Theodore de Korwin Szymanowski ( ; ; 4 July 1846 – 20 September 1901) was a Polish nobleman and impoverished landowner, an economic and political theorist writing in French. He was the author in 1885 of a strikingly original economic blueprint for a proto Unified Europe and for the abolition of African slavery. He was also a Polish poet.
Background
Born into a notable and well connected Polish noble family, of Roman Catholic observance, he was the only surviving son of Napoleonic officer and banker, Feliks Szymanowski and his wife, Maria Łubieńska, granddaughter of minister of justice, Feliks Lubienski. The composer Karol Szymanowski was a younger relative. He was raised together with his cousin, Bernard Łubieński, in Warsaw and on the family estate in Mazovia in Russian-occupied Poland. Frequent visitors were their first cousins, Jacek Malczewski and his family. From 1858, Theodore was educated in France at the Jesuit-run Collège St Clément in Metz. He absconded from school with the intention of taking part in the 1863 Uprising but, as recorded in 1863 by his kinsman, bishop Konstanty Ireneusz Łubieński in a letter to Tomasz Wentworth Łubieński, 16-year-old Theodore was arrested in Kraków in the Habsburg controlled province of Galicia. There is no evidence that he saw any fighting but he was escorted back to school to complete his studies. In 1864 he would have witnessed the end of serfdom in Poland, regarded as a swift reprisal by the Tsarist authorities against the insurgent Polish gentry. It was a profound social change that was later to inform his original theoretical writing.
His ageing father's declining health and the downturn in the family's fortunes probably curtailed his opportunity for further formal education. In 1867, twenty year old Theodore inherited the family estate. He was introduced into society to find a suitable match. When he was 27, he was introduced during a New Year's ball to the twenty year old, Julia Bożeniec Jełowicka, descended from Ruthenian aristocracy whose legal guardian was Feliks Sobański, a first cousin of Theodore's mother. Marriage followed in 1874 and her dowry temporarily boosted the depleted Szymanowski coffers. The couple went on to have seven sons, of whom one died in infancy, and one daughter. Whether due to the economic climate or to mismanagement, by 1885 the family were obliged to abandon their home and livelihood of the preceding 130 years. There is a suggestion that the estate may have been confiscated by the authorities as a result of Theodore's political activities, although evidence for this has not been confirmed. He was careful to express his controversial views in French and have them published in Paris, out of the Tsar's reach. In effect, the family was 'exiled' to Western Ukraine where it remained in straitened circumstances for the duration of Theodor's life.
Anticipation of a unified Europe
Korwin Szymanowski's polemical L'avenir économique, social et politique en Europe – The Future of Europe in Economic, Political and Social Terms – was written in French in 1885 and published in Paris in 1885 and 88. At the time Poland was a dismembered state and occupied by Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary. His work begins with this exhortation:
Pardonnez l'incorrection à l'auteur, qui n'est Français que par sympathie, mais lisez jusqu'à la fin, et cherchez, dans ces idées détachées et en désordre, l'énigme de nos malheures. – 'Forgive the author's poor style, as he is a Frenchman only by sentiment, but read on to the end, and seek, in these disparate and unorganised thoughts, the enigma of our misfortunes.'
As a declared francophile, he envisaged a Europe predicated on a reformed parliamentary system, a customs union, centrally collected statistics, financial contributions from all the participating European states for deposit and lending via a central bank with a common currency, for preference, the French franc. His thesis was not influenced by any kind of Socialism in the style of French contemporaries like Henry Maret or Jules Ferry. It was underscored by a form of absolutism, born probably out of his deep commitment to Catholicism, combined with a deliberate nod to the absolutist authorities in Saint Petersburg.
