Adam Jerzy, Prince Czartoryski

Adam Jerzy, Prince Czartoryski (born January 14, 1770, Warsaw, Pol.—died July 15, 1861, Montfermeil, France) was a Polish statesman who worked unceasingly for the restoration of Poland when Russia, Prussia, and Austria had partitioned his country’s former lands among themselves.

Czartoryski was the most renowned member of a princely family, descended from the Lithuanian royal house, which wielded great power in Poland in the 18th century. He received a thorough education in his native country and traveled widely in western Europe. On returning to Poland in 1791, he played a distinguished part in the anti-Russian 1792 campaign that precipitated the second partition of Poland (1793). Although neither he nor his father took an active part in the 1794 insurrection that resulted in the third partition of Poland (1795), their palace at Puławy was destroyed and the family estates confiscated.

Seeking the recovery of his property, Czartoryski went in 1795 to St. Petersburg, where he joined the Russian government service and became friendly with the grand duke Alexander. When Alexander became tsar, he called upon Czartoryski, who had become one of his close advisers, to work on plans for the reform of the government, naming him deputy minister of foreign affairs in 1802 and minister in 1804. Czartoryski’s hostility to Russia’s alliance with Prussia and the Russian military defeat in the 1805 campaign against Napoleon (undertaken against his advice), caused his dismissal in 1806; but he remained in Russian service as curator (from 1803) of the educational region of Wilno (Vilnius), which embraced the eastern provinces of the former Polish state.

After Napoleon’s downfall, Czartoryski resumed his efforts to restore Poland. With Alexander’s consent, he was Poland’s spokesman at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, obtaining as much as was possible—the creation of a new Kingdom of Poland with Alexander as king. He helped to prepare a liberal constitution for the kingdom and became a senator and member of the executive council, but in 1816, disillusioned with Alexander, he largely withdrew from public life.

Czartoryski did not want a Polish rebellion against Russia and knew success would depend more on Western diplomatic intervention than on fighting by the Poles, but he found himself at the head of the Poles’ November Insurrection that broke out on Nov. 29, 1830. On the collapse of the rebellion, sentenced to death by the Russians and deprived of his estates, he went into exile on Aug. 15, 1831. His Paris residence, the Hôtel Lambert, became the centre of the political activity of the Polish exiles. He was unofficially acknowledged as “Polish king in exile” and maintained unofficial representatives in Constantinople, Rome, and other European capitals. Czartoryski wrote his memoirs, in addition to other literary and historical books and essays.