The Historical Memory of the 1812 War in Lithuania in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries: A Complex Process

Abstract

In historiography, significant attention to the memory culture of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe focuses on issues relating to the memory culture of the Franco-Russian War of 1812; however, the case of Lithuania is not commonly analysed separately, thus this article discusses how assessments of the 1812 war were maintained in the historical memory in Lithuania. The Russian government offered the population in the lands of the former GDL its official version of the historical memory of the 1812 war (of a heroic battle against an invader), which contradicted the version this population considered as ‘its own’, experienced as their support for Napoleon and the new political and social prospects they believed he would bring. The Russian government’s censorship of written literature suppressed the spread of the people’s ‘own’ local historical memory, yet it did not prove to be so effective due to the population’s very limited opportunities to use the printed word. Communicative memory dominated in the land in the first half of the 19th century, becoming the main source testifying to and passing on to subsequent generations the actual multifaceted experiences of the 1812 war, including the chance of liberation from the yoke of the Russian Empire. In the second half of the 19th century, representatives of local Russian imperial government structures and the local Russian intelligentsia, responding to the 1812 war as a Polish struggle for freedom and a symbol of political independence, explained in academic, educational and popular literature that the hopes of the Poles related to Napoleon were actually unfounded: the French emperor had no intentions of restoring the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within its historical boundaries, but simply wanted to fill his army units with Polish forces. It was highlighted that this expression of Polish support for Napoleon stopped the Russian imperial government’s potential plans to restore the Poles’ former statehood. This so-called regional narrative which appeared in history textbooks and was used by exacting emotional and visual impact in order to influence the political and cultural provisions of the younger generation had a dual purpose. First, to justify the discriminatory policies against individuals of ‘Polish origins’. Second, to ‘block’ the path for using the 1812 war as a historical argument testifying not just to the common historical past and struggle of Poles and Lithuanians but also their possible political future, which was openly expressed in the Polish national discourse of the early 20th century. Over the course of a hundred years, despite the government’s actions, Poles managed to uphold ‘their own’ historical memory about the 1812 war; its meanings were spread in various forms of media such as fictional literature, museum exhibitions and history textbooks, and were used to shape the political and cultural position of the younger generation. In the Lithuanian national discourse on the other hand, the 1812 war, along with the 1830–1831 and 1863–1864 uprisings, was viewed as a matter concerning the Poles and the Polonised nobility, and it was thus a foreign place of historical memory. The 1812 war and assessments of its potential importance to Lithuanians in the Lithuanian national discourse of the early 20th century were one-off cases and fragmented, while their spread among broader layers of society was limited.