The grand duke managed to escape (according to one historian he scurried off in women’s clothing), but the failed rebellion launched six months of unrest and turmoil.Ĭhopin had left Warsaw three weeks before the November Uprising for a European sojourn of music and adventure, traveling through Dresden, Vienna, Salzburg, and Munich, going to the opera and immersing himself in the local musical life.
On November 29th, 1830, a cadet at the Warsaw officers’ school led a group of co-conspirators in an attack on Constantine’s palace.
The final insult was a Russian scheme to use Poland’s army against the people of France to suppress their July Revolution, which deposed the last Bourbon monarch and put Louis Philippe-the “citizen king”-on the throne. The czar’s brother and factotum, Grand Duke Constantine, unleashed his secret police, abolished press freedoms, imposed taxes, closed Vilnius University, and deported Mickiewicz, the country’s most famous poet. The year before, Nicholas I of Russia had crowned himself King of Poland, disregarding the national constitution and parliament. The decisive moment in Frédéric Chopin’s story, and that of Poland during the first half of the 19th century, came in 1830, when he was 20 years old and a spark of independence flew in Warsaw.
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