Religion in the rhetoric of the 1863-64 uprising

ENThe leaders of the 1863-64 Uprising, also known as the January Uprising, sought the active involvement of all social classes, and tried to mobilize the masses to a far greater extent than any earlier attempts to break free from Russian rule. To that end, the possibilities provided by the printed word were widely explored. A distinctive feature of the uprising was the abundance of publications released by the central insurgent leadership and local organizations, and their diversity in terms of aim, audience, and language. The press not only wished to report the decisions taken by the leaders of the uprising and the military or diplomatic situation; its primary goal was to persuade readers to understand the necessity of the uprising, commit themselves to action, and see the task through to a successful conclusion. The press was divided up according to audience: both the Catholic clergy and ordinary urban and rural residents had their own publications. The latter had to be addressed in their own language; therefore, in addition to a variety of material in Polish, there were also Lithuanian and Belarusian publications, albeit not very numerous. Small posters, pamphlets, proclamations, appeals, notifications, and advertisements were used for agitation too. Multilingual papers and journals, as well as material from small presses, published as the uprising developed, constitute the object of this research. Only work published by and targeted at the Catholic clergy, in which religious rhetoric was dictated by the politics of audience and writer, is excluded from this study as being unduly specific. [Extract, p. 50]