Joseph Conrad. 'Secular principles' in 'Prince Roman'

Abstract

IN his short story of Poland’s 1831 war against the Czar following the November Uprising (Tales of Hearsay, 29–55),1 Conrad substitutes the quasi-fictional title hero Prince Roman S–’s pseudonymous father Prince John for the historical Roman Sanguszko’s patriot father Eustachy. Masking his indecent prudence as passionless realism by purporting to ‘ “judg(e) all things calmly” ’ (40), the accommodationist father berates his fervently nationalist son: ‘ “There are secular principles of legitimity (sic) and order which have been violated in this enterprise for the sake of the most subversive illusions” ’ (40). The theory of ‘secularium principum’ had long bedevilled both the Roman Church and Europe’s nobility who were content to rule by Papal fiat; indeed, Guilelmus Barret’s seventeenth-century tract, The Rule of Princes, or Of The Absolute and Independent Secular Principles of Power,2 had joined the Vatican’s index of prohibited texts.3 One therefore may reasonably expect a magnatial noble of the szlachta to have professed fidelity to Polish Catholicism; so at first blush Prince John’s phrase ‘secular principles’ may seem puzzling.