Although historical and popular memory of the post-1812 Polish order has been tinged by the Polish national uprisings of 1830 and 1863, the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in Poland was somewhat ambiguous. On one hand, the Vienna settlement cemented a neo-Partition of Poland in which there was no sovereign Poland that remained. Conversely, Alexander I's toying with the Polish issue, both for reasons of state and personal vanity, did create a resurrected Kingdom of Poland (often termed Congress Poland in the historical literature) in personal union with the Romanov dynasty.

To an outside observer, the neo-Partitions seemed to be a return to the status quo outside of minor territorial revisions and entities like the Free City of Krakow. The process of amalgamation and co-option of the Polish nobility continued apace and the process of emancipation of the peasantry continued to favor the elite. In some cases, the social status and power of the szlachta (local nobility) had actually improved.

Counter-intuitively, this brief resurgence of the Polish nobility's local power was in Russian Poland. The Kingdom of Poland had a good deal of its administration at the local level handled by Poles and Poland had a constitution and an army that seemingly resurrected a Polish state. The franchise for the Sejm, much like the Commonwealth, was comparatively broad and the Polish nobility dominated the legislature of Congress Poland. The Napoleonic Civil Code remained intact and the army could still display its battle honors and decorations won under the leadership of the French emperor.

However, Alexander I's desire to have Poland be a showcase of liberal principles proved to be somewhat short-lived, and even Alexander I's acceptance of a liberal Poland was highly conditional. The Polish army was kept very small and under the command of the Emperor's brother, the Grand Duke Constantine. Alexander I also appointed the aged Józef Zajączek as the Governor-General of Poland instead of the more reformist and Polish nationalist Adam Czartoryski. Moreover, many tsarist officials had internalized a distrust of Poles. During the Napoleonic Wars, many Russian army officials regarded Poles as rebellious subjects. Tensions between the Duchy's military and the Russian Army had flared up during the 1809 campaign when the two were nominally allies, but the Russian commander Golitsyn refused to recognize any resurrection of Poland. When the Duchy's commander Poniatowski wished to be addressed as the Commander of Polish Forces, Golitsyn gruffly responded to Poniatowski:

I do not recognize either Poland, which has long outlived itself, nor the Polish army or troops. I only acknowledge the Duchy of Warsaw which was established by the Treaty of Tilsit, which, however, makes no mention of Poland.

Popular Russian opinion blamed Polish troops for the worst excesses during the occupation of Moscow and captured Poles were among the last repatriated prisoners from the 1812 campaigns. Field Marshal Kutuzov evinced a disgruntlement with Alexander I's lenient Polish policies during his occupation of the Duchy, and the Prussian General von Bulow likewise stoked fears of a Polish national uprising in the Allied army's rear.

These preexisting Polonophobic sentiments among Russian state elites were given freer reign with the succession of the archconservative Nicholas I to the throne. Polish nobles' connection to the Decemberist officers as well as Alexander I's pet liberal project in Poland ensured that the days of Congress Poland's even nominal independence were numbered. The Polish revolts helped solidify these prejudices within the Russian state and the chances that the Kingdom of Poland would become like the Grand Duchy of Finland, another foreign entity in personal union with the Romanov dynasty, became nil. Unlike the earlier, more permissive period, the military service in Napoleon's armies was no longer celebrated, but rather taken as yet another sign of Poles' innate disloyalty to the Russian empire.

Prussian Poland followed much the same political trajectory as the Kingdom. Berlin's position in 1813 was very much that of St. Petersburg in that victory over Napoleon meant a return to the status quo ante-Partition. Unlike Russia, Prussia so little need to champion a revived Polish state and scrapped the Napoleonic Code as soon as they restored control over the area. There were some sops given to Polish national sentiments in the first decade of restored Prussian rule, but these were largely tactical in nature given the fear that Alexander I could harness Polish national sentiment to expand his Polish kingdom. The presence of a strong German gentry class meant that it was much easier for the Prussian state to keep this region quiet and the local szlachta were unable to arrest the dispossession of Polish land nor were they able to put a halt to the increasingly Polonophobic attitudes within German culture. Larger Prussian economic policy favored land reform that favored land-owners over small-freeholders, which in turn favored the mostly German magnates. Much of the Prussian szlachta's efforts were spent trying to protect its own class interests, such as opening a Polish Bank to save nobles from penury or forming the Polish Casino to become a power bloc within the Prussian, later imperial German, legislative apparatus.

Thus the immediate two decades after Waterloo were somewhat ambiguous for Poland. To a certain degree, there was a line of continuity between the Duchy's elite and those of the Kingdom. Likewise, the landlords' power still continued to be a major facet of economic life. Yet, even this nominal independence and continuities had real and rather hard limits in the world of Vienna. Whatever Polish national sentiments that did exist owed their fate to the indulgence of the governing non-Polish state. This Napoleonic legacy soon became taboo in post-1815 Poland as it was tied to the very idea of an independent and sovereign Poland. The only exception to this dim state of affairs was in Austrian Galicia in which the Habsburgs did not have such an antipathy towards Poles and Polish national sentiment. Historical reenactment and commemoration in Krakow kept the memory of the Vistula Legion and heroes like Poniatowski alive. The centennial of his Polish Marshal's death, which also coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1863 uprising, was an opportunity for Krakow's local authorities to celebrate a martyr to the Polish cause. Notably though, Krakow's officials tended to evade some of the more potentially irredentist aspects of the Poniatowski centenary and often emphasized Poniatowski's fidelity to his non-Polish liege, Napoleon. Even in the relative freedom of Krakow, Polish national sentiment and memory of the Duchy could only go so far.

Sources

Dabrowski, Patrice M. Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Hagen, William W. "National Solidarity and Organic Work in Prussian Poland, 1815-1914." The Journal of Modern History (1972): 38-64.

Hartley, Janet M., Paul Keenan, and D. C. B. Lieven. Russia and the Napoleonic Wars. New York: Palgrave, 2015.

Kappeler, Andreas, and Alfred Clayton. The Russian empire: a multiethnic history. Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2001.

Mikaberidze, Alexander. "Non-Belligerent Belligerent Russia and the Franco-Austrian War of 1809." Napoleonica. La Revue 1 (2011): 4-22.

Vushko, Iryna. The Politics of Cultural Retreat: Imperial Bureaucracy in Austrian Galicia, 1772-1867. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

Wandycz, Piotr Stefan. The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795-1918. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974.