More information about the proposed "Napoléonide"
(For those who have gone through Totentanz0's Napoleon source book)
Napoléonide
Napoléonide. A name for a proposed state to be established on the territory of
Southern Ukraine in the wake of
Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of
Russia. According to
Elie Borschak, the first historian to study this geopolitical project in the 1920s and 1930s, Napoleon was well-informed about Ukraine’s past and present and even empathized with
Ukrainians’ alleged desire to free themselves from tsarist despotism.
Furthermore, a high-ranking French official at the Foreign Ministry (Alexandre Maurice Blanc de Lanautte, Comte d’Hauterive) suggested the creation of a state of the Ukrainian
Cossacks allied to
France and named after the French emperor. These Borschak’s findings were largely accepted by generations of Ukrainian historians, but have been seriously challenged by Vadym Adadurov, a specialist in French-Ukrainian relations. Based on new discoveries in the French archives, Adadurov contended that the author of the project of Napoléonide was not the Frenchman Comte d’Hauterive, but the Pole Michał Sokolnicki (1760–1816)—a major-general in the army of the
Grand Duchy of Warsaw and later aide-de-camp of Napoleon during his campaign in Russia in 1812.
In his memoranda commissioned by the French government (11 in total, between 1811 and 1812), this Polish supporter of
Napoleon Bonaparte argued for a break up of the
Russian Empire along national lines and for a further reorganization of eastern Europe after an imminent French victory. As a way to eliminate the Russian threat from ‘Europe’s gate,’ a number of peoples conquered by the ‘Northern Barbarians’ (
Russians) were expected to join Napoleon’s ‘Great Empire.’ Among those peoples were Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainian
Cossacks, and
Crimean Tatars, who, according to Sokolnicki, would gratefully accept freedom from Napoleon’s hands. It is in this context that the duchy of Napoléonide is mentioned. Arguably the Polish author of the memorandum was among the first to suggest the idea of Ukrainian independence.
The project presupposed the creation of a set of ‘federated duchies’ on the territory between the restored
Poland and the truncated
Muscovy, among them two French puppet states in
Left-Bank Ukraine and
Southern Ukraine that would isolate
Russia from Europe and block its access to the
Black Sea. These buffer states, placed under Polish protectorate, but with their governments appointed by the French emperor, were to separate Europe’s ‘civilization’ from Asia’s ‘barbarism.’ One state would have included the territories of
Chernihiv gubernia and
Poltava gubernia and adjacent lands as far north as Orel.
The other would have been a unified state of the former enemies: the Ukrainian
Cossacks and
Crimean Tatars. It would have been called Napoléonide and consisted of the territories of
Katerynoslav gubernia, the
Donets River valley, and
Tavriia gubernia (including the
Crimea). As Sokolnicki expected, once these communities are freed by Napoleon from the ‘Muscovite yoke,’ they would have become gradually civilized and joined the European family of nations.
Although stillborn, never realized on political maps, Sokolnicki’s imaginative proposals clearly showed the importance of Ukraine and the Cossacks for the interests of Europe and its security. In spite of a well-documented interest of the French authorities in Ukraine’s past and present, Vadym Adadurov’s research also revealed that the French had little to do with the proposed state to be named after their belligerent emperor.
Napoléonide was not authorized by any high-ranking French official, let alone by
Napoleon Bonaparte himself. In the end, the French were not keen on the idea of a separate Ukrainian state, be it the Duchy of
Chernihiv or Napoléonide. Contrary to the fervent desires of Napoleon’s Polish allies, the emperor of the French was also reluctant to restore
Poland in its pre-partitioned borders, instead toying with the idea of a few ‘duchies’ or ‘kingdoms’ in
Right-Bank Ukraine and historic
Lithuania, dependent on
Paris but not united with the
Grand Duchy of Warsaw.
One possible reason for the lack of Napoleon’s consistent interest in Ukraine was the fact that his 1812 invasion of
Russia was directed at the conquest of
Moscow via Lithuanian and Belarusian territories, with western
Volhynia being the only Ukrainian region occupied by his Grande Armée. A more plausible reason, however, was that Napoleon did not want to commit himself to any plan of territorial rearrangement of eastern Europe, for he intended to use conquered territories as leverage in his future settlement with the Russian tsar and as a way of compensating his Austrian and Ottoman allies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borschak, E. ‘Napoléon et l’Ukraine,’
Revue des études Napoléoniennes, 19 (July–December 1922)
Borshchak, I.
Napoleon i Ukraïna (Lviv 1937)
Adadurov, V.
‘Napoleonida’ na skhodi Ievropy: uiavlennia, proekty ta diial'nist' uriadu Frantsiї shchodo pivdenno-zakhidnykh okraїn Rosiis’koї imperiї na pochatku XIX stolittia. 2d ed. (Lviv 2018)
Serhiy Bilenky
[This article was written in 2021.]
