572 Chapter XXIV
and discreetly encourage all anti- British, pro- French, democratic, or separatist
feeling.^10 In October the French minister, Adet, openly interfered in the presiden-
tial election, to the extent of making public speeches in which he intimated the
displeasure of the French Republic if John Adams should be elected.^11 From the
Hague, at the same time, the American minister, John Quincy Adams, reported
that the French design was to favor a separate Western or Southern republic in the
United States, “as they are now forming a republic in Italy.”^12
In Austria there was no likelihood of revolution, nor did the French imagine
that there was; but after the suppression of the “Jacobins” at Vienna there remained
a good deal of discontent in the city, and the chancellor, Thugut, remarked in July
1796, by which time the French had driven the Austrians from Milan, that he was
still more afraid of anti- war feeling in Vienna than of the French army.^13
Against Austria, especially since it enjoyed the backing of Russia, it was useful
for the Directory to express sympathy for the Poles, of whom thousands left Po-
land after the Third Partition, and many converged upon Paris. Receiving certain
assurances from Delacroix in March of 1796, these Polish patriots, with French
assistance, brought to Paris from his place of refuge in Poland one of the heroes of
the uprising of 1794, J. H. Dumbrowsky, to serve as commander of an armed force
of Polish exiles. The Directory sent him on to Bonaparte in Italy, where he orga-
nized a Polish Legion, which was attached to Bonaparte’s army. The Legion was
recruited from Polish refugees in France, Venice, and the Ottoman Empire, and
from Polish prisoners of war and deserters from the Hapsburg armies. By July
1797 it had 6,000 men, and Dumbrowsky was boasting that his émigré force was
larger than either the French or the Dutch émigrés had been able to raise.
Dumbrowsky had far- reaching plans, which the French listened to but never al-
lowed him to execute—to carry war and revolution to Eastern Europe, with a
grand march through Fiume, Croatia, the Serbiaa provinces of Turkey, Wallachia,
Transylvania, Galicia, and the old center of Poland, rallying everywhere the ene-
mies of the Hapsburgs, and even forcing Russia to withdraw from European af-
fairs. The Polish Legion never made so grand a march, but it did serve with the
French in Italy for two years, and occupies a place of importance in the history of
the Polish nationalist movement. The national anthem of later times, a kind of Pol-
ish Marseillaise, was created in the Polish Legion in Italy.^14
On May 4, 1796, the Directory authorized a French adventurer, named Poter-
atz, working with a few Germans, to conspire against the governments of Baden,
Württemberg, and certain lesser states and set up a revolutionary South German
or Swabian republic. Poteratz was instructed to work with the French General
10 R. Palmer, “A Revolutionary Republican: M. A. B. Mangourit,” in William and Mary Quar-
terly, IX (1952), 483–96.
11 DeConde, 472–76.
12 J. Q. Adams, Writings, 7 vols. (New York, 1913–1917), II, 156. The republic in Italy here men-
tioned, in November 1796, was the Cispadane, the predecessor to the Cisalpine.
13 E. Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials (Oxford, 1959), 185.
14 M. Oginski, Mémoires sur la Pologne et Ies polonais, 4 vols. (Paris, 1826), II, 137–38, 206; L.
Chodzko, Histoire des légions polonaises en ltalie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1829), I, 119, 172–84, 217; II, 31. The
Poles, it seems from these passages, were also in touch with certain Greeks in Paris and the Ottoman
Empire.