Aleksander Wielopolski

Margrave Aleksander Ignacy Jan-Kanty Wielopolski (March 13, 1803 in Sędziejowice, Kraków Department, Duchy of Warsaw, December 30, 1877 in Dresden, Kingdom of Saxony, German Empire) was a Polish aristocrat, owner of large estates, and the 13th lord of the manor of Pinczów. In 1862 he was appointed head of Poland's Civil Administration within the Russian Empire under Tsar Alexander II. Education and early career Wielopolski was educated in Vienna, Warsaw, Paris and Göttingen. In 1830 he was elected a member of the Polish diet on the Conservative side. At the beginning of the November Uprising of 1831 he was sent to London to obtain the assistance, or at least the mediation, of England, but the only result of his mission was the publication of the pamphlet Mémoire présenté à Lord Palmerston (Warsaw, 1831). On the collapse of the insurrection he emigrated, and on his return to Poland devoted himself exclusively to literature and the cultivation of his estates. On the occasion of the Galician outbreak of 1846, when the Galician peasantry massacred some hundreds of Polish landowners, an outbreak generally attributed to the machinations of the Austrian government, Wielopolski wrote his Lettre d'un gentilhomme polonais au prince de Metternich (Brussels, 1846), which caused a great sensation at the time, and in which he attempted to prove that the Austrian court was acting in collusion with the Russians in the affair. National politics In 1861, Wielopolski was appointed president of the commissions of public worship and justice and subsequently president of the council of state. A visit to the Russian capital in November still further established his influence, and in 1862 he was appointed adjutant to Grand Duke Konstantin, who had recently been appointed Polish viceroy.