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• The Grand Duchy of Poznań emerged from the debates (...)
• The enfranchisement was (...)
• The turbulent events of the year 1848 (...)
• Its first stage was the Kulturkampf policy (...)

The enfranchisement was - so to speak - a historic necessity which gave rise to the formation of modern society, however, from the point of view of Berlin, it was also of significant political importance. Poles were perceived with distrust, and this was demonstrated by the initiation of the construction of a fortress in Poznań in the year 1828. The motivation for this was the geopolitical location and the resulting willingness to secure the eastern borders of Prussia and counteract potential Polish rebellions. From the Prussian perspective, the fundamental problem was the aristocracy which took charge of the Polish society and received support from the clergy; it was the main carrier of Polish national awareness. Peasants, who were the majority of the society, were perceived as a passive mob dependent on their lords and priests, which could have significant political consequences. This called the attention of Karl von Roeder, the commanding general of the 5th Army Corps which  was based in Poznań during the November uprising. He claimed in his report that although the Polish peasant is completely passive and his attitude towards the authorities is slightly favourable, if the Polish armies entered the territory of the Poznań region from behind the cordon, it would have to be necessary to take into account hostile mutinies of peasants against the German population and authorities. In Roeder’s opinion, the reason for this was the peasants’ historical hatred towards the Germans, which could easily be used by the representatives of the Polish movement. Roeder's concerns regarding the attitude of the Poles were not groundless; after the outbreak of the uprising in Warsaw in 1830, about 3000 Poznań residents including about 200 representatives of the most prominent Polish landed-gentry families rushed behind the Prosna River, just to mention for instance, Dezydery Chłapowski, Tytus Działyński, Seweryn and Maciej Mielżyński and Gustaw Potworowski. Although the uprising was against Russia, Berlin considered it a demonstration of their lack of loyalty, all the more that even at the very beginning of the Polish revolution the Prussian authorities had imposed an unequivocal ban on their subjects from going to the Kingdom. After the defeat of the uprising, its participants returned to the Duchy and had to face various prosecutions and repressions; some of them were imprisoned for some time in the fortress and their properties were sequestered, though they were returned to their owners after some time.

However, the general change in attitude towards the Poles was most important at that time, and the embodiment of this was the new supreme president, Eduard von Flottwell, who took his office in autumn 1830. At the same time, Governor Radziwiłł was dismissed and a couple of years later this position was liquidated. Flottwell did not intend to continue the experiment of seeking agreement with Poles, discredited in his eyes by their participation in the November rebellion. The actions taken by him had all the traits of a conscious Germanisation policy, therefore, at the end of the 19th century, he would become a favourite figure of German nationalists. As well as the various forms of repression targeted at the participants of the uprising, Flottwell reorganised the judiciary and administration systems, increasing the number of German officials and removing the last Polish officials, i.e. poviat starostes. This gave rise to the practice of filling offices in the Duchy with Germans only, and resulted in a failure to develop the class of Polish public officials, which was the most numerous part of the intelligentsia forming in other partitions. In the spirit of the Prussian Protestant Enlightenment, Flottwell contributed to the ultimate liquidation of Catholic orders, and after the outbreak of the so called dispute regarding mixed marriages, he did not hesitate to arrest Archbishop Marcin Dunin in 1839, who was thereafter imprisoned in the Kołobrzeg fortress. These activities were accompanied by significant modernisation projects in the 1830s. The process of the enfranchisement of the peasants, inspired by the state, clearly gained momentum. This resulted in the occurrence of various tensions and conflicts which divided the gentry and the peasantry, which according to the intentions of the authorities was supposed to loosen the ties binding Polish peasants to noblemen and to provide grounds for the building of their new Prussian loyalty. The foundation of elementary schools was significantly accelerated and the construction of a network of modern roads was started, which obviously had its military significance too. The effects of Flottwell's politics were rather ambivalent. The conflict with the Church wiped out, to a great extent, any expected positive effects of the enfranchisement for the authorities as it boosted the anti-governmental sentiments among the folks strongly attached to Catholicism. On the other hand, for the Polish elites, such a policy was a clear signal that passivity will lead to the integration of the Poznań region with Prussia and the marginalisation of the Polish community. This became an impulse for the first initiatives to which we refer as organicist, such as the “Kasyno” in Gostyń, the Poznań Bazar or the Scientific Help Society, the latter established on the initiative of a leading figure of the Polish movement, Karol Marcinkowski. It was also an absolute disgrace for Flotwell to establish a fund that would acquire Polish land property and sell it exclusively to Germans. Even for the Prussian officials in Berlin this turned out to be a gross infringement of the rule of law and of the principles of equality of all Prussian subjects. This coincided with a change on the Prussian throne, as Frederick William III who died in 1840 was replaced by his son Frederick William IV, who was a harbinger of a new, more liberal policy adopted towards the Poles. Its end was brought by the detection of a great conspiracy of the Poznań Centralizacja in 1846, which caused the mass arrests of the most active representatives of the Polish elites, and the dissolution of the majority of Polish organisations. An event that was urgently followed by the whole of Europe was the great trial of conspirators in 1847, whose effects were swept away by the wave of Revolutions related to the Spring of the Nations, which reached Berlin, Prussia and consequently also the Grand Duchy of Poznań in March the following year.

The Revolutions of 1848 opened a short, but extremely intense episode when new solutions were looked for as regards the status of the Poznań region. After all, for a short period of time, the world, so to say, seemed to turn upside down. Polish conspirators, who were sentenced to death, were freed from the prison in Moabit and transported through the streets of the Prussian capital city. Polish students formed – as was the case with the November uprising – an academic legion which enjoying the sympathy of the Berlin residents. This legion kept guard in front of Prussian official buildings, armed with broadswords provided by the local president of the police who was ... Julius von Minutoli, the same man who had uncovered the Polish conspiracy in Poznań two years previously. In the capital city of the Duchy itself, the outburst of enthusiasm around this liberty movement made the National Committee, which had been established here on 20 March, demand the renouncement of the Polish territories by Prussia, however, the delegation sent to Berlin only limited itself to the more realistic postulate of providing broad autonomy to the Grand Duchy of Poznań (the so called national reorganisation). In that revolutionary atmosphere king Friedrich William IV not only gave his preliminary consent to this but also allowed for the formation of Polish military troops in the Poznań region, whose task was to counteract the expected Russian intervention together with the Prussian army, though the commander of those troops, Ludwik Mierosławski, saw them as the foundation of the Polish army which would liberate all Polish territories and lead to the rebirth of the independent Polish state. The Polish movement was divided into those who wished to follow the reorganisation programme and the maximalists who sought a way to transfer the source of conflict to the Kingdom of Poland and trigger an independence uprising. However the expected Russian intervention did not take place, the evaluation of the significance of freedom forces in Germany turned out to be exaggerated and in addition to this, the resistance of the local Germans and Jews against the reorganisation project started to manifest itself more and more strongly. They did not agree to being treated as a minority in a province administered by Poles. After some time the king began to backtrack from his promise of the national reorganisation of the Grand Duchy of Poznań, making a proposal of its division into a Polish and a German part, while the direct aim of the army stationed in the Poznań region was to eliminate the Polish movement. The pretext for this was the issue of Polish military camps; the Prussians attacked the camp in Książ, massacring its defenders, and despite consolation victories near Miłosław and Sokołów, the Poles had to lay down their arms. Those who were taken into captivity had to face various humiliations and prosecutions, also from the German inhabitants of towns, through which the Polish prisoners were led, and some of them were imprisoned for some time in the fortress.