Poland, Mazzini and Revolutionary Europe

The Great Emigration did not understand Polish independence as an isolated national problem. For many of the political refugees who left the partitioned Polish lands after the November Uprising, the destruction of Poland belonged to a larger European system in which dynastic empires suppressed national movements, constitutional government and republican politics across the continent. If that system could be broken in Italy, Germany, Hungary or the Balkans, the political order that had partitioned Poland might also begin to collapse.

No figure expressed this international conception of national revolution more powerfully than Giuseppe Mazzini. The Genoese revolutionary believed that nations possessed distinct historical missions but could only fulfil them within a wider community of free peoples. Italian unification was therefore not, in his conception, a narrowly Italian project. It formed part of a European transformation in which Poles, Germans, Hungarians and other politically divided or subject peoples would overthrow the dynastic order created after the Napoleonic Wars and replace it with a Europe founded upon independent nations.

For Polish émigrés, this language was immediately familiar. The November Uprising had failed partly because Poland had confronted Russia without decisive support from the Western powers, while the partitions themselves had been sustained by the cooperation of Russia, Prussia and Austria. Many democrats therefore concluded that another purely Polish insurrection could not succeed unless it formed part of a much wider European crisis. Mazzini offered them a political framework in which national independence and international solidarity were not contradictory but mutually dependent.

The relationship ran in both directions. Italian scholarship has emphasised that Mazzini was himself strongly influenced by the Polish émigrés and by Polish interpretations of national suffering, while his ideas helped shape organisations and political documents within the Polish democratic emigration. The encounter between Italian and Polish nationalism became one of the most important examples of the transnational political culture created by nineteenth-century exile.

Read about the Polish political factions of the Great Emigration here.

Italy and Poland: two nations divided by the European order

The parallels between the Polish and Italian situations were never exact, but they were powerful enough to inspire contemporaries. Poland had ceased to exist as an independent state after the partitions, its historic territory divided principally between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Italy remained divided among several states, while Austrian power dominated Lombardy and Venetia and exerted wider influence over the peninsula.

Both national movements therefore confronted political structures defended by the same European order. Austria was an especially obvious link. It ruled Polish Galicia while simultaneously controlling substantial Italian territory, and a weakening of Habsburg power could therefore create opportunities in both Central Europe and Italy. Russia represented the principal imperial enemy of Polish independence, while the Italian national movement faced a different combination of Austrian domination, dynastic fragmentation and papal authority, but both causes were increasingly presented as parts of a common European struggle.

The memory of the Napoleonic period strengthened the connection. Polish legions had already fought in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century under Jan Henryk Dąbrowski, hoping that participation in French revolutionary warfare would eventually permit the restoration of Poland. Half a century later, Adam Mickiewicz would deliberately revive the tradition by creating another Polish legion on Italian soil.

The connection between the two countries was therefore older than Mazzini, but the Great Emigration gave it a new ideological form. Instead of Polish soldiers merely fighting abroad in the hope that a foreign power would eventually restore their homeland, democratic émigrés increasingly imagined a reciprocal alliance between national movements. Italians would support Polish liberation because both causes belonged to the same transformation of Europe, while Poles could fight for Italy because the defeat of Austria or another imperial power weakened the system that sustained the partitions.

This idea would become central to the politics of the revolutionary generation.

Mazzini and the idea of a Europe of nations

Giuseppe Mazzini founded Young Italy, Giovine Italia, in 1831, at almost exactly the moment when the defeat of the November Uprising was sending thousands of Poles into exile. His objective was an independent, united and republican Italy achieved through national insurrection rather than diplomatic bargaining among existing dynasties.

Mazzini's nationalism was nevertheless explicitly European. He rejected the idea that one nation could become free by subordinating another, and he imagined national independence as a stage in the moral and political development of humanity. Nations possessed particular historical duties, but those duties ultimately belonged within a larger international order of free peoples.

The Polish experience became important to this thinking. Mazzini followed the fate of Poland closely and regarded the Polish struggle as one of the clearest demonstrations that the post-Napoleonic order rested upon the suppression of national rights. Treccani's study of his political thought notes that he was particularly influenced by Polish émigrés and by the Christian and martyrological interpretation of national suffering that had become powerful within Polish Romantic culture. His writings on Poland and his correspondence with Polish political figures helped transform the Polish question into one of the central examples through which he imagined European national solidarity.

The affinity was political as well as emotional. Polish democrats and Mazzinian Italians shared republican instincts, hostility to the conservative alliances that had stabilised Europe after 1815 and a belief that national liberation could not simply be granted by foreign governments. Both movements were suspicious of a politics in which oppressed peoples waited passively for the great powers to rescue them.

They did not agree on everything. Polish émigré politics encompassed conservatives, monarchists, democrats and social radicals, while Mazzini's own republican programme did not correspond neatly to every Polish conception of the future state. Yet the conviction that national movements should act together created a durable point of contact.

From the November Uprising to Mazzini's Savoy expedition

The connection between the Polish military diaspora and Italian revolutionary politics appeared almost immediately after 1831.

One of the most revealing figures was Gerolamo Ramorino. Born in Genoa, Ramorino had participated in the Piedmontese constitutional movement of 1821 before going into exile. When the November Uprising broke out, he offered his services to the Polish cause and became a general in the insurgent army. After the defeat he returned to Western Europe carrying the prestige, and controversy, of his Polish military career with him.

Mazzini selected Ramorino to command the armed expedition into Savoy in 1834, an attempt to provoke revolution against the Sardinian monarchy and initiate a wider republican movement in northern Italy. Polish and German volunteers joined the enterprise. The expedition failed badly, but its failure became important to the development of Mazzini's European strategy. Treccani notes that Mazzini responded by concluding that the Italian revolutionary cause needed to be placed within a wider international framework, and within months he moved towards the creation of Young Europe.

The episode captures the fluid political world created by exile. An Italian revolutionary who had fought for Poland could command Polish refugees in an attempted Italian rising organised by another Italian exile from Switzerland. National movements were already exchanging soldiers, political methods and revolutionary experience before any formal international organisation existed.

Mazzini's next step was to give that exchange an ideological structure.

Young Europe and Young Poland

On 15 April 1834 representatives of Young Italy, Young Germany and Young Poland signed the act establishing Young Europe in Bern. Mazzini intended the organisation to become an alliance of national democratic movements capable of opposing what he understood as the conservative alliance of monarchies with a corresponding alliance of peoples.

Young Europe was an ambitious idea rather than an effective continental command structure. Its practical achievements were limited, its organisations were vulnerable to police repression, and the national movements involved possessed different priorities. Yet its intellectual significance was considerable. It proposed that Polish, Italian and German independence should not be treated as separate diplomatic disputes but as aspects of the same European political transformation.

Young Poland, Młoda Polska, became the Polish component of this network. It should not be confused with later movements that used the same name. The organisation of the 1830s belonged to the democratic politics of the Great Emigration and drew Polish refugees into Mazzini's conception of coordinated national revolution.

Joachim Lelewel became closely associated with this world. After his expulsion from France and settlement in Brussels, he remained one of the principal intellectual authorities of Polish democratic exile, and the Polish Biographical Dictionary records that in 1835–1836 he formally headed Young Poland. Lelewel's relationship with Mazzini endured well beyond the organisation's short active phase; Italian biographical sources describe the two men as maintaining a lasting political friendship.

The affinity was natural. Lelewel had long regarded the Polish struggle as part of a wider European republican movement and distrusted excessive dependence upon great-power diplomacy. Mazzini similarly believed that nations had to win liberty through their own action while cooperating with other peoples facing analogous political conditions.

Their political languages were not identical, but both imagined European revolution as something more than a collection of unrelated national rebellions.

Szymon Konarski and the movement from exile back into Poland

The significance of Young Poland can also be seen through Szymon Konarski. A veteran of the November Uprising, Konarski entered the émigré revolutionary world in Switzerland and joined a Young Poland commune at Bienne. According to his Polish Biographical Dictionary entry, Mazzini offered the Polish democrats an alliance on equal terms against the common enemy represented by the states of the conservative European order. Konarski also participated in the failed Savoy expedition of 1834 before continuing his political activity.

His later career demonstrates that the international organisations of exile were not intended merely for discussion among refugees. Konarski returned clandestinely to the partitioned Polish lands and built an underground political network before his arrest and execution by the Russian authorities in Vilnius in 1839.

The route is revealing: November Uprising, exile, Mazzinian internationalism, clandestine return to Poland. The political world of the Great Emigration constantly moved between these stages. Paris, Brussels, Switzerland, London and Italy were not substitutes for Poland but bases from which a future Polish revolution might be prepared.

Mazzini's importance to the Polish movement therefore lay partly in demonstrating a method of political exile. The émigré was not necessarily a defeated refugee waiting for circumstances to change. He could become an organiser within an international revolutionary network, produce propaganda, recruit supporters, create secret structures and attempt to send political action back across national borders.

This model would recur throughout nineteenth-century Polish political life.

Poland and Italy in the political imagination

Mazzini's interest in Poland became more than tactical cooperation. He increasingly treated Poland and Italy as major components of a future European order.

Italian scholarship on his political thought has drawn attention to an exchange published in Giovine Italia in which Polish representatives invoked the historic ties between Poles, Hungarians and Italians and the similarity of their national situations. Mazzini responded by imagining the émigrés as participants in a great assembly of peoples whose separate national missions would contribute to the emancipation of Europe. He envisaged Poland operating towards the north and Slavic world while Italy assumed a corresponding role in southern Europe.

This was characteristic of Mazzini's nationalism. He did not imagine a homogeneous Europe in which national identities disappeared. The nation was, for him, the necessary political form through which peoples contributed to humanity. International solidarity therefore required national independence rather than the dissolution of nationality.

This aspect of Mazzinian thinking appealed strongly to Polish émigrés because the internationalism it offered did not require them to abandon the specific objective of restoring Poland. A Polish democrat could support Italian unification without regarding the Italian cause as a distraction from his own. Helping to break Austrian power in Italy could weaken an empire that also ruled Polish Galicia; encouraging revolutionary cooperation could make a future general European crisis more likely; supporting the principle of national self-government strengthened the intellectual argument for Polish independence itself.

The relationship was therefore reciprocal. Poland became evidence for the injustice of imperial partition, while Italy offered a living example of how a divided nation might attempt to reconstruct itself through revolutionary action.

The Kraków Uprising of 1846 and Mazzini's continuing Polish commitment

The revolutionary optimism of the early 1830s produced repeated disappointment, but Mazzini did not lose interest in the Polish cause.

When the Kraków Uprising failed in 1846 and Austria annexed the Free City of Kraków, Mazzini publicly supported Poland and participated in efforts to raise assistance. Research into his relationship with the Polish emigration shows him using the crisis to renew attempts at international democratic coordination and seeking Lelewel's involvement in broader European organisations.

The Kraków catastrophe reinforced the argument that localised national risings could be isolated and defeated unless they formed part of something larger. Poland's insurgents had again been overwhelmed, while the annexation of Kraków demonstrated how easily the conservative powers could eliminate the remaining political exceptions created by the settlement of 1815.

Two years later that apparently stable European order would be shaken across the continent.

The revolutions of 1848 transformed the relationship between abstract international solidarity and practical revolutionary cooperation.

The Springtime of Nations

The revolutions of 1848 appeared to fulfil the expectations around which the democratic Great Emigration had organised itself for nearly two decades. Revolution overthrew the July Monarchy in France, unrest spread through the German states and Habsburg Empire, Milan and Venice rose against Austrian rule, and national movements suddenly acquired possibilities that had seemed remote only months earlier.

For Polish democrats, the crisis seemed to prove that independence could return only within a continental upheaval. Poles entered revolutionary struggles across Europe, sometimes pursuing explicitly Polish objectives and sometimes fighting within the national movements of other peoples. Greater Poland saw armed conflict against Prussia; Józef Bem and Henryk Dembiński would become major figures in Hungary; Ludwik Mierosławski moved between Polish, German and Italian revolutionary theatres.

Italy occupied a special place because the struggle against Austria could be interpreted directly as part of the same conflict that affected Polish interests. The expulsion of Austrian power from northern Italy would weaken one of the partitioning empires, while successful national revolution there might encourage similar movements elsewhere.

For Adam Mickiewicz, the opportunity was decisive.

Mickiewicz in Rome and the Polish Legion of 1848

Adam Mickiewicz had spent much of the 1840s exploring the spiritual and political meaning of national liberation. When revolution spread across Europe in 1848, he concluded that the moment demanded action.

He went to Rome and attempted to place the Polish cause within the upheaval transforming Italy. On 29 March 1848 he established the nucleus of a new Polish Legion and issued the Skład zasad, or Set of Principles, as its political programme. The document combined Christian language, Polish national resurrection and an ambitious democratic social vision. It demanded equality before the law, freedom of religion and speech, elected public office and equal civil rights for women and Jews, while also declaring political solidarity with other nations.

The legion deliberately recalled the earlier Polish Legions in Italy, but the political context had changed. Dąbrowski's legions had fought within the military system of revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Mickiewicz's formation was conceived as an expression of solidarity between national movements. Poles would fight for Italian freedom because the Italian struggle against Austria formed part of the same European transformation upon which Polish independence depended.

Mickiewicz's legion moved north and became attached to the struggle in Lombardy. The Polish Army Museum records that the force developed into a company of roughly 150 bayonets under Colonel Mikołaj Kamieński, including émigré volunteers and Poles who had previously served in Austrian forces. It fought in the Italian campaign against Austria and later participated in the revolutionary conflicts that continued into 1849.

The legion was never a large army and could not determine the outcome of the Italian war. Its importance was political and symbolic. It embodied the conviction that Polish independence could be advanced by fighting for another nation's liberty.

Mickiewicz and Mazzini

Mickiewicz and Mazzini belonged to the same broad Romantic revolutionary world, but their direct personal relationship developed relatively late. Research into the Polish emigration records that they met during the revolutionary events of 1848, when Mickiewicz was organising his Italian initiative and Mazzini was deeply involved in the revolutionary movement. Mazzini supported the idea of the Polish Legion and admired the political principles Mickiewicz attached to it.

The affinity between them is easy to understand. Both believed that nationalism should carry a moral content extending beyond territorial self-interest. Both treated the nation as something with obligations towards other nations, and both regarded revolutionary politics in spiritual as well as institutional terms. Mickiewicz's vision was shaped by Polish messianism and his own complex religious thought, while Mazzini developed a distinct republican theology of duty, nation and humanity, but the two could recognise one another as participants in the same European political moment.

Mickiewicz himself described his legion in correspondence with Mazzini in explicitly republican and socially progressive terms. His intention was not to create a conventional expatriate military unit seeking rank or reward but to participate in what he understood as the general cause of peoples.

Their convergence in Italy therefore represented more than friendship between two famous Romantic figures. It brought together two political traditions that had developed through exile: Polish messianic-democratic nationalism and Mazzinian republican nationalism.

Both were trying to answer the same problem. How could stateless or divided peoples transform moral legitimacy into political power?

The Roman Republic and Polish participation

The revolutionary cycle in Italy continued into 1849, when the Roman Republic became one of the most dramatic experiments of the European revolutionary period. Mazzini emerged as one of its leading political figures, while Giuseppe Garibaldi became central to its military defence.

Polish involvement did not end with Mickiewicz's departure from the peninsula. The Polish legion continued to participate in the Italian struggle and took part in the defence of revolutionary Rome. Mickiewicz's initiative had therefore become incorporated into one of the most famous episodes of the Risorgimento.

The defeat of the Roman Republic by French forces demonstrated again how complicated the supposed fraternity of European revolution could become. Republican France, whose revolution in February 1848 had helped ignite hopes across Europe, sent troops against another republic in Rome. National and ideological solidarities could collide with state interests just as they had during the earlier history of the Polish emigration.

For Polish observers, the lesson was familiar. Governments could invoke liberty while behaving according to strategic calculation. The lasting alliances were often not between states but between opposition movements, political refugees and revolutionary networks.

This distinction helps explain why Mazzini remained important to Polish democrats even when Italian governments pursued very different policies.

Ludwik Mierosławski and the international revolutionary soldier

Ludwik Mierosławski provides perhaps the clearest example of a Polish revolutionary whose career became genuinely European.

A participant in the Polish struggle and leading figure of the democratic insurrectionary movement, Mierosławski was released from Prussian imprisonment during the revolution of 1848 and took command in the Greater Poland uprising. After its defeat he moved into the Italian revolutionary theatre and was appointed commander of the Sicilian revolutionary army fighting the Bourbon monarchy. Wounded in 1849, he then moved to the revolutionary conflict in Germany.

His movements are almost a map of the revolutionary Europe imagined by the émigrés: Poland, Italy, Germany and later renewed connections with Garibaldi and the Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth. By 1861 he was involved in a Polish military school in Italy, part of the preparation of a new generation for another struggle for independence.

Mierosławski's career also illustrates the practical market for revolutionary military expertise created by the upheavals of the period. Polish officers had acquired battlefield experience in 1830–1831 and subsequently carried it into other national conflicts. Their participation abroad was not merely mercenary. Many genuinely believed that each successful revolution weakened the political system that had destroyed Poland.

For this reason the Great Emigration produced soldiers who could move from one national cause to another without regarding themselves as having abandoned their own.

The limits of revolutionary nationalism

The idea of a fraternity of nations was powerful, but 1848 also revealed its limitations.

National movements did not always possess compatible territorial claims. Poles, Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Italians and South Slavs could all oppose imperial domination while disagreeing profoundly about the borders and political structures that should replace it. The language of national liberation could unite movements against empires but could not automatically resolve conflicts between neighbouring national programmes.

This problem was particularly significant for Poland because the historical Commonwealth had encompassed territories inhabited by Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Jews, Germans and others. Restoring Poland therefore involved questions different from those surrounding the unification of the Italian peninsula. Even within the Polish emigration there was no consensus on how national and historical claims should be reconciled.

Mazzini's formula of independent nations cooperating within a broader European moral order offered a compelling principle but not an automatic solution to these territorial conflicts. The revolutions of 1848 demonstrated that solidarity among peoples was easier to proclaim than to sustain once rival claims became concrete.

The failure did not destroy the ideal, however. Instead, it became part of the political inheritance carried into the next generation.

From Mazzini to Garibaldi

The relationship between Italian and Polish national movements survived the defeat of 1848–1849.

Italy itself moved increasingly towards unification through a combination of Piedmontese statecraft, popular nationalism and Garibaldian military action rather than through Mazzini's preferred republican route. Yet the success of the Italian movement became immensely important to Poles. Here was a divided European nation that had spent decades under foreign domination and had nevertheless succeeded in transforming the political map.

Polish revolutionaries maintained contacts with Italian figures. Mierosławski developed connections with Garibaldi and Kossuth around 1860 and became involved in Polish military preparation in Italy. His later career would lead directly into the January Uprising, where he briefly served as dictator of the insurrection.

The Italian achievement strengthened the argument that apparently permanent political arrangements could in fact be overturned. For Polish activists entering the 1860s, the Risorgimento was therefore not simply a foreign example admired from a distance. It was evidence that national unification and liberation remained possible within their own lifetime.

The political relationship created during the Great Emigration now began to work in reverse. Earlier, Poles had gone to Italy to fight against Austria. In 1863 Italians would come to Poland.

Francesco Nullo and the inheritance of revolutionary solidarity

The January Uprising lies beyond the first generation of the Great Emigration, but the participation of Francesco Nullo demonstrates the durability of the political culture that Mazzini and the Polish émigrés had helped to create.

Nullo was a veteran of the Italian revolutionary struggles, a Garibaldian and one of the Thousand who had participated in the conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. When the Polish uprising began in 1863, he travelled with a small group of Italian volunteers to join the insurgents against Russia.

Treccani's biography of Nullo makes the ideological continuity explicit. The Polish rising generated a powerful response among Italian democrats, and Mazzini attempted to connect it with renewed revolutionary action elsewhere in Europe. Nullo ultimately decided to go directly to Poland, where he was given command within an insurgent force and killed fighting Russian troops near Krzykawka on 5 May 1863.

His death became one of the most powerful symbols of Polish-Italian revolutionary solidarity because it reversed the pattern of 1848. Polish volunteers had fought for Italian liberty; an Italian revolutionary now died for Poland.

The principle “for our freedom and yours” had acquired a literal international history.

Mazzini, Poland and the meaning of European nationalism

The relationship between Mazzini and the Polish Great Emigration is important because it complicates modern assumptions about nineteenth-century nationalism.

For Mazzini and many Polish democrats, the nation was not necessarily imagined as an isolated community competing against every other nation. National independence could instead be treated as a prerequisite for international cooperation. A Europe dominated by empires was unjust because peoples could not fulfil their own political and historical development; a Europe of independent nations might create a more legitimate international order.

This was why an Italian nationalist could devote serious attention to Poland and why Polish émigrés could participate in Italian revolutionary movements without believing they had abandoned their own national cause. The freedom of another people could be understood as strengthening the principle upon which one's own claim depended.

Reality repeatedly frustrated the ideal. National programmes conflicted, revolutions failed, governments abandoned principles when strategic interests changed and liberation movements sometimes produced new rivalries. Mazzini's vision of a coordinated democratic Europe never became the political system he imagined.

Yet the network itself was real.

Young Europe brought Italian, German and Polish exiles into a common organisation. Lelewel maintained political relations with Mazzini. Konarski passed through Mazzinian revolutionary networks before returning clandestinely to Poland. Polish volunteers joined Italian struggles. Mickiewicz created a legion in Rome and marched it north to fight against Austria. Mierosławski commanded revolutionaries in Sicily. Italian democrats later supported renewed Polish insurrection.

The political map of the Great Emigration was therefore much larger than France, Britain or Belgium. It extended through Switzerland into Italy and across the revolutionary movements of the continent.

Poland within Revolutionary Europe

The defeat of the November Uprising removed the possibility of conducting Polish politics entirely within Poland. The Great Emigration responded by internationalising the struggle. Some émigrés, above all the Hôtel Lambert circle, pursued diplomacy among governments. Others looked instead to revolutionary movements among peoples.

Mazzini offered the latter group one of its most influential political languages.

His Europe would not be liberated by restoring the old balance between monarchies. It would be remade by nations acting for themselves and recognising the legitimacy of one another's freedom. Poland, precisely because it had been partitioned out of existence, became one of the most powerful symbols of what was wrong with the existing order.

Italy supplied the corresponding example of a nation divided internally and subjected in part to foreign rule. The two movements therefore recognised one another across exile, revolutionary journalism, secret organisation and ultimately military action.

Their relationship should not be reduced to a sentimental story of friendship between nations. Polish and Italian political movements contained internal divisions, pursued different strategic interests and did not always agree about the direction of European revolution. Mazzini's republicanism did not represent all Italians, just as Lelewel, Mickiewicz or the Polish Democratic Society did not represent every Polish émigré.

What connected them was more fundamental: the conviction that the map of Europe was not permanent.

The Vienna settlement, the partitions of Poland and Austrian domination in Italy might possess armies, governments and diplomatic recognition, but revolutionary nationalists rejected the assumption that these facts made them legitimate or eternal. They understood exile not as the end of political action but as the place from which new alliances could be constructed.

The Great Emigration therefore became one of the laboratories of modern European nationalism. Polish refugees did not merely continue to campaign for Poland from abroad. They participated in a continental argument about what Europe itself should become.

Young Europe, the relationship between Mazzini and Lelewel, Mickiewicz's Polish Legion in Italy and the later movement of volunteers between Polish and Italian uprisings all belonged to this wider history. They reveal a nineteenth-century political world in which national independence and European revolution were often imagined as two dimensions of the same struggle.

For the Polish émigrés, Italy was consequently never simply another foreign country. It was a battlefield, a political example and a potential ally. For Mazzini, Poland was not simply a distant victim of Russian power. It was one of the nations whose destruction demonstrated the injustice of the European order he hoped to overthrow.

Their encounter helped make the Polish question part of revolutionary Europe, and European revolution part of the political imagination of the Great Emigration.

 

Explore the wider subject: The Great Emigration: Poland in Exile After the November Uprising