488 Chapter XX
larations. It was too calculated and practical to fire any one with a passion for com-
bat and sacrifice, too tepid to ignite any mass upheaval.
Fighting against the Russians, and also the Prussians, begun in April, continued
into the autumn. Only in a few localities did the peasantry take part. Nothing was
created (nor could it have been in the circumstances) like the French citizen army
which at the same moment was pushing the forces of the First Coalition back
across the Rhine. Tens of thousands took to arms. But the insurrection remained
mainly an operation conducted by nobles (it must be remembered that they formed
a large proportion of the population) with support from the middle classes, with
many Catholic clergy of the lower grades lending aid, and with some participation
by non- Polish elements, including the Jews, who were exceptionally numerous in
Poland. In the defense of Praga, across the river from Warsaw, a Jewish battalion
took part, commanded by a Jewish merchant named Berek Joselewicz, who fled
later to the Polish Legion in Italy, and died in 1809 in the service of Napoleon’s
Grand Duchy of Warsaw. There were many cases in Italy, Holland, and elsewhere
of individual Jews favoring the new political order, but Poland seems to offer the
only case of an organized Jewish body, and an armed one at that, acting in support
of the eighteenth- century revolution.
The Poles made attempts to propagandize in neighboring countries. The Polish
Jacobins, like those of France in 1792, entertained a generous hope for the libera-
tion of mankind. They drew confidence in the strength of their own cause by iden-
tifying it with both the French and the American revolutions, as in the Civic Ser-
mons of a certain priest, Father Florian Jelsky.^23 Kosciuszko himself, who was not a
Jacobin but inclined in that direction, believed that the liberation of Russia might
be a necessary prerequisite to freedom in Poland. Emissaries were sent to Hungary,
where opposition to the Hapsburgs was chronic, and where a Jacobin conspiracy
was discovered in July 1794. Revolutionary literature was translated into Russian
and German, and used to subvert the enemy armies. The national insurrection, and
the revolutionary agitation which accompanied it, communicated itself to the for-
mer parts of Poland which the Russian and Prussian monarchies were barely be-
ginning to organize after the Second Partition. Unrest spread even to Silesia,
which had belonged to Prussia for fifty years.
There can be no doubt that Poland was a menace to the three eastern monar-
chies as they then existed, more of a menace even than distant France. Even a re-
stored Constitution of 1791 might cause restlessness in Breslau, Lemberg, or
Prague. A successfully established civil community on a Jacobin model might have
less appeal; but the mere mention of the abolition of serfdom was enough to annoy
landlords all over Eastern Europe; it might set a bad example for peasants every-
where, and remind those of Bohemia and Hungary of what they had won and lost
under Joseph II; it might even infect the enlisted ranks of the Austrian, Prussian,
and Russian armies. The governments of these empires were not mistaken in the
belief that the new Poland was a country they could not live with, at least without
some modification in their own.
23 Lesnodorski, 210, 278.