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“A Colony of Alien Capital”: French Investments, Polish Identity, and a Story of Murder in 1930s Warsaw
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 July 2022
Abstract
This article explores public reactions to a murder of a foreign managing director running a French-owned textile factory in interwar Poland. The 1932 killing provoked an intense discussion in the press, which sheds light on Polish identity and narrative strategies used by the elites to rationalize the consequences of Poland's peripheral economic status. The study is based on discourse analysis of over 200 press articles. I argue that commentators saw the killing as the result of French policies in the factory, and interpreted these in turn as the result of either the Polish government's negligence, influenced by Paris's diplomats, or of global capitalism. The most dramatic arguments framed French policies in Żyrardów as a form of colonialism or slavery. This framing was based on the journalists’ perception of French actions as transgressions of two imagined hierarchies: a geo-racial division of the world, and the local hierarchy of labor.
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- Copyright © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Footnotes
Many thanks to Anna Bąk, Maciej Jaworski, Jacek Luszniewicz, Piotr Puchalski, Adam Rogoda, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and to Antoni Grześczyk for his kind research assistance. This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland grant no. 2018/31/D/HS3/00405. The title has been redacted.
References
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59. ABC, April 29, 1932, 1; Naprzód, November 3, 1932, 7. “Anonymous” was a reference to the French term for a publicly traded company, société anonyme.
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104. Quotation from: Ciancia, Civilization’s Edge, 17. See also Kwiecińska, “Civilizing Relay,” 201, 220, 245; Vera Tolz, “Constructing Race, Ethnicity, and Nationhood in Imperial Russia: Issues and Misconceptions,” in David Rainbow ed., Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context (Montreal, 2019), 29–58, 42–43. See also Marius Turda and Maria Sophia Quine, Historicizing Race (London, 2018); Catherine Baker, Race and the Yugoslav Region: Postsocialist, Post-Conflict, Postcolonial? (Manchester, 2018); Magdalena Gawin, Race and Modernity: A History of the Polish Eugenics Movement (Warsaw, 2018); Bolaji Balogun, “Race and Racism in Poland: Theorising and Contextualising ‘Polish-Centrism,’” The Sociological Review 68, no. 6 (2020): 1198–1200, doi:10.1177/0038026120928883 (accessed February 10, 2022); Kristín Loftsdóttir and Lars Jensen, “Introduction: Nordic Exceptionalism and the Nordic ‘Others,’” in Kristín Loftsdóttir and Lars Jensen, eds., Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities (Farnham, Eng., 2012), 1–12.
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108. Puchalski, Poland in a Colonial World Order, 67.
109. Kofman, “Koła wielkoprzemysłowe.”
110. Ilustrowana Republika, October 28, 1932, 4.
111. See Jedlicki, Suburb of Europe, xiii.
112. Świat, November 5, 1932, 10.
113. Wiadomości Literackie, June 5, 1932, 1.
114. Paweł Hulka-Laskowski, Z dziejów polskiego miasta i z dziejów pisarza (Warsaw, 1934); Irena Pietrzak-Pawłowska ed., Żyrardów 1829–1945 (Warsaw, 1980).
115. Naprzód, November 3, 1932, 7.
116. Elizabeth C. Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca, 2004), 69; Aleksandra Leyk and Joanna Wawrzyniak, Cięcia: Mówiona historia transformacji (Warsaw, 2020).
117. Rudolf Nötel, “International Credit and Finance,” in Michael Charles Kaser and E.A. Radice, eds., The Economic History of Eastern-Europe 1919–1975, vol. 2, Interwar Policy, The War, and Reconstruction (Oxford, 1986), 287.
118. ABC, May 6, 1932, 3.
119. Gazeta Polska, February 10, 1932, 3; Naprzód, April 29, 1932, 3; Dobry Wieczór! Kurjer Czerwony, April 30, 1932, 1; Ilustrowana Republika, May 5, 1932, 5; quotation from Kurjer Warszawski, October 26 (morning edition), 1932, 5.
120. The aforementioned novel Czarne Skrzydła, which takes place in a French-controlled mining town, explores the consequences of two such transgressions. The protagonist, an inventor from the intelligentsia, challenges social norms by starting a job as a miner, and entering into a relationship with one of the women from the mine.
121. The position of workers in comparison with clerks is documented thoroughly in Janusz Żarnowski, Społeczeństwo Drugiej Rzeczpospolitej: 1918–1939 (Warsaw, 1973), 48–113, 189–227. See also Zbigniew Landau and Jerzy Tomaszewski, Robotnicy przemysłowi w Polsce: Materialne warunki bytu, 1918–1939, (Warsaw, 1971); Łukasz Baszak, “Regulacje prawne umowy o pracę robotników w latach 1928–1939,” Folia Iuridica Universitatis Wratislaviensis 6, no. 2 (2017): 9–30; Leszczyński, Ludowa historia, 466–74.
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123. Ostatnie Wiadomości, April 29, 1932, 4.
124. Wiadomości Literackie, June 5, 1932, 1.
125. Józef Łobodowski, “Piłsudski,” in Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Folejewski, eds., Antologia poezji społecznej 1924–1933 (Wilno, 1933), 39.
126. Ciancia, Civilization’s Edge, 3. See Puchalski, Poland in a Colonial World Order, 264.