Adam Zamoyski, Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess, William Collins, £25

Most of us have only the roughest idea of the national histories of our European neighbours, but there are occasional public reminders to prompt further inquiry, even if they are often in poor taste – the Paris Olympics, for example, featured a tableau of a headless Marie Antoinette.

The history of Poland, though, is a blank page for most people, despite the fact that the Anglo-Polish minority is now one of the largest in the UK and their language is that country’s second most widely spoken. Nobody has done more to raise awareness of this rich culture and heritage than Adam Zamoyski, though he is always careful to give Poles their rightful place at the heart of Western civilisation. Having lived in England for most of his life, he has enough distance to avoid lapsing into the lachrymose self-pity that has sometimes afflicted historians in Poland itself, let alone any nationalist blame games. Zamoyski brings to his narratives the best of British readability, combined with a genuinely European sensibility.

The subject of his latest book, Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess, is not only – probably – the most illustrious of his many noble ancestors, but also the most irresistible. Izabela, the Princess Czartoryska, had to be indomitable to endure the loss of four children in infancy and another as a teenager — though four more outlived her. And it required valour to survive for nine decades, from 1745 to 1835, while her estates were ravaged by war, her family scattered to the winds and her country erased from the map. In spite of it all, she was witty, passionate, proud, possessive, generous, enthusiastic — in short, tremendous fun.

Her life spanned the era from rococo to romanticism, from the age of enlightenment to that of revolution. Izabela embodied each and every stage of this evolution. Thanks to her own peregrinations and her innumerable friends and relations, she was in touch with every influential milieu, with every important development on the Continent. The rise and fall of the Famiglia, as the Czartorysky clan were known, presents us with a microcosm of Europe’s intellectual as well as the hereditary aristocracy at an epochal moment. As a very old lady, she thought it bliss to be alive in the post-Napoleonic period, which, despite its reactionary politics, witnessed a miracle: what my father, the historian Paul Johnson, called ‘the Birth of the Modern’. Izabela had lived through changes in the human condition, in the very consciousness of time and space, that were unprecedented before or, perhaps, since. Above all, however, she was a witness to the loss of Poland’s independence. It was to the preservation of Polish identity and the ultimate resurrection of her nationhood that Izabela dedicated her life.

The eclipse of what had once been the sprawling Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not happen all at once, but in three ‘partitions’ by its predatory neighbours Russia, Prussia and Austria. The first, in 1772, left Poland at the mercy of the ‘Great’ autocrats Frederick II and Catherine II. The second partition, in 1793, was the coup de grace; the end came two years later. Napoleon recreated Poland as a ‘Grand Duchy’, but treated it as a source of cannon fodder. The Congress of Vienna renamed it a Kingdom (‘Congress Poland’), but as a satrapy of the Russian Empire. Despite uprisings in 1795, 1830, 1848 and 1863, all brutally suppressed, the Russians remained in control until 1918. In 1939, Hitler and Stalin partitioned Poland again; worse was to follow under both Nazi and Soviet occupations. The People’s Republic set up after the war was scarcely more independent than Congress Poland. It was only thanks to the national revival begun by the Polish Pope John Paul II in 1979, followed by the struggles of Solidarity and martial law, that in 1989 a truly independent Poland finally emerged.

Even now, the Poles are openly menaced by Putin, who sees himself as the heir to Catherine the Great. It was that German-born empress who first seized Crimea from the Tatars and turned Russia into a police state. Reading Zamoyski’s account of the agony of Polish partition and occupation, seen through the lives of one woman and her family, I was forcibly reminded of the present ordeal of the Ukrainians. Putin’s annexation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas in 2014 were his first partition of Ukraine. For the past two and a half years, they have been resisting Putin’s second partition. If Zelenskyy is forced by the West to accept this state of affairs, a third and terminal partition will follow within a few years. Even NATO member states are vulnerable, especially if US forces were to leave under a Trump administration. The Poles are the only large nation in Europe that is rearming as if they mean to fight. That is because they know from bitter experience how this story ends.

Izabela Czartoryska was privileged, but she was not immune to the miseries of her people. After the confiscation of her beloved estate at Pulawy after the insurrection of 1795, she lamented: ‘I had founded hopes for centuries of happiness on it! My flowers, my grassy swards and my walks have been destroyed, my children are far from me and are not happy. My friends have been scattered, ruin and misfortune are their lot…’ Yet the catastrophes that were visited upon her clan only strengthened her resistance. Eventually Pulawy was restored to her and there she built two museums to house her memorabilia: the Temple of the Sybil and the Gothic House. The Czartorysky palaces and country houses have mostly gone, but the collections amassed by Izabela and her family were saved from the Russians; they may now be seen in the Czartorysky Museum in Krakow.

Zamoyski’s narrative dazzles with Izabela’s escapades and encounters with great contemporaries. On her honeymoon she visits Rousseau, who gets into a row with her husband and whose discourse is incomprehensible. Yet she educates not only her own children but innumerable waifs and strays on Rousseauesque principles, even writing a bestselling children’s story on the lines of Émile.

No less remarkable was her therapeutic session with Benjamin Franklin on a visit to London. The princess was suffering from depression, so the future founding father held her hands and drew ‘celestial’ tones from his invention, the ‘armonica’, prompting a fit of weeping. ‘You are cured,’ he told her. By her own account, she was.

Izabela’s meeting with the elderly Frederick the Great, whose daughter, was equally strange. He, too, took her by the hand and, blaming his poor eyesight, led her to the window to examine her. Having just carved up Poland, this most despotic of enlightenment monarchs seemed to her ‘the most terrifying man on earth’. But the man she saw was ‘smaller than myself, a little misshapen, in a worn uniform stained all over with snuff, with the most beautiful blue eyes, a kind though piercing look, and something reassuring about his whole personality’.

Frederick was kind to her but patronising about Stanislaw, the last King of Poland and her former lover. ‘Sire, you have given him a cruel and undeserved lesson,’ she shot back. ‘I have often said that Poland should be governed by its women,’ der alte Fritz replied.

In 1787 she was entrusted with a mission by the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II: to deliver a secret package to his sister, Marie Antoinette. The French queen received Izabela at Trianon, her estate at Versailles, and her guest was charmed by her candlelit cabinet. But Marie Antoinette lamented her windows, which were barred: ‘When I see those iron bars it makes me feel sad, because to me it looks like a prison.’ Izabela aptly commented: ‘Poor queen, what a presentiment!’

This was a golden age for confident, intelligent women who could handle men and their importunities. Izabela certainly had her share of dangerous liaisons. While touring England, for instance, she was simultaneously pursued by the French Ambassador, Comte Adrien-Louis de Guines, the Duc de Lauzun, and Prince Repnin, who was Catherine the Great’s satrap in Warsaw and almost certainly the father of Izabela’s adored son and heir, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski.

Hence Izabela literally had a love-hate relationship with the Russians. Tsar Alexander I was Adam Jerzy’s best friend, called her ‘Maman’ and felt ‘en famille’ at Pulawy. But his successor Nicholas I again sequestered the Czartorysky estates after the 1830 uprising, forcing much into exile.

Izabela, now too old and frail to flee, remained in her beloved homeland to the last. ‘Poor Poland, unfortunate country,’ was her refrain, but she never gave up hope. Zamoyski provides a ‘Postscript’ about what happened after her death in 1835. In Paris, Adam Jerzy Czartoryksi set up an unofficial government-in-exile at the Hôtel Lambert, a ramshackle pile on the Île Saint-Louis found for him by his friend Eugène Delacroix. For two decades, it became the cultural focus of Franco-Polish life, frequented by everyone from Chopin, Berlioz and Liszt to Balzac, George Sand and Adam Mickiewicz. With the Hôtel Lambert —at once artistic salon, refugee oasis and princely court — ‘Adam I’, the uncrowned King of Poland, was following in his mother’s footsteps. More than a century later, during the martial law period of the 1980s, Polish dissidents and Solidarity activists in Paris were given a meeting place which they promptly dubbed the ‘Motel Lambert’.

Thus the memory of Izabela, her dynasty and her indefatigable ambition for the Polish nation lived on. Her collections survive as proof of her insatiable appetite for culture, nature and history. Now she has a fitting monument, which was researched and written while the author was being persecuted by Poland’s Law and Justice government (2015-23), basically for the crime of being blue-blooded and liberal-minded. Adam Zamoyski completed this erudite yet effervescent biography under circumstances of the utmost adversity: a Polish patriot no less valiant than his subject.