THE GROWTH OF THE MODERN NATION 43the Tsar in Warsaw, is a case in point. The critics of Jozef Pilsudski have said
that he too was a 'Jacobin turned chauvinist' and that on the assumption of
power he abandoned all the ideals which he had nurtured in opposition.
Conversely, the most effective revolutionaries were often to be found among
converted loyalists. There is no doubt that the Officer Corps of the Russian
army acted as the most fertile ground for nurturing and training Polish revolu-
tionaries. In the centre of Polish politics, away from these extremes, political
figures who strove to reconcile contradictory pressures were most easily misun-
derstood. In examining the career of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, for
instance, it would be simple to say that as Foreign Minister of Russia in 1804-6
he was a 'Loyalist'; as Curator of the Wilno School District from 1803 and pro-
moter of Polish schooling, he was a 'Conciliator'; and in 1831 as President of the
National Government that he was an Insurrectionary. In effect, Czartoryski's
changing fortunes were not instigated by any dramatic convulsions in his per-
sonal attitudes, but rather by fundamental changes in the political situation, and
by striking differences in the policies of Alexander I and Nicholas I.^44 As always,
the history of Political Ideas, which exist in the abstract, is logical and coherent:
the history of real men and women, who have to operate in fluid circumstances,
is infernally complicated.
Political life in the Polish lands was further characterized by the existence of
powerful and independent institutions which, whilst denying any overtly polit-
ical purpose, have always exercised a distinct political influence. These institu-
tions have always come to the fore in periods of repression when the free right
of political organization was not admitted. First and foremost were the
Christian churches, and in particular the Roman Catholic Church, which was
directed by the Vatican from a point beyond the control of the ruling govern-
ments. (See Chapter 7.)
Secondly, and more surprisingly perhaps, came Polish Freemasonry, whose
continuing existence is proved by the frequent appeals and decrees for its
abolition. Officially abolished in the old Republic in 1734, it re-emerged in the
reign of Stanislaw-August and claimed the King as one of its devoted members.
Henceforth the Masonic Lodges, which rejected the religious absolutism of the
Church and the political oppression of the governments alike, thrived on the
established conspiratorial habits of their members, and played a prominent and
little acknowledged role in nationalist history. In Prussian Poland, their activ-
ities were almost completely Germanized in the course of time, and were asso-
ciated with German liberal movements. But in the Congress Kingdom, and
again in Russian Poland after the revolution of 1905, they attracted a large fol-
lowing among the Polish liberal intelligentsia. Some aspects of their history,
such as the foundation of a movement for National Freemasonry by the
ill-starred Walerian Lukasinski (17861868) in 1819, are well known. But re-
search in depth is still in its infancy; and a full list of Polish Freemasons in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries might well contain a surprising number
of the champions of the national cause.^45