Poland at the Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815

When the victorious powers assembled at Vienna in the autumn of 1814, the future of Poland became one of the most difficult questions before them. The Duchy of Warsaw had been created by Napoleon only seven years earlier, enlarged after the Polish-Austrian War of 1809, and then occupied by Russian troops following the disastrous campaign of 1812. Napoleon's defeat removed the power that had sustained the Duchy, but it did not answer what should replace it. The territory contained millions of inhabitants, possessed an established Polish administration and army, and stood directly between the strategic interests of Russia, Prussia and Austria.[1]

For several months the Polish question threatened the unity of the coalition that had defeated Napoleon. Alexander I wanted most of the Duchy of Warsaw and intended to create a Polish kingdom joined personally to the Russian crown. Prussia supported Russia while seeking compensation through the annexation of Saxony. Austria and Britain feared the resulting expansion of Russian and Prussian power, while Talleyrand saw an opportunity to restore defeated France to the centre of European diplomacy. By January 1815 the dispute had become serious enough for Britain, Austria and France to conclude a secret defensive alliance.[2]

The settlement eventually reached at Vienna divided the Duchy once again, but it also preserved forms of Polish political existence created during the Napoleonic period. Most of its territory became the Kingdom of Poland under Alexander I, the state later known as Congress Poland. Poznań and surrounding western districts passed to Prussia as the Grand Duchy of Posen, while Kraków became a Free City under the protection of Russia, Austria and Prussia. The arrangement established in 1815 would shape Polish political life until the November Uprising and remained fundamental to the geography of the Polish question throughout the nineteenth century.[1]

Poland after Napoleon

By the beginning of 1813 the military position of the Duchy of Warsaw had become desperate. Napoleon's retreat from Russia brought Russian armies westward, and Warsaw was occupied in February. Prince Józef Poniatowski continued fighting alongside Napoleon with the surviving Polish forces and was killed at Leipzig in October 1813, shortly after Napoleon made him a Marshal of France. The political institutions of the Duchy survived only provisionally under Russian occupation.

Napoleon's first abdication in April 1814 removed any realistic prospect of preserving the Duchy in its existing form. Polish political attention therefore shifted towards Alexander I. This change was less improbable than it might appear in retrospect. Alexander had cultivated a reputation for constitutional ideas, and his long relationship with Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski offered some hope that Russian supremacy might be reconciled with the restoration of a Polish kingdom possessing its own institutions.[1]

Alexander's intentions were ambitious. He wanted the greater part of the former Duchy of Warsaw and proposed to govern it as King of Poland. The new state would remain connected to Russia through his person while possessing a separate administration and, eventually, a constitution. The plan offered Poles the continuation of a recognisable political state, but it would also carry Russian power much farther west into central Europe.[3] For Austria and Britain, that strategic consequence was impossible to ignore.

The Polish-Saxon question

The future of Poland became inseparable from the future of Saxony. Frederick Augustus I of Saxony had remained loyal to Napoleon and had also ruled the Duchy of Warsaw since its creation in 1807. Prussia argued that his conduct justified the annexation of Saxony and sought virtually the entire kingdom as compensation for accepting Russian predominance in Poland.

The arrangement suited Alexander. Russia would receive the greater part of the Duchy, while Prussia would be strengthened in Germany at Saxony's expense. Frederick William III's close personal relationship with the Russian emperor helped bind the two powers together during the negotiations.[2]

Austria regarded the scheme with considerable anxiety. A greatly enlarged Russian position in Poland would bring Alexander's power deeper into central Europe, while the absorption of Saxony would strengthen Prussia immediately to Austria's north. Britain, represented principally by Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, likewise opposed a settlement that would give Russia and Prussia such extensive gains and disturb the European balance the Congress was intended to establish.[2]

The dispute became increasingly bitter during the final months of 1814. Alexander already possessed a powerful advantage because Russian troops physically occupied most of the Duchy of Warsaw. Territorial negotiations were consequently taking place against an existing military reality. Austria and Britain could dispute Russian claims diplomatically, but removing Alexander from Poland would potentially require renewed war.[3]

France now found its opportunity. Talleyrand had arrived in Vienna representing a country defeated only months earlier, yet disagreement among the victors allowed him to present Bourbon France as a defender of legitimacy and the European balance. His opposition to the destruction of Saxony brought France closer to Austria and Britain, weakening the diplomatic isolation imposed upon it after Napoleon's defeat.[4] The disagreement over Poland and Saxony became the most dangerous crisis of the Congress.

Europe comes close to another war

By December 1814 military preparations were accompanying increasingly hostile diplomacy. Prussia had taken over the administration of Saxony from the Russians, while Austria became more determined to prevent the complete annexation of the kingdom. The powers that had marched together against Napoleon were now considering the possibility of fighting one another only months after entering Paris.[2]

On 3 January 1815 Britain, Austria and France signed a secret defensive treaty. The agreement was directed against the possibility of Russian or Prussian aggression and provided for substantial military forces to be made available if war occurred. Its significance extended beyond its practical military provisions. France, the defeated power of 1814, had entered an alliance with two members of the coalition that had defeated it because the Polish-Saxon dispute had divided the victors so deeply.[2][4]

The crisis eventually subsided through compromise. Alexander accepted that Russia would not receive the whole Duchy of Warsaw, while Prussia abandoned its attempt to absorb the whole of Saxony. The Saxon king retained a reduced kingdom, and Prussia received a substantial portion of Saxon territory together with important gains elsewhere in Germany. The Polish settlement could now be completed.

The Kingdom of Poland

The principal result for Poland appeared in the agreements incorporated into the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, signed on 9 June 1815. Most of the Duchy of Warsaw was united to the Russian Empire under a distinct constitutional arrangement. Alexander added the title King of Poland to his imperial titles, and the territory became the Kingdom of Poland, subsequently known as Congress Poland.[5]

The language of the settlement was significant. The kingdom was to possess a distinct administration, and Alexander reserved the right to give it the internal political development he considered appropriate. The Congress also declared more generally that Polish subjects of Russia, Austria and Prussia were to receive representation and national institutions according to the political circumstances each government considered suitable.[5]

Alexander went considerably further in the Kingdom itself. The Constitution of 1815 created a Polish government, bicameral Sejm, judiciary and army. Polish remained the language of administration. The kingdom possessed its own treasury and considerable institutional autonomy while sharing its monarch with Russia.

Many of these structures had direct roots in the Duchy of Warsaw. The territorial and political system created by Napoleon disappeared, but the experience of Polish administration since 1807 survived into the new kingdom. For the generation that had governed and fought for the Duchy, 1815 represented another reconstruction of Polish political life rather than a return to the situation that had followed the Third Partition in 1795.

Poznań and the Prussian settlement

Russia did not receive the entire Duchy. The western territories centred upon Poznań passed to Frederick William III of Prussia and were organised as the Grand Duchy of Posen. The Final Act carefully defined its frontier, while Prussia presented the new province as possessing a distinct Polish character within the monarchy.[5]

The title carried political significance. Napoleon's Duchy had restored Polish administration to Poznań in 1807; Vienna now returned the region to Prussian sovereignty while acknowledging its Polish identity through the designation “Grand Duchy of Posen.”

The practical extent of Polish autonomy under Prussian rule would become a separate and increasingly contentious question. The Congress settlement nevertheless ensured that the lands of the former Duchy were divided between political systems in which the continued existence of Polish nationality could not simply be ignored.

The Free City of Kraków

Kraków received the most distinctive settlement of all. The ancient Polish capital and its surrounding territory were declared a “free, independent and strictly neutral city” under the protection of Austria, Prussia and Russia.[6]

The Free City received its own constitution, Senate and representative assembly. Polish was to be the language of government and justice, while the Jagiellonian University retained an important place within the new political order. The arrangement created a small Polish republic surrounded by the three powers responsible for the Partitions.[6]

Its independence was always constrained by that geography. Russia, Austria and Prussia possessed extensive powers of supervision and would intervene repeatedly in Kraków's affairs. Yet from 1815 until the Austrian annexation of 1846, the city offered another surviving form of Polish political and intellectual life outside direct incorporation into one of the partitioning monarchies.

The settlement also separated Kraków from the kingdom ruled by Alexander. A city incorporated into the Duchy after Poniatowski's successful campaign of 1809 now followed a different political path from Warsaw.

For a detailed history of the Free City of Gdansk and its establishment, read here.

What Vienna meant for Poland

The Congress of Vienna did not restore the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the territories lost during the Partitions remained divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria. Lithuania, Volhynia and the other eastern territories of the former Commonwealth already incorporated into Russia were not united with Alexander's new Polish kingdom. Galicia remained under Austrian rule, while substantial western territories returned to Prussia.[1]

Yet the settlement of 1815 differed considerably from the complete disappearance of Polish statehood in 1795. Warsaw remained the capital of a Polish kingdom possessing a constitution, parliament and army. Poznań became the centre of a Polish grand duchy within Prussia. Kraków became a constitutionally separate republic. The institutions created during the Napoleonic period had changed the terms upon which the Polish question could be settled.

The importance of Vienna also lies in the expectations it created. Alexander's constitutional kingdom promised defined political rights and institutions. When censorship increased, parliamentary life was restricted and Russian government departed from Polish interpretations of the constitution, opposition could appeal to obligations created by the settlement of 1815 itself. The constitutional conflict that developed during the next fifteen years led directly towards the November Uprising of 1830–31.

The Congress of Vienna therefore opened a new phase rather than resolving the Polish question. Napoleon's Duchy of Warsaw disappeared, but the idea that Polish territory should possess distinct institutions survived him. The compromise reached in Vienna created the political framework within which an entire generation would experience Polish government, contest Russian authority and eventually take up arms in November 1830.

For nineteenth-century Poland, the road from Napoleon to the Great Emigration passed directly through Vienna.

Bibliography

[1] Bogusław Dybaś, ed., Die polnische Frage und der Wiener Kongress 1814–1815 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2021), especially Jarosław Czubaty, “Die Situation der polnischen Gebiete während des Wiener Kongresses,” and Karin Schneider, “Die polnische Frage am Wiener Kongress.” A major recent collection devoted specifically to Poland and the Congress of Vienna.

[2] Enno E. Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, Volume II: The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), particularly the chapters on the confrontation with Russia and the Saxon crisis.

[3] Reinhard Stauber, “Polen und die Arbeit der ‘Statistischen Kommission’ auf dem Wiener Kongress,” in Dybaś, ed., Die polnische Frage und der Wiener Kongress 1814–1815, pp. 61–72. Stauber traces Alexander I's demand for the occupied Duchy of Warsaw and the territorial negotiations surrounding it.

[4] C. K. Webster, “England and the Polish-Saxon Problem at the Congress of Vienna,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Third Series, vol. 7 (1913), pp. 49–101; see also Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

[5] Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, 9 June 1815, Articles I–II and associated treaties concerning the former Duchy of Warsaw. The settlement united the greater part of the Duchy with Russia as the Kingdom of Poland and transferred western territories to Prussia as the Grand Duchy of Posen.

[6] Additional Treaty Relative to Cracow, Vienna, 3 May 1815, incorporated into the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, together with the Constitution of the Free City of Cracow. The treaty declared Kraków and its territory free, independent and neutral under the protection of Austria, Prussia and Russia.