24 NAROD
Yet as the devoted son of a family closely tied to the Confederacy of Targowica,
he also gave whole-hearted support to the political supremacy of the Russian
Empire, under whose benevolent aegis the entire Slav world was supposed to
unite. In his way, Rzewuski was certainly a Polish patriot, but one so attached
to traditional social and cultural principles that he automatically opposed all
forms of political change. His congenital hatred of conspiracies inspired him, in
his Mieszaniny obyczajowe (A Miscellany of Manners, 1842) to write that
'Poland is a corpse which is being eaten by worms.' He made an ideal aide to
Prince Paskievitch, the Russian Viceroy in Warsaw, in the darkest days of
Nicholas I's reign. Rzewuski's contemporary, Adam Gurowski (1805-66), was
led to similar conclusions by a very different road. Gurowski's philosophy was
as radical as Rzewuski's was reactionary; but he, too, came to believe in
Poland's spiritual bankruptcy and in Russia's providential mission. Having
studied under Hegel at the University of Berlin, he returned to Warsaw as one
of the firebrands of the 1820s, hatching an abortive plot to assassinate Nicholas
I and, during the November Rising, initiating the demands to dethrone the Tsar.
In Paris, he helped found the Polish Democratic Society (TDP). Three years
later, however, he experienced a total change of heart, abandoned all his former
views on the national issue, and abjectly pleaded with the Tsarist authorities for
a pardon. In the following period, as a self-confessed admirer of Saint-Simon
and Fourier, he somehow saw Russian autocracy as an ideal instrument for
social and cultural modernization. He savagely denounced the conceited, uncar-
ing individualism of the Polish nobles, and gave practical proof of his sincerity
by denouncing his disaffected neighbours to the Tsarist police. He even submit-
ted a memorandum on educational reform, which proposed that the Polish lan-
guage - 'a degenerate dialect of Russian' - should be replaced in Polish schools
by Old Church Slavonic. His major works — La Civilisation et la Russie (1840)
and Le Vanslavisme (1848) — systematically advocated loyalist politics. But they
failed to win him the prominent position which he hoped for, and in 1847 he fled
to Germany, and thence to the United States. In later life, he became a doughty
champion of the abolition of slavery and a prophet of America's 'Manifest
Destiny'. His America and Europe (1857) elaborated de Tocqueville's earlier
thesis that America and Russia were destined to overtake the decayed European
powers and that they would divide the world between them. In America,
Gurowski is well remembered. In his native Poland, as a 'national apostate', he
has been cast to oblivion.
Loyalism, moreover, was not the preserve of a few peripheral eccentrics.
Nowadays it is often forgotten that large numbers of people in the Polish lands
were either indifferent to Polish politics or else were categorically opposed to
them. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these 'non-Poles' included not
only whole ethnic groups who were preoccupied with separate nationalist
movements of their own, but also a significant sector of the educated classes,
who identified increasingly with German or Russian culture. They also included
the broad masses of the Polish peasantry, who were as yet largely illiterate and