Sources

To study public discourse I look primarily at the press, the only true mass medium in 1932 Poland, with an audience amounting to some three million citizens.Footnote ¹³ The press produces news, a type of discourse that presents stories “as impersonal statements of facts,” and organizes content “in order to be noticed, understood, represented, memorized, and finally believed and integrated.”Footnote ¹⁴ Despite using various markers of neutrality, news always has an angle, and its publishers attempt to persuade their audience. It shapes how readers perceive social events by presenting them in a particular way and weaving their interpretation into the authors’ political worldviews. As news is produced by elites, it forms, when seen as a historical source, a reservoir of opinions promoted by press owners. Articles on any subject contribute to a wider discourse, with implicit assumptions and presupposed knowledge on the side of the readers.Footnote ¹⁵ When news of Koehler's murder spread, it encountered a complex mix of narratives competing to explain the Polish situation during the Great Depression. By studying the descriptions of events in 1932 and their interpretations, we can access not simply the perception of the murder and its economic and political context, but also the general worldview which influenced these perceptions.

To access opinions of different political circles, I started by adopting a simplified tripartite division of the Polish political scene proposed by Andrzej Paczkowski.Footnote ¹⁶ The three camps constituted the left, with the leading role of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS); the right, comprising the National Democratic camp under Roman Dmowski (Endecja) and different breeds of conservatives; the ruling Sanacja movement of Józef Piłsudski. For each of these camps, I picked two leading titles. Among socialists, Robotnik (The Worker) towered over other publications in prominence, if not always in circulation. Moreover, the newspaper's correspondent in Żyrardów, Adam Obarski, was one of the more powerful voices in the analyzed discussions. I also added the closely related Naprzód (Forward), published in Cracow. Among right-wing newspapers, I picked the middlebrow ABC, with its excellent coverage of the 1932 trial, to represent the National Democratic press, while the venerable Kurjer Warszawski (The Warsaw Courier) allowed me to study conservative opinions. Finally, for Sanacja's point of view, I chose the semi-official Gazeta Polska (Polish Gazette), combining it with the widely read Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny (The Daily Illustrated Courier) from Cracow.

As I wanted my research to go beyond strictly political titles, I looked for suitable tabloids, publications connected to big industry, and titles for the intelligentsia. Among tabloids Ostatnie Wiadomości (Latest News), with its wide coverage of the affair and many long and emotional articles on the city, including those of correspondent Ryszard Ross, eclipsed other newspapers. For titles targeting the intelligentsia, I added some weeklies to my corpus, including Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News), known for its highbrow literary discussions. I was surprised that the economic press, which expressed views of the industrial milieu, did not participate in discussions.Footnote ¹⁷

After some preliminary reading, I narrowed down my research to the two weeks directly after the murder, and another two after the beginning of the trial. For weeklies, I used annual tables of contents to find the needed issues. Together, this provided me with a corpus of 206 articles on Żyrardów to analyze, including 184 from the daily press published over the studied four weeks. One third of those appeared on just four days: the two directly after the murder (April 27–28, 1932), after the first day of the trial (October 25, 1932), and after the final sentence (November 1, 1932).

Polish authorities controlled the press by censoring newspapers and exerting informal pressure on editors. Unfortunately, the archives of the Warsaw censorship office did not survive World War II, and scholarship on the situation in Cracow is of limited use for the Żyrardów trial, since most of the studied papers were published and censored in the Polish capital.Footnote ¹⁸ Nonetheless, some information can be deduced from other primary sources. Editors of Robotnik always notified their readers when the censors intervened. I found only two such articles: one, directly after the murder in 1932, with information about Koehler, the other during the trial later that year, in which the newspaper attacked labor inspection.Footnote ¹⁹ This would suggest relatively minor formal interference in the Żyrardów case. Informal interventions are more difficult to gauge, since they did not leave such traces.Footnote ²⁰ Still, some data is available. For example, I did not find mentions in Robotnik of an attack on another French executive in September 1932, possibly inspired by Blachowski, and described in French diplomatic archives.Footnote ²¹ Likewise, the investigative journalist Romuald Karaś mentioned that the government suppressed the more aggressive attacks on the French owners in October. The latter case is consistent with the memoirs of the French ambassador in Warsaw, Jules Laroche, who mentioned that his interventions at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs bore some fruit.Footnote ²²

Informal censorship might have contributed to the change in the corpus during the trial. This period yielded almost 40 per cent of the studied articles, but they offer less material to work with. Part of this stems from the articles’ source: the coverage of the trial is simply that—reporting from the court room, with extensive quotations and scant editorial comments. Articles on the trial differ mostly in the editors’ choice of witnesses to quote in more detail, and in how to introduce them. These are, however, differences of degree rather than of kind, and they have little to do with the questions I ask in this paper.

Nonetheless, government intervention does not present a major obstacle to my research. As my goal is to look at public discussions about the Żyrardów affair, I need to consider publications that did appear, instead of trying to recreate what the coverage would have been without censorship.

The Two Victims of Żyrardów

In this section I show what journalists believed happened in Żyrardów by looking at ways in which they described the principal characters of the story. A commentator from Słowo (The Word), an influential conservative daily published in Wilno, argued that the murder's staying power with the public came from the juxtaposition of the murderer and the victim.Footnote ²³ Blachowski's past as a socialist, a freedom fighter, and a veteran, offered a contrasting canvas to Koehler's portrayal as a haughty foreign capitalist who disliked and abused the Poles. For the left, the murder represented a clash between labor and capital; for the right, a story of an indomitable Pole fighting a vicious foreigner.

Journalists described Blachowski in three main contexts: he was called a victim, an avenger, and an alcoholic. The victim interpretation dates to the initial reporting, which almost universally described Blachowski as a “discharged clerk.” Journalists wove his story into a wider narrative of unemployment and misery during the Great Depression. A few newspapers followed this narrative in later articles, calling Blachowski a “desperate pauper,” who killed because he had become destitute, and saw Koehler as the cause.Footnote ²⁴ Consequently, journalists labelled Blachowski a victim too—“a victim of foreign capital” or even the “victim of the Żyrardów tragedy.”Footnote ²⁵ While the popular press often overused the word tragedy, it is telling how journalists applied it in this case. Some papers described the murder in this manner, others called it the “grim finale of an unemployed worker's tragedy” or even “the killer's tragedy.”Footnote ²⁶

The most common narrative soon abandoned the simple story of economic hardship and victimhood. Journalists linked the murder with Blachowski's past as a freedom fighter, exiled to Siberia by tsarist Russia.Footnote ²⁷ This narrative reinterpreted the murder as a logical part of Blachowski's political career. The killer thus became the “hero of dramatic shots,” themselves rephrased as “the tragic deed.”Footnote ²⁸ The left-wing Robotnik quoted approving comments among workers: “Blachowski did him in, he got even.”Footnote ²⁹ The Żyrardów-based writer and translator Paweł Hulka-Laskowski reported that after the news of the murder arrived in the city, “Everyone looked at each other in joyous disbelief, that perhaps a new day was dawning on the wretched town.”Footnote ³⁰ The sensationalist weekly Tajny Detektyw (Private Eye) printed Blachowski's face on its cover, with the caption: “He wanted to avenge his worker comrades.”Footnote ³¹

Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny from Cracow approached the story differently. Although the editors did mention Blachowski's poverty, they focused on his alcohol abuse and bad work record.Footnote ³² Calling the killer a bad employee rather than a victim sounded out of place in April and May, and appeared in few newspapers, such as the conservative Słowo.Footnote ³³

During the trial Blachowski's picture became more nuanced, in part thanks to the prosecutor's witnesses, and the accused's own meandering testimonies. They confirmed much of the negative information that Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny had brought to light.Footnote ³⁴ Nonetheless, most newspapers still treated the killer kindly.Footnote ³⁵ In one of the best pieces to come out of the conflict, renowned journalist Irena Krzywicka portrayed Blachowski as a complex character, pushed to the brink by French actions. She redefined the murder as a “reflex” of a tortured man, a reaction to the hell of Żyrardów.Footnote ³⁶

A negative view of the murder victim dated to early reporting, and did not undergo major changes throughout the studied period. Almost everyone found reasons to blacken Koehler's name and thus excuse Blachowski's deed.Footnote ³⁷ Editors claimed that “the French director was not liked by his employees, appearing harsh and ruthless.”Footnote ³⁸ To others he seemed “responsible for all disasters” that had befallen Żyrardów; the embodiment of evil, who had refused to help orphans and widows.Footnote ³⁹ Others labelled the director a sadist, who had “inherited psychopathic personality traits from his mentally ill father.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Ostatnie Wiadomości styled him as “an invisible power, the sound of whose name sent chills down spines.”Footnote ⁴¹ Some journalists followed their attack with victim blaming. They argued that despite receiving death threats, the director never changed his behavior.Footnote ⁴² One of the witnesses during the trial stated this explicitly, calling Koehler's death not murder, but suicide.Footnote ⁴³

This form of victim blaming combined with vicious personal attacks achieved its most emotional shape in the many articles written by Paweł Hulka-Laskowski. To his readers, they might have seemed weirdly out of character, as he had just published his charming translation of The Good Soldier Švejk. His foreboding description of Żyrardów appeared in February 1932, well before the murder. Writing for Gazeta Polska, he painted a vision of an unnamed small town, where foreign capital controlled a large factory.Footnote ⁴⁴ A brutal foreigner, who abused his Polish employees, ran it. Hulka-Laskowski likened the executive to Coeur, a character from Czarne skrzydła (Black Wings), a Polish novel from the 1920s dealing with the workings of a French-owned coal mine. Coeur, the mine's despotic chief executive, terrorized the town, until the workers lynched him.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Żyrardów author added that the situation in his city could well produce a similarly “shocking tragedy.”

The fulfilment of this dark prophecy emboldened the writer, who published another emotional first-page article for Gazeta Polska soon after the murder, showing Koehler as a deranged and hateful sadist.Footnote ⁴⁶ Soon afterwards, in an interview for Ostatnie Wiadomości, Hulka-Laskowski compared the victim to the Roman emperor Caligula, whom he described as a “mentally ill despot” and a “perfect psychopath.”Footnote ⁴⁷ He returned to this analogy in the highbrow weekly, Wiadomości Literackie. After describing Caligula's assassination, Hulka-Laskowski quoted the words of Decimus Valerius Asiaticus, uttered when the Roman senator was accused of killing the emperor: “I wish I had been the man.”Footnote ⁴⁸

When “Gazeta Polska” published Hulka-Laskowski's first comment after the murder, the newspaper's editors added a short introduction, distancing themselves from the author. They argued that no circumstances could justify killing.Footnote ⁴⁹ The avenger narrative, which grew to dominate public discourse, was more ambivalent. Some journalists, for example in Robotnik, would still pay lip service to the law, but their justification of the murder told a different story.Footnote ⁵⁰ The narrative seemed to be based on a tacit conviction that violence could be a legitimate response in some situations.

This stance is not surprising. After all, two eruptions of violence shaped the politics of the Second Republic: the Warsaw riots inspired by National-Democratic discourse, and the subsequent assassination of the country's first president Gabriel Narutowicz in December 1922, both followed by Piłsudski's bloody coup in 1926.Footnote ⁵¹ Public life was rife with violence, from the bloody resistance of the working classes to radicalized students, who often saw themselves as vigilantes, protecting the national community.Footnote ⁵² While the topic has not been systematically studied, the most immediate explanation would link these events to the wider post-war brutalization of politics.Footnote ⁵³ It is easy to see grounds for this to occur in Poland, with its long experience of the Great War and the subsequent “Civil War in Central Europe.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Moreover, Marcin Zaremba made a powerful argument about a similar outcome after World War II.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nonetheless, reducing the relative acceptance of political violence to the effects of the war omits its earlier role. After all, Piłsudski himself led the 1908 raid on a Russian train in Bezdany, with three future Polish prime ministers under his command.Footnote ⁵⁶ More importantly—especially since the Bezdany attack was broadly in the tradition of the Polish struggle for independence—the 1905–1907 revolution saw fratricidal fighting between National Democrats and socialists. Modern mass politics in Russian Poland were born during these years, when Poles would kill other Poles because of different political positions, and the National Democrats were open to cooperation with Russia to quell the workers’ movement. The turmoil of the revolution—in which Blachowski took part as a young man—might be the source of at least some sentiments seen in the studied articles.Footnote ⁵⁷

Żyrardów in Political Interpretations

The basic division of the Polish political scene in 1932 pitted the ruling authoritarian Sanacja movement of Józef Piłsudski against a varied opposition. This split explains why otherwise very different opposition newspapers used Żyrardów to attack the government in similar ways. Both the National Democratic ABC and the socialist Robotnik ultimately blamed government neglect—the “real tragedy” of Żyrardów—for Blachowski's deed.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is easy to imagine Polish socialists subscribing to ABC's call for the state to curb the “excesses of big business” and “anonymous capital.”Footnote ⁵⁹

ABC and Robotnik took different stances towards Paris. National Democratic commentators argued that France, as Poland's ally, would not forbid the country from defending its domestic interests.Footnote ⁶⁰ In contrast, for the editors of Robotnik, and in particular for Adam Obarski, Żyrardów was an international problem. “Enslaved by alien capital,” declared one article title.Footnote ⁶¹ “A colony of alien capital in the heart of the Republic,” continued another.Footnote ⁶² The use of the adjective “alien” (obcy), rather than “foreign” (zagraniczny), was telling.Footnote ⁶³ Obarski described French policy as “occupation,” and “predatory” exploitation of workers.Footnote ⁶⁴ For the socialist author, the policies of Żyrardów's owner Marcel Boussac epitomized those of “the most savage” French capitalists, who tried “to achieve the biggest possible profits, by destroying and devastating their companies.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, Obarski questioned the Franco-Polish alliance itself. He argued that together with Boussac's political clout, it facilitated the French magnate's actions by allowing him to ignore Polish laws and avoid government intervention.Footnote ⁶⁶ Journalists from a few other newspapers also mentioned the role of diplomats in supporting the French-owned company, but they never connected it in the way the articles in Robotnik did.Footnote ⁶⁷ Perhaps Edward Szymański got the closest in his 1933 poem: “It is far from [Żyrardów] to Paris—but much nearer to prison…the company logo tightens the friendship between France and our country.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Both Obarski's writing and Szymański's poetry are early observations of George-Henri Soutou's impérialisme du pauvre (imperialism of the poor).Footnote ⁶⁹ The French historian argued that after World War I French capital expanded into central and eastern Europe based not on the country's economic strength, but on its diplomatic influence. In particular, Poland searched for both political and financial support at the Paris Peace Conference. It found them in France, which provided Poland with some (expensive) credits, and in 1921 became the new country's ally, the cornerstone of its security policy. Likewise, after the fall of the tsarist empire, Poland played the role of the most significant French partner in eastern Europe.Footnote ⁷⁰ Both parties profited from the relationship, but Poland remained the junior partner, who had to pay for Paris's support and allow privileged French companies to expand on its territory. After the rush of the early 1920s, Franco-Polish relations soured, especially when the Locarno treaties undermined Poland's security and the French need for an eastern ally. On November 2, 1932, just two days after Blachowski's final sentence, Józef Beck replaced August Zaleski as Poland's Minister of Foreign Affairs. Within fifteen months, Poland would sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.Footnote ⁷¹

Did the comments in pro-government newspapers in 1932 suggest such a change? Not really. Their editors could hardly argue that the state had not failed Żyrardów. As a result, they instead concentrated on attacking the owners of the factory. One writer mused whether Blachowski had killed “evil incarnate, who had ruined the workplace of thousands.”Footnote ⁷² While the editors in Gazeta Polska focused on Koehler's nationality, they did not make use of xenophobic rhetoric.Footnote ⁷³ Nonetheless, the coverage of Żyrardów provided an opportunity to blame others in return for political capital. Pro-government commentators could either attack the opposition (which they did, by reminding readers that the National Democrats had given Żyrardów to the French), or turn on foreign capital.Footnote ⁷⁴

Government-leaning journalists criticized the actions of foreign capital in Żyrardów mostly to channel social discontent caused by the Great Depression.Footnote ⁷⁵ They did not systematically attack the presence of foreigners (or specifically the French) in Poland, and their arguments remained mild. Indeed, mainstream commentators still saw foreign investment as a necessary component of economic development.

All the arguments explored so far explained the murder by the circumstances in Żyrardów and placed the blame on a specific actor (the government, foreign capitalists, National Democrats). A more radical narrative linked the situation in the factory town with inherent capitalist flaws, rather than any particular wrongdoing. Interestingly, it appeared in right-wing and government newspapers, yet was only hinted at in Robotnik.Footnote ⁷⁶ Perhaps for the left-wing press such a critique of capitalism would have appeared too obvious.

On the right, Stanisław Piasecki, the head of ABC's literary supplement, attacked the global economic system, the cause, as he argued, of the situation in Żyrardów.Footnote ⁷⁷ He wrote that monopolistic capitalism allotted too much power to big capital, which ignored borders, national and social interests, and only cared for profits. According to Piasecki, the Great Depression heralded the end of this system, the “monstrous factory under the sign that reads, ‘standardization, rationalization, Taylorization,’” that had “failed to provide people with work and bread.” Only the state could help steer the economy to calmer waters. As an alternative to socialist collectivism and Sanacja's statism, Piasecki argued for a reimagined capitalism of small, privately owned local companies, heavily influenced by Catholic corporatism. In the later 1930s, a similar vision, dubbed the “third way” in Polish political literature, would evolve in the works of the radical National-Democratic writer Adam Doboszyński.Footnote ⁷⁸

In pro-government newspapers, Hulka-Laskowski presented surprisingly similar views, putting them more forcefully in the left-liberal Wiadomości Literackie.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Żyrardów-born author's arguments were to some extent parallel to Piasecki's and used similar imagery, but he did not offer any answers beyond vaguely referencing a revolution and Catholic social teaching. Hulka-Laskowski started by arguing that Poland's experience of the Great Depression was unique. In France, the US, or Germany, the capital invested came from within. The poverty of workers brought profits for local capital, and the profits remained home. In Poland, the capital came from abroad and employed domestic workers. When foreign capitalists transferred profits home, their poor workers and the unemployed needed help from the Polish government: “The profits are someone else's, the losses ours.” In Wiadomości Literackie Hulka-Laskowski went further still. He criticized the government's policy, arguing that the state should never try to lure in more foreign capital by relinquishing control over investors. Without control, capital dominates labor, creating systemic unemployment. Thus, “capitalism begets super-capitalism.”

Newspapers representing all political positions printed articles espousing at least one of these narratives condemning the actions of French capital in Żyrardów. Journalists with very different worldviews quickly called on the government to intervene. This distancing from liberal thought points to wider changes in political and economic discourse. The interwar period saw falling agricultural prices, dwindling migration opportunities, and reduced access to foreign investment. This put a heavy toll on countries of central and eastern Europe, which had to finance post-war reconstruction and create new state institutions. Then the Great Depression hit, pushing world prices further down. Faced with a global downturn and a contracting world market, governments of the European periphery saw little incentive to follow liberal economic policies. As a result, the 1930s saw growing acceptance of state intervention.Footnote ⁸⁰

The final narrative denied any French blame. It was foreshadowed in May in Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny, which criticized the Polish social model of labor.Footnote ⁸¹ Its journalist wrote: “Often we do not treat work and a career as a clerk or civil servant as a certain, normal, and defined part of an individual's life.” People trudge on aimlessly and wake up thirty or forty years old without definite abilities. Needing to support their families, they get jobs, for which they have no skills, and “the smallest shock spells catastrophe and ruin.” According to this line of reasoning, Poland's backwardness was to blame for Blachowski's situation in life, and perhaps for the murder as well.

The ambitious young prosecutor during Blachowski's trial, Józef Fürstenberg, went further.Footnote ⁸² In Żyrardów two cultures were in conflict, he argued. In the west people learned to keep work and private life separate, but the Poles did not. They made unprofessional workers, who needed discipline. Koehler was no tyrant—his employees deserved to be punished. Fürstenberg thus interpreted Polish culture as backwards and inferior to that of the modern west, using this inferiority to justify the treatment of Polish employees.

No one seriously challenged the prosecutor's interpretation, repeated in court by a representative of Koehler's family. It was eerily similar to a 1934 diplomatic report by Jules Laroche: “Eastern minds adapt badly to French administrative methods,” he wrote, adding: “It is said that French capitalists ‘persecute’ or ‘torment’ workers, even when they are only enforcing order in the workplace.”Footnote ⁸³ The Polish historian Maria Pasztor demonstrated that such opinions were common among French elites, who looked down on their eastern allies, and presented them in orientalizing ways. “They are like big children, very talkative, very proud, and very sensitive; they think they know everything; they are sometimes insincere, and not always honest. They cannot do anything practical because their brains are still poorly furnished and they lack persistence,” wrote a French officer stationed in Poland.Footnote ⁸⁴ “Contrary to what I was taught in school, Asia begins somewhere between Warsaw and Moscow,” added a journalist, while another “found Asia in Warsaw itself.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The tradition of essentializing eastern Europeans dates to the Enlightenment, when French thinkers conceived of eastern Europe as a region conceptually different from the west.Footnote ⁸⁶ Their conceptualizations were soon met by a parallel process in the east. In Poland, devoured by its neighbors in 1795, local observations and Enlightenment influences coalesced into a form of Occidentalism. Its proponents believed that “the West had created a better kind of civilization the values of which would serve as the universal norm” and harshly judged their society by (sometimes imagined) western standards.Footnote ⁸⁷ By the end of the 19^th century the intelligentsia, a new social class emerging from the late feudal system, identified with European culture (perceived as modern) and regarded “its own country as a poor and neglected suburb of Europe.”Footnote ⁸⁸ This process of both being the object of orientalizing discourses and producing their local versions continued in the interwar period, and indeed persists today.Footnote ⁸⁹

In interwar Poland, the western self-image of elites provoked the need for confirmation.Footnote ⁹⁰ From this point of view, the prosecutor's attack on his fellow citizens constituted symbolic violence of the said elites against their fellow citizens. As a narrative strategy, it allowed the elite not to see the events in Żyrardów as proof of Poland's subservient position to western capital, and to demonstrate its members’ own modernity, understood as following perceived western standards.Footnote ⁹¹

Hierarchies in Żyrardów

Adam Obarski called Żyrardów a “colony of alien capital,” where the owners treated “workers like slaves.”Footnote ⁹² In the same newspaper, its vice editor-in-chief, Jan Maurycy Borski, condemned “orgies held by the representatives of French capital, like in an African colony.”Footnote ⁹³ Stanisław Dzikowski in Express Poranny (The Morning Express) wrote about “foreign mercenaries, ruling over a piece of Polish land like over a conquered country, like over African soil.”Footnote ⁹⁴ In Dobry Wieczór! Kurjer Czerwony the editors claimed that Żyrardów's owners treated Polish workers and clerks “like natives from Tonkin and Madagascar” (both French colonies at the time).Footnote ⁹⁵ Finally, journalists from Ostatnie Wiadomości framed French actions as a “system for oppressing ‘Polish blacks’” and a “punitive expedition” against workers.Footnote ⁹⁶

The quoted authors showed outrage by referring to two connected issues: colonialism and race. In both cases they were angry not about the existence of colonial practices or racial theories, but rather about their—as the authors perceived—wrongful application by the French in Poland. How, then, did the Poles understand colonialism and race, if their country neither instituted any explicit politics of race, nor directly engaged in New World slavery and overseas imperial projects? When journalists used such terms as “blacks” or “natives,” did these words carry the same connotations as when employed by western writers? After all, comparing the local peasants and factory workers to “blacks” or “negroes” was a trope used by Polish commentators well before the Żyrardów case.Footnote ⁹⁷

The self-identification as objects of colonial aggression occurred in the context of Poland's own colonial endeavors. Already in the nineteenth century such a possession, while close to impossible to maintain without a state, was imagined as earning Poland a higher status and dragging it out of the socioeconomic periphery. A colony would provide both economic benefits, and a foundation for a stronger society, forged in the hot climes of Africa. It would also perhaps help the Poles “prove to other European nations their place in western civilization.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In the 1930s, the colonial rhetoric strengthened. The Maritime and Colonial League (Liga Morska i Kolonialna) swelled to over a million members, becoming the second-largest non-governmental organization in the country. Pundits argued that Poland needed to take over colonial holdings or League of Nations mandates. They maintained that new lands would give access to resources, which it lacked, and provide a much-needed outlet for migration. As Piotr Puchalski writes, “The continued ubiquity of colonial relations around the globe and their enshrinement in the Wilsonian system encouraged the transplantation of Poland's domestic issues into colonial settings.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Some authors, both before and after 1918, did criticize the brutality of colonizers, or even argued that the Poles were more sensitive to the plight of oppressed nations because of their own suffering at the hands of European empires. As Lenny A. Ureña Valerio observes, however, “It is common to find in Polish sources fantasies of colonial mastery, and a desire to rewrite the history of European colonialism according to imagined Polish ‘benevolent’ colonial views.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This context makes it easy to see why journalists in 1932 did not attack colonial practices, treated as natural, but rather their use in Poland.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Its elites were aware “of their intermediate position on the European civilizational hierarchy,” and were pursuing “policies that reflected an ongoing repositioning on global civilizational scales.”Footnote ¹⁰² Now, the case of Żyrardów challenged this repositioning.

This outrage was closely connected to race. For Polish journalists, French actions seemed to undermine the whiteness of Poles and their country's European character. The perceptions of race in interwar Poland have not been systematically studied, so we have to rely on fragmentary evidence. It seems that in Poland, like in other European peripheries at the time, the ideology of race mirrored concepts from the colonial core. This ideology did not result from colonial endeavors, or from any large-scale interaction with non-European peoples, but was largely adopted from the west. We can see it in popular culture from the period, like in Henryk Sienkiewicz's African novel W pustyni i w puszczy, with its essentializing depictions of the local inhabitants. It is present in interwar travel literature, and in other sources.Footnote ¹⁰³ Moreover, the Poles created local variants of racial theories, which in the nineteenth century served to bolster Polish national identity in the context of their subjugation by their neighbors. In interwar Poland, whiteness signified modernity and civilization, both “labels to be mobilized politically”; French actions in Żyrardów put Polish whiteness into question.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The colonial interpretation influenced public discourse beyond newspapers. When in 1933 Czesław Miłosz, then barely over twenty years old, wrote a poem about Julian Blachowski, he began it with words that seemed taken from press articles: “here is a land flat and poor / for voyagers from Moscow to Berlin / a colony of French capital / exploited lands.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In Native Realm from 1959, Miłosz named Żyrardów one of the visions that had “festered inside” him, and pushed him to write. Nonetheless, he considered the poem a failure, akin to journalism, and written, “to redeem [himself] for not taking part in the workers’ clashes with the police.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Young radicals were not the only ones moved by this discourse. The respected economic commentator Roger Battaglia wrote in 1933: “In the worldwide capitalist empire, Poland belongs to vassalized states, or perhaps even to exploited and neglected colonies.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Even the leading figure of Poland's colonial push, General Gustaw Orlicz-Dreszer, argued that Poland was “foreign capital's most alienated and forgettable colony, subject to an economics of devastation without scruples or pangs of conscience.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The diffusion of this self-diagnosis merits a separate study, but literature suggests that the Żyrardów case significantly contributed to making it mainstream.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In the previous section, I analyzed a narrative that blamed the situation in Żyrardów on the Poles, and I linked it with othering discourses in Poland. I argued that this approach was connected to the elites’ western self-image. The association of French actions with colonialism was another way of reconciling this identity with reality. Both functioned as narrative strategies of resistance against Poland's subservient place in the global economy. The one denied that anything wrong had happened, the other defined French actions as transgressive, since they went against Poland's rightful place in the imagined geo-racial hierarchy.

A third approach combined these strategies. Soon after the prosecutor's statement quoted earlier, Ilustrowana Republika published an article claiming that while the situation in Żyrardów shocked the Poles, it hardly surprised anyone with knowledge of French labor relations.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In France employers routinely used secret informers or verbally abused their employees, argued the author. He then ironically redefined the situation in Żyrardów as a consequence of introducing a modern (if awful) work culture in backwards Poland.Footnote ¹¹¹

A week later, a further adaptation of the argument appeared in Świat (The World), a Warsaw sociocultural weekly with an impressive array of well-known editors and writers.Footnote ¹¹² Its author claimed that Koehler had indeed adopted western management methods, but that these were techniques reserved for the colonies, hardly used in Europe. The manager had misread his workers. The Poles adapted perfectly well to western environments, but their strong sense of dignity—in Blachowski's case honed by his Siberian exile—revolted against such treatment. Behind this argument lies another form of victim blaming: the “natives” allowed the west to control them, but the Poles, with their national character steeled by decades of suffering, would not.

What about descriptions of worker exploitation in Żyrardów as slavery? Laborers from Żyrardów, mostly women, did not directly participate in public discourse. White-collar editors of Warsaw newspapers, all men, produced the interpretations mentioned above. To understand the assumptions behind their narratives it is useful to ask what journalists saw as particularly jarring in the treatment of labor, and how they framed labor issues.

Commentators produced two labor-related arguments, used in different contexts. The first one concerned factory workers. They were exclusively Polish, and it was mostly their treatment that journalists called slavery. Together with the plight of the unemployed, it was key to the story of Żyrardów, with the left-wing and popular press producing the more radical interpretations discussed above. Journalists also linked the situation of workers to the main avenger narrative. Indeed, in early reporting they often described Blachowski as a “worker” rather than a clerk, since it fit the narrative better.

According to newspapers, the French owners treated people like mindless bodies. They expected female workers to look pretty, young, slim, and to wear long stockings, even in the heat of summer. The women were expendable: cheap, easy to train, and to let go. One of the foreign managers allegedly sexually harassed them. The French also reduced social spending in the factory, started in the nineteenth century by the previous owners.Footnote ¹¹³ If the relationship between the factory and its workers before the war was paternalistic, under Boussac it became much more distant. The new management treated the labor force as an external factor, kept for its low wages, and readily replaced by machines.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The journalists’ accounts give a second meaning to Jan Kwapiński's observations in Naprzód that the French were performing “the most savage experiments on the body of the working masses.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ When Elizabeth Dunn studied the entrance of foreign capital into Poland during the post-socialist transition, she noticed how a push towards a post-Fordist flexibility defined not only marketing, but also the ideal worker. Employees aimed to exhibit “their ‘flexible capitalist dispositions’ on their bodies and through their presentation of self.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the 1930s, under the logic of Taylorism, the values were different, but the process similar. Rudolf Nötel argued that one of the positive consequences of the entrance of foreign capital into central and eastern Europe in the interwar period was the spreading of new management techniques.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The Żyrardów case seems to show opposition to this spread, best epitomized in Piasecki's already quoted protests against the global economic system.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The second labor-related argument concerned clerks. Newspapers gave them more attention during the trial, when many office workers from the factory's headquarters in Warsaw were called as witnesses to show the environment in which Blachowski had worked. Editors quoted complaints that clerks could not use the telephone for private calls during office hours, and that Koehler had supposedly installed peepholes to make sure they did not smoke. Journalists also noted that this treatment mostly concerned Polish clerks, who were also forced to learn foreign languages to talk to higher management. French and German nationals escaped harassment, and allegedly received higher salaries for less work. Many journalists observed that Koehler did not trust the locals. During the trial, one of the witnesses mentioned a widely quoted observation that the deceased never smoked Polish cigarettes, claiming that they “muddled the mind.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

The workers and clerks thus faced different problems, and there was little unified critique of labor issues in the studied corpus. It should not come as a surprise: in interwar Poland these two groups were very different. In the textile industry, white-collar workers earned on average more than three times as much as blue-collar workers. The two groups had distinct patterns of consumption, as well as deeply unequal access to education and culture. They also existed in separate social worlds; a lower clerk's job was considered a perfectly acceptable early position for a member of the intelligentsia, but operating a machine in a textile factory was not.Footnote ¹²⁰ This cleavage, deeply rooted in public consciousness, was confirmed by law: the two groups were regulated by different legal acts, and benefited from distinct social security systems.Footnote ¹²¹ Female workers, the majority of the Żyrardów labor force, formed the weakest part of their class. They were on average younger than their male counterparts, and received lower salaries. Endemic sexual harassment in many workplaces was an open secret. Like in other countries of central and eastern Europe, while more women started working during the war, their toil was perceived as secondary to male labor. The Great Depression further weakened their position.Footnote ¹²²

The two arguments about labor played different roles in the corpus. The situation of workers was used in more general stories, where it helped prove the colonial nature of French actions, and the evil consequences of global capitalism. The toxic environment faced by clerks, on the other hand, helped paint a darker picture of Koehler, and thus explain Blachowski's deed. The most telling twist in this story came when some journalists were surprised that Koehler had treated all Poles badly, workers and “seasoned old clerks” alike, apprentices and managers.Footnote ¹²³ Even Paweł Hulka-Laskowski asked, despite his blue-collar heritage: who did Koehler harass, “apprentices? No—clerks, office workers, the intelligentsia, the nation's best.”Footnote ¹²⁴ This surprise highlights the social order of labor, showing that the worse treatment of factory workers was a given for interwar writers. In other words, not only did the French treat Polish workers like blacks, transgressing the hierarchy of race, but Koehler abused both male clerks and working women, flattening the local hierarchy of labor.

In April 1932, Julian Blachowski's shots provided the press with two stories to offer to the public. The first was a tragic tale of clerk turned avenger, the second, an international account of foreign investors controlling a small town. Journalists worked hard to weave both stories into wider political and social narratives, and to use them for political gain. Those who fought the authorities, found fault with government policies; representatives of the Sanacja movement attacked the right and foreigners; capitalism opponents blamed “anonymous capital.” On the other hand, for parts of the elite nothing wrong had happened, and the events of 1932 were only another example of Poland's backwardness compared to the idealized west. Likewise, few commentators used this opportunity to take shots at the Franco-Polish alliance. Only left-wing journalists, who also produced the more radical colonial narratives, seriously brought up the link between the alliance and economic imperialism.

The murder of Gaston Koehler-Badin and the story of Żyrardów forced Polish elites into an uncomfortable position, perfectly diagnosed by the poet Józef Łobodowski.Footnote ¹²⁵ Rather than discuss local politics, the impact of the Great Depression, or Polish modernization projects like the port in Gdynia, journalists had to grapple with the reality of economic imperialism at the hands of Poland's main ally. They produced two broad groups of interpretations, arguing that either the French had oppressed the Poles, or the Poles themselves were backwards. Both rationalizations were based on a similar set of assumptions. They relied on an imagined civilizational hierarchy, with the west at the top rung of a cultural, economic, and colonial ladder. For those who interpreted Koehler's actions as a form of colonialism or slavery, what happened in Żyrardów was wrong, because the French had ignored Poland's Europeanness, and the Poles’ whiteness. For their opponents, who saw nothing wrong in Żyrardów, the French remained at the top of the civilizational pecking order, but Polish workers were found lacking. Both narratives allowed the commenting elites to maintain their modern, western self-image, and distance themselves from the events in the factory. The framing of the outrage at French policies in Żyrardów reveals another hierarchy deeply rooted in interwar worldviews: the hierarchy of labor. Interwar journalists found it surprising that foreigners treated all Poles badly, both workers and clerks. In the case of Żyrardów, this hierarchy had the secondary dimension of gender. The workers in question were mostly female, and the clerks male, like almost all the commenting journalists.

The studied reactions challenge simple narratives about Poland's place in the world, and reaffirm the country's “in-between” status. Faced with exploitation, Polish elites produced rationalizations and defenses that were themselves based on racial categories and colonial hierarchies. This suggests that despite the ostensible racial homogeneity of their country—and indeed, of central and eastern Europe—race constituted an important way for the Poles to conceptualize human difference. Similar to what Kathryn Ciancia observed while studying Poland's eastern borderlands, this did not, however, mean that the Poles “simply aped the language of their western European counterparts.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Accusations of colonialism were used as weapons against French investors, and the idea of race served to reaffirm the Poles’ European identity.