The Crimean War

Russian merchant vessel from every sea upon the face of the globe. (Cheers) Let a fleet be sent to the Baltic to close up the Russian ports, and what would the Emperor of Russia be then? A Kalmyk surrounded by a few barbarian tribes (Cheers), a savage, with no more power upon the sea, when opposed by England and France, than the Emperor of China had (Cheers).²²

The presence of Prince Czartoryski, ‘Poland’s uncrowned king’, in London increased British sympathy for the Polish cause. The fact that the exiled Pole was a former Russian foreign minister gave his warnings about Russia’s menace to Europe even greater credibility. Czartoryski had entered the foreign service of Tsar Alexander I at the age of 33 in 1803. He thought that Poland could regain her independence and a good deal of her land by fostering friendly relations with the Tsar. As a member of the Tsar’s Secret Committee he had once submitted an extensive memorandum aiming at the complete transformation of the European map: Russia would be protected from the Austrian and Prussian threat by a restored and reunited Kingdom of Poland under the protection of the Tsar; European Turkey would become a Balkan kingdom dominated by the Greeks with Russia in control of Constantinople and the Dardanelles; the Slavs would gain their freedom from the Austrians under the protection of Russia; Germany and Italy would become independent nation states organized on federal lines like the United States; while Britain and Russia together were to maintain the equilibrium of the Continent. The plan was unrealistic (no tsar would consent to the restoration of the old Polish-Lithuanian kingdom).

After Poland’s national aspirations were dashed with Napoleon’s defeat, Czartoryski found himself in exile in Europe, but returned to Poland in time for the November uprising. He joined the revolutionary executive committee, was elected president of the provisional government, and convened the national parliament. After the suppression of the insurrection, he fled to London, where he and other Polish emigres carried on the fight against Russia. Czartoryski tried to persuade the British government to intervene in Poland and, if necessary, to fight a European war against Russia. What was now at hand, he told Palmerston, was an unavoidable struggle between the liberal West and the despotic East. He was vocally supported by several influential liberals and Russophobes, including George de Lacy Evans, Thomas Attwood, Stratford Canning and Robert Cutlar Fergusson, who all made speeches in the House of Commons calling for a war against Russia. Palmerston was sympathetic to the Polish cause and joined in condemnations of the Tsar’s actions, but, given the position of the Austrians and Prussians, who were unlikely to oppose Russia as they also owned chunks of Poland, he did not think it ‘prudent to support by force of arms the view taken by England’ and risk ‘involving Europe in a general war’. The appointment of the anti-Russian Stratford Canning as ambassador to St Petersburg (an appointment refused by the Tsar) was about as far as the British government would go in demonstrating its opposition to the Russian actions in Poland. Disillusioned by Britain’s inaction, Czartoryski left for Paris in the autumn of 1832. ‘They do not care about us now,’ he wrote. ‘They look to their own interests and will do nothing for us.’²³

Czartoryski next took up residence at the Hotel Lambert, the centre of the Polish emigration in Paris and in many ways the seat of the unofficial government of Poland in exile. The Hotel Lambert group kept alive the constitutional beliefs and culture of the emigres who gathered there, among them the poet Adam Mickiewicz and the composer Frederic Chopin. Czartoryski maintained close relations with British diplomats and politicians calling for a war against Russia. He developed a strong friendship with Stratford Canning, in particular, and no doubt influenced his increasingly Russophobic views during the 1830s and 1840s. Czartoryski’s chief agent in London, Wladislaw Zamoyski, a former aide-de-camp to the Grand Duke Constantine who had played a leading part in the Polish uprising, kept good ties to Ponsonby and the Urquhart camp – he even helped to finance the Vixen adventure. Through Stratford Canning and Zamoyski, there is no doubt that Czartoryski exercised a major influence on the evolution of Palmerston’s thinking during the 1830s and 1840s, when the future British Crimean War leader gradually came round to the idea of a European alliance against Russia. Czartoryski also cultivated close relations with the liberal leaders of the July Monarchy in France, in particular with Adolphe Thiers, the Prime Minister of 1836–9, and Francois Guizot, the Foreign Minister of the 1840s and last Prime Minister of the July Monarchy, from 1847 to 1848. Both French statesmen realized the value of the Polish emigre as a friendly link to the British government and public opinion, which at that time were cool in their relations towards France. In this sense, through his exertions in London and Paris, Czartoryski was to play a signficant part in bringing about the Anglo-French alliance that would go to war with Russia in 1854.

Czartoryski and the Polish exiles of the Hotel Lambert group also played a significant role in the rise of French Russophobia, which gained strength in the two decades before the Crimean War. Until 1830, French views of Russia were relatively moderate. Enough Frenchmen had been to Russia with Napoleon and returned with favourable impressions of its people’s character to counteract the writings of Russophobes, such as the Catholic publicist and statesman Francois-Marie de Froment, who warned against the dangers of Russian expansionism in Observations sur la Russie (1817), or the priest and politician Dominique-Georges- Frederic de Pradt, who represented Russia as the ‘Asiatic enemy of liberty in Europe’ in his best-selling polemic Parallele de la puissance anglaise et russe relativement a l’Europe (1823).²⁴ But the Tsar’s opposition to the July 1830 Revolution had made him hated by the liberals and the Left, while Russia’s traditional allies, the legitimist supporters of the Bourbon dynasty, had strong Catholic opinions, which alienated them from the Russians on the question of Poland.

The image of Poland as a martyred nation was firmly established in the French Catholic imagination by a series of works on Polish history and culture in the 1830s, none more influential than Mickiewicz’s Livre des pelerins polonais (Book of Polish Pilgrims), translated from the Polish with a preface by the extreme Catholic publicist Charles Montalembert, and published with the addition of a ‘Hymn to Poland’ by the priest and writer Felicite de Lamennais.²⁵ French support for Poland’s national liberation was strongly reinforced by religious solidarity, which extended to the Ruthenian (Uniate) Catholics of Belarus and western Ukraine, territories once dominated by Poland, where Catholics were forcibly converted to the Russian Church after 1831. The religious persecution of the Ruthenians attracted little attention in France during the 1830s, but when that persecution spread to Congress Poland in the early 1840s Catholic opinion was outraged. Pamphlets called for a holy war to defend the ‘five million’ Polish Catholics forced by Russia to renounce their faith. Encouraged by a papal manifesto – ‘On the Persecution of the Catholic Religion in the Russian Empire and Poland’ – in 1842, the French press joined in condemnations of Russia. ‘Since today all that remains of Poland is its Catholicism, the Tsar Nicholas has picked on it,’ declared the influential Journal des debats in an editorial in October 1842. ‘He wants to destroy the Catholic religion as the last and strongest principle of Polish nationality, as the last freedom and sign of independence that this unhappy people has, and as the last obstacle to the establishment in his vast empire of a unity of laws and morals, of ideas and faith.’²⁶

French anger at the Tsar’s persecution of the Catholics reached fever pitch in 1846, when reports arrived of the brutal treatment of the nuns of Minsk. In 1839, the Synod of Polotsk, in Belarus, had proclaimed the dissolution of the Greek Catholic Church, whose pro-Latin clergy had actively supported the Polish insurrection of 1831, and ordered all its property to be transferred to the Russian Orthodox Church. The leader of the Polotsk Synod was a pro-Russian bishop called Semashko, who had previously been chaplain to a convent of 245 nuns in Minsk. One of his first acts on taking over the episcopate was to order the nuns to submit to the Russian Church. According to the reports that arrived in France, when the nuns refused, Semashko had them arrested. With their hands and feet bound in irons, the nuns were taken to Vitebsk, where fifty of them were imprisoned and forced to perform heavy manual labour in their iron chains, and suffered dreadful torture and beatings by the guards. Then, in the spring of 1845, four of the sisters managed to escape. One of them, the abbess of the convent, Mother Makrena Mieczyslawska, then aged 61, made her way to Poland, where she was helped by the Archbishop of Poznan, and then taken by his Church officials to Paris. She recounted her appalling tale to the Polish emigres of the Hotel Lambert group. Makrena next brought her account to Rome, and met with Pope Gregory XVI just before the Tsar’s visit to the Vatican in December 1845. It is said that Nicholas emerged from his audience with the Pope covered with shame and confusion, having had his denials of the persecution of the Catholic Ruthenians refuted by documents in which he himself had praised the ‘holy deeds’ of Semashko.