What makes a man a Pole? what does it mean to be a Pole?

He almost certainly doesn't qualify for a Polish passport. Oh, and he wouldn't if he wasn't black either.

The Zeitgeist movement is another one of those "utopian" ideas that are bad
Most of the points in those movies have been debunked.

harry so in your opinion ppl that found themselves in the partition ex-poland werent polish?
was mickiewicz a non pole or Chopin or Kosciuszko?

haha your opinions humiliate you ;)

Obviously not.
Duh.

How can you possibly be born in a country when it doesn't even exist.

Silly.

Unless their parents were Polish, then you could argue that they were.....at a stretch.
I always thought Chopin was French anyway,.....until I moved here that is...although I find it strange that when he left Poland he never once returned....

and that Maria Curie was French too...until I moved here. What is it with France, eh?

I just googled Kosciuszko, I've no interest in military stuff tbh, so I've no opinion on him...although it was pretty cool of him to leave the money in his will to Thomas Jefferson to continue to fight for the abolishment of slavery in Virginia. Fair play though in fairness.

Would you care to quote me saying that?


Your insistence on saying that I've said what I clearly have not said demonstrate that you are nothing but a liar.


Chopin was born to French parents. He did not qualify for Polish citizenship under Polish law then in force and would not qualify for Polish citizenship under Polish law currently in force. However, he would qualify for French citizenship under French law then and now, which would be handy for him, considering that he spend the majority of his adult life living in France as a Frenchman.

Just another pooof that citizenship is yet another bureaucratic invnetion like the sick and skewed EU. The clerks have to have their paperwork to do otherwise they'd be totally usesless. But Chopin's music is so permeated with his Poland's ancestral heritage, they evoke the green meadows of Masovia, the quaint wayside shrines eternally festooned with flowers and the inimitable folk melodies of the Polish people, and that is soemthing no scrap of paper could change.

Besides, Chopin would not have qualified for Polish citizenship because there was no free Poland at that time, only an earlier verison of PRL -- the tsarist-ruled Congress Kingdom. Back to Polish History 101!

yes, a fairy tale. Its human to have hope, we need to justify our existence and religion is the perfect excuse.


recessions are perpetual, i have been an adult for two and im not old.


bad LOL. List the points Legend any of them. Your statement proves to me that you don't have a clue what you're talking about, the same as goofy.

The concept of citizenship goes back a lot further than the EU.


Oh dear, yet another fail from you when it comes to Polish history. Chopin was born in 1810, meaning he was born in the Duchy of Warsaw; Congress Poland dates from 1815.

But let me put it another way: Chopin never qualified for Polish citizenship and never would have qualified for it for anything other than naturalisation, the same process which you yourself reject.

That proto-PRL was a frog-controlled puppet state as everybody knows.

That's a matter of debate, but there's not much point in debating it with a man whose knowledge of Polish history is so poor that he doesn't even know where Chopin was born.

Meaning he lived all of 2 years in that pseudo-mini-state. Until he emirgated he was officially a subject of the tsar.

Your display of knowledge just gets better and better! The Congress of Vienna was in 1815, not 1812, as every Polish schoolboy knows!


Nope, he was, from the moment of his birth until his death, a citizen of France (the empire, the kingdom and finally the republic, if my French history serves me correctly).

His motehr was Justyna Krzyżanowska, or maybe it was really Christine Crisané? His father was a 'naturalised' Pole, a Frenchman by blood but a Pole by choice.

Since some people attach importance to bureaucracy and paperwork, one could say that
both Chopin's parents were Polish.

citizenship is bs.
what matters is whats in your heart.
as i said blood only accounts for a one percent of the polishness of an individual.

If "we" exclude mental illness and a lie feeling X and being X would amount to the same thing.

She acquired French citizenship when she married her husband. I refer you to paragraph 12 of chapter 1 of the 1804 French civil code. She was French.


Really? Got any sources for that particular gem? Care to explain why FF Chopin's baptism certificate says the exact opposite?


One could, if one wanted to be a liar. However, the priest who filled in Chopin's baptism certificate was not a liar. And neither were the people who gave Chopin his French passport.

As for FF Chopin himself, if he thought himself Polish, why didn't he apply for a 'laissez-passer' for foreigners living on French soil? He instead got the French passport which was his birth-right.

i referred to the more poetic version of the heart.. as a soul would an old poet say.

It's hardly a run of the mill question is it?
Galician Pole :)

Harry... lol
Judging by his letters (which I could read because I know... Polish language) he considered himself Polish.
His friend and lover, George Sand, said he was "more Polish than Poland".
When he left Poland he took a goblet of Polish soil with him.
Even his contemporaries (like another composer and pianist, Liszt) considered him as not only a Polish artist but a Polish patriot, and even a nationalist, it seems lol:


Quote from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Chopin

Only someone with the limited mentality of a 'bezduszny służbista' (heartless letter-of-the-law clerk) would split hairs over what paperwork Chopin had completed or failed to complete without reocgnising the unquestionable Polish soul reverberaitng throughout his works and his life. It's like the little boy who couldn't see the forest becuase the trees got in the way.

And who are you to tell others what is in their own hearts?????

You seem to forget that at the time when she said that, Poland didn't exist, so anything which claimed to be Polish was more Polish than something which didn't exist.

One does wonder why if Chopin was so Polish he chose to live in France as a Frenchman. Perhaps you can explain that?


Oh, I am sorry: if wikipedia says it, it must be true, right....


A life he chose to live in France as a Frenchman, a bit like somebody who we all know who claims to be Polish but instead chooses to be American and refuses to become Polish.

+1

I'm born and raised in denmark, but my parrents are both polish.. And my father taught me the language, I don't speak it fluently though. He also taught me the history, the battles, WW2 and all the movies we saw togehter, were polish.

So even I don't speak polish fluently and never lived in Poland, I do feel polish.

Good, you are Polish, but do visit Poland.

I did visit PL, many times. And I do feel home, meanwhile I'm there.

Harry, don't be a petty a$$hole, please.
Your denial of facts really makes me wonder.
Chopin considered himself Polish, he was a Polish patriot and he was viewed a Pole and a Polish patriot by his contemporaries.
Why do you have such a problem with that? Only because Polonius3 writes that Chopin was Polish? Do you see anything else around you besides your conflict with Polonius3? Don't you think it went too far already?

Or maybe it hurts your Western soul that some great composer considered himself Polish? lol
What the hell is wrong with you?


Chopin was travelling around Western Europe when the November Uprising of 1830 broke out. He was with Tytus Woyciechowski in Vienna when the news reached them. Woyciechowski returned to Poland to enlist. Chopin stayed. From what I've read his friends and family told him not to go because they didn't want for such a talented man to die in an uprising. Chopin wrote to a friend '"I curse the moment of my departure."

The November Uprising was crushed. Chopin arrived in Paris in late September 1831. He would never return to Poland, thus becoming one of many expatriates of the Polish Great Emigration. He got the French citizenship in 1835 and travelled on a French passport.

Paris was a cultural and artistic centre of Europe, many artists went there, including Poles. Olga Boznańska, a Polish painter, was one of them.

Some Poles emigrated to further their careers. Maria Curie-Skłodowska, unable to get accepted into any Russian (Poland was partitioned) universities (due to her gender and the anti-Polish repercussions of the January Uprising), pursued her studies in Paris from 1891.

Also Chopin was half French, since his dad was French, so it's only natural, considering the situation in partitioned Poland, that he chose Paris which was sympathetic to the Polish cause and had already become the home of many Polish émigrés.

You know about dany_moussalli, a PF user from Syria? Because of the situation in Syria his parents are sending him and his brother to study in Poland. Those boys have some Polish roots and they have Polish passports already. Do you think they aren't Syrians anymore? lol


Oh, ffs, you are like kondzior now? lol Wikipedia is no good as long it doesn't fit your views? You have never linked to Wikipedia on this forum?

If Wikipedia says it, it doesn't mean it isn't true either.

Sources are given there, if you haven't noticed:

Schumann (1988), 114.
Franz Liszt, Chopin, 1852, p. 163.
Taruskin (2010), 344–5.
Taruskin (2010), 346.
Rosen (1995), 361-3.


+1000!

That very simply is not true: Chopin was born a French citizen.


Would you care to quote a single fact which I deny? Or is that comment just another of the untrue things you love to say about me?

I just quoted the English version of Wikipedia (the source for this is Szulc (1998), 69 but maybe it's a mistake and it was only about passport). I can't find anything about his citizenship in Polish Wikipedia and in Encyclopedia Britannica.

Btw, how do you know he was born a French citizen? Did his father retain French citizenship?


You deny the fact that Chopin considered himself Polish and his contemporaries considered him Polish and a Polish patriot.
No?
You don't deny that?
Then I'm all ears.
Write that you accept the fact that Chopin considered himslef Polish and his contemporaries considered him Polish and a Polish patriot.

Wikipedia is often wrong when it comes to subjects related to Poland. You'd do much better to look at actual source documents (which are banned from use by Wikipedia authors).


I know he was born a French citizen because (and I'm repeating myself here) I know what the 1804 French civil code says (i.e. a woman who marries a Frenchman acquires French nationality upon marriage and a child born to French parents is French at birth) and I know what it says on FF Chopin's baptism certificate (Chopin snr is listed as being French) and what it says in FF's French passport ("né de parents français", i.e. born to French parents).


Do I really? Perhaps you could be so kind as to quote me saying that. Either that or apologise for yet again lying about what I say.