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term Prussian Poland is used in this book to refer to the territories acquired by the Kingdom of Prussia during the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, carried out in agreement with the Russian Empire and the Habsburg monarchy at the end of the eighteenth century. It also includes Upper Silesia, which was acquired from Habsburg rule during the First Silesian War in 1742, but “rediscovered” and reimagined as a Polish and Slavic land by Poles (and Germans) in the mid-nineteenth century.²⁸ During the first Polish partition, which took place in 1772, the Kingdom of Prussia was able to annex Ermland and Royal Prussia—excluding the cities of Danzig (Gdańsk) and Thorn (Toruń), which remained under Polish dominance. Prussia also took the northern parts of Great Poland (Wielkopolska) (map I.1, highlighted in yellow). These territories formed the new province of West Prussia. In the second partition of 1793, which resulted from the Polish Great Senate’s (Sejm Wielki) adoption of the May Constitution (1791), Prussians ended up taking hold of both Danzig and Thorn. In addition, they acquired the rest of Great Poland and parts of Mazovia, which were organized under the new province of South Prussia with Posen as its capital city (map I.1, highlighted in light brown). The third and final partition, in 1795, followed the uprising that Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746–1817), the famous military leader who had fought in the American Revolution, led to liberate the Polish lands from Russian influence. During this partition, Prussia took over Warsaw, the rest of Mazovia, Podlasie, and parts of Little Poland (Małopolska). Warsaw became the new capital of South Prussia. The annexed parts of Mazovia and Podlasie formed the province of New East Prussia and the incorporated territories from Little Poland became the province of New Silesia (map I.1, highlighted in dark brown).

      MAP I. 1. The Partitions of Poland, 1772–1795. Reproduced with permission from Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 3rd revised and expanded ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 71.

      From 1772 to 1795, Prussia acquired a territorial extension of 141,400 square kilometers and almost three million Polish-speaking subjects—ethnic Poles and Jews.²⁹ The Prussian legal system was introduced in the newly incorporated lands. It guaranteed many privileges for the Polish nobility, but it also protected serfs against seigniorial exploitation. In addition, the Polish secondary school system was dismantled and German-language education was largely promoted. As in the Polish territories belonging to Russia and Austria, serfs now had to serve in the military for a period of twenty years, a statute that had no precedence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.³⁰

      The Kingdom of Prussia was able to hold the Polish territories until the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars, which led to the uprising of Poles in South Prussia in 1806. Following the Peace of Tilsit, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw. The duchy was a constitutional monarchy under the political administration of the Saxon king Frederick Augustus III, who officially became the Duke of Warsaw. It included the majority of the lands that Prussia had acquired through the partitions, except Danzig, which was once again declared a free city, and other territories in the northern parts of West Prussia that remained under Prussian control. After the victorious campaign that the Polish troops led against Austrians in 1809, the duchy was enlarged to include half of the territories the Habsburg monarchy had gained with the partitions, covering the cities of Lublin and Cracow. The new Polish state was governed by a constitution fashioned after Napoleon’s centralized administrative system and the Napoleonic legal code. The code abolished serfdom and introduced freedom of worship for all religions.³¹ It also provided legal equality for all the inhabitants, but with great restrictions upon unassimilated Jews, who had to wait a period of ten years before they could obtain full citizenship rights. The minister of education expanded elementary schooling, a move that contributed to the professional growth of the middle class. All of these measures would eventually contribute to the narrowing of the social gap between the nobility and other classes.

      Although the Duchy of Warsaw was in every term a dependence that France created to support Napoleon’s campaigns in central Europe, many Poles fought for the resurrection of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The state contained only one-fifth of the territories and thirty percent of the population that once belonged to the commonwealth. Following Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia, the lands were partitioned in the Congress of Vienna of 1815. Russia reorganized its part of the duchy into an area of limited autonomy under the political authority of the Russian emperor until his death in 1825, which throughout the nineteenth century was known as Congress Poland or the Kingdom of Poland. Prussia received the territories it had lost from West Prussia and the Great Poland parts of former South Prussia. The latter was organized as a semiautonomous province called the Grand Duchy of Posen. In the Prussian constitution of 1848, the duchy came to be known the Province of Posen. At the Congress of Vienna, Austria also regained Galicia and Cracow was declared a republic under the protection of the three partitioning powers. The Cracovian Republic was a free city state until the Polish uprising of 1846.

      Both the Napoleonic conflict and the ensuing Congress of Vienna represented two fundamental moments in the history of Polish-German relations in the nineteenth century. The Napoleonic Wars brought to the fore the fact that Prussians had failed in their cultural project of transforming Poles into loyal subjects of the kingdom.³² Poles in general showed no interest in stopping the French and defending the Prussian state. Many Prussians became convinced that Poles would eagerly work for the restoration of the Polish state each time the government proved to be politically weak. Some Prussian officials recommended several of the Germanizing projects that would be implanted decades later. They even demanded expatriation of the clergy and nobility, whom they viewed as main supporters of the insurrection. However, the approach that the Prussian government took after 1815 was conciliatory, as a series of political and cultural concessions were granted to Polish-speaking subjects of the Grand Duchy of Posen. The Prussian king, Frederick William III, pledged to respect Polish nationality, religion, and private property. He also promised the use of the Polish language alongside German in all public functions. Poles were allowed to participate in the civil service and many worked directly in the central administration of the duchy. In addition, Antoni Radziwiłł, a Polish prince, was declared governor (Statthalter) of the lands, and a liberal Prussian official, Joseph von Zerboni di Sposetti, who was sympathetic to Poles, was appointed as provincial president (Oberpräsident). With these appeasing methods and softening of its colonization policies, the government hoped to win over the Polish population and develop its loyalty to the Prussian state.

      Many of these concessions were not implemented in West Prussia, where half of the population in 1815 was Polish. Beyond the borders of the Grand Duchy, Polish-speaking subjects continued to be submitted to Germanization policies. In 1824, the province of West Prussia disappeared and was administratively merged with East Prussia until 1878. The land reforms passed in the early 1800s adversely affected the Polish nobility in the region, where a significant number of them ended up selling their landed estates to the German upper class.

      In the 1820s, Polish dreams of self-government in the Grand Duchy failed to concretize. Local officials persisted in giving priority to the German language in schools and continued their cultural efforts to Germanize the population. It was clear that the Polish question had turned into a major concern for the Prussian government and that it intended to secure the product of several decades of political conquests and territorial expansion. The Grand Duchy of Posen was reorganized into the Province of Posen shortly after the 1848 uprising and the adoption of the new Prussian constitution, which curtailed significantly Polish political power in the region.

      In general, ambivalent German feelings towards Polish subjects were prominent until 1848. Up to this point, many German liberals still saw a continuation between Polish desires for political independence and their own efforts to democratize their government.³³ Even Prussian anti-Polish sentiments were usually directed against the Polish gentry and clergy, whom Prussians identified as their main enemies. The majority of Polish-speaking subjects were still regarded as possible future German subjects.

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