Marcin Kwiecień

When ruled by Peter Leopold (1765–1790), the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was regarded as the “model state of enlightened absolutism”. Young ruler carried out numerous reforms in his state. They were of political, social and economic nature. The area in which there was an attempt made to introduce considerable changes were the relationships between State and Church. The first stage of reforms was concluded with the synod of Pistoia. On occasion of holding this synod, the reformers, headed by bishop Scipione de’Ricci, tried to introduce a series of changes into the relationships inside the Church. The changes varied from those of organizational type to those referring to theology and dogmas. The aforementioned synod ended with the victory of reformers, yet an attempt to transfer its achievements into the territory of other dioceses of Tuscany faced the resistance of conservative episcopate and caused a spectacular defeat of the reformatory camp (gathering of bishops in Florence). The conflicts between State and Church, observable in the international scene, usually ended with the victory of State authorities but the plans to drum up the support of multitude for the Church reforms produced a countereffect in the form of riots against the reform-oriented clergy. The crowd protests in Prato, Pistoia and Florence were designed to defend the traditional model of religiousness, cult of saints, relics and pictures as well as the Latin language as used in liturgy. These protests forced the millieu of bishop de’Ricci to resign from the remarkable part of planned reforms.

The Promethean movement in the policy of II Republic of Poland consisted in offering support to the independence movements and strivings of the peoples making up the then Soviet Union. With active participation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (henceforth referred to as: MFA), II Branch of the General (Main) Command – intelligence services and a number of research institutes, close contacts had been maintained with the émigré governments and politicians representing various nations of the Soviet Union. In recent years, the pressure of current policy has led to a renewed interest in issues relating to Prometheism, which brought about a crop of a number of valuable papers devoted to the interwar period. A lot has already been written about the Promethean movement following the end of the Second World War. Yet relatively little has been written about the war-time history of the movement. The documents presented below are associated with the war period, following the Soviet invasion of Finland. Among the circles of the French and British staff officers there even appeared a conception of bombing the oil fields in the Caucasus – naturally taking advantage of the Turkish airspace and the French military bases on the territory of Syria. It was thought that the subjugated nations in the Caucasus would then rise up against their oppressor. It was in such an atmosphere that a meeting between the representatives of the Caucasian nations and W. Bąkiewicz, which constitutes the subject-matter of analysis contained in the first of the published documents, took place in Istanbul. The second document is a translation of the treaty of the Caucasian Confederacy whereas the third document dates back to the autumn of 1940 and constitutes a commentary to the memorial concerning Promethean issues submitted by a reporter and Promeathean activist W. Pelc; the commentary had been written by Prof. Olgierd Górka, an expert of the Polish government in exile specializing in ethic issues. The above documents are associated with a rather peculiar and paradoxical situation which arose after the fall of the Polish state when for a brief period a time, thanks to propitious political circumstances, Prometheism had a chance to succeed. The conception was to have been realized in cooperation with the allies – France and Great Britain; the pact between Poland and the Allies was to have been directed against the totalitarian Soviet system and indirectly against the Nazi system. However a change of the international situation had quickly made the realization of these plans impossible.

Under the rule of Grand Duke of Tuscany Peter Leopold there were undertaken in this Duchy some reforms of relationships between the State and the Church. The reforms reached their climax an occa sion of the Synod of Pistoia. It has been for a long time now that the historians had a concern in them. What makes up a particularly interesting but simultaneously controversial problem are the doctrinal roots of the discussed reforms. What is in dispute is the question of Italian Jansenism. The Italian his‐ torians usually emphasize that such Jansenism existed, this opinion being challenged or even rejected by some English and French historians. The latter argue that Jansenism, as fully developed theological doctrine, was detectable only in France. Likewise, these historians claim that in case of the reception of Jansenism we in fact deal only with the shallow and primitive substitution of the views articulated by the bishop of Ypres. The article tries to demonstrate that it is not possible to speak of only one in‐ tellectual tendency that decidedly affected the shape and the course of the discussed reforms. It was sometimes fairly incidental and not perfectly coherent mélange of various political, legal, theological and economic tendencies, not infrequently distant one from another, that made up the intellectual basis of the work that was focused on the change of the Church relationships in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.