Compares the history of France and Poland during the last years of the 18th century and into the 19th century.
This paper compares the different histories of France and Poland and how the Catholic Church affected those histories. The paper points out how Poland’s embrace of the Catholic Church was what helped Poland maintain its national identity and encourage Polish attempts at resistance against oppression.This is compared to the way France rejected what it saw as the medieval system of Church and State and how this, in turn, united the French people into a single indivisible entity and allowed for the rapid modernization and industrialization of the country.
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.