific story of the convent’s liquidation suppression, and torture of the nuns, became a European sensation debated by journalists, politicians, and religious figures across Europe. ⁸¹ Although her story was false (this was not proven in her lifetime), Mieczysławska’s narrative further hardened the relationship between Russian autocracy and religious abuses in the European imagination and provided Poles a chance to advance their own political goals. ⁸²

As a result, in the 1840s, the Uniate Church often played a rhetorically larger place in Polish discussions of politics and religion than did the Roman Catholic Church. The Uniate Church’s suppression in Russia provided the best illustration of Poland’s higher level of religious tolerance, which justified the restoration of statehood. It also illustrated the centrality of Poland’s historic connections to the Ukrainian lands in claims about Polish Panslavism. The Roman Catholic theologian Piotr Semenenko in 1834 argued that Greek Catholic Ruthenians were “the very heart of the Slavic body” and therefore the central element not only of Poland but “Slavdom” as a whole, where they “account for everything.” ⁸³ Semenenko—who went on to an illustrious career as a Roman Catholic prelate and head of the Congregation of the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ (a Polish order founded in Paris by exiles in the late 1830s and early 1840s)—reflected the religious complexity of the Polish lands in his own biography: he came from a confessionally mixed background with Protestant, Orthodox, and Greek and Roman Catholics in his immediate family. ⁸⁴

For some of the more pious Catholic members of the Polish emigration in western Europe, the question of Christian co-existence in Poland took the form of explicit debates over the liturgy. The Greek Catholic Church used a Slavic-language liturgy that (although explicitly permitted by numerous papal decrees) was often viewed with suspicion among Roman Catholics. The Ruthenian priest Hipolit Terlecki (1806–1888) spent a decade of his life in Polish circles defending a multi-liturgical Catholic tradition where all rites—Roman, Byzantine, Slavic, and Arabic—were equally canonical. ⁸⁵ Within these multitude of liturgical expressions, “there is no distinction among [the Catholic Church’s] children.” “Any sort of Catholic nation,” he wrote, “is equally the beloved son of the same mother, the Catholic Church.” One is “always only a Catholic” regardless of whether one was “a Catholic of this or of that rite.” ⁸⁶ Terlecki’s ideas emerged in the aftermath of 1848 and were related to his understanding of Panslavism. While a priest, he wrote anonymous treatises about Panslavism, arguing that the Slavs were united by “tribal feeling,” where “the guidance belongs to Poland.” ⁸⁷ Terlecki’s and Semenenko’s piety was a distinctly Catholic version of a broader political argument about religious co-existence made by more politically motivated members of the Polish emigration. Importantly, this meant that perhaps the Uniate Church could have played a greater role in debates about Polish independence in the 1840s than Roman Catholicism. In this regard, Russian persecution of the Uniates gave one of the greatest motivations for Polish patriots to leave a small space open for the place of Catholicism (writ large) in Polish nation-building.

Yet not all commentators saw the Uniates as unambiguously Catholic. For most of the figures here, confessional boundaries or identifications mattered less than the rhetorical importance of using the Uniates as an intellectual and political cudgel against Russian rule. Collectively, these Polish Panslavs painted a picture of Poland-Lithuania as a historically harmonious Christian society where Christians of all confessions co-existed. Before the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century ideas of an integrated Polish national Catholicism emerged, Polish nationalists stressed religious tolerance.

Conclusion

These defenses of Polish independence that emphasized religious tolerance could have surprising ramifications. In 1850, Michał Czajkowski (1804–1886) converted to Islam and joined the Ottoman military, adopting the Turkish name Sadyk Pasha. ⁸⁸ Czajkowski—a conservative Polish novelist and an emissary of Prince Adam Czartoryski—interpreted conversion as an extension of his previous political activity. On one hand, Czajkowski converted to avoid extradition to Russia from the Ottoman Empire, where he was then working; he was seemingly little motivated by religious fervor. As a character in a later book put it, “religions are for peasants, not for gentlemen.” ⁸⁹ On the other hand, he defended the choice to embrace Islam as an action that preserved his connection to Poland. A decade and a half later, Czajkowski described revolutionary Poles like himself who converted to “Islamism in order to remain Poles and serve Poland” in a book on his contemporaries called The Strange Lives of Polish Men and Women. ⁹⁰ For Czajkowski, religion was not the defining marker of Polish nationality—or of any nationality. He imagined his nationalist commitments instead in martial terms: the defense of Poland with military arms. ⁹¹ He found no contradiction in referring in the same breath to “Polish Muslims” [Polacy Muzułmanie] and “Polish Christians” [Polaków Chrześcian]. ⁹² While Czajkowski’s conversion was not theologically motivated, his choice to become Muslim nonetheless reflected his longstanding admiration of what he understood as the Ottomans’ preservation of traditional, rugged masculinity that was suited to the political needs of Poland. ⁹³ Religious commitments were separate from national ones, and a variety of confessions could serve the Polish cause in different situations.

Czajkowski’s conversion also reflected the world of all the writers, politicians, and publicists in these pages who saw Poland’s historic religious diversity as a strategy to employ in their campaigns to restore independence. Despite their political differences, none of these men saw an obvious link between Catholicism and Polish political goals. They each defended Polish statehood based on an invented tradition of early modern religious tolerance. The contours of this imagined, tolerant Poland reflected the political and religious worlds of the Commonwealth they hoped to restore. If the entirety of the population of Polish lands with their multitude of religious confessions were to be reunited in a single state, the Polish political and intellectual elite needed to avoid too easily conflating Roman Catholics with their political project. The defense of religious tolerance was one way to pursue this goal in a way that would justify rule over others while keeping themselves at the top.

Yet within this rhetorical argument, there were implicit limits to the extent of tolerance that these men advocated. In most of the arguments here, Jews were largely absent. Protestantism, Greek and Roman Catholicism, and even Islam could have direct geopolitical relevance to major European powers. While Walerian Krasiński could appeal to British Protestantism and Michał Czajkowski to Ottoman Islam as a strategy to promote the Polish cause, there was little geopolitical gain to be had from an explicit defense or inclusion of Polish Jews. There was no Jewish power in Europe to back the cause of Polish independence. Although Jews were one of the largest religious demographics in the Polish lands, Poles’ rhetorical constructions of a multi-confessional Poland could at times make more direct reference to Islam in Poland than Judaism. Jews were not frequently explicitly excluded, but neither did many publicists explicitly embrace Jews as an aspect of the Polish cause; more often, Judaism was a problem to solve. While these Poles saw confessional Catholicism as a threat to their political goals, the rhetoric of their project was nonetheless broadly Christian. In the early nineteenth century, the Polish elite was often ill at ease with the integration of confessional and political programs, but the idea of a “Christian” Europe had enduring appeal. These men did not build a Catholic Poland, but they linked the Polish cause to ideas of tolerant, Christian Europe. In so doing, they provided a platform for the subsequent confessionalization of nationalism in new geopolitical circumstances.

The rhetorical construction of a multi-confessional Poland was linked to the geopolitical situation of the early nineteenth century; Poles hoped to exploit the system of the Concert of Europe that presided over the balance of geopolitical power in Europe. The brutal Crimean War (1853–1856) broke the geopolitical frame that many Poles had been exploiting in the previous decades to agitate for independence across Europe and eroded the European international concert system that Poles hoped to exploit to recreate an independent Poland. ⁹⁴ The outbreak of the violence of war did not bring about a Polish state but the marginalization of Polish publicists across Europe. ⁹⁵ If Polish nationalists had believed it possible to exploit this system for the Polish cause, by the late 1850s, it was much more difficult to imagine that the broad alliance of European powers necessary to restore Polish independence would indeed occur. As Walerian Krasiński wrote in 1854, in a pamphlet about “the probable consequences of the present war,” the geopolitical situation had fundamentally changed. “It cannot be admitted for a moment that a peace between the allied powers and Russia could ever be negotiated on the principle of the status quo ante bellum,” he argued. ⁹⁶

The Crimean War also began to shift the language both Poles and non-Poles used to discuss Poland. Texts produced during the war and its aftermath employed increasingly more antagonistic, violent, and racialized arguments for Polish independence. The thoroughly Russophobic pseudo-scholar and racial scientist Franciszek Duchiński (1816–1893) propagated theories of the world’s division into European and “Turanian” races during the war. He argued that Russians (in his language “Muscovites”) were “completely foreign to European peoples.” ⁹⁷ Among the “barriers that separate the Muscovites from the Poles,” Duchiński listed “the difference of races.” ⁹⁸ This description of Poles as a racial category was not yet a dominant framework in Polish nationalism, but the tightening of political antagonism during the war helped to strengthen its appeal across Europe. Even such figures as the Catholic conservative Cyprian Norwid had begun to ruminate about the nation in more ethnic and racial terms by this time. ⁹⁹

By the mid-nineteenth century, religious divisions in Europe had also hardened, and the challenges to orthodox confessional boundaries that characterized the work of Polish Romantics had become less prominent. ¹⁰⁰ Mickiewicz’s Books of the Polish Nation and the Polish Pilgrimage had avoided being added to the Index of Forbidden Books, but the 1849 publication of his The Official Church and Messianism was not so fortunate. ¹⁰¹ The growing power of the ultramontane Catholic Church enabled more rigid disciplining of confessional boundaries. In 1852, the French count Montalembert, an avid supporter of Poland, declared that the Catholic Church had regained its old power after its battering by revolution and hostile politics: “We are entering the century of the Catholic renaissance.” ¹⁰² Thus, in the second half of the century, attempts to defend the Polish cause in a religious manner increasingly had to do so in more confessional terms. ¹⁰³

In 1855, the publicist Krystyn Ostrowski (1811–1882) could easily exclaim that the association of “Catholicism and Poland” was “a stupid execration.” ¹⁰⁴ Like the other publicists in this article, Ostrowski’s claim was representative of a particular historical moment and milieu. It reflected the multi-confessional Polish world that the generations who came of age around 1830 sought to construct and used to defend their understanding of European geopolitics. These men represent a lost world where Roman Catholicism was not integral to Polish political activism, a world where the integration of Roman Catholicism and Polish nationalism was not the only possible (or perhaps even likely) outcome of nineteenth-century Polish nation-building projects. Instead, the Poland they defended was multi-confessional. Yet, nonetheless, their insistence on the relevance of religion to patriotic agitation laid the groundwork for subsequent developments in later decades.