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There were warlike uprisings3/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Perhaps also with Wróblewski, who was studying at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Forestry.īrought up in a patriotic home, Walery probably conspired already in a Vilnius middle school. He also made contact with his compatriots living in the imperial capital. Influenced by forbidden books and his friendship with Zygmunt Sierakowski, the lieutenant decided that instead of complaining one should act, and became a pillar of the illegal officers’ organisation. Many liberals studied there, disillusioned with the procrastination of the new Tsar Alexander II in introducing reforms. Distinguished with the Order of Saint Stanislaus, Dąbrowski entered the elite General Staff Academy in Saint Petersburg. Having completed an artillery school, he was sent to the Caucasus, where he took part in the conquest of the territories inhabited by the Circassians. His intuition was right, the cherub did not allow himself to be Russified, and when he grew up, he became a nuisance to the Russian empire. The monarch must have expected a different answer, because he furiously threw the child on the ground so that he lost consciousness. He took him in his arms, asked his name and origin. A nine-year-old cherub caught his eye, standing in a row with older boys. On one occasion, the Tsar visited a cadet corps school in Brest Litovsk. The repression intensified under Nicholas I, a primitive sadist called Palkin by his subjects. Opponents of the new order ended up on the gallows or in exile. These lands were not seized by the Russians until the third partition of the Polish-Lithuanian state, but they immediately instituted a blunt police-military regime. Walery on 27 December in Zheludok upon Neman and Jarosław on 13 November in Żytomierz (now Zhytomyr) in Volhynia. Thanks to the energy and courage of the Poles, it took the government army as long as two months to crush the revolution. They had to start by taming the anarchy in their own ranks. They were both in favour of offensive action, but the poorly disciplined Parisian National Guard, composed of volunteers, was unsuited to such actions. ![]() The Commune promoted Dąbrowski and Wróblewski to the rank of generals. In Nice, he worked as a blacksmith’s assistant, which did not stop him from playing roulette. In Paris, he was a printer and street lamp keeper. Friendly, honest and always cheerful, even though he lived on the verge of poverty. In émigré circles, he had more enemies than friends, unlike Walery Wróblewski, a man with impossibly tousled dark-brown hair, who was liked by everybody. Jarosław Dąbrowski was a blond man with slick-backed hair and boyish features, whose short stature and leadership skills earned him the nickname Łokietek (Short/Elbow-high), referring to the warlike King Władysław I (1260– 1333). They were both 34 years old, but apart from that they differed a lot. Nor did they harbour any hatred for priests or monarchical monuments. Unlike the French communards, they were opposed to killing prisoners of war and taking hostages. Allegory of the first partition of Poland, showing Catherine the Great of Russia (left), Joseph II of Austria and Frederick the Great of Prussia (right) quarrelling over their territorial seizures They were buoyed up by the success of the Italian irredentist movement which, after many defeats, had achieved its goal, creating a united state. Accustomed to fighting ‘for our freedom and yours’, they dreamt of returning to their homeland with weapons in hand. ![]() The impoverished Polish émigrés had little to lose, and everything to gain. They toppled governments and were like earthquakes that triggered secondary political upheavals across the continent. Since 1789, all the Paris revolutions had been successful. ‘In every dispute between the satisfied and the discontented, a Pole must take the side of the latter,’ explained Roman Czarnomski, a veteran of the November Uprising, the Spring of Nations in Greater Poland and Baden, the Crimean War, the January Uprising and the Franco-Prussian War. Why did the Poles join the rebellion? Disillusioned with the attitude of Europe’s political elites, they saw their chance of victory in an alliance of peoples, in a popular revolution. Going against a stronger and better-armed enemy was not new to them. Most of them had already experienced the smell of gunpowder, so they became the elite of the communard army suffering from a lack of experienced fighters. In the spring of 1871, when Adolphe Thiers’ government fled to Versailles and the capital was engulfed in the flames of revolution, between four and six hundred Polish émigrés volunteered to fight under the red banner. ![]()
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