12 NARODpious aspirations of their authors or confirm the details of political settlements
already accomplished. At Vienna, for example, there was no way that the states-
men could have persuaded the Tsar to relinquish control of a country long since
occupied by his victorious army. At Paris, there was no way that the Allied lead-
ers could have induced Jozef Pitsudski to follow their policies. At Yalta and
Potsdam, there was no way that Churchill or Roosevelt, by diplomatic means,
could have deflected Stalin from his chosen solution. At each of these critical
moments, matters were not decided at the conference table, but by the situation
on the ground and by the men who held the reins of practical power. At
moments of less importance, diplomatic action counted for even less.
Throughout the modern period, in fact, notes, protests, and rejoinders about
Poland fell thick as autumn leaves, whilst life in Eastern Europe continued
unruffled. The Polish nation grew from infancy to maturity regardless of the
diplomats, and it owes them no debt of gratitude.
Certain forms of Polish national consciousness were much older than the
Partitions, of course. But there is little point in tracing their manifestations back
into the Renaissance or the Middle Ages, when nationality played little
significant part in social or political affairs. Yet certainly in 'the Deluge' of the
seventeenth century, and more acutely in the civil wars of the eighteenth, the
citizens of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic were bound to question the age-old
traditions of loyalty and identity. Political allegiances, which had always
assumed that 'to be a Pole' was to be a loyal subject of the Polish King and the
Republic, were undermined. In the situation which prevailed after 1717, where
King and Republic were puppets of the Russian Tsar, 'loyalty' was gradually
confused with 'collaboration' and 'careerism'. In its place, religious and
cultural bonds were strengthened. Henceforth, for men of integrity, the 'good
citizen' also included the one who was prepared to protest and to resist, the one
who, secure in the Church's promise of eternal salvation, thought light of laying
down his life in resistance to the established order. These ideas were already cur-
rent among the Confederates of Bar. They provide a precocious example of the
revolutionary nationalism which swept America and Europe in the subsequent
era. From the very beginning, Polish patriotism was associated with dissidence
and insurrection.
For the Poles, however, the Revolutionary Era proved a bitter disappoint-
ment. In theory, the French Revolution was supposed to replace the corrupt and
oppressive rule of the old monarchies with an age of national liberation. In prac-
tice, the old tyrants were exchanged for new, more efficient ones. In terms of
money and blood, Napoleon's exploitation of Poland was as blatant as anything
which the Tsar had achieved. For those Poles who flocked to the Napoleonic
armies, there was no reward. They were seduced by the banners of 'Liberte,
Egalite, Fraternite', as surely as the beautiful Maria Walewska was seduced by