New Castle · Bayonne · Paris
May 5, 1798. At New Castle on the Delaware, Kościuszko boards a ship for France under an assumed name. On June 28 he lands at Bayonne, and before mid-July he is already in Paris. Here he meets Peter Josef Zeltner, envoy of the Helvetic Republic in Paris (1798–1800), a republican — and from this acquaintance a friendship is born. In 1801 the Naczelnik will take up residence on Zeltner’s estate at Berville near Fontainebleau. So begins his personal relationship with the Zeltner family — a relationship that will, in the end, lead him to his deathbed in Solothurn.
Bonaparte · the first refusal
Berville is an estate in the commune of La Genevraye near Fontainebleau, on the Loing River, some seventy kilometers south-east of Paris. Surrounded by parkland, orchards, and a kitchen garden. Here Kościuszko will spend, with interruptions, fourteen years (1801–1815). From Berville he writes letters to Jefferson (president since 1801), to Niemcewicz in Philadelphia, to Wybicki in the camp of the Polish Legions in Italy. The first refusal came earlier still: already in 1798 he declined the command of the Legions — he would stand at their head only when they marched on Poland. On October 17 and November 6, 1799, in the weeks before the coup of 18 Brumaire, he twice meets General Napoleon Bonaparte, freshly returned from the Egyptian campaign — without agreement. After the coup of November 9, 1799, when Bonaparte assumes the consulship of France, Kościuszko calls him “the gravedigger of the Republic.”
The reasons for the refusal are three. First, the Polish Legions are being used by France as cannon fodder on the peripheries of the Italian and Caribbean (Haitian) campaigns — in 1802 Napoleon will send Polish regiments to suppress the slave uprising of Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, where, of the more than five thousand sent, some four thousand will die. Second, Bonaparte declares no concrete plan for the restitution of Poland — he uses Poles but promises them nothing. Third, Kościuszko does not believe in the republicanism of a dictator: “Liberty that is not pledged anew each day turns, in the first war, into a throne.”
I beg of you three favours. The first — that you grant a general amnesty to the Poles without any reservation […]; the second — that you proclaim yourself King of Poland with a free constitution […] and order schools to be founded at government expense for the instruction of the peasants.
Tadeusz Kościuszko, letter to Tsar Alexander I, Berville,
Original in French; rendered from the Polish edition: H. Mościcki (red.), Kościuszko. Listy, odezwy, wspomnienia, Warszawa 1917, pp. 120–121.
Niemcewicz, Jefferson, correspondence
The years 1800–1812 are for Kościuszko a time of intense correspondence but political withdrawal. He writes to Jefferson on average once every three months — the letters concern the abolition of slavery (Jefferson, president 1801–1809, signs in 1807 the law banning the importation of slaves, though he does not abolish the institution itself), the restitution of Poland (Jefferson, through Robert Livingston in Paris, attempts a delicate diplomacy), political philosophy (Jefferson regularly notes Kościuszko’s letters in his “commonplace book”). He writes to Niemcewicz, who has settled in New Jersey and married Susan Livingston Kean. He reads the philosophers of the Enlightenment and military treatises. He designs an irrigation system for the farms around Berville (effective — the wheat grows). He suffers from rheumatism and the back wound that will never heal.
Withdrawal does not mean, however, that he has been forgotten. After Jena, on , Napoleon, through Fouché, summons Kościuszko to his headquarters. The Naczelnik answers in his own fashion: on he demands guarantees of an English-style constitution and of Poland’s borders “as far as Riga and Odessa.” The emperor’s reply is brief — Kościuszko “is simply a fool.” Instead of the imperial headquarters, the Naczelnik receives police surveillance at Berville.
Alexander I · the second refusal
Napoleon’s Russian campaign, summer 1812. Alexander I, son of Paul I, tsar since 1801, reaches Vilnius in December 1812 after the catastrophic retreat of the Grande Armée. Here he begins to warm to the Polish cause — for strategic reasons (better a Polish puppet state than a French Duchy of Warsaw). After Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig and the capitulation of Paris, Kościuszko writes to the tsar — on April 9, 1814, asking for an amnesty for Poles and for a constitutional crown on the English model. Alexander summons him to Paris and on May 3, 1814 receives him with ostentatious honors. Alexander proposes: the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland within the borders of the Duchy of Warsaw plus parts of the Austrian and Prussian partitions, under the personal patronage of the Tsar. That is, Poland exists, as an autonomous kingdom in personal union with the Russian Empire, with a constitution, a sejm, and a Polish army.
Kościuszko, at sixty-eight, sets three conditions: borders reaching the Dvina and the Dnieper, the enfranchisement of the peasants, and a constitution on the English model. All three are unacceptable to Alexander. The negotiations end in failure. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 creates the Kingdom of Poland according to Alexander’s plan (limited to the Duchy of Warsaw, minus the Poznań and Cracow regions), without peasant reform, and with a constitution granted from above. The meaning of the refusal fits in a single sentence: Kościuszko let Alexander pass by, because Alexander did not want all of Poland.
Solothurn · Gurzelngasse 12
. On a summons arrives from the tsar. Alexander receives Kościuszko at Braunau, and on the Naczelnik talks in Vienna with Prince Adam Czartoryski. A kingdom smaller than the Duchy of Warsaw he calls “a mockery.” Disappointed by both conversations, on June 25, 1815 he sets out for Switzerland. In October he settles in Solothurn, a Catholic town on the Aare, with Franz Xaver Zeltner, Peter’s brother, in the family’s burgher townhouse. The address: Gurzelngasse 12, in the very center of the old town, a few dozen meters from St. Ursus Cathedral, a hundred meters from the market square.
Solothurn, a small town of some four thousand inhabitants, is for Kościuszko ideal. Quiet. Catholic. Politically peripheral (Switzerland, neutral after the Congress of Vienna). Surrounded by the Jura and the river plain of the Aare. Here he will spend the last two years of his life. He writes letters daily; in 1816 he draws up his Solothurn will. In he visits Pestalozzi’s institute at Yverdon, and on , in a letter to Jefferson, he confirms his American will. He walks daily along the town ramparts, talks with the local youth in German and French, teaches them the history of Poland.
From Solothurn, too, comes the most important act of his last years. On Kościuszko executes a deed freeing the peasants of Siechnowicze from serfdom and granting them their land. “Feeling deeply that serfdom is contrary to the law of nature…” — so begins the Siechnowicze Manifesto. Tsar Alexander does not recognize the act.
Death
October 1, 1817, Solothurn. After a fall from his horse on one of his rides, Kościuszko’s health gives way: fever, sleeplessness, “blinding” headaches. The cause of the fall — hard to say after two centuries. He lies in bed for two weeks. He dictates letters to his loved ones to thirteen-year-old Emilia Zeltner, the Naczelnik’s favorite. On October 10 he draws up his last will. On the evening of October 14 he asks for the last sacraments. On October 15, 1817, around 10:00 p.m., in Solothurn, Tadeusz Andrzej Bonawentura Kościuszko dies. He is seventy-one years, eight months, and eleven days old. Typhus was once spoken of; the autopsy pointed to an internal hemorrhage, and DNA analysis of the preserved heart (2021–2022) — to endocarditis.
A canopy bed, a Louis XVI sofa, a candlestick by the bedside, a portrait of Kościuszko in an oval frame above the armchair. A burgher townhouse from the second half of the seventeenth century, the apartment one floor above the street — a few dozen meters from St. Ursus Cathedral, a hundred meters from the market square.
The museum was opened here on September 27, 1936 on the initiative of the Polish envoy Modzelewski; the Kosciuszko-Museum Solothurn is run by the Swiss Kościuszko Society. The permanent exhibition includes the original furnishings of the death room, the death mask (a copy from the MNK), and personal mementos. The commemorative plaque was placed on the house in 1865. Photograph by the FWNDK Foundation · Kosciuszko-Museum Solothurn, Gurzelngasse 12.
Deeply feeling that serfdom is contrary to the law of nature and to the prosperity of nations, I hereby declare that I abolish it entirely and for all time on my estate of Siechnowicze […]. I ask of them only that, for their own good and the good of the country, they should seek to found schools and spread education.
Act emancipating the peasants of Siechnowicze, Solothurn, ; signed before a notary, witnesses F. Grimm and Ksawery Zeltner
Original in the Kościuszko Museum, Solothurn; rendered from the Polish edition: H. Mościcki (red.), Kościuszko. Listy, odezwy, wspomnienia, Warszawa 1917, pp. 139–140.
After death
The news of his death reaches Europe within two weeks. Jefferson, at Monticello, receives word only some months later (transatlantic post in winter takes up to three months). Already in February 1798, in the Naczelnik’s lifetime, he had written of him to General Horatio Gates: “He is as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.” The sentence will enter American history as one of the most frequently repeated descriptions of Kościuszko. The Polish diaspora in Paris and London organizes memorial services. Coleridge at Highgate recalls his sonnet of 1794; beside him stands Keats with his sonnet “To Kosciusko” of . In Solothurn the funeral takes place on October 19 at the former Jesuit church, with full military honors of the Swiss cantonal militia. The body is provisionally deposited in the crypt of that church, awaiting translation to Poland.
Not the whole body, however, will go to Poland. The entrails were buried at Zuchwil, where a monument was raised in . The heart, in accordance with Kościuszko’s wishes, went to Emilia Zeltner — first at Vezia (), then at Varese (); in it passed to the Polish Museum in Rapperswil, and on to Warsaw, to the chapel of the Royal Castle — to which it returned once more on .
The initiative to bring the remains home comes from the Senate of the Free City of Cracow; Alexander I (who sees the translation as a gesture of reconciliation with Polish public opinion) gives his consent and funds the exhumation. The cortège leaves Solothurn on March 28, 1818, reaches the church of St. Florian in Cracow on April 11, and on June 23, 1818 the coffin is laid in Wawel Cathedral, in St. Leonard’s crypt — among the tombs of the kings of Poland. A place Kościuszko never directly sought, but one he had earned.
The Wawel funeral has its direct sequel. On Cracow begins to raise the Kościuszko Mound; the work continues until . Into the mound goes earth from the battlefields; a granite boulder from the Tatras will stand on its summit in .
Here ends the life. Here begins the heritage.
Here ends — also — our biographical narrative. Still to be written is Chapter IX: the history of what was done with Kościuszko’s name in the two centuries after his death. Less history. More legend.