A woman in protective gear resolutely strides towards a tall wooden cross, carrying a chainsaw. She lowers her face shield and starts the chainsaw’s motor. The metal teeth meet the wood, spitting an arc of sawdust into the air. Within a few minutes, the vertical beam has been cut in half and the cross tumbles to the ground. Behind it, a surface covered with electric bulbs suddenly lights up, forming the shape of the Polish national emblem – a crowned eagle. This scene is the epilogue of Klątwa (The Curse) by Oliver Frljić, a play that premiered in 2017 in Warsaw and that one critic pronounced “the most iconoclastic and blasphemous performance of the century.”Footnote 1
Frljić’s play, which ruthlessly denounces the hegemony of the Catholic Church in Poland and tests the boundaries of artistic freedom in a country where the principles of liberal democracy are in question, provoked a harsh response from conservative politicians and state-owned media, who branded it “an attack on Poland.”Footnote 2 While right-wing activists and religious groups protested against the play in front of the theater, the Polish Bishops’ Conference called for expiatory prayers, municipal authorities attempted to ban performances in state-owned theaters, and the state attorney placed the production under investigation for offending religious feeling and inciting violence.Footnote 3 Facing threats and continuing the performance staged under police protection, Frljić made an open call to the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, to take a stance on the “clear violation of human rights and […] attack on freedom of speech” occurring in Poland.Footnote 4
Pickets and skirmishes in front of the theater accompanied the performance throughout the year, as Klątwa continued to play to sold-out audiences. The heated controversy sparked by Frljić’s work was not the first of its kind in Poland, but it revealed with particular poignancy a fundamental fissure in Polish society.Footnote 5 The Curse threw into relief the contradiction between two constitutive elements of the Polish national narrative: the will to freedom and self-determination and the centrality accorded to the Catholic faith and its symbols and rituals. The clash of the independent state (symbolized by the crowned eagle) and the all-powerful Church (the cross) depicted in the play’s closing scene represented the major conflict over which values should define Polishness. Felling the cross on stage and equipping his actors with machine guns assembled from wooden and iron crucifixes, Frljić touched a nerve not only because of the play’s anticlerical message, but also because the symbols he used had long ago begun to represent the nation itself.
***
Why the Cross?
No other symbol is as omnipresent in Poland as the cross. It features prominently in public spaces and state institutions; it is anchored in the country’s visual history, inspires protest culture, and dominates the natural landscape itself. No other symbol is as multilayered and contradictory either: the cross recalls Poland’s historic struggles for independence and anti-Communist dissent, but it also encapsulates the country’s current position in Europe as a bulwark of Christianity and a champion of conservative values. It is both a national symbol – defining the boundaries of Polishness in opposition to a changing constellation of the country’s Others, be it Russians, Jews, or Muslim refugees – and a key object of contestation in the creative arts and political culture. Yet, despite the centrality of the symbol in Polish culture, political history, and social life, a cultural history of the cross in Poland has not yet been written.
Cross Purposes is a cultural history of the symbol of the cross in modern politics that, focusing on the case of Poland, traces the symbol’s political genealogy and the ways different secular projects appropriated it for their own ends. Doing that, it debunks the popular misconceptions that the symbol’s semantic content is set in stone or that, in the political realm, the cross is the symbol of conservative values par excellence. Both in Poland’s current public discourse and in much of the critical writing, the cross emerges as a “natural”Footnote 6 and “obvious”Footnote 7 symbol of Polish “national traditions,”Footnote 8 “values that Poles hold dear,”Footnote 9 “national memory,”Footnote 10 and “Polish identity.”Footnote 11 In this kind of narrative, all these categories appear to be clearly defined, invariable, uncontested, and perennial. The supposedly shared principles, legacies, and narratives that the symbol embodies are invariably positively valued and presented as requiring to be protected, defended, and preserved.Footnote 12 It is, therefore, the physical presence of the cross in the public arena that becomes a visible guarantor of their continuity. From this point of view, the cross appears as the embodiment and material guardian of the old order, the ultimate shorthand for “the nation” that indexes the past, encodes stability, and withstands change.
In reality, the cross has never meant just one thing. Its meaning has changed from epoch to epoch; it has been contested and is contingent on partisan interests. In different periods, the cross has even connoted diametrically opposed ideas. While at the turn of the twentieth century Polish socialists used it to communicate ideals of social justice, to their opponents, the National Democrats, the cross denoted the right-wing worldview and served as a rallying sign against the Communist “heresy.”Footnote 13 While in the Solidarność era it served as “a sign of diversity against an imposed monolithic worldview,” after the fall of Communism it became to many Poles a symbol of “right-wing oppression within the nation.”Footnote 14 And if the symbol’s history demonstrates any continuity, it is in the fact that its tremendous emotional impact has always provided the ultimate resource for those demanding radical political change or attempting to legitimize a new and still vulnerable political system. Indeed, the reconstruction of the symbol’s historical trajectory reveals a paradox that lies at the heart of its political success: the cross gained its political appeal as a tool to legitimize new and risky political projects. Rather than being a synecdoche of the old order, for the last century and a half, the cross came to embody political projects that were radical, daring, emancipatory, or outright revolutionary. Tracing the history of the cross as a symbol of transformation allows us to see not only how society mobilizes support for new and risky political undertakings, but also how it articulates new demands and reconfigures its boundaries vis-à-vis the Others.
Looking at modern Polish history through the prism of the multiple iterations of this crucial symbol helps us challenge the myth of the immutable national canon. Such a microperspective reveals paradoxes, contradictions, and creative appropriations under the surface of the ostensibly linear narrative of national endurance and the preservation of the nation’s values. The story of the cross discloses how even the most iconic symbols of what are routinely seen as the unchanging bedrock values of “the Polish nation” have undergone multiple, and sometimes mutually contradictory, symbolic mobilizations, served disparate agendas, and demarcated the core of the national community each time anew. Focusing on the symbol of the cross in the longue durée, this book also illuminates the way Poles have used religious symbols to rally their ranks, but also to disempower, demonize, and exclude their adversaries. By doing that, the book foregrounds the costs of grand narratives of national unity, including the stigmatization and silencing of the minorities, but also symbolic violence against those cast out of the national collective.
To be sure, Poland is not unique in the way its political culture is intensely interconnected with religion. The political appeal of the cross has been a global phenomenon, too. Yet, despite its long history of political deployment not just in Poland, but across the world, including in the colonization of the Americas, the Nazi rise to power, and the recent storming of Capitol Hill, the cross has never been systematically studied as a political symbol in its capacity to mobilize for action and solidify power structures, much less across different historical epochs.
In other regions of the world where Catholicism has a traditionally prominent position, such as Latin America, the symbol of the cross has also been repetitively used for political mobilization.Footnote 15 Peronism in Argentina employed religious imagery to craft a “civil religion” that was detached from the Catholic Church, but deployed as an ideology to unite the nation behind its leader.Footnote 16 Repressive military regimes in countries like Paraguay, El Salvador, Brazil, and Chile made extensive use of Christian symbols as they attempted to legitimize themselves as defending “Western Christian civilization.”Footnote 17 And radical proponents of Liberation Theology, who preached the necessity of politically organized combat for social justice, envisioned the cross as “a symbol of challenge and struggle” in the name of the poor and the oppressed.Footnote 18
Also in Western Europe, considered the most secularized region of the world, the symbol of the cross has accompanied a number of disparate political enterprises, particularly in Catholic countries, like Spain, Italy, and Ireland.Footnote 19 Catholic imagery was used, for example, to mobilize support for Italy’s colonial ambitions in Libya, and, later, served as a reference point for the anti-democratic Italian Nationalists and proto-fascists.Footnote 20 Catholic symbols were also salient in the so-called Northern Ireland Troubles, where the involvement of the Catholic Church in the conflict caused a lot of controversy.Footnote 21 In the Spanish Second Republic, religious symbols and rituals became a bone of contention in the confrontation between the republican government, seeking to confine religion to the private sphere, and its opponents, who protested the secularization measures and framed the predicament of Spanish Catholics as that of martyrs.Footnote 22 The ensuing Franco regime, with its “liturgical triumphalism,” reaffirmed the central role of the Catholic imaginary in the Spanish public sphere, as Catholicism became the “ideological pillar” of the regime.Footnote 23
Catholic symbols remained ubiquitous and “invisible” in the public spaces even after the demise of Italian fascism and the Franco regime, turning into markers of “banal Catholicism.”Footnote 24 They become salient only if challenged by pro-secularist activists or court rulings. Over the last three decades, major controversies around the presence of crucifixes in public institutions have taken place in Italy, Spain, and Germany, for example.Footnote 25 The political engagements with the symbol of the cross continue, however, as right-wing populists across Europe (and beyond) have begun to brandish Christian religious symbols as markers of “a civilizational identity” pitched in opposition to Islam.Footnote 26 Since the refugee crisis of 2015, the symbol of the cross has been increasingly instrumentalized in anti-immigrant discourse across Europe, aimed in particular against Muslim refugees. The German party Alternative für Deutschland, for example, used the image of a crucifix on their 2018 election posters, one of which read “Islam does not belong in Bavaria.”Footnote 27 Meanwhile, Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior minister (2018–2019) and leader of the Lega Nord party, caused a nationwide controversy with his 2019 tweet: “If you’ve got a problem with the crucifix in public buildings, go back where you came from.”Footnote 28 Such instrumentalization of religious symbols by right-wing populists is not limited to regions with a predominantly Catholic population.Footnote 29 And the political context in which the symbol of the cross is being used extends beyond the core populist issues of the defense of conservative values, or immigration. During the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, the crucifix became part of the protest paraphernalia of the anti-vaccine movement, too.Footnote 30
Poland, therefore, does not stand alone in having developed cultural scripts that employ religious symbols as shorthand for political agendas. And the specifically Polish brand of Catholicism, which frames the Polish nation as a unique recipient of divine patronage, is, likewise, not as singular as it might seem from the Polish perspective.Footnote 31 Yet, against the wider canvas of different global employments of the symbol of the cross, Poland still provides a perfect case to investigate the permutations of religious symbols in the political realm. Focusing on Poland – today a nearly homogeneously Catholic country, where the long history of foreign rule conditioned the symbol’s incorporation into the national iconography, enables us not only to trace the role of religious symbolism in a modern nation state, but also to study its shifting significance under dynamically changing political conditions. Given that the semantic content of any symbol can only be understood in a long chronology, Poland, where the symbol of the cross changed hands, serving a number of sometimes diametrically opposed political agendas, provides a rich field of analysis. Once a multiethnic regional power that fell into the orbit of the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and Prussia, losing its sovereignty for more than a century, Poland re-emerged on Europe’s political map in the twentieth century, only to meet a series of further challenges, including Nazi and Soviet occupation, genocide, major border shifts, mass migration, and decades of Soviet control. Looking at the politicization of religion in a territory marked by foreign occupations, mass-scale liberation movements, forced migrations, and oppressive authoritarian regimes, the analysis of the Polish case also offers insights into the historical experience of a European region that disrupts the neat binary of the so-called Global North and Global South.
Cross Purposes aims to fill a considerable historiographical lacuna by critically tracing the iterations of a single but highly contentious political symbol – one of the most powerful and polarizing images in Poland’s modern political life. While Polish nationalism is far from being an understudied field,Footnote 32 the intersection of nationalism and religion remains an area where critical research is still needed. A number of authors have investigated the entanglement between Polish nationalism and Catholicism, examining how Romantic nationalism fed on the Christian motifs of crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation, generating the philosophy of Polish Messianism;Footnote 33 exploring how the idea of the nation became central to the Polish Catholic Church and led to the emergence of the concept of Polak-katolik;Footnote 34 or tracing the role of the Catholic Church in Polish politics and the negotiation of “national values.”Footnote 35 But, while the populist mobilization of the “realm of symbolic imagination”Footnote 36 and the emergence of a new “mnemonic language of politics”Footnote 37 in Poland have been noted in the existing scholarship, a more systematic study of the symbols used to maintain cleavages and sustain partisan identities is still missing.
What is more, a large part of Poland-based scholarship on the intersection of nationalism and Catholicism lacks the necessary critical distance, often celebrating rather than questioning Poland’s “nationalized Catholicism.”Footnote 38 Insofar as the impact of religious symbols in the Polish public domain is concerned, it is their religious meaning and their status as sacred art objects that has attracted most of the attention of historians and ethnographers.Footnote 39 Only a few studies have critically addressed the symbol of the cross in the Polish political realm.Footnote 40 Adopting a diachronic perspective, this book takes such analyses further by examining both the way the symbol of the cross has been politically instrumentalized in different historical epochs and how the meaning of the cross has changed over time.
Reconstructing the genealogy of a single symbol, as this book does, can open our eyes to more than just the “historical depth” of a given emblem. If “we think only in signs,” as Charles Sanders Peirce had it, symbols are not only our gateways into the concepts they represent, but can also help us understand the human capacity to interpret, to ascribe meaning, and to associate.Footnote 41 Understanding how symbols work can tell us how we communicate, but also what we hold dear, what evokes our emotions, and how societies change over time. If symbols have the capacity to “synthesize a people’s ethos,”Footnote 42 they provide important points of entry into the inner workings of communities, too. Reconstructing the history of a key Polish symbol, the cross, therefore allows us to probe not only the ways Poles have conceived of themselves as a nation over time, but also the very weave of Poland’s culture itself.
The Cross as a Polyphonic Symbol
“[S]ymbols are dynamic entities, not static cognitive signs,” argued Victor Turner in his path-breaking Dramas, Fields and Metaphors from 1974.Footnote 43 The often volatile situations in which symbols emerge and operate mean that some connections between symbols and their meanings are temporary and contingent. This “uncertainty of meaning” is, however, what constitutes the strength of the symbol.Footnote 44 Seemingly limitless possibilities of association render particularly “opaque” symbols like the cross incredibly powerful and subject to intense appropriation. Paul Ricœur, who used the notion of “opacity” to define the quality of symbols, in which their literal meaning points to further latent layers of significance that are accessible only through the primary meaning, argued that the “depth” of a symbol can be “inexhaustible.”Footnote 45 A single symbol’s capacity to invoke even seemingly disjointed ideas and images, but also to render some of them less obvious and accessible, makes the analysis of symbols an ideal starting point from which to study changing master narratives and societies in transition.
Examining the different meanings ascribed to the cross, this book aims to reveal mechanisms by which certain visions of community become fortified through symbolic practices, while others are repressed and forgotten. Investigating how those meanings have been recycled or overwritten, it also aims to pinpoint the specific circumstances that have given rise to shifts in the symbol’s semantic field. One phenomenon in particular that the book sets out to explore is cycles of protest and institutionalization.
One of the main theoretical concepts informing this analysis has been Victor Turner’s premise that political symbols follow a cycle of “structure” and “antistructure.” To Turner, symbolic shifts are always a result of changes in social relations.Footnote 46 In other words, the content of symbols transforms continuously as societies evolve, adapting to new agendas, goals, and master narratives. If “structure” corresponds to periods in which power is solidified, “antistructure” stands for dissent, rebellion, and change.Footnote 47 The symbols of structure thus legitimize hierarchies, underscore differences between “us” and “them,” secure boundaries, and define the rules undergirding a given group. The symbols of antistructure, in turn, are characterized by creativity; have non-rational, emotional appeal; and point to alternative, more egalitarian modes of coexistence.Footnote 48 In Turner’s vision, structure and antistructure are not two fully separate conditions, but rather phases in a cycle that blur into one another. Even though antistructural “communitas,” or communities of dissent, rebel against established structures, if they succeed, their discourses solidify into a new mainstream and “are converted into institutionalized structure, or become routinized, often as ritual.”Footnote 49 Initially daring and innovative protest language is thus harnessed by the emerging structure once again. As a result of ritualizing previously spontaneous practices and introducing sanctions for violating the new symbolic order, power holders eventually find themselves confronted with fresh opposition. And given that this flux in the significance and status of political symbols is caused by moments of change (e.g. transition of power), the history of symbolic upheavals will also reflect the political history of a nation.
The Turnerian cycle helps us to understand how a single symbol might perform an entirely different function depending on whether it is used to mobilize the public for collective acts of defiance (“antistructure”) or to help solidify power (“structure”). For example, in the period leading up to the Polish national uprising of 1863–1864, the cross served as an inclusive symbol of emancipation from absolutist power and was meant to rally different ethnic groups to join the anti-tsarist struggle. In those years, anti-Russian demonstrations, which were usually headed by a large crucifix, also attracted a number of progressive Warsaw Jews, who not only marched alongside ethnic Poles, but also, after one cross had been damaged by the gendarmes, even raised funds for a new one.Footnote 50 Yet, if the cross was initially used as a symbol of interethnic solidarity in a fight for national sovereignty and a more egalitarian society, the message it embodied changed fundamentally after Poland regained its independence in 1918. Now the cross was no longer a sign of defiance on the part of an oppressed ethnic group, but rather a tool of domination utilized by a colonizing power in multiethnic areas, where other groups were expected to abandon their aspirations to nationhood.Footnote 51
The Cross as a Political Symbol
While the cross is an extremely multilayered symbol whose primary religious signification has been reflected both in Poland’s sacred art and in its vernacular culture, this book concerns itself solely with its political dimension. The obvious challenge of this approach, however, lies in the difficulty of discerning where the religious transforms into the political. While some ambiguity in the symbol’s use and reception is always a given, my analysis is guided by Brian Porter-Szücs’s dictum that a religious symbol becomes political when it turns into a “means of easily labeling combatants in struggles motivated primarily by secular concerns.”Footnote 52 Thus, even if the symbol of the cross features in social practices that may include acts of devotion, it is its use in the articulation of secular agendas that gives it its political character.
A religious symbol employed in a political setting can also signal something entirely different from the spiritual message it originally carried. As David Kertzer convincingly demonstrates, “the power of the ritual transcends its ideological content.”Footnote 53 And, by being “less obviously political in form,” religious symbols can actually be much more politically efficacious than others, especially since they are not only widely recognizable, but also provide political movements with a moral authority and a transcendental legitimation of their political objectives.Footnote 54 Last but not least, if such “secular concerns,” bolstered by religious paraphernalia, win the endorsement of religious leaders, they enable political actors to tap into the logistics, networks, and mobilization mechanisms that religious organizations have at their disposal.Footnote 55 This malleability of religious symbols and their tremendous emotional appeal are what renders them so irresistible on the political scene and brings them onto so many different barricades.
But when did the cross first become a political symbol? There is some point to the argument that the cross was a political symbol from day one. As the biblical scholar Neil Elliott notes, the crucifixion of Jesus was “one of the most unequivocally political events recorded in the New Testament.”Footnote 56 If Jesus was a victim of political persecution and the form of capital punishment he received was “an instrument of imperial terror”Footnote 57 that enabled the Romans to exert large-scale social control, then the political character of the symbol of the cross predates Christianity itself.
With Emperor Constantine the Great (c. 280–337), the cross became for the first time a state symbol. Representations of the cross in the form of christograms and staurograms appear on his coins and, with time, the cross becomes more and more diffused as the “victorious symbol of the emperor” and a military insignia.Footnote 58 The cross also becomes a symbol of conquest and subjugation. As later Christian emperors take control over new territory, they place crosses on pagan temples and “Christianize” heathen human statues by having crosses etched on their foreheads.Footnote 59 Coins adorned with the cross in the role of an imperial symbol first appear in Constantinople in the fourth century.Footnote 60 Soon, the Byzantine iconography, like the globus cruciger, the cross-bearing orb, establishes itself as a Christian symbol of authority and royal regalia.Footnote 61 By the fifth century, memorial crosses marking the military victories of Christians are already a widespread tradition, and soon even liturgical hymns include the topos of the cross as battle insignia.Footnote 62 The military use of the cross becomes even more articulated in the Middle Ages, when not only are crosses carried to the battlefields, but also the institution of the crusade captures the imagination of contemporaries.Footnote 63
The political history of the cross in the Polish context can also be traced a long way back. In the early fifteenth century, as the conflict between the Teutonic Knights and the Polish crown reached its apex, King Ladislaus Jagiełło’s diplomatic efforts focused on delegitimizing the Order’s crusade in the international diplomatic arena. Contesting the Teutonic Knights’ right to raid, dispossess, and forcibly convert the heathens, Paul Wladimiri, Jagiełło’s legal expert and representative in this debate, sought to present the Polish king, in a state of war with the crusaders, as the bearer of true Christian values.Footnote 64 The symbol of the cross, adorning the robes of the Order, also known as the Crucifers (Cruciferi), thus became the central object of contention. And, as the Teutonic Knights insisted that they had been “adorned with the sign of the cross to [fight] the enemies of the Cross of Christ,”Footnote 65 Wladimiri, in his numerous political writings, went to great lengths to wrest from them the claim to the symbol. Reporting about the Order’s atrocities against the civilian population, Wladimiri spoke of “the diabolic devotion cloaked under the white gown”Footnote 66 and “the iniquitous causer of darkness, and father of lies, hiding under [the Crucifers’] black cross.”Footnote 67 With the emergence of modern Polish nationalism, the image of the Crucifers and their black cross was to return as a powerful symbol of German subjugation of Poland, inspiring both the visual arts and, later, post-1945 Communist propaganda.Footnote 68
The period of the Counter-Reformation brought a surge of Catholic piety and a more intensive dissemination of Catholic symbols in public space. To discourage the spread of “heresy,” the Catholic hierarchy ordered all Protestants “under severe penalty” to participate in the Corpus Christi public processions, and banned Protestants (and Jews) from displaying their own religious worship publicly.Footnote 69 After a synod of 1621 had ordered Catholic parishes to plant wayside crosses “to manifest that God-fearing Catholics have nothing to do with heretics, Jews and pagans,”Footnote 70 wayside Latin crosses mushroomed across the country. Their function was both ritual – delineating the perimeter of the spaces believed to be thus protected from evil, disease, and other harm – and political, signaling the privileged position of the Catholic Church in the Commonwealth.Footnote 71 This symbolic marking of space survived in Poland for centuries. As the author of a Polish-language Ecclesiastical Encyclopedia noted in 1878, “No other country of today has as many large crosses beside the roads, in the fields, and in village cemeteries as we do.”Footnote 72 In 1936, a local priest from Janów reported that there were so many crosses lined up along the roads in his parish that they could be mistaken for overhead telephone lines.Footnote 73
Another key early modern episode that helped to cement the central position of Catholic symbolism in the Commonwealth was King Sobieski’s Relief of Vienna in 1683. Arriving to aid the international military alliance formed in defense against the Ottoman invasion, Jan III Sobieski went down in European historiography and literature as the “last crusader,”Footnote 74 the “defender of Christ,”Footnote 75 and a “destroyer of the Muslims”Footnote 76 who was “converting mosques into churches.”Footnote 77 Though the iconography of the period does not make very intensive use of the symbol of the cross in representations of the battle,Footnote 78 the image of the fearless crusader who rallies his troops “to defend the Cause of God, and to preserve the Western Empire”Footnote 79 did leave a lasting mark on the political imagination of the Commonwealth’s elites. As European poets eulogized Sobieski as “a man sent by God”Footnote 80 who “has no fear of any force”Footnote 81 because he “raises the Cross as his standard”Footnote 82 and may even “return Byzantium to worshipping the Cross,”Footnote 83 the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was forging its own myth as the eastern “bulwark of Christianity.” Emerging in this turbulent period, the image of Poland as the Antemurale Christianitatis, a state on the edge of the “Western Empire” resisting invasions by Protestant Swedes, Orthodox Muscovites, and Muslim Ottomans, continued to shape the Polish political imagination for centuries to come.Footnote 84 And, in the early twentieth century, as Polish ethno-nationalism was taking its modern form, the memorialization of the Battle of Vienna and of Sobieski as the “defender of the cross” returned in full force, serving new political agendas.Footnote 85
The cross became an important symbol in intra-Polish political clashes at the latest during the Confederation of Bar (1768–1772). An alliance of Catholic Polish gentry formed to rebel against King Stanisław August Poniatowski and took to arms when the Polish parliament, pressured by Catherine the Great, passed an unpopular bill that granted Protestants and Russian Orthodox believers equal political rights and limited the liberties of the nobility. The armed mobilization in defense of “faith and freedom,” which led to four years of civil war and precipitated foreign intervention and the first partition of Poland, carried the symbol of the cross on its banners and insignia.Footnote 86 The Catholic symbols not only served as rallying signs for adherents of the Confederation, but also provided the means to confound the opponent in battle by changing the register of the encounter from armed struggle into an act of religious devotion. As Paweł Jasienica recounts, based on an eyewitness report, when the joined royalist and Russian forces approached the stronghold of the rebels, the fortress of Bar, expecting to start the siege with negotiations, “from the ramparts of Bar, resounding with hymns and supplications, instead of envoys, descended ‘four priests with crucifixes and the fifth one with the statue of Virgin Mary, whom nobody knew how to deal with.’”Footnote 87 From that point on, the symbol of the cross not only came to connote political projects that entailed the supremacy of Roman Catholics and the privileged position of the Catholic Church in the Polish state, but also became a symbol that marked the banners of partisan conflicts. With the Polish parliament declaring 2018 the year of the Confederation of Bar, the ambiguous legacy of the rebellion and its aesthetics got revived both in the right-wing populist “historical politics” and in the popular culture at large.Footnote 88
A true golden age for religious imagery in the Polish political discourse came, however, with the Romantic era. The motif of crucifixion as an allegory of the suffering of partitioned Poland had been particularly popular among the Polish Romantics. Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish national bard, verbalized this metaphor most powerfully in his Books of the Polish Nation and of the Pilgrimage of Poland, published in Paris in 1831. Comparing Poland to the crucified Christ was a way of expressing hope for Poland’s resurrection – that is, regaining independence. “For the Polish nation did not die,” wrote Mickiewicz, “its body lies in the tomb […] And on the third day the soul will re-enter the body and the nation will rise from the dead and liberate all the peoples of Europe from slavery.”Footnote 89 The biblical language of this vision reinforced a narrative of Poland as the Christ of nations, but also invested a series of images – related to crucifixion, death, entombment, and so on – with not only spiritual, but also political meaning. Thus, the cross, a bier, and a crown of thorns became symbols of foreign rule in the Polish lands, as well as visual shorthand for the failed uprisings and the repercussions in their aftermath.
This language of symbols established itself as early as in the 1820s and soon gained resonance in the political sphere. During the November Uprising of 1830, the symbol of the cross featured on the insurgents’ banners, while the symbolism of crucifixion and resurrection inspired a flurry of patriotic images and lyrical texts in its aftermath.Footnote 90 The symbol also reappeared in 1846, when a group of revolutionaries carried it in a rally to mobilize peasants in the area of Kraków for an uprising against the Austrians. The envoys with the crucifix were not successful, however, and twenty-four-year-old Edward Dembkowski, who marched at the head of the group, was killed when the demonstration was attacked by the Austrian troops supported by local peasants.Footnote 91 The incident and the resulting Austrian policy of containment sparked off a massacre of over 2,000 Polish nobles, students, and other activists in the course of the so-called Galician Slaughter (Rabacja Galicyjska).
It was only at the time leading up to the January Uprising, however, that the circulation of these Romantic symbols in the public sphere reached significant dimensions. “Widely used in a limited number of variations,” note Opalski and Bartal, “these biblical images spread rapidly, enriching the language of the street as well as that of political propaganda.”Footnote 92 Adam Zamoyski, observing this trend in a transnational comparison, does not mince his words, speaking of Poland “developing a pathology of martyrdom” in this period.Footnote 93 What contributed to the spread of these symbols was not only the revolutionary mood, but also the advent of new technologies that facilitated the reproduction and wide circulation of such contents. The advances in printing, lithography, and photography allowed contemporaries to disseminate greater amounts of visual material both to rally support for armed struggle against foreign rule and to report on current events in the ever more widely circulating illustrated press. The middle of the nineteenth century was precisely this point in time when the rising interest in matters of politics and the increasing literacy rate coincided with a greater and cheaper supply of the printed word and visual materials.Footnote 94 With the advent of machine-made paper, the rotary press, mechanical binding, and new techniques that reduced the cost of printed illustrations, activists of the national cause could reach an exponentially larger audience than ever before, and communicated their ideas with visual symbols on an unprecedented scale.Footnote 95 Mass manufacturing, in turn, supplied the new material vehicles of dissent, in the form of patriotic jewelry, medallions, and other small objects that encapsulated the message of national resistance.
It is in this period that the revolutionary imagery begins to reach a wide audience and symbols like the cross enter the visual canon of a nation-in-the-making. It is also at this point that religious symbols, decontextualized from their original use, become visual shorthand for the profound social change unfolding in Polish society. The time of the last and most tragic nineteenth-century Polish insurrection, with the “patriotic fever” that accompanied it, was such a watershed for the Polish symbolic imagination because the revolutionary impulse that sparked the uprising brought with it a promise of very radical social changes. The abolition of serfdom by the revolutionary National Government and the promise of social equality extended to Jews, at least in the short period of Polish–Jewish rapprochement, meant an epochal transformation of social relations. And, indeed, the period of the January Uprising counts as “one of the greatest breakthroughs and upheavals” of Polish history – a military failure that “ploughed through Polish life more deeply than any other and weighed with a great force on the minds of at least two generations to come.”Footnote 96 Beginning my scrutiny at this historical juncture, I take up the long history of the cross midstream, but also at a crucial caesura that marks the true onset of modern forms of political participation. It is in the 1860s that new social challenges emerge that require a novel language of politics. Thanks to the new technologies of communication, the visual language developed at that point continued to inspire Polish political debates for decades to come.
The story of the symbol of the cross entering the visual arsenal of political communication parallels in many ways that of the icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa. Ever since the consecration of the Virgin Mary as the “Queen of Poland” by King Jan Kazimierz after the defense of the Jasna Góra monastery against the invading Swedes in 1656, the icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa has had a prominent place in the Polish “national sensorium.”Footnote 97 It is also an immensely popular symbol, both in Polish culture and in the process of negotiating the national identity.Footnote 98 De Busser and Niedźwiedź go as far as to say that the icon is a “Polish master symbol” that “enshrine[s] the major hopes and aspirations of an entire society.”Footnote 99
Indeed, the two symbols have coexisted on political banners, often used to rally for the same cause and, at times, even appearing in combination. The images of Maria Regina, just like those of the cross, have served to legitimize imperial authority, crusades, and conquests since late Antiquity.Footnote 100 The symbol of the imperial Virgin Mary, which featured on Byzantine coins, spread from Constantinople throughout the Mediterranean, but also far beyond.Footnote 101 The representation of Mary as a triumphant “war goddess,” who is both “imperious” and “pugnacious,” served the Teutonic Knights to morally sanction the conquest of pagan peoples in Prussia.Footnote 102 The image of the Virgin Mary as “La Conquistadora” also figured in the Spanish colonization of New Mexico “as an embodiment of military conquest and of religious conversion.”Footnote 103 The icon of Mary likewise inspired warfare against the Muslims during the Reconquista and the Battle of Vienna.Footnote 104 In the era of rising nationalisms, the Virgin Mary also remained a politically relevant symbol from partitioned Poland to Mexico.Footnote 105 Finally, the cult of Marian apparitions, like those in Medjugorje and Transcarpathian Ukraine, continues to inspire ethno-nationalist discourses, and their locations become sites of political contention.Footnote 106
Despite the functional similarities in the way the symbol of the cross and the image of the Virgin Mary have been politically instrumentalized to legitimize power, draw lines of demarcation between different groups, mark territory, and mobilize for armed conflicts, the two symbols have divergent semantic fields and a different materiality. The uniqueness of the symbol of the cross in the political context, as I will argue throughout this book, results from its simplicity, abstractness, and ease of reproduction and adaptation, as well as from its vertical expressivity and the variety of performative uses that it affords. A cross can be planted, painted on surfaces, assembled from other objects, performed as a gesture, or used as a weapon. It can also become a canvas for other images, messages, or manifestos, and a site of performance (e.g. during a mock crucifixion). It can be toppled, destroyed, or burned. While the image of the Virgin Mary circulates in the Polish political context as a symbol much akin to, and, in some instances, functionally interchangeable with, that of the cross, it is the latter that offers a uniquely efficient tool for political mobilization, thanks to its visual minimalism, symbolic opacity, and wide range of affordances.
This book sets out to survey moments of symbolic mobilization in Poland’s modern history as symptoms of social change. Focusing on key political caesuras in modern Polish history, it looks at how different moments of transition necessitated efficient and impactful means of political mobilization and how the symbol of the cross successfully delivered that tool. It is a story of how a very old symbol, inextricably embedded in the nation’s centuries-long history and tradition, became a vehicle to domesticate political ideas that were new, radical, and, sometimes, revolutionary. The simple, but powerfully expressive symbol of the cross captured the eye, synthesized complex contents in a visually minimalist message, underscored intellectual arguments with an emotional overtone, and, last but not least, could reach a wide audience before the era of mass literacy.Footnote 107 At the same time, it has always been a contested and polarizing symbol that political actors of different colors, and sometimes opposing factions in the same conflict, placed a claim on. The inappositeness of the sacred symbol put to a profane political use made this kind of instrumentalization inevitably controversial – the politicized cross has always triggered emotions and a cacophony of contesting voices. The story of what political messages the cross came to amplify and what responses it catalyzed is the heart of this book.
Inspired by theories of nationalism and classical semantics, but also by political anthropology, cultural studies, and gender studies, this text draws on a wealth of sources, ranging from the visual arts to political pamphlets, patriotic music and literature, monuments, and performative practices, using a radically interdisciplinary toolkit. It offers a cultural history of the cross spanning the period from the national uprisings of the nineteenth century, when the cross was first used as a political symbol on a mass scale, to the present day. Taking this diachronic perspective, it fills a gap in the existing scholarship while also critically exploring a number of controversial issues, such as the role of the Catholic Church in shaping Polish nationalism and the interethnic violence, antisemitism, and misogyny that have long undergirded the Polish nation-building project. At the same time, the book aims to address a number of broader issues.
Taking the symbol of the cross as a point of departure from which to explore Poland’s key political upheavals, it traces the country’s dramatic transformations on both a macro- and a micro-scale, addressing the nation’s grand narratives as well as its forgotten margins: geographic borderlands, ethnic minorities, and the female voice. Despite being primarily a historical study, the book aims to contribute to understanding of how religious symbols work to bolster national discourses and become powerful tools to mobilize political action. By examining how the symbol of the cross has been used as a tool to exclude certain groups from the national community and how it emerged as the symbol of popular dissent against a ruling elite perceived as illegitimate, the book also traces the roots and symbolic repertoire of contemporary Polish populism. At the same time, it provides insight into legacies of nationalism specific to the East-Central European region more generally, including nineteenth-century imperialisms, national consolidation in the interwar period, state socialism, and neoliberal transformation after 1989.
Organization of the Book
The chapters to follow focus on a sequence of case studies that afford insight into six key moments in Poland’s modern history in which the symbol of the cross loomed large as a rallying sign: the anti-tsarist uprisings of the nineteenth century, the First Republic (1918–1939), the early decades of state socialism, the Solidarity era (1980–1989), the years of systemic transformation, and, finally, the aftermath of the Smolensk plane catastrophe in 2010. Although this book tries to provide an overview of the evolution of the symbol of the cross in Poland’s modern history, the story also takes large leaps forward, skipping over, most notably, the period of World War II and the Holocaust. Given the extent to which wartime occupation regimes in the Polish lands repressed free public expression, decimated the political elites, stripped whole groups of civil rights altogether, limited political participation, and criminalized political dissent, I regard the years between 1939 and 1945 as a caesura in the story of political evolution that this book tries to tell. This is not to say that the symbol of the cross was absent from the grassroots expressions of wartime piety and collective mourning, or that the tribulations of World War II and the profound traumas that Poland’s population suffered in these years did not have a bearing on what the symbol of the cross came to signify to Poles in the changed political reality after 1945. My argument here, however, is that the new political articulations of the symbol could only truly unfold after the traumatic earthquake that the war-related violence brought with it. And, indeed, as I demonstrate in Chapter 3, they came out with full force during the 1956 “symbolic revolution” and its aftermath. The ripples of the exogenous shocks that Poland’s population suffered in the war could become visible in the symbolic sphere only in the ensuing period of (relative) calm.
Although each of the chapters to follow paints, in broad strokes, the general atmosphere, ideological goals, and underlying frictions that motivated political actors in a given period, they go beyond a synthetic overview. Focusing on specific micro-histories, they shed light on the cracks, paradoxes, and discontinuities of the grand narratives; point to local idiosyncrasies; and deliver what Marci Shore has termed “excessive detail”: the unexpected, curious, and jarring facts that challenge the master framework, revealing its silences and limitations.Footnote 108
Chapter 1 recounts how the cross began functioning as a political symbol in modern Polish history. Set against the background of the last and most tragic nineteenth-century Polish insurrection and the patriotic fever that preceded it, the story opens with the figure of the Jewish defender of the cross, Michał Landy, shot dead while carrying a crucifix at an anti-tsarist demonstration in 1861. Landy’s death and its resonance provide an entry point into the story of how the cross was first used to voice protest, mobilize action, and convey a strictly political vision – in this case, that of an interethnic alliance of the Central Eastern European nations subjugated by the tsarist regime rising in a joint struggle for freedom, equality, and emancipation.
Chapter 2 takes us to the moment when partitioned Poland regains its independence in the aftermath of World War I. As the young nation attempts to delineate its new borders and defend them against threatening Others, in particular atheist Soviet Russia, the symbol of the cross comes to denote an ethno-nationalist vision of the country’s future. Harnessed to legitimize Poland’s claim to the multiethnic territories of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the cross is now used as a symbol of military dominance and morally grounded supremacy over Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews, who are symbolically excluded from the national fold. Three case studies illustrate this transition in the symbol’s meaning, focusing on three highly controversial and politicized “borderland crosses”: the Three Crosses monument in Wilno (Vilnius), the Cross of the First Corps at the fortress of Bobrujsk, and the Cross at the Legionnaires’ Pass in the Carpathian Mountains.
Chapter 3 traces the emergence of a spectacular and uniquely Polish form of protest – the “defense of the cross.” It focuses on the iconic defense of a wayside cross that took place at the heart of the model socialist metropolis of Nowa Huta in 1960, an initially peaceful protest that transformed into violent street riots against the Communist authorities. The case study not only illustrates how the cross became a rallying sign for anti-systemic protest in Communist Poland, but also sheds light on the role of women in devising creative modes of nonconformist behavior in the gray zone between religiosity and rebellion.
Focusing on the transformative decade marked by the rise of the Solidarity movement (1980–1989), Chapter 4 examines how the cross served as a source of metaphysical legitimation for Poland’s growing opposition movement. The chapter traces how Solidarity used the symbol to mark spaces of anti-Communist dissent, mourn workers killed in confrontations with the police, and foster a rift in the popular mind between “the nation” and the Communist power holders, portrayed as “anti-nation.” Three case studies illustrate how the symbol of the cross was instrumental in both solidifying and challenging this boundary: Communist attempts to hijack celebrations held at the foot of the Poznań Crosses in commemoration of the workers’ rebellion of 1956, Solidarity’s campaign to rebrand May Day using Catholic symbols, and the project to display the symbol of the cross during the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising throw into sharp relief the ambivalence and contradictory nature of the symbol in the late socialist period.
Chapter 5 covers the immediate post-1989 period, when exploitation of the symbol of the cross by a variety of political actors was unabated and it continued to define new frontlines of conflict. Examining a number of contexts in which the symbol intersected with politics, including the abortion debate, the anti-pornography campaign, and Poland’s lustration process, the chapter reveals the inner workings of an ideological shift that deeply transformed the country.
Finally, Chapter 6 revisits the events of the year 2010, when a fatal crash suffered by the Polish presidential plane near Smolensk sent massive shock waves through society and triggered some of the most iconic symbolic clashes in the county’s contemporary history. The rise of right-wing populism, which followed the Smolensk crash and laid the groundwork for the country’s recent shift towards illiberal democracy, coincided with a surge in the use of religious imagery, which came to dominate mainstream expressions of national pride and belonging. Taking as a case study the so-called Smolensk cross planted in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, which for six months was fiercely defended by a group of the late President Kaczyński’s supporters, this chapter investigates populist instrumentalization of Catholic symbols and the opposition it triggered.
A comprehensive history of the symbol of the cross in Polish political life could fill volumes, and this book certainly has no ambition to list encyclopedically every single manifestation of the symbol. Nor is it a history of Polish religiosity or an anthology of a single motif within the national culture. Instead, tracing how the central symbol of Christianity came to feature on very different political barricades, harnessed in conflicts over entirely secular concerns, the book aims to illuminate how the symbol of the cross has achieved its present status as a ubiquitous, unmarked, and almost transparent element of the public realm in Poland. In doing so, it journeys through a territory exceptionally fraught with taboos and befogged with myths. While at times the story follows the mainstream Polish national narrative, revisiting well-known events, at other points it meanders into obscure, marginal, and uncharted tributaries, exploring unexpected facts and unconventional sources. It is a history of political crusades, appropriation, and power, but also of cultural resistance and nonconformism – a story of hope and of outrage.
