France and Poland: A Study in Contrasts France and Poland:

Study in Contrasts

Few countries in Europe have such widely differing modern histories as France and Poland. Both began the modern era as ancient Catholic monarchies. Each nation covered a large expanse of territory and could claim, at least in theory, to be a power within its own region. There however, the comparison stops. France was a relatively well-organized, and fairly coherent state under the rule of a powerful king and a centralizing absolute monarchy. Poland, on the hand, was a hold-over from the medieval past, an elective monarchy dominated by an overweening, exceedingly numerous aristocracy. While France was destined to enter the Nineteenth Century as a powerful empire, and to become more highly centralized than ever before, Poland would, at almost the very same time, completely disappear from the map. Absorbed into Russia, Germany, and Austria, the Polish people would be condemned to a long continuation of the Middle Ages, and to an equally long fight for freedom and for membership in the modern world.

The France that emerged in the wake of the devastating revolution of the last years of the Eighteenth Century was a country purged of virtually the last vestiges of the medieval past. Though true democracy lay well in the future in 1800, France had shed the old feudal structures of the past. Noble privileges had been abolished. The traditional union of church and state had been broken, and all French men had won equal rights. The numerous, semi0autonomous provinces of the Ancien Regime had been abolished, replaced by well-organized, and identically-administered departments. The welter of feudal and provincial laws and customs, the special rights and privileges of the different estates, the bewildering array of jurisdictions, and systems of law and taxation now all fell under the umbrella of the national government in Paris. In a few years, the famous Code Napoleon gave to a single, coherent legal system that endures to this day.

French unity was enhanced in many other ways as well....

The French language and culture was supreme throughout the land, and was fully imposed on all contiguous French territory. When Napoleon III conquered Nice in 1860, the formerly Italian city acquired its French name, and in every way became an integral part of the French Nation. The dialectal difference long present in Southern France, not to mention the entirely different language still spoken in some parts of Brittany, were replaced - in all public spheres - by French. A single national educational system was created - one of the most highly centralized in the world - with French as the sole language of instruction. The state gained precedence over local, regional, ethnic, and religious ties. Though still a predominantly Catholic nation, the France that evolved during the course of the Nineteenth Century was no longer inextricably linked with the Church. Once the last of the monarchies and empires had disappeared with the ending of the Franco-Prussian War, France became one of the world's first truly secular states. This secularism did much to modernize, educate, and unify the country:
Higher education was...placed...under the care of the state. Between 1881 and 1886, under the leadership of Minister of Education Jules Ferry, a series of laws was passed to establish a universal, secular system of primary education for children between 6 and 13 years of age. These Ferry laws intended to ensure the Republic's survival by creating a nation of literate and secular citizens. In 1865 approximately a quarter of the people residing in France could not speak French and in 1870 30% of men entering the army were illiterate; by 1906 only 5% of military conscripts were illiterate and 97.1% of men and 94.8% of women could sign their marriage contracts. (Haine, 2000, p. 123)

In contrast to the French experience of increasing national, cultural and linguistic unity, modernization, and advancement, Poland underwent a very different and troubling course of history. The old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth entirely disappeared at the end of the Eighteenth Century, the lion's share of the country…