I Discovered the Polish Declaration of Independence

The manuscript entered the market looking like the sort of fragment that can easily pass through the trade without attracting much attention. It was the lower portion of a letter in French, written and signed by General Jan Zygmunt Skrzynecki in Warsaw on 12 March 1831. The upper part was gone, the recipient had not been identified, and a name written beneath the signature had been read as belonging to an otherwise obscure general. It was being treated, in effect, as an interesting autograph from the November Uprising.

What caught my attention was the language. In the few surviving lines Skrzynecki was not discussing troop movements or routine military administration. He was speaking about the rights of the Polish nation and the guarantees necessary to secure them. Those rights, he wrote, rested upon “deux besoins absolus: la religion et la liberté”, two absolute needs: religion and liberty.

The date made those words considerably more important. On 25 January 1831, only six weeks earlier, the Polish Sejm had dethroned Nicholas I as King of Poland, formally severing the constitutional bond between the Kingdom of Poland and the Russian emperor. The Russian army had subsequently advanced on Warsaw. The Battle of Grochów had taken place on 25 February, and Skrzynecki had been appointed Commander-in-Chief the following day. When he signed this letter on 12 March, he had held supreme command for barely two weeks and the survival of the uprising was still entirely unresolved.

The possibility that this was more than a routine military letter was therefore apparent almost immediately. What took considerably longer was proving exactly what it was.

 

The fragment

The first problem was the recipient. Immediately before the closing formula, Skrzynecki addressed the person to whom he was writing simply as “M. le M.” In a military context in 1831, the obvious possibility was Monsieur le Maréchal, but that still left the question of which marshal.

Beneath Skrzynecki’s signature appeared another notation: “Monsieur le Comte / Le General Lt. de Pahlen.” This had previously been interpreted as part of the address, and the surname itself had apparently been misread. Once I looked at the manuscript in the context of the Russian command structure during the November Uprising, however, the name Pahlen immediately became significant. General Count Peter von der Pahlen was one of the senior Russian commanders operating before Warsaw.

That still did not explain why Skrzynecki, apparently addressing a marshal, should have Pahlen’s name beneath his signature. The answer only emerged once I stopped trying to identify the document from the manuscript alone and began looking for the correspondence around it.

The crucial discovery was in the contemporary Polish press. On 29 March 1831, Polak Sumienny published an Order of the Day issued by Skrzynecki together with a sequence of four communications exchanged between the Polish and Russian high commands. The first was headed as a letter to Field Marshal Count Ivan Dybicz, the Russian Commander-in-Chief. Its date was 12 March 1831.

More importantly, its ending corresponded exactly with the surviving manuscript. The same ideas appeared in the same sequence: the Polish nation, the guarantees required for its rights, the foundations of those rights in religion and liberty, the address to the Field Marshal, Warsaw, the date and Skrzynecki’s name. At precisely the point where the manuscript abbreviated the recipient as “M. le M.”, the contemporary Polish version addressed him as “Panie Marszałku”. The unidentified fragment suddenly had a place in history. It was the surviving original conclusion of Skrzynecki’s letter of 12 March 1831 to Field Marshal Dybicz.

The newspaper also restored what the manuscript had physically lost. Because the complete letter had been printed only seventeen days after it was written, the contents of the missing upper portion could be fully reconstructed. Skrzynecki had rejected the demand that the uprising end in unconditional submission and that the previous political order simply be restored. He argued that Russian actions had forced the Polish nation to defend its political existence and to assume the position of a people entitled to recover its independence. The Sejm, the army and the nation were presented as participants in the same cause, and Skrzynecki declared that the army could not separate its fate from that of the country.

The surviving fragment contained the culmination of that argument. This was why the references to national rights, guarantees, religion and liberty appeared in its final lines. They were not isolated patriotic sentiments. They were the conclusion of a direct political argument addressed by the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish army to the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian invasion force. That was already considerably more important than the manuscript had appeared when it entered the market. But it still left one fundamental question. Was this simply a contemporary copy of Skrzynecki’s letter, or was it part of the actual document carried through the Russian lines?

 

Reconstructing the journey of the letter

The name beneath the signature provided the first answer. The Russian response to Skrzynecki’s initiative records that two Polish officers, Colonels Michał Mycielski and Klemens Kołaczkowski, had crossed the lines carrying the communication. They did not succeed in handing it personally to Dybicz. Instead they were received by General Count Pahlen, who spoke with them and forwarded the letter to the Russian Commander-in-Chief.

That sequence explained the manuscript perfectly. The letter itself was addressed to Dybicz, hence “M. le M[aréchal]”. Pahlen’s name appeared separately beneath Skrzynecki’s signature because Pahlen was the Russian officer through whose hands the document actually passed. What had looked like an inconvenient annotation became some of the strongest evidence for the identity of the object. A retained Polish copy would have no reason to carry Pahlen’s name. The manuscript in front of me did because this was the sheet that had actually crossed the front lines to declare Polish independence to the Russian High Command.

I then found the Polish side of the same episode in the diary of Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz. His account takes the research close to the creation of the document itself. During the negotiations, Skrzynecki retained Niemcewicz after dinner for a conference also attended by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski and Andrzej Horodyski. Niemcewicz records Skrzynecki setting down the ideas for a letter to the Field Marshal while they discussed the guarantees Poland should demand: the constitution, Polish laws and institutions, the character of the nation, the spirit of the army and the impossibility of accepting unconditional submission. Niemcewicz then records the next physical stage. Mycielski and Kołaczkowski were sent with the letter to Dybicz. On the following day he noted that the officers had gone towards the Russian Commander-in-Chief but had not found him personally at Miłosna.

At that point the documentary chain was almost entirely complete. Skrzynecki composed and signed the letter at Polish headquarters. Contemporary Polish testimony records the political conference from which it emerged. Two named Polish officers carried it through the battle lines. Russian evidence records their reception by Pahlen and his forwarding of the document to Dybicz. The surviving manuscript itself carries Pahlen’s name. Dybicz’s command replied the following day.

However, the correspondence then went higher still. Dybicz reported the Polish approach to Tsar Nicholas I himself on 13 March. The emperor replied from St Petersburg on 16 March and approved the Russian position. Within four days of the manuscript leaving Warsaw, the political question it embodied had passed from the Polish Commander-in-Chief, through the Russian army, to the emperor whose authority the Polish Sejm had rejected six weeks before.

The subsequent correspondence confirmed the significance of the first letter. The Russian response refused to recognise the constitutional position from which Skrzynecki was attempting to negotiate. From the imperial perspective, the dethronement of Nicholas had broken the relationship between the emperor and the authorities created by the uprising, and those authorities could not therefore be accepted as a legitimate negotiating power.

Skrzynecki replied again on 19 March. He defended the Polish position and insisted that the dethronement could not simply be undone without guarantees compatible with Polish rights and national honour. A final Russian communication brought the exchange to an end. Skrzynecki himself then made the correspondence public. In his Order of the Day of 27 March he presented the negotiations to the Polish army as a sequence of four letters and stated that those documents represented the complete course and result of his initiative. Two days later the entire exchange appeared in print with the letter I found as the first.

This detail mattered enormously for the identification. The surviving manuscript had not been connected to the exchange by a chain of modern conjecture. Its date, author, recipient and text had all been fixed publicly within seventeen days of its creation. The contemporary printed version preserved the missing beginning, while the original fragment preserved something the printed text could not: Skrzynecki’s signature and the physical evidence of the document’s passage through the Russian command. By that stage, the object had ceased to be a fragmentary autograph. It was a surviving state document of the November Uprising.

 

The Polish declaration of independence

The title I eventually gave it, The Polish Declaration of Independence, arose from what the research revealed about the actual function of the letter.

The formal constitutional act had already taken place on 25 January. The Sejm’s Act of Dethronement removed Nicholas I from the Polish throne and broke the political bond with the Russian emperor. That manuscript survives in Paris and is one of the foundational documents of the November Uprising, entered on the UNESCO Memory of the World list for Poland.

The letter of 12 March represents the next stage. Here the constitutional decision of the Sejm was carried out of the parliamentary chamber and placed directly before the Russian army. Poland’s Commander-in-Chief rejected unconditional submission, treated the Polish nation as entitled to recover its independence, tied the army explicitly to the national cause and demanded guarantees for Polish rights founded upon “religion and liberty”. The distinction is important. I had not found another copy of the Act of Dethronement. I had found the original surviving document in which the military head of the Polish state asserted the consequences of that act directly before the power attempting to reverse it.
In that sense, the manuscript records independence becoming operational.

There is something particularly compelling about the survival of only its conclusion. The upper part of the letter has disappeared, yet almost everything required to establish its identity and historical trajectory survives in the portion that remains. The final political demands are there. The appeal to religion and liberty is there. The address to the Field Marshal is there. Warsaw and 12 March are there. Skrzynecki’s signature is there. And beneath it is Pahlen’s name, the small administrative trace that allowed the physical journey of the sheet to be reconstructed across the battle lines. The lost beginning can be recovered from the contemporary printed version. The surviving original, meanwhile, preserves the features that print could never reproduce: the hand, the signature and the evidence of transmission.

I also tried to determine whether any of the other original manuscripts from the four-letter exchange survived. So far, I have been unable to identify another. The texts themselves are known because Skrzynecki deliberately published the correspondence, but the original papers appear to have disappeared into the enormous documentary dispersal that followed the defeat of the uprising. If further examples survive, they have not emerged in the research I have been able to carry out. That is what makes the route by which this fragment returned to view so striking. It came onto the market as something much smaller than it was. Nothing had been forged, embellished or concealed. The decisive evidence was already on the page. It had simply ceased to be understood.

A misread surname became Pahlen. An abbreviated “M. le M.” became Field Marshal Dybicz. A few lines about religion and liberty became the conclusion of a complete political argument. A date became the opening document in a four-letter confrontation between the Polish and Russian high commands. Contemporary newspapers recovered the lost text. Niemcewicz reconstructed the room in which the letter was conceived. Russian records reconstructed its passage through the front. Imperial correspondence showed the question reaching Nicholas I within days. The manuscript itself never changed. What changed was the amount of history that could once again be seen in it.

That, for me, is the most satisfying kind of discovery in the rare manuscript trade. Not finding something that nobody has ever seen, but taking an object that has survived for nearly two centuries and recovering what it actually is. On 12 March 1831, two Polish officers carried this sheet out of Warsaw and through the Russian lines of the November Uprising itself. They carried with them a letter in which the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish army refused unconditional submission and asserted the rights of a nation that, six weeks earlier, had declared that the Russian emperor was no longer its king.

Nearly two hundred years later, the surviving conclusion emerged again as an unidentified fragment. It was the Polish declaration of independence, carried onto the battlefield.