Adam Jerzy Czartoryski
Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, in English known as Adam George Czartoryski, was a Polish nobleman, statesman, diplomat and author.
The son of a wealthy prince, he began his political career as a foreign minister to the Russian Tsar Alexander I after Poland was partitioned by Russia, Prussia and Austria. He later became a leader of the Polish government in exile and a bitter opponent of Alexander's successor, Tsar Nicholas I. In exile, he advocated for the reestablishment of a sovereign Polish state, which also stimulated early Balkan and Belgian nationalism, and intensified their desire for independence.
Czartoryski was a dedicated patron of arts and greatly contributed to the Czartoryski Collection. In 1798, he purchased one of Poland's most important national treasures – Leonardo da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine, which he brought as a gift for his mother from Italy.
Early life and education
Czartoryski was born on 14 January 1770 in Warsaw. He was the son of Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski and Izabela Flemming. It was rumored that Adam was the fruit of a liaison between Izabela and Russian ambassador to Poland, Nikolai Repnin. However, Repnin left the country two years before Adam Czartoryski was born. After careful education at home by eminent specialists, mostly French, he went abroad in 1786. At Gotha, Czartoryski heard Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read his Iphigenia in Tauris and made the acquaintance of the dignified Johann Gottfried Herder and "fat little Christoph Martin Wieland."In 1789 Czartoryski visited Great Britain with his mother and was present at the trial of Warren Hastings. On a second visit in 1793 he made many acquaintances among the British aristocracy and studied the British constitution.
In the interval between these visits, he fought for Poland during the Polish–Russian War of 1792, which preceded the Second Partition of Poland. He was arrested on his way to Poland at Brussels by the Austrian government. After the Third Partition of Poland the Czartoryski estates were confiscated, and in May 1795 Adam and his younger brother Konstanty were summoned to Saint Petersburg.
Russian service
Later in 1795, the two brothers were commanded to enter Russian military service, Adam becoming an officer in the horse, and Konstanty in the foot guards. Catherine the Great was so favourably impressed by the youths that she restored them part of their estates, and in early 1796 made them gentlemen-in-waiting.Adam had already met Grand Duke Alexander at a ball at Princess Golitsyna's, and the two young men at once evinced a strong "intellectual friendship" for each other. On the accession of Tsar Paul I, Czartoryski was appointed adjutant to Alexander, now Tsarevich, and was permitted to revisit his Polish estates for three months.
At this time the tone of the Russian court was relatively liberal. Political reformers, including Pyotr Volkonsky and Nikolay Novosiltsev, possessed great influence on the tsar.
Diplomacy
Throughout the reign of Paul I, Czartoryski was in high favour and on the closest terms of intimacy with the Tsar, who in December 1798 appointed him ambassador to the court of Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia. On reaching Italy, Czartoryski found that that monarch was a king without a kingdom, so that the outcome of his first diplomatic mission was a pleasant tour through Italy to Naples, the acquisition of the Italian language, and a careful exploration of the antiquities of Rome.In the spring of 1801 the new tsar, Alexander I, summoned his friend back to Saint Petersburg. Czartoryski found the Tsar still suffering from remorse at his father's assassination, and incapable of doing anything but talk religion and politics to a small circle of friends. Against all remonstrances, he only replied, "There's plenty of time."
Foreign minister
Tsar Alexander appointed Czartoryski curator of the Vilna Academy so that he might give full play to his advanced ideas. He was curator of the Vilnius university and he greatly improved the Polish education system. Czartoryski paid most attention to foreign-affairs for as the tsar's key advisor he exercised practical control of Russian diplomacy. His first act had been to protest energetically against Napoleon's murder of a Bourbon royal prince the Duke of Enghien and insist on an immediate rupture with the government of the French Revolution, then under Napoléon Bonaparte, whom the tsar considered a regicide.On 7 June 1804, the French minister, Gabriel Marie Joseph, comte d'Hédouville, left St. Petersburg; and on 11 August a note, dictated by Czartoryski to Alexander, was sent to the Russian minister in London, urging the formation of an anti-French coalition. It was also Czartoryski who framed the Convention of 6 November 1804, whereby Russia agreed to put 115,000, and Austria 235,000, men in the field against Napoleon.
Finally, in April 1805 he signed an offensive-defensive alliance with George III's United Kingdom.
Czartoryski's most striking ministerial act, however, was a memorial written in 1805, otherwise undated, which aimed at transforming the whole map of Europe: Austria and Prussia were to divide Germany between them. Russia was to acquire the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmora, the Bosporus with Constantinople, and Corfu. Austria was to have Bosnia, Wallachia and Ragusa. Montenegro, enlarged by Mostar and the Ionian Islands, was to form a separate state. The United Kingdom and Russia together were to maintain the equilibrium of the world. In return for their acquisitions in Germany, Austria and Prussia were to consent to the creation of an autonomous Polish state extending from Danzig to the sources of the Vistula, under the protection of Russia. This plan presented the best guarantee, at the time, for the independent existence of Poland. But in the meantime Austria had come to an understanding with England about subsidies, and war had begun.
While Czartoryski was Minister of Foreign Affairs of Imperial Russia he was rumoured to have been a lover of Louise of Baden, Empress consort to Alexander I of Russia.
Chief minister
In 1805 Czartoryski accompanied Alexander to Berlin and to Olmütz as chief minister. He regarded the Berlin visit as a blunder, chiefly due to his distrust of Prussia; but Alexander ignored his representations, and in February 1807 Czartoryski lost favour and was superseded by Andrei Budberg.Though no longer a minister, Czartoryski continued still to enjoy Alexander's confidence in private, and in 1810 the Tsar candidly admitted to Czartoryski that in 1805 he had been in error and that he had not made proper use of his opportunities.
That same year, Czartoryski left Saint Petersburg forever; but the personal relations between him and Alexander were never better. They met again as friends at Kalisz shortly before the signing of the Russo-Prussian alliance on 20 February 1813 and Czartoryski was in the Tsar's suite at Paris in 1814, and rendered him material services at the Congress of Vienna.
Later career
It was considered that Czartoryski, who more than any other man had prepared the way for the creation of Congress Poland and had designed the Constitution of the Kingdom of Poland, would be its first namiestnik, or viceroy, but he was content with the title of senator-palatine and a role in the administration.In 1817 he married Princess Anna Zofia Sapieha. The wedding led to a duel with his rival, Ludwik Pac.
On his father's death in 1823, Czartoryski retired to his ancestral castle at Puławy; but the November 1830 Uprising brought him back to public life. As president of the provisional government, he summoned the Sejm of 1831, and, after the end of Chlopicki's dictatorship, was elected chief of the supreme council by 121 out of 138 votes.
On 6 September 1831, his disapproval of the popular excesses at Warsaw caused him to resign from the government after having sacrificed half his fortune to the national cause.
Yet the sexagenarian statesman continued to display great energy. On 23 August 1831 he joined Italian General Girolamo Ramorino's army corps as a volunteer, and subsequently formed a confederation of the three southern provinces of Kalisz, Sandomierz and Kraków. At war's end, when the Uprising was crushed by the Russians, he was sentenced to death, though the sentence was soon commuted to exile.
On 25 February 1832, while in the United Kingdom, he kept advancing the Polish cause and with the help of influential friends, many of them Scottish, inspired the creation of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland, based in London, but with branches in Glasgow, Birmingham and Hull.
Hôtel Lambert
That same year, Czartoryski emigrated to France, where he bought and took up residence in Paris' Hôtel Lambert. As a magnate and arguably the most considerable Polish-émigré figure of the time – Czartoryski was Chairman of the Polish National Uprising Government, and leader of a political emigre party – his political faction came to be identified by his private address, simply as the Hôtel Lambert.Czartoryski was an active leader of the mushrooming committees that were formed to maintain political momentum and salvage Polish cultural heritage in the exile community. He was the founding chairman, in April 1832, of a Historical and Literary Society. In 1838 he became the legal owner and founding president of the Polish Library in Paris, the first repository of polonica, books, and archives outside the territory of Poland, which had secured, with French public support, a building on the Ile Saint-Louis in the heart of Paris.
Turkish idyll
His tireless efforts on behalf of Poland continued well into his seventies: in 1842 he conceived a project to found a Polish settlement in rural Turkey. Czartoryski wanted to create a second emigration centre there, after the first one in Paris. He sent his representative, Michał Czajkowski, to Turkey and purchased a forest area which encompasses present-day Adampol from the missionary order of Lazarists. The settlement was named Adam-koj after its founder, in Turkish, the "Village of Adam", whereas in Polish it was referred to as "Adampol". Polonezköy or Adampol survives to this day as a small village on the Asian side of Istanbul, about 30 kilometres from the historic city centre. At its inception, the village was inhabited by just 12 people, while at its peak, there were no more than 220 people. Over time, Adampol developed and became populated by emigrants from the unsuccessful 1848 Revolution, the Crimean War in 1853, and by escapers from Siberia and from captivity in Circassia. The Polish villagers engaged in agriculture, animal husbandry and forestry.Proposed federation
After the November Uprising in 1830-31 until his death, Czartoryski supported the idea of resurrecting an updated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on federal principles.The visionary statesman and former friend, confidant and de facto foreign minister of Russia's Tsar Alexander I acted as the "uncrowned king and unacknowledged foreign minister" of a non-existent Poland.
Czartoryski was disappointed when the hopes that had he held as late as the Congress of Vienna of Alexander undertaking reforms failed to materialise. His subsequent thoughts were distilled in a book, completed in 1827 but published only in 1830, Essai sur la diplomatie. According to the historian Marian Kamil Dziewanowski, it is indispensable to an understanding of the Prince's many activities conducted in Paris following the ill-fated Polish November 1830 Uprising. Czartoryski wanted to find a place for Poland in the Europe of the time. He sought to interest Western Europeans in the adversities facing his stateless nation, which he still considered to be an indispensable part of the European political structure.
Adhering to the Polish motto, "for our freedom and yours", Czartoryski connected Polish efforts for independence with similar movements in other subjugated nations of Europe and in the East as far as the Caucasus. Thanks to his private initiative and generosity, the émigrés of his subjugated nation conducted a foreign policy often on a broader scale than had the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Of particular interest are Czartoryski's observations, in his Essay on Diplomacy, regarding Russia's role in the world. He wrote that, "Having extended her sway south and west, and being by the nature of things unreachable from the east and north, Russia becomes a source of constant threat to Europe." He argued that it would have been in Russia's greater interest to have surrounded herself with "friend slave." Czartoryski also identified a future threat from Prussia and urged the incorporation of East Prussia into a resurrected Poland.
Above all, he aspired to reconstitute – with French, British and Turkish support – a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth federated with the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians and all the South Slavs of the future Yugoslavia. Poland, according to his vision, could have mediated the conflicts between Hungary and the Slavs, and between Hungary and Romania. At the same time, the Belgian people were also seeking independence.
Czartoryski's plan seemed achievable during the period of national revolutions in 1848–49, but foundered through the lack of western support, on Hungarian intransigence toward the Czechs, Slovaks and Romanians, and on the rise of German nationalism." "Nevertheless", Dziewanowski, concludes "the Prince's endeavour constitutes a link the 16th century Jagiellonian and Józef Piłsudski's federative-Prometheist programme ."
Czartoryski died at his country residence at Montfermeil, near Meaux, on 15 July 1861. He left two sons, Witold, Władysław, and a daughter Izabela, who in 1857 married Jan Kanty Działyński.
Awards
- Knight's Cross of the Order of Virtuti Militari
- Order of the White Eagle, 1815.
Works
Popular culture
The 1975–1976 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour.Czartoryski makes a cameo appearance in volume 3 of Leo Tolstoy's novel, War and Peace, at an Allied Council conference that takes place at Olmütz on 18 November 1805, just before the Battle of Austerlitz.