Emilia Plater: the countess who led insurgents in 1831

In the spring of 1831 a 24-year-old countess cut her hair short, put on men's clothes and a saber, and called the people of a Lithuanian parish to rise against the Russian Empire. Emilia Plater died before the year was out, of illness rather than a bullet, but her story, retold within months by Adam Mickiewicz, made her one of the best-known heroines of the Polish struggle for independence.¹

Early life: Vilnius and Liksna

Emilia Plater was born in Vilnius on 13 November 1806, into the noble Plater family. Her father, Franciszek Ksawery Plater, was by Stefan Kieniewicz's account in the Polish Biographical Dictionary a reckless spendthrift, and her parents separated while she was a child. She grew up with her mother on the estate of relatives at Liksna, near Dyneburg (today Daugavpils in Latvia), in the part of the old Commonwealth then ruled by Russia.²

She was educated at home, alongside cousins. Both the dictionary and the Polish History Museum's dzieje.pl describe a girl who wrote poetry, rode and handled weapons: the dictionary mentions target shooting, the museum fencing and hunting. Kieniewicz suggests she was inspired by heroines such as the legendary Wanda, Grażyna, the warrior princess of Mickiewicz's poem of that name, and Bouboulina of the Greek war of independence.³

In 1829 she traveled with her mother to Warsaw and Kraków, the dictionary records, visiting the battlefield of Raszyn, Ojców and Puławy, the seat of the Czartoryskis. Her mother died in 1830. Her father remarried and, Kieniewicz writes, refused to see her.⁴

Marriage did not tempt her, though the sources tell the story differently. dzieje.pl says she turned down a wealthy Russian engineer for patriotic reasons. Straszewicz, who wrote the first biography from the family's accounts, describes two suitors among the Russian officers who visited Liksna, a general and a Saxon-born captain of engineers whom she respected but could not love, because Poland, he writes, was the only object of her thoughts. Kieniewicz is cooler: plain and without a dowry, she had few suitors, and the Russian officers who courted her were never serious candidates.⁵

The November Uprising reaches Lithuania

The uprising broke out in Warsaw in November 1830. In Lithuania it began in the last third of March 1831, the IPN notes, in five districts of Samogitia, and spread fast; the insurgents took Raseiniai on 26 March, the news, as dzieje.pl puts it, that signaled the rising across Lithuania.⁶

Plater had been waiting. On 25 March 1831, the dictionary says, she signed a statement for her guardian that no one had talked her into it and that she had long meant to go to war. Around 29 March, after Mass at Dusiaty (Dusetos) near Jeziorosy (Zarasai), she is said to have appeared in men's clothing, with a saber and cropped hair, and to have called on the people to rise; the IPN, too, places her raising of the insurgent banner at Dusiaty. Kieniewicz warns that this famous scene is hard to separate from later legend. On 4 April she signed the act of the district's rising at Jeziorosy.⁷

Straszewicz, writing in exile only a few years later, tells the Dusiaty scene in full: the young woman cuts off her golden hair, takes pistols and a dirk, and rides with Maria Prószyńska to the village, which belonged to her cousin Cezary Plater, where on a Sunday the church was fuller than usual and the insurgents were waiting for the banner to be raised. It is a stirring page, and exactly the kind of account Kieniewicz warns may owe as much to legend as to memory.⁸

In the field: Załuski, Prestowiany and Chłapowski

dzieje.pl describes the band she raised with her friend Maria Prószyńska as several hundred strong, riflemen, horsemen and scythemen. She dreamed of seizing the fortress of Dyneburg, but the plan had little chance, and the two small victories near the Daugava later credited to her are, the dictionary says, unconfirmed. Both sources agree that the attack on the fortress never came.⁹

On 30 April she reached the insurgent force of Karol Załuski, and on 4 May she fought in its unsuccessful battle at Prestowiany, where, in Straszewicz's telling, she asked to be admitted to the ranks of the free riflemen of Wiłkomierz. Memoirs quoted by Kieniewicz praise her serious and tactful service; others say her comrades sometimes had to rescue her when she fainted or fell from her horse. Here she met Maria Raszanowicz, who stayed with her to the end. After Załuski's force broke up she served with the riflemen of Wiłkomierz (Ukmergė) and fought in a skirmish at Mejszagoła, a fight dzieje.pl also lists.¹⁰

In late May a Polish cavalry raid under General Dezydery Chłapowski, about 800 men by the IPN's count, crossed into Lithuania, and early in June General Antoni Giełgud followed with about 12,000 men. On 5 June, at Gabrielów, Plater met Chłapowski. He advised her to go home, as both Kieniewicz and her first biographer, Józef Straszewicz, record; instead, the dictionary and dzieje.pl agree, he gave her the honorary rank of captain and command of the 1st company of an infantry regiment being raised in Lithuania.¹¹

Was Emilia Plater really a captain?

Yes, but the rank was honorary. Kieniewicz judges the command to have been largely nominal, and even Chłapowski's diary, which mentions a detachment of "Miss P.", leaves it unclear whether she really commanded it and for how long. The sources name the regiment differently: dzieje.pl calls it the 1st Lithuanian Infantry Regiment, the Polish Biographical Dictionary the 25th Line Infantry Regiment. Straszewicz, writing in the 1830s, reconciles the two: the first Lithuanian regiment, he says, was renamed the 25th of the line a few days after her appointment.¹²

For about two weeks she served in the garrison of Kaunas, where a ball was given in her honor. dzieje.pl adds that she distinguished herself guarding supply convoys.¹³

Defeat and refusal

The campaign went badly. On 19 June Giełgud's assault on Vilnius from the Paneriai hills failed with heavy losses, and the insurgents fell back from Kaunas. During the failed attack on Šiauliai in July, which the IPN dates to 8 July and Kieniewicz to 6 July, Plater was kept with the baggage train.¹⁴ › Battle of Paneriai, 1831

A few days later the Polish corps in Lithuania was ordered across the Prussian border, where its units laid down their arms on 13 to 15 July. Plater condemned the step as shameful, Kieniewicz writes, and refused to follow. With her cousin Cezary Plater and Maria Raszanowicz she set out to reach the insurgent army near Warsaw, traveling through the forests, dzieje.pl adds, disguised as a peasant.¹⁵

How did Emilia Plater die?

She died of illness, not in battle. She fell sick on the road, sheltered first in a village hut and then at the manor of the Abłamowicz family at Justianów in the Sejny district, where she was hidden as a governess under the name Korawińska. She died there on 23 December 1831, at the age of twenty-five.¹⁶

She was buried in the cemetery at Kopciowo, today Kapčiamiestis in Lithuania, where her grave still survives. The Russian government confiscated her belongings.¹⁷

Command style

Plater was not a trained officer, and the sources do not pretend otherwise. Her gifts were those of a recruiter and a symbol: she raised a band from her own neighborhood, kept the respect of the soldiers, as dzieje.pl puts it, and held to the cause when generals gave it up. Kieniewicz's summary of the memoirs is balanced: serious and correct service, no scandal, and moments when her comrades had to protect her.¹⁸

Legacy: the Colonel

The Warsaw and Poznań press spread news of her exploits while she was still alive. In March 1832 Adam Mickiewicz wrote The Death of the Colonel (Śmierć pułkownika), in which riflemen and villagers mourn a revered commander dying in a forester's hut; only in the last lines is the colonel revealed to be a young woman, Emilia Plater. The poem made her a colonel, a rank she never held, and, as Kieniewicz notes, an ideal leader adored by people and soldiers.¹⁹

Her fame crossed borders. In Paris, Kieniewicz notes, she was shown on stage as a new Joan of Arc, and Straszewicz's biography, first published in French in 1835, already called her the Joan of Arc of Poland; an English translation by a Polish exile appeared in New York in 1843.²⁰

In independent Poland her portrait appeared on the 20-złoty banknote between the wars, and many Polish schools and streets bear her name; both the dictionary and dzieje.pl record this. She stands today among the great women warriors of history.²¹

Her name was also taken for a unit she would hardly have recognized. The IPN stresses that the 1st Independent Women's Battalion named after Emilia Plater was formed by the Soviet authorities at Sielce on the Oka on 19 August 1943, as part of the Polish forces raised in the Soviet Union beside the 1st Division named after Tadeusz Kościuszko, and it lists street names honoring the battalion among those that should be changed. The dictionary confirms that she was chosen as the battalion's patron.²²

Read about the uprising's great battle in Lithuania, the Battle of Paneriai, or test yourself in the Polish battles quiz.