Citizens!
After the first partition of their country, Poles who had left their fatherland crossed the Atlantic in order to defend the great American republic, which had just come into being.[386] Kosciuszko fought side by side with Washington. In 1794, when the French Revolution was resisting the coalition forces with difficulty, the glorious Polish revolt deflected danger away from it.[387] Poland lost its independence, but the Revolution survived. The defeated Poles joined the army of the sans-culottes and helped to smash feudal Europe.[388] Finally, in 1830, when Tsar Nicholas and the Prussian King[3] sought to carry out their plans to restore the Legitimist monarchy with a new attack on France, the Polish Revolution,[389]
whose memory you are celebrating today, blocked their path: "Order was restored in Warsaw."
The cry "Long live Poland!" which then resounded throughout Western Europe was not merely an expression of sympathy and admiration for the patriotic fighters who were crushed with brutal force — with this cry men hailed the people whose revolts all ended so unhappily for itself but always halted the advance of the counter-revolution, the people whose best sons never ceased to fight the struggle of resistance by everywhere going into battle under the banner of the popular revolutions. On the other hand, the partition of Poland consolidated the Holy Alliance, which served as a disguise for the Tsar's hegemony over all the governments of Europe. Thus the cry "Long live Poland!" has really meant: Death to the Holy Alliance, death to the military despotism of Russia, Prussia and Austria, death to Mongol rule over modern society.
Since 1830, when the bourgeoisie in France and England more or less took power in their hands, the proletarian movement began to grow. Since 1840 the propertied classes of England were already obliged to resort to force of arms to resist the Chartist Party, this first militant organisation of the working class. Then in 1846 in the last corner of independent Poland, Cracow, the first political revolution to proclaim socialist demands broke out.[390]
From that time on, Poland forfeited all the ostensible sympathies of the whole of Europe.[3]
In 1847 the first international congress of the proletariat[391] met secretly in London. One outcome of this congress was the writing of the Communist Manifesto, which ended with the new revolutionary watchword: "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!" Poland had its representatives at this congress, and at a public meeting in Brussels[3] the famous Lelewel and his supporters declared their adhesion to the resolutions of the congress.— In 1848 and 1849 numerous Poles served in the revolutionary German, Italian, Hungarian and Romanian armies, distinguishing themselves as soldiers and commanders.[393] Although the socialist aspirations of this age were drowned in the bloodbath of the June days,[394] the revolution of 1848 nevertheless — and this should not be forgotten— turned Europe for a moment into one community by seizing it almost entirely with its flame, and in this way prepared the ground for the International Working Men's Association. The Polish insurrection of 1863,[395] by giving rise to a joint protest of English and French workers at the international machinations of their governments, formed the starting point for the International, which was founded with the participation of Polish exiles. Finally, the Paris Commune[396] found its true champions among the Polish refugees and after its fall, it was sufficient to be a Pole to be shot by the war tribunals in Versailles.
Thus outside the borders of their country the Poles have played a major part in the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat; in this struggle they were predominantly its international combat force.
May this struggle develop among the Polish people itself, may our propaganda and the refugee press support it, and may it unite with the unequalled(1) endeavours of our Russian brothers; this will be yet another reason to echo the cry of old: "Long live Poland!" Fraternal Greetings! London, November 27, 1880
(Signed) Karl Marx, Frederick Engels,
Paul Lafargue, F. Lessner(2)
Endnotes
[385] This letter of greeting was read out at the meeting held on November 29, 1880 in Geneva to commemorate the Polish uprising of 1830 (see Note 389). The meeting was convened by the editorial board of the Polish magazine Râwnosc and attended by nearly 500 socialists of different nationalities: Poles, Russians, Germans, Austrians, Frenchmen, Italians and Swiss. For Engels' assessment of the magazine's stand, see his letter to Kautsky of February 7, 1882 (present edition, Vol. 46). The original of the letter is not extant. It was published for the first time in French in the Précurseur, No. 49, December 4, 1880, and in Polish (translation from the French) in Sprawozdanie z migdzynarodowego zebrania zwolanego w 50-letnia rocznice listopadowego powstania przez redakcyje "Rownosci" w Genewie, Geneva, 1881, pp. 30-32. The discrepancies between the texts are indicated in the footnotes. In English, the letter was published for the first time in the magazine The Class Struggle, Vol. 2, No. 5, New York, 1918, pp. 573-75.
[386] On the first partition of Poland, see Note 9. On the participation of Poles in the American War of Independence, see Note 73.
[387] The reference is to the Polish national liberation uprising of March 12-November 16, 1794 led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
[388] After the defeat of the 1794 uprising and the third partition of Poland (see Note 11), some of the participants in the uprising emigrated to France. In October 1796, the Polish general Jan Henryk Dabrowski submitted to the Directory (see Note 349) a plan for the formation of Polish legions which could fight against Austria. In January 1797 two Polish legions were formed within General Bonaparte's army.
[389] This refers to the Polish national liberation uprising of November 1830-October 1831. Its participants belonged mosdy to the revolutionary gentry, and its leaders to the aristocracy. The uprising was crushed by Russia aided by Prussia and Austria. Lack of support from the peasantry, due to the leaders' refusal to abolish serfdom, contributed to its defeat.
[390] On the Cracow uprising of 1846, see Note 25. The programme drawn up during die Cracow uprising by Edward Dembowski and expressing the interests of the peasantry and the urban poor demanded that the landless be given land, and that the condition of the working class be drastically improved by establishing national or "social" workshops.
[391] M» See Note 220.
[393] The reference is to the participation of Polish refugees in the European revolutionary movement of 1848-49. A number of prominent Polish revolutionaries took an active part in the revolutionary events in Hungary (Jozef Bern, Henryk Dembinski und Ludwik Wysocki) and in the final stage of the revolution in Germany (Wiktor Heltman, Aleksander Krzyzanowski, Ludwik Mieroslawski). The poet Adam Mickiewicz organised a Polish legion in Italy for the struggle against Austrian oppression. Mieroslawski led the struggle of the Sicilian insurgents against the troops of the Neapolitan King Ferdinand Bourbon. A Polish Southern legion was formed on the territory of the Danubian Principalities, which was involved in the liberation struggle of the local population.
[394] 3** See Note 17.
[395] See Note 14.
[396] See Note 26.
[3] 3 A reference to the assassination attempt on the Russian Emperor Alexander II made by Antoni Berezowski in Paris in 1867. Berezowski was sentenced to twenty years of hard labour.