Introduction

This book dwells on one piece of this question and analyses how the Austrian Empire was perceived, discussed, and, in some cases, acted upon by the representatives of the constitutional-monarchist wing of the Great Emigration, widely recognised as Hôtel Lambert. It focuses primarily on the views and actions of its two leading actors: Adam Jerzy Czartoryski and Władysław Zamoyski.The chronological demarcation of this study is years 1830 and 1846. The former brought the outbreak of the November Uprising against the rule of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I in the Kingdom of Poland, Czartoryski's return to the highest political and diplomatic positions, but also the formative experience of defeat and subsequent emigration. The latter, in turn, marks the unsuccessful attempt to provoke an uprising in several places of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which in Austrian Galicia turned into a peasant uprising against the local nobility and ended in massacres with hundreds or more than a thousand victims and several hundred burnt down estates.