International reactions to the Russian suppression of the Polish insurrection (November 1830)

Abstract

The outburst of the Polish insurrection and its evolution attracted the attention of the European Powers, due to the international political context in which it started, that of the liberal-bourgeois revolutions in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and of the implications that were expected to occur due to power balance on the continent and in the Eastern Question. Russia’s position in the political systems mentioned above depended on how the Polish Question would be solved. By subordinating all the Kingdom of Poland, whose political individuality, in the Russian political and institutional system, in which the decisions of the „Final Act” of the Peace Congress in Vienna (June 9th 1815) placed it, was about to be abolished by the Tsar, opened to the Russian Empire the path towards the consolidation of its positions in the Baltic region, strategically, political an economical, thus upsetting the other Powers in the European political system, on one hand. And secondly, because it would have relieved it of the necessity to divide its forces to oversee the evolution of the embarrassing Polish Question and would have been capable to focus its attention on a solution to the other problem, the Eastern one. This perspective was likely to happen, especially in the conditions of the peace Treaty that Russia had imposed to Turkey, at Adrianople, on September 14th 1829, which ensured the latter’s „passivity” towards the Oriental policy of its victor. These perspectives affected, in particular, Great Britain and France, the secular rivals of Russia in that area, so they tried, using only diplomatic means because of the very complicated international situation at the beginning of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, to determine Russia to adopt a more conciliatory attitude towards the Polish insurgents. The rivalries that aggravated the Franco-British relations, especially in Western Europe, prevented the two Powers to adopt a unitary position towards Russia, a fact that allowed the latter to dictate the law in the Kingdom of Poland. A position, in some way singular, towards the Polish Question was adopted by another state, with direct interests in the Baltic sea area and with more specific ones in the Eastern Question. It is the United Kingdom of Sweden and Norway, created in the letter and the spirit of the Swedish-Norwegian Convention from Moss, on August 14th 1814. Sweden’s internal and external political circumstances in which, in 1810, the famous marshal of Napoleon I, Jean Baptiste Sebastien Bernadotte, prince of Pontecorvo, was proclaimed crown prince under the name Karl Johan, King Karl XIV Johan, from 1818, as the creation of the Swedish-Norwegian personal Union, determined the Swedish-Norwegian diplomacy favor the Russian interests in the Polish Question as well as in the Eastern Question. In the Polish Question, the one under our analysis, this was also because the insurrection of November 1830 started in the international conditions mentioned above and due to the fact that the liberal internal opposition to the conservative and absolutist monarchical policy of King Karl XIV Johan was becoming more active and could have constituted a reason for the Norwegians to evade the personal Union, which they did not favor and against which they fought, first through arms then by institutional means. The forms in which Great Britain, France and Sweden took position in regard to the reprisal of the Polish insurrection of November 1830, very well documented by the diplomatic reports of the British diplomats in St. Petersburg and of the Swedish ones, accredited in Petersburg and in London, which we had the opportunity to consult in the funds of manuscripts of British Library, in London, and those of the National Archives of Sweden, in Stockholm, constitute, in our opinion, a contribution to the knowledge of the history of European diplomacy, on one hand, and to the research of the international relations in the first half of the nineteenth century, on another. This is the reason why we intend to approach them in this study. All the documents selected from Sveriges Riksarkivet, in Stockholm and cited in these pages are included in the volume X, part I, of the Collection “Europe and the Porte”, which is still in manuscript, for this reason we indicated the archive quotations.