486 Chapter XX
Resound everywhere.
Let us follow in her footsteps...
Let the nobles and lords disappear
Who would deny Fraternity to the people.^20Further symptoms of a deeper development may be seen in the changes of
meaning of certain Polish words, changes such as were occurring in the West Eu-
ropean languages also. In the older usage the Polish word for “citizen” (obywatel)
had referred to nobles only, others being called “inhabitants.” A different connota-
tion had been implicit in the constitution of 1791, but it was only in 1794 that
“citizen” was applied to virtually everyone. Formerly the “nation” had meant the
gentry who sat in provincial diets and took part in political life. Townsmen and
serfs had formed no part of this nation; the idea of burghers in the diet, in 1791,
had come to many “gentlemen” literally as a shock. Now the “nation” came to sig-
nify the Polish people, defined not by linguistic or cultural lines, but as a civic com-
munity of harmoniously cooperating classes living under the same laws. The old
expression, pospolite ruszenie, which had formerly meant the general call to arms of
all nobles, now came to mean the levée en masse, or mass rising of the people. Such
words as “people,” “liberty,” etc., underwent similar modifications. In this semantic
transition, it was the Jacobins who used such words in their most extended and
modern sense.
The impression can be ventured, for what it is worth, that “Jacobinism” or the
democratic excitement in some parts of Poland, including Warsaw, though much
briefer if only because soon repressed, compared in intensity with what happened
in Holland beginning in 1795, and with what happened in northern Italy begin-
ning in 1796. In some ways its intensity was greater. The Poles, in driving out the
Russians and upsetting the Polish regime which the Russians sponsored, were the
only people in Europe who effected so much of a revolution without French help.
A furious vindictiveness against “traitors” showed itself also, when a mob broke
into a Warsaw prison and hanged eight of the prisoners, six of whom had in fact
collaborated with the Russians, including the prince- bishop of Vilna. Since Polish
Jacobinism was simultaneous with the triumph in France of the gouvernement
révolutionnaire, that is, since it came before Thermidor, much sympathy was ex-
pressed in Poland for Robespierre and for the Terror, matters which the post-
Thermidorian Dutch, Italian, Swiss, and other democrats generally avoided as an
embarrassment.
The requirements of a war against foreigners, with the need for a maximization
of manpower, advanced the principle of equality in a way that was by no means
unique for Poland. In France, it had been the war of 1792 that radicalized the
Revolution, and the need of raising a citizen army that forced the leadership to
make concessions to the lower classes; in America, in 1775, the upper- class colo-
nial leaders, finding themselves at war with Britain, took steps to popularize their
cause; and one recalls that few things have done as much for racial equality in the
United States as the wars of the twentieth century. “We want to move the whole
20 Ibid., 256, translated by A. Michalski.