Planning an Uprising; Remaking a Nation: The Polish Radicals’ Debates on the Army and War in 1832-1846 Revisited

Abstract

ABSTRACT The primary aim of this article is to investigate the debates among those radicals who found themselves in exile after the failure of the Polish November Uprising (1830–1831) about whether a new national war was necessary. Instead of dealing with their reflections on warfare, I focus on the political dimension of these debates, and in particular on their ideas about mobilization during wartime. The first part of the article sketches out the general context of these reflections, stressing the deep roots of the debates about ‘citizen-soldiers’ and mass military mobilization. The second part examines the Polish radicals’ sometimes contentious debates during the 1830s, which focused on the reasons for the failure of the November Uprising, the lessons that needed to be learned, and the means by which the peasantry could be included into both military ranks and the political sphere. The principal forum for these discussions was leaflets and articles. The third part concentrates on their disputes during the 1840s. This decade was marked by the particular intensity of these polemics as the radicals confronted, amongst other issues, the question of revolutionary terrorism and mass democracy during the (supposedly impending) war. The article concludes by recapitulating the main features of these debates, and clarifies that there was only a bare thread of continuity between the radicals from the 1830s and 1840s and those who mulled over similar issues in the second part of the 19th century.