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Adam Jerzy Czartoryski
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Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (also known, in English, as Adam George Czartoryski; January 14, 1770 – July 15, 1861) was a Polish-Lithuanian noble, statesman and author. He was the son of Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski and Izabela Fleming (though he was rumored to have been the fruit of a liaison between Izabela and Russian ambassador to Poland, Nikolai Repnin).
Czartoryski was known in Russia as the Russian Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs and was rumored to have been a lover of Louise of Baden, Empress consort to Alexander I of Russia.
Czartoryski holds the distinction of having headed, at different times, the governments of two mutually hostile countries.
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Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski (also known, in English, as Adam George Czartoryski; January 14, 1770 – July 15, 1861) was a Polish-Lithuanian noble, statesman and author. He was the son of Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski and Izabela Fleming (though he was rumored to have been the fruit of a liaison between Izabela and Russian ambassador to Poland, Nikolai Repnin).
Czartoryski was known in Russia as the Russian Imperial Minister of Foreign Affairs and was rumored to have been a lover of Louise of Baden, Empress consort to Alexander I of Russia.
Czartoryski holds the distinction of having headed, at different times, the governments of two mutually hostile countries. He was de facto Chairman of the Russian Council of Ministers (1804-6), and President of the Polish National Government during the November 1830 Uprising against Imperial Russia.
Travels
Czartoryski was born in Warsaw, and after a careful education at home by eminent specialists, mostly French, he went abroad in 1786. At Gotha, Czartoryski heard Johann Wolfgang von Goethe read his Iphigeneia 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 his country during the war of the second partition and would subsequently also have served under Tadeusz Kosciuszko, had he not been arrested on his way to Poland at Brussels by the Austrian government in the service of Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor. After the third partition of Poland the Czartoryski estates were confiscated, and in May 1795 Adam and his younger brother Constantine were summoned to Saint Petersburg.
Service in Russia
Later in 1795, the two brothers were commanded to enter the Russian service, Adam becoming an officer in the horse, and Constantine in the foot guards. Catherine the Great was so favorably 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 youths at once conceived 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 extremely liberal. Humanitarian enthusiasts like Pyotr Volkonsky and Nikolay Novosiltsev possessed great influence.
Diplomatic career
Throughout the reign of Paul I, Czartoryski was in high favor and on terms of the closest 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. To all remonstrances, he only replied, "There's plenty of time." The Senate did most of the current business; Pyotr Vasilyevich Zavadovsky, a pupil of the Jesuits, was minister of education.
De facto foreign minister
Tsar Alexander appointed Czartoryski curator of the Vilna Academy, now Vilnius University (April 3, 1803) so that he might give full play to his advanced ideas. Czartoryski was, however, unable to give much attention to education, for from the beginning of 1804, as adjunct of foreign affairs, he had practical control of Russian diplomacy. His first act was to protest energetically against the murder of Louis-Antoine-Henri de Bourbon-Condé (March 20, 1804), and insist on an immediate rupture with the government of the French Revolution, then under First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte.
On June 7, 1804, the French minister, Gabriel Marie Joseph, comte d'Hédouville, left St. Petersburg; and on August 11 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 November 6, 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 the United Kingdom of George III.
But Czartoryski's most striking ministerial act 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 Bosphorus 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 erection of an autonomous Polish state extending from Danzig (Gdansk) to the sources of the Vistula, under the protection of Russia. This project 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 as to subsidies, and war had begun.
Chief minister
In 1805 Czartoryski accompanied Alexander to Berlin and to Olmütz (Olomouc, Moravia) as chief minister. He regarded the Berlin visit a blunder, chiefly due to his distrust of Prussia; but Alexander ignored his representations, and in February 1807 Czartoryski lost favor and was superseded by Andrei Budberg.
But, though no longer a minister, Czartoryski continued to enjoy Alexander's confidence in private, and in 1810 the Tsar candidly admitted to Czartoryski that his policy in 1805 had been erroneous and he had not made a proper use of his opportunities.
That same year, Czartoryski left Saint Petersburg forever; but the personal relations between him and Alexander were never better. The friends met again at Kalisz (Greater Poland) shortly before the signature of the Russo-Prussian alliance on February 20, 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
Everyone thought that Czartoryski, who more than any other man had prepared the way for the Congress Kingdom, 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 share in the administration.
In 1817 he married Anna Sapiezanka. 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 Pulawy; but the November 1830 Uprising brought him back to public life. As president of the provisional government, he summoned (December 18, 1830) the Sejm of 1831, and, after the end of Chlopicki's dictatorship, was elected chief of the supreme council (Polish National Government) by 121 out of 138 votes (January 30, 1831).
On September 6, 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. Throughout the Uprising, he did not live up to his great reputation.
Yet the sexagenarian statesman showed great energy. On August 23, 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 February 25, 1832, in the United Kingdom, he founded a Literary Association of the Friends of Poland.
Czartoryski emigrated to France, where he resided in Paris' Hôtel Lambert—a prominent Polish-émigre political figure, head of a political faction accordingly called the Hôtel Lambert.
He died at his country residence at Montfermeil, near Meaux, on July 15, 1861. He left two sons, Witold (1824-65) and Wladyslaw Czartoryski (1828-94), and a daughter Izabela, who in 1857 married Jan Dzialynski.
Proposed federation
Between the November and January Uprisings, in 1832–61, Czartoryski supported the idea of resurrecting an updated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on federation 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 nonexistent Poland.
He had been disappointed in the hopes that he had reposed, as late as the Congress of Vienna, in Alexander's willingness to undertake reforms, and the distillation of some years' subsequent study and thought was Czartoryski's book, completed in 1827 but published only in 1830, Essai sur la diplomatie (Essay on Diplomacy). This book is, according to the historian Marian Kamil Dziewanowski, indispensable to an understanding of the Prince's many activities conducted in France's capital 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 of a stateless nation that was nevertheless an indispensable part of the European structure.
Pursuant to the Polish motto, "For our freedom and yours", Czartoryski connected Polish efforts for independence with similar movements of other subjugated nations in Europe and in the East as far as the Caucasus. Thanks to his private initiative and generosity, the émigrés of a subjugated nation conducted a foreign policy often on a broader scale than had the old independent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Of particular interest are Czartoryski's observations, in the 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 interest, instead, to have surrounded herself with "friend[s rather than] slave[s]." Czartoryski also identified a future threat from Prussia and urged the incorporation of East Prussia into a resurrected Poland.
Above all, however, 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, in his concept, could have mediated the conflicts between Hungary and the Slavs, and between Hungary and Romania.
Czartoryski's plan seemed achievable during the period of national revolutions in 1848-49 but foundered on lack of western support, on Hungarian intransigence toward the Czechs, Slovaks and Romanians, and on the rise of German nationalism. "Nevertheless", concludes Dziewanowski, "the Prince's endeavor constitutes a [vital] link [between] the 16th century Jagiellon [federative prototype] and Józef Pilsudski's federative-Prometheist program [that was to follow after World War I]."
Awards
Works
Czartoryski's principal works, as cited in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, are Essai sur la diplomatie (Marseilles, 1830); Life of J. U. Niemcewicz (Paris, 1860); Alexander I. et Czartoryski: correspondence ... et conversations (1801-1823) (Paris, 1865); Memoires et correspondence avec Alex. I., with preface by C. de Mazade, 2 vols. (Paris, 1887); an English translation, Memoirs of Czartoryski, &c., edited by A. Gielguch, with documents relating to his negotiations with Pitt, and conversations with Palmerston in 1832 (2 vols., London, 1888).
In popular culture
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 (Olomouc, Moravia) on November 18, 1805, just before the Battle of Austerlitz.
See also
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