At six in the evening on 29 November 1830 a fire at a brewery in Warsaw's Solec district gave the signal, and a conspiracy of Polish officer cadets rose against Russian rule in the Kingdom of Poland. The attack on the Belweder palace failed to seize Grand Duke Constantine, but around nine the people of Warsaw, helped by Polish soldiers, stormed the Arsenal, and by morning the insurgents held much of the city. The November Uprising had begun.
The cadets' conspiracy
The secret society behind the rising was founded in 1828 at the Infantry Cadet School in Warsaw under Second Lieutenant Piotr Wysocki and had about 200 members. Britannica relates that after the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris, Tsar Nicholas I made clear he meant to use the Polish army to suppress it. Orders of 19 and 20 November putting the Russian and Polish armies on alert decided the conspirators to act at once.1
The night did not go to plan. Some conspirators missed the signal fire or moved late, while the blaze alerted the Russian units; the attack on the Belweder failed to capture Constantine, the Tsar's brother and commander in chief in Poland. According to dzieje.pl, the Museum of Polish History's news service, there were 6,500 Russian and 9,800 Polish soldiers in Warsaw that night, and six Polish generals who refused to join the rising were killed by the conspirators. The turning point came at about nine, when the people of Warsaw, with soldiers of the 4th Infantry Regiment, took the Arsenal and its weapons; after midnight the insurgents and the Polish units that joined them held the Old Town, the bridges and Praga.2
Ten months of war
Dzieje.pl calls the rising the greatest armed effort of the Polish struggles for independence in the 19th century, carried on for ten months by some 140,000 people against the strongest military power in Europe. The battles that followed include the defense of Warsaw at Olszynka Grochowska in February 1831 and the defeat at Ostrołęka on 26 May. The Russians attacked Warsaw on 6 September, and on 5 October the remains of the Polish army crossed into Prussia and laid down their arms. In Russia, still on the Julian calendar, the outbreak was dated 17 November.3
The rising's slogan and its exiles are the subject of our article For your freedom and ours, and its commanders and heroes appear in our profiles of Józef Bem and Emilia Plater.
Also on this day
- 1864: Battle of Spring Hill. Confederate General John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee struck John Schofield's retreating Union force at Spring Hill, Tennessee, in the Franklin-Nashville Campaign.
