At the Crossroads: 1865–1918

Front matter

GESCHICHTE - ERINNERUNG - POLITIK 9

Magdalena Micińska

At the Crossroads 1865-1918

Chapter 1: The situation of the Polish intelligentsia

1. Professional development opportunities ec eee enea 13 2. The development of capitalism and

3. Liberal professions it ii AE i E 23 Chapter 2: Styles Of life a zoo ennan kia 41 1. The financial and property elites oes eee 41 3; An artistic: DOMeMIas.:.c.sicsis sisssecasivstssidinsssceediedsciiacessseseatedscascbasivseatusagisssseisivetaete 61

Chapter 3: The development conditions of a national culture WŚ wdw moana 63

Chapter 4: The ideological debates of the 2" half of the 19%- century ada ddd odkad 83 1. The Galician milieus: the birth of the Stańczyk faction and the Krakow historical school. The Democrats and Positivists of Krakow

4. The self-stereotype of the Polish intelligentsia in the 2 half ofthe 9" cefturj s o RAA aa dad 119

Renovation movements in the late 19*/early 20 century Promoting Polish education in society Being a Polish twentieth-century intellectual in Poznań,

Krakow and Warsaw ....cccccccsssssssssssesessssssssssessssssssssesessssssssesessssssssesesesssssseseseses 163

ONSI RB W

Chapter 6: The Polish intelligentsia in Europe.

The influence of pan-European

2. Young Poland: between community

Introduction: The Black Gown

Schowaj, matko, suknie moje, Keep away from me, mother,

Gdy nam nadziei wytrysknął zdrój; As a spring of our hope gushed;

Lecz gdy do grobu Polska zstąpiła, But now, that Poland descends to her grave, Jeden mi tylko przystoi strój: Thats my costume, and all things lush: Czarna sukienka! The black, black gown!

Mourning gowns, pall ribbons, or jewellery featuring apparent patrioticeschatological symbolism was made obligatory by the populace of Warsaw in 1861, the time of demonstrations preceding the January Insurrection. Clearly enough, this gloomy atmosphere intensified as the uprising fell. Characteristically, the crushing defeat experience was initially described in a romanticist style, well-known and acknowledged at the time, but sounding naive today.

The little poem quoted above, Czarna sukienka ['The Black Gown] by Konstanty Gaszyński (d. 1866), refers to Adam Mickiewiczs ballads written a few dozen years earlier. In the face of the horrible disaster, metaphors of this kind and equally simple rhymes were in use among almost all the romanticist epigones. However, this trivial ditty perfectly renders the mood that overwhelmed Poles — at least, the educated individuals, completely formed in terms of national awareness, deeply concerned about the present and future condition of the entire nation, and that is, representatives of the intelligentsia — in the mid-1860s. That the insurrection was defeated was not the end of the story. Its conclusion was a disgraceful calamity embracing those who summoned others to fight, using pompous language, many of them joining the battle as well, along with those who, in the name of the purposes of reason and moderation, turned their backs on those struggling, distancing themselves from the juvenile recklessness, the lack of political responsibility, the maleficent myopia, or the internal feuds inside the insurgent party. The January Insurrection ended in a wave of repressive measures being applied to Polish people in the Russian Partition (initially, also in the Austrian Partition), which outright menaced the nation’s physical existence. Part of this outcome was a piercing conviction, shared by the vast majority of the educated Polish elites, that armed struggle was ultimately discredited as a means of regaining lost independence; that Poles had not only to go on mourning the fallen and the executed but, in parallel, search for new ways to defend their national substance. Soon after, a new, clear and crude language, adequate to the falls depth and to the aspirations for the future, was elaborated on.

The Polish intelligentsia, across the partitioned lands, attired the black gown from Gaszyńskis simple poem - symbolically, in most cases, but sometimes also in the most literal way. Among the Galician democrats, who cultivated the memory of the heroes of 1863-4, it was the fashionable mode to manifest national bereavement. At the house, for instance, of the Lwów journalist and politician Tadeusz Romanowicz (1843-1904), “it was so plaintive, to the extent that awe was striking”. The host “wore Polish-style clothes, a black żupan [a sort of caftan]”; his sister, Zofia Romanowiczówna (1842-1935), a writer, “gave the impression of being a vestal who had decided, sworn, never to laugh out loud, never to be consoled”; his mother "was seated on a sofa, like a goddess of mourning, in a black dress [...]. A silver Eagle [badge] served her as a brooch; the black hair, which all the family had, did not spoil the harmony of that dreary tone”!

Dismal mourning of the glory of yore or, the opposite of it, condemnation of the insurgents’ pestilent imprudence became predominant, over several dozen years, in the Polish debates on the January uprising, and in the Polish intelligentsias way of thinking about the last armed spurt. Several dozen years, with new generations having matured, were necessary for words of criticism and tearful lamentations to be replaced by the heroic legend of the January Insurrection, proclaimed in dozens and hundreds of poems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; in stories, tales and novels authored by scribblers with a sense of patriotic mission as well as by the leading exponents of the Polish literary scene. What is more, half a century after the defeat, not only was public homage to the lost and suffering ones called for, but also a pride owing to the insurgents’ achievements, their audacity, devotion, fortitude, tactical skills, valour and, in particular, their outstanding abilities in becoming self-organised under the extremely hard conditions of an inimical partitioned environment.

These abilities were, one might say, incarnated by the National Government, its courier services, the stamp featuring the Polish Eagle, and its nameless order - the factors that integrated a considerable share of society for a dozen-or-so months during 1863-4. On the verge of the 20" century, the January

1 Kazimierz Chłędowski, Pamiętniki [‘Memoirs’], vol. 1 Galicja 1843-1880 [‘Galicia, 1843-80]. Wrocław 1951, p. 110-111.

Insurrection became not only a repository for heroic and martyrdom attitudes, commemorated in annual Galician celebrations; but a treasury for participants of gymnasium (secondary-school) conspiratorial dealings in the Russian and Prussian Partitions. Half a century after the last insurrection was defeated, and two years before the world conflict broke out, young Poles could see in it, quoting Józef Piłsudski's statement from 1912, “a forge of the war thought that is to continue enduring in Poland”.

Over the fifty years following 1864, not only the judgement on the January uprising evolved: the period was decisive to the crystallisation of attitudes among the Polish intelligentsia. For those people, the disastrous outcome of January 1863 was the largest challenge in their class’ history; in what ways they got to grips with it, how hard-won successes were recorded to their credit, and how ignominious defeats were incurred, will be discussed further in Chapter 4 ofthis volume. The late 1860s and early 1870s became the period when Polish intellectuals views and opinions for the first time diverged so dramatically: responses to the catastrophe, attempts at understanding and rationalising it, setting completely new objectives and paths for the entire nation, drove educated Poles to completely different itineraries and did not at all foster a sensitive understanding for dissimilar choices.

The distance kept by the wrathful young Positivists, who in the post-January Warsaw declared war against the eulogists who claimed a Christ-related mission for the Polish nation, taken over from the Romanticists, and hackneyed; or, the distance demonstrated by the no-less-irate, and almost equally young, Stańczyk faction exponents, was enormous, in Krakow, they denied that the local democrats had a decent level of patriotism, and its expression was not limited to acrimonious commentaries in the press but also in the indiscriminate epithets they would flounce against one another.

And still, it nonetheless seems that the 1870s or 1880s was probably the last period, particularly in the Russian Partition, when representatives of the Polish intelligentsia proved capable of coming to an agreement, in the name of a common position of the Poles against the partitioner. Catholic publicists could for many years display hatred toward Aleksander Świętochowski, a liberal man; for his part, Świętochowski could provoke them by stigmatising parochial models of religiosity, sexuality, and family; Darwinists could jeer at creationists who, in

2 Józef Piłsudski, Zarys historii militarnej powstania styczniowego [An outline of the military history of the January Uprising ], [1912], Lecture 8; quoted after: J. Piłsudski, Pisma zbiorowe [ Collected works ], vol. 3, Warszawa 1937, p. 129.

turn, could directly equate Darwinism to a cult of Satan — all this still seems to have been an internal struggle between Poles, carried out without the participation of the partitioning authorities, without referring to the common enemy. In those realities, a man like Świętochowski could be received in a conservative salon by his ideological opponents, although before then, a wall of disgust separated him from them. In 1880, about a dozen years after the leading Positivist manifestos were published, he was invited to pay a visit to the house of Aleksander and Jadwiga Kraushar, but this was not all: the hosts “were ordering a regular storm for three days in order to take the man by it for their soirée”? Aleksander Swietochowski no more impersonated at that time the incomprehensible and odious principles, but was a confederate in the struggle against the superior adversary. In the late 19" century, the everyday reality in Warsaw, willingly remarked by memoirists, was mutual contact (albeit very much warinessimbued) and the exchange of views (with one’s own opinion remaining guarded) between zealous Catholics and non-denominational people; between socialists and moderate advocates of conciliation; between the wealthiest and best-related, by marriage connections, and the intelligentsia elite and pen-pushers living from hand to mouth; and, amidst members of the intelligentsia of varied ethnic backgrounds.

This same period, the century’s close, disturbed, however, this relative balance, maintained with great exertion. From the mid-1880s, the young Polish intelligentsia drew upon the intellectual ferment which was engulfing Western Europe as well as Russia at that time, eventually causing a looseness in the nineteenth-century, positivistic, rational understanding of the universe. The new modernist epoch did not perhaps annul all the achievements and beliefs of the ‘age of science, now coming to its end, but it certainly caused a deep break in them. The decadent, melancholic end of the century, drowning in the fumes of absinthe, brought along the seeds of qualitatively new phenomena, modern ones (moderne, in French), determining, as it would occur, the public and private life of the inhabitants of Europe, and of Poland, for at least the whole of the following century. Modernity implied a redefinition of the subject and object of politics, and a new style of its pursuance; the birth and development of mass-scale movements (socialism, nationalism, peasant parties); new methods of playing the political game and winning over supporters to one’s platform; and, moreover, the conviction — perhaps not really new but articulated so boldly for the first time — that the

3 Eliza Orzeszkowa, Listy zebrane [‘Collected letters], ed. by Edmund Jankowski, vol. 6, Wrocław 1967, p. 87.

right argument in the game rests with a single, and only (that is, ours), side and party. Modern states, and nations too — self-aware though without a state organisation, like the Poles — were codifying at that time new formulas of patriotism and their own identity, forming ethnically homogeneous communities and excluding and placing beyond the pale the elements they deemed foreign. The late 19" and early 20" century was also marked by an attempted redefinition of relations between outstanding individuals and the nameless masses; the visionary artist and the philistine public; woman and man; wife and husband; parents and children; the old and the young; the wealthy and the destitute; those who enjoyed common respect with contentment and those rejected, in neglect and disregard.

In Polish lands, most of these phenomena took a course more laborious and painful than in Western Europe, as Poles, apart from in Austrian Galicia, had no modern, centrally controlled instruments available with which to incarnate the assumptions of a modern Polish government — that is: a national army, school, cultural and scientific institutions, or even legal political parties. At the same time, the turn of the twentieth century was the time when the public life of the Polish people began to be formed, and subsequently dominated, by the generations on which the ‘black gown’ of mourning after the January Insurrection defeat was never superimposed. Generations, represented for the first time ever, on such a scale, by males and females alike, which challenged the usefulness, patriotism, and even the simple honesty of their fathers, rejected the common sense coerced by the sense of frailty, ignominiously moderate purposes and even more temperate methods of achieving them. Symbolic to these was, for instance, Głos, a magazine issued from 1886 in Warsaw: an emphatic utterance of that young generation, their common cry of dissension toward the detestable reality and, in parallel, a metaphorical intersection at which the Polish intelligentsia eventually turned in two completely different directions, to the left and to the right, going further and further away from each other at the crossroads ever since. The increasing conflict would come to an apogee in the Revolution of 1905-7 - in the fierce struggles over declarations, journalistic texts, bloody sacrifices, and clashes between socialist and nationalist party armed gangs.

More than fifty years of the history of the Polish intelligentsia between the fall of the January Insurrection and Polands regained independence in 1918, abounded with sudden turnings of the plot and astonishing paradoxes. There was a horrific disaster and no less horrid repressions at the period’s dawn; nonetheless, the following decades proved, for the intelligentsia, to be a period of quite unprecedented revival: this group set for itself probably the highest aspirations in its history, enjoying a hitherto-unknown prestige. The First World War (1914-8) and the reinstatement of independence for Poland, with a remarkable contribution from the local intelligentsias thoughts, effort, and blood, conclude the period under discussion.

Between those limited dates, the Polish educated elites changed radically. If the latter half of the 19" century admitted common mourning, shared meditation on common needs, common “quiet confidential conversations between fellow countrymen”, the turn of the century finally dispelled these good-natured illusions. The socialists and the nationalists reproached each other for having betrayed the immemorial ideals, for yielding to foreign influence, for lusting for power, interestedness, and ideological strangeness. In 1918, an unusual tangle of internal endeavours and external occurrences will enable the construction of what was then called The Second Republic. Would the builders, Polish intellectuals, be capable of building a new country out of the rubble — or would they rather transfer to the regained homeland the phobias and resentments bred over the years of national bondage?

4 Ludwik Krzywicki, Introduction, in: Ignacy Radliński, Mój żywot [“My life], Luck 1938, p. IV.

Chapter 1: The situation of the Polish intelligentsia after the January Insurrection

1. Professional development opportunities

The late 1860s and early 1870s were marked with a deep and long-lasting change in the Polish intelligentsias self-consciousness and ideological profile, and impressed their stamp on most issues relating to the intelligentsias everyday existence and prospects for professional development. The intelligentsia had to (re)define themselves, and continue developing in the bosom of three thoroughly different state organisms which themselves were subject at that time to grave transformations and reforms.

After the January Insurrection was defeated, the Russian Partition was subject to brutal repression affecting the whole of society, not just its intellectual elite. The physical losses in the insurgent fights and summary executions were multiplied by the subsequent deportations into the depths of Russia, of Siberia, which embraced some 40,000 insurrectionists and their families, thus eliminating them for a number of years, often forever, from the country’s life. Detentions and deportations were accompanied by the confiscation of property, upsetting ownership conditions (particularly in rural areas) or, at times, irrecoverably changing the country’s map, since a frequent practice in Bialystok Land, Byelorussia and Lithuania was the displacement of entire nobility-owned small farms, under the pretext that their dwellers had participated in the uprising. A majority among the deportees were the movements most active and most conscious participants, dedicated to the idea of an expeditious restoration of an independent Poland. The Circum-Baikal [also called Baikal] Uprising of 1866 closed this stage of Polish history. Initiated by a few hundred Polish exiles working on the construction of the Circum-Baikal road, a beaten track, in Siberia, after a series of a few days’ skirmishes and a dozen-or-so days of wandering across the Siberian wilderness, the insurgents were captured again; their leaders were shot by firing squads, and most of the others had their sentences exacerbated.

Soon after the January uprisings defeat, the liquidation of the autonomy of Kingdom of Poland (or, Congress Kingdom) was initiated: the Russians abolished the central administration’s institutions, assimilating them to the structures existing in the Russian Empire; also, the Polish language was gradually eliminated from public life and the school system. In 1869, the Main School was closed, an Imperial University of Warsaw being opened in lieu of it, with Russian as the language of instruction; in parallel, Russian was introduced in the gymnasia (high schools) and, after 1871, in the peoples schools. The Kingdom of Poland’ was renamed ‘Vistula Country’ (or, Vistula Land’; Russian, Privislinsky Krai). Churches other than Orthodox ones were also subject to repressive measures. As far as the Catholic Church was concerned, the abolishment of dioceses, the persecution of bishops, the confiscation of ecclesial properties, and the cassation of monasteries was the daily agenda. 1875 saw the abolishment of the Uniate Church in the Kingdom, which in Podlachia and Chełm Land triggered the bloody suppression of resistance from the Greek-Catholic people forcibly proselytised into Orthodoxy.

In the Lost (also called Stolen') Lands, the annexed territory so called by Poles (Ziemie Zabrane; termed Zapadnyi [Western] Krai’ by the Russians), no structural changes occurred, as they already formed an integral part of the Russian state; but post-Insurrection repressions affected language, in turn: Polish was thereafter completely ousted from all spheres of public life. Even more consistent than in the Kingdom was the policy aimed locally against Catholicism, which was identified with Polishness: resulting from dissolutions of parishes and cloisters,the Latin monasticlifein the easternlandsofthe former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (referred to as Kresy - the Eastern Borderlands) came to an almost complete standstill.

At that same time, the Austrian Partition witnessed a process no less seminal, but marked with a converse vector. Resulting from the reforms of the entire Habsburg Monarchy in the late 1860s/early 1870s, Galicia too introduced an autonomic state administration, and political authority came, to a prevalent degree, into Polish hands.

The situation in the Prussian Partition was determined by the emergence, in 1871, of the German Empire under Hohenzollern rule, whose Constitution transformed the Reich into a federal state (a union country), with the King of Prussia as the German Emperor. The Polish lands, however, were still governed by the Prussian Constitution of 1848.

The diverse legal status and developmental opportunities in these few sectors entailed a different situation for the professional intelligentsia. Particularly strong differences could be observed in the access of educated Poles to jobs with the state-apparatus bodies of Russia, Austro-Hungary and Prussia (thereafter, Germany). In the Russian Partition, such opportunities were gradually restricted owing to the aforesaid institutional changes, the elimination of the Polish language, and a tendency to replace Polish officials with Russian counterparts. However, the civil service in Congress Poland had never been de-Polonised completely. Generally, Poles held lower-rank offices and their promotion was neglected. For instance, Warsaw courts before the outbreak of World War One had only nine judges of Polish nationality employed (this being 4.2% of the total headcount), whereas the Court of Appeals featured not a single Pole, among a little less than 200 judges. The situation was different at lower levels of the administration though, as well as in the local-government institutions of the municipalities (particularly, small towns) and communes that still held a (rather limited) scope of authority, enjoying, by consequence, less prestige as a potential path of clerical career.

Career opportunities with public educational and learned institutes were equally low for Poles. The closure of Warsaw s Main School signified a loss of many chairs that provided the basic means of living for a considerable group of scholars and scientists; it also grossly impeded the education of their subsequent generations. Only a very small group of Polish professors were offered an opportunity to continue their work within the university, which was now Russian. With time, and the natural departure of the older generation of scholars and scientists, the number of chairs held by Polish professors was continually diminishing. Those retiring were replaced by Russians; there were only a few cases where Poles assumed independent posts, for to obtain them one had to provide a certificate of political loyalty, use the influence of high-placed people, and accept the principles imposed by the system. The latter was loathed by a number of scholars, especially exponents of the humanities, for whom Polish was the workspace. This attitude is well illustrated by the case of Piotr Chmielowski. This illustrious critic and literary historian refused, in 1882, to accept his appointment as a docent with the Warsaw University, having learned that, contrary to what had been decided beforehand, the history of Polish literature was to be lectured in Russian and not in Polish.

As a result, the university saw a dramatically quick shrinking of Polish staff: as of 1870, there were thirty-six Poles on the senior academic staff, twenty years later — fourteen, and in 1910 — only one. The situation was similar with the Institute of Farming and Forestry in Puławy, which was Russified. The chances for gaining a post with state gymnasia were not better: firstly, Russian was obligatory as the language of instruction; secondly, such schools were few, existing mostly in guberniya towns and in the larger urban centres. Given the situation, some scholars, scientists and pedagogues in Congress Poland found a basis of subsistence mainly in private educational institutions, editorial teams of scientific magazines and social institutions extending patronage to the sciences; these will be covered at more length later on. Contestation of the binding regime meant, in these areas as well, many lost opportunities for legal employment. An extreme, but nowise unique, example was the experience of Stanisław Mieczyński, a scholar of Polish and a teacher of Polish grammar at Jadwiga Sikorskas boarding school in Warsaw. For lecturing in Polish, rather than in the obligatory Russian (a Russian inspector eavesdropped one of his lessons through the classroom's door), he lost the right to teach in legally functioning institutions, and was afterwards sent on a three-year exile into the depths of Russia — for laying a bunch of flowers during a 1891 celebration, declared illegal, for the one-hundredth anniversary of the Third-of-May Constitution.

In the Stolen Lands, almost all the possibilities for a public career were closed to Poles, at least until 1905. Their access to public posts was immensely hindered; the only distinctive domains against this background were courts with juries and magistrates’ courts, where landed gentry representatives mainly served. In the Stolen Lands area, there were almost no Polish institutions able to absorb Polish science and education workers. Career opportunities for the intelligentsia were further undercut by the removal of the Polish language from public life, since — in contrast to the Kingdom — all the Polish publishing houses, newspaper editorial offices and theatres were closed down when the lands were incorporated into the Empire; what is more, a strict prohibition of Polish books and pamphlets was in force. Kiev, an important centre of Polish life in the Eastern Borderlands for several decades before the Great War, played a special part, given the context: this university city, along with — to a lesser extent — Żytomierz (Zhytomyr), with its continually operating Catholic theological seminary, attracted and educated members of the Polish youth, preparing the ground for the intellectual ferment of the early twentieth century.

In the Prussian Partition, the access to jobs with state institutions was considerably hindered for Poles and, moreover, largely depended on the policy pursued by the authorities (in the Kulturkampf period, especially, Polish teachers and officials were removed from their posts). There was no Polish institution of higher education in this region. The influx of Polish teachers to secondary and elementary schools, limited as it was, almost subsided after 1888 — the date they were forced to pledge that they would teach and educate their youth in the spirit of German ideals, particularly, in loyalty to the German fatherland and its Emperor. Poles had, in turn, a representation in the Landtag throughout this period; however, in the competition for a parliamentary career, holders of the professions typical to the intelligentsia would usually lose to the landed gentry and Catholic clergy.

Galicia, enjoying its autonomy, and the Cieszyn/Teschen Silesia area were places of peculiarity, given the context. Public institutions were progressively Polonised there with time; promotion opportunities in the domains of politics, military affairs, local government, science, or education and the school system lied open for Poles. Polish politicians, officials and clerks could count on a career with one of the Galician authorities, with the provincial Diet of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria at the head, as well as with the Habsburg Monarchy's state-wide institutions. In the autonomy period, the Austrian Prime Ministers office was held by two Polish politicians, Alfred Potocki and Kazimierz Badeni; Agenor Gołuchowski, Leon Biliński, and Julian Dunajewski ran various ministries of the Austrian Government. While the highest-ranked posts were mainly reserved for politicians derived from the aristocratic, best-connected and most influential families of Galicia, Polish officials and clerks in the offices and ministries, military-men with the officer corps and foreign-service diplomats were recruited from various, generally petty-nobility and intelligentsia, milieus. The career of a civil servant was, in Galicia itself, the most desirable and most willingly chosen way of life for most of the young educated people, as it ensured a stable, though not quite high, income.

With time, the daydream of a “collar of gold, with emptiness in the pocket” - and the Galician bureaucracy, taken more broadly - were subject to increasingly overt criticism by comers from other Polish lands and commentators from within Galicia. The hierarchical system of Galician offices, their overwhelmingly feudal spirit, their fondness of ranks and formal dress-codes, their tributary attitude toward superiors, instilled into employees (for instance, a clerk was not supposed to criticise his boss, under pain of dismissal), were meant to kill any individualism, restrict any enterprise, and absorb the employees best years without ensuring them an equitable return, in exchange. “For forty long and bloodletting years, the Galician is tormented, destroyed, growing barren, and languishing - to finally, in his year forty-and-one, get his retirement pension”: so wrote Tydzień, a Lwow magazine, as the twentieth century opened. Moreover, as Franciszek Bujak, one of the leading intellectuals, remarked in his Galicya, strict observance of “the clerical duty, combined with no high aspirations displayed by the officials, made for a disadvantaging influence, producing an “anti-social sentiment in the minds of the Galician intelligentsia”. In parallel, however, clerical work done in a Galician town, or in Vienna, could help build a financial background, based whereon members of the intelligentsia could pursue their off-professional interests and passions. Kazimierz Chłędowski was a perfect example of an official/intellectual of this kind. A writer, he authored works on Italian Renaissance

5 Pawel Ciompa, Drożyzna w Galicji i nędza urzędnicza [‘High prices in Galicia and clerical poverty’], Lwów 1913, p. 83.

culture, which enjoyed popularity; in terms of his professional life, he was employed with the governorship office in Lwów and with the Ministry for Galician Affairs in Vienna. However, Chłędowski wrote his most important works after his resignation and retirement. It was with genuine relief that he accepted the end of his more than thirty years service. "I have most completely come to terms with a life without an office) he recollected; "instead of going to the office at nine, I would sit down and write, at home. Then, some business to attend in the town, a short walk, a luncheon, then on, some reading [...], [receiving or paying] visits after four, often a dinner party of the soirće, or, a theatre — and so did the day pass over, without longing for a clerical life:

Galicias teaching personnel, remaining under the control of the Home School Council, established in 1867, was for the most part formed of exponents of Polish intellectualism and representatives of the Polish intelligentsia. The autonomy period saw a considerable increase both in the number and the standards of state gymnasia. The professorial staff stood out, compared to the other Polish lands, in terms of professional competencies, displaying a European standard. Secondary schools in the big cities, especially in Lwów and in Krakow, were frequently scientific institutions of importance, and their teachers, due to multiple bonds and scholarly interests, remained in close contact with the university staff.

Krakow and Lwów were also the only hubs countrywide which could boast Polish universities. The latter half of the 19* century saw their significant development, as well as their increasing autonomy and Polonisation. Polish was officially the exclusive language used at the Jagiellonian University from 1870 onwards; in the following year, lectures at the Emperor Francis University of Lwów (much better known by its interwar-period name John Casimir University) started to be delivered in two languages: Polish and Ukrainian. A regulation concerning the organisation of the academic system, enacted in 1873, confirmed the extensive power of the University Senates and Rectors; this was followed by an increase in the number of departments, students and professors. The universities traditions were becoming codified at that time as well, which manifested itself in a standardisation — or, in fact, a new design — of the rectors’ and deans’ gala costumes. The custom of solemn anniversary celebrations was launched: one of the most pompous and expanded ceremonies was the funeral of the remains of King Casimir the Great, which took place on 8" July 1869 (and became the first opportunity for all the university professors to wear their gowns); another such occasion was the five hundred year anniversary of the Krakow Academy, in 1900.