Polish Émigrés and Parisian Intellectuals: Imagining a Nationalist European Future through Polish Music

After the failed Polish uprisings of the mid-nineteenth century, Fryderyk Chopin, Adam Mickiewicz, and many other Polish musicians and intellectuals fled to Paris. Members of the Polish diaspora were welcomed into the circles of Astolphe Custine, Gustave Flaubert, and other prominent French citizens. Nonetheless, in French sociopolitical discourse, Poland played a contested role, as it had since the time of Voltaire and Rousseau. Was Poland a regressive, disorganized nation, justly deserving its foreign imperial rulers; or did Poland symbolize the struggle for nationalism that all Europeans soon would face?

In this paper, I examine Parisian musicians’ essays and travelogues about Poland that appeared in Parisian arts journals of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. I investigate why and how Parisian musicians, such as Franz Liszt, used Polish music as evidence to claim that Poland offered a model for Western Europe’s aesthetic and political future. For example, Franz Liszt published extensive musical criticism on recent Polish compositions, Polish music history, and the Polish-born Fryderyk Chopin, arguing that Polish music reflected and verified the Poles’ admirable national character. Armed with musical analyses, Parisian musicians used Polish compositions to rebuff the arguments non-musical writers commonly used to denigrate Poland, such as that its society was weak because of its overly powerful women and regressive feudal system. Through analyzing Polish music and Polish musicians, Liszt and other Parisians championed Poland as a model for an aesthetic and political future based on nationalism.