Józef Poniatowski: Poland's Marshal of France

He was born a Viennese aristocrat, spent his youth in an Austrian uniform, and was mocked in Warsaw as a playboy prince. He died a Marshal of France in the muddy water of a Saxon river while covering the army's retreat, and became for generations of Poles a symbol of soldierly courage and honor. Prince Józef Poniatowski's life spans the end of the old Commonwealth and the short, bright hope of the Napoleonic years.²

Early life: a prince from Vienna

Józef Antoni Poniatowski was born in Vienna on 7 May 1763, the son of Andrzej Poniatowski, a general in the Austrian army, and Countess Teresa Kinsky. The family's star rose a year later, when his uncle Stanisław August was elected king of Poland, and the Sejm granted Józef's father the hereditary title of prince. Józef lost his father at the age of ten and grew up under the guardianship of the king.³

He made his career in the army of the Habsburgs. Commissioned in 1780, he was a major by 1784 and later a colonel of light cavalry. In 1788, in the war against the Ottoman Empire, he served as an aide to Emperor Joseph II and was wounded at the storming of Šabac on the Sava.⁴

Rise: the king's nephew in the king's army

In 1789, as the Commonwealth set about reforming itself and enlarging its army, the king called his nephew home. Poniatowski entered Polish service as a major general and commanded a division in Ukraine. When Russia invaded in 1792 to undo the constitutional reforms, he commanded the Crown army in Ukraine.⁵

Campaigns

Zieleńce, 1792, and the fall of the Commonwealth

On 18 June 1792, near the village of Zieleńce in Volhynia, the Polish forces under Poniatowski, with Tadeusz Kościuszko among his generals, defeated an 11,000-strong Russian corps under Herkules Morkov. It was the first real Polish victory in almost a century. Four days later the king created the order of Virtuti Militari, and Poniatowski and Kościuszko were among the first fifteen men to receive it.⁶ › The Battle of Zieleńce, 1792

The victory did not save the Commonwealth. Ordered to sign an armistice, Poniatowski refused, but the king gave in to Catherine the Great and joined the Targowica Confederation. His nephew resigned his command and left the country. He returned for the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794 and commanded a sector of the defense of Warsaw. After the third partition he withdrew from public life in 1795 and later settled in Warsaw, where his lavish life at the Pod Blachą palace earned him a poor reputation.⁷

The Duchy of Warsaw, 1806 to 1809

Napoleon's defeat of Prussia in 1806 brought French troops to Warsaw and reopened the Polish question. In December 1806, after Napoleon arrived in the city, Poniatowski handed him a memorandum calling for a Polish state, and he joined the provisional government as head of the war department. When the Duchy of Warsaw was created in 1807 he became its minister of war and commander-in-chief, and he built its army almost from nothing.⁸

The test came in April 1809. Austria invaded the Duchy with about 30,000 men under Archduke Ferdinand d'Este while the French were busy elsewhere. Poniatowski met them on 19 April at Raszyn, south of Warsaw, with a smaller army that included some 8,000 raw recruits, and held them in the marshy ground until nightfall, leading the counterattack at Falenty himself. He then gave up the capital without a fight, crossed the Vistula and struck south into Austrian Galicia, taking Sandomierz, Zamość and Lwów in May and Kraków on 15 July. The Austrians had to abandon Warsaw to defend their own lands, and the Treaty of Schönbrunn of 14 October 1809 added more than 50,000 square kilometers to the Duchy.⁹

Russia, 1812

In 1812 Poniatowski commanded the V Corps of the Grande Armée, made up of the Duchy's troops. He fought at Smolensk and at Borodino, where he commanded on the right wing of the army, and entered Moscow with the emperor on 14 September. After Smolensk Napoleon reprimanded him for a failure that was, in the view of Polish historians, the fault of Napoleon's brother Jérôme. During the retreat, according to the Fondation Napoléon, he was injured when his horse slipped and handed command to General Zajączek; the remnants of the corps reached Warsaw in December.¹⁰

Leipzig, 1813

In early 1813, as the Russians advanced into the Duchy, Poniatowski refused offers to change sides. He left Warsaw on 5 February with about 14,000 men, by the Fondation Napoléon's count, rebuilt what he could of the army and led it west to join Napoleon at Dresden; dzieje.pl puts the force he withdrew to Saxony at about 30,000. There it became the VIII Corps of the Grande Armée. It was the last army the Duchy of Warsaw would ever field, and Poniatowski had kept it together through a winter in which the Duchy itself was overrun. At Leipzig Napoleon made him a Marshal of France, the only foreigner ever to receive that rank from him. The Fondation Napoléon dates the appointment to 16 October 1813, the first day of the great battle; Szymon Askenazy writes that Napoleon announced it to the army on the morning of 15 October, on the eve of the fighting. His name is carved on the Arc de Triomphe.¹¹

On 19 October, as the beaten French army streamed west across the Elster, Poniatowski's corps held the suburbs to cover the retreat. A French engineer blew the bridges over the river too early. Already wounded several times, Poniatowski tried to cross on horseback. He was hit again, possibly by mistake by French troops, and drowned in the river.¹²

Character and command style

Poniatowski was personally brave and immensely popular with his soldiers, who saw him in the front line at Zieleńce, at Falenty and on the banks of the Elster. His biographer Szymon Askenazy recorded that in his last hours he spoke of dying bravely, of Poland and of honor. Polish tradition gives him the words "God has entrusted me with the honor of the Poles; I will give it back only to God", which became a national motto, though they are attributed rather than recorded.¹³

He was a loyal subordinate and a good organizer rather than a Napoleonic genius. Historians quoted by dzieje.pl describe him as cautious in the attack and lacking Napoleon's dash, and he was criticized at Borodino for feeding his battalions into the fight one at a time. His true achievement was the Duchy's army itself: built in 1807, saved in 1809, rebuilt after the disaster of 1812, and still fighting at Leipzig. By 1812, in the words of the historian Jarosław Czubaty, he was already a kind of living national legend.¹⁴

Death and legacy

His body was recovered from the river, embalmed and carried back to Poland. In 1817 he was laid in the crypts of Wawel Cathedral, the first man who was not a king to rest among the kings of Poland, and his cult began. Painters from Horace Vernet to January Suchodolski showed the prince on his rearing horse at the edge of the Elster.¹⁵

His monument has had a life as dramatic as his own. The equestrian statue was commissioned from the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen in 1817 and shows the prince in a Roman tunic, which shocked Warsaw. Finished just as the November Uprising broke out, it was taken by Field Marshal Ivan Paskevich to his estate at Homel in 1840, came back to Warsaw after the Treaty of Riga in 1922, stood on Saxon Square from 1923, and was blown up by the Germans after the Warsaw Uprising. In 1951 Denmark sent a new bronze cast from Thorvaldsen's model in Copenhagen, and since 18 October 1965 it has stood in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw.¹⁶ › The Greatest Commanders in Polish History