A Pole apart

ROGER MOORHOUSE is absorbed by a little-known but politically significant Polish princess whose life encompassed the major events of the later 18th and 19th centuries

- ROGER MOORHOUSE

Everyone had a lockdown project. Some of us learned languages, or took up embroidery. Adam Zamoyski set himself the task of researching the life of his great-great-great-grandmother, the Polish princess Izabela Czartoryska.

Born in 1746, Czartoryska was certainly a remarkable woman, not least because her exceptional longevity – she lived to the age of 89 – meant that she witnessed a period of huge upheaval. For one thing, one can see through the prism of her life the unravelling and destruction of the Polish Kingdom, which was first undermined and partitioned by its avaricious neighbours in the last quarter of the 18th century then devoured after the Napoleonic Wars. Remarkably, Czartoryska was a subject, in turn, not only of the Kingdom of Poland but also of the Holy Roman Empire, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the Russian empire and the Austrian empire.

More than that, she lived through a period of enormous social and political change, encompassing not only the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars but also the wider ideas of the Enlightenment, despotism and the rise of nationalism. And they were changes that she felt very personally – not least as an aristocrat, but also as one who had met many of the leading figures of the age from Benjamin Franklin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as Marie Antoinette, Frederick the Great and Tsar Alexander I. One of her lovers, the Duc de Lauzun, even ended his days under a revolutionary guillotine in 1793.