Departures of note

In 1885, Théodore de Korwin Szymanowski, a Polish nobleman living in exile in Western Ukraine, published a strikingly original economic treatise in French titled L'avenir économique, social et politique en Europe. Written while Poland was partitioned and occupied by Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary, the work proposed a reformed parliamentary system, a customs union, centrally collected statistics, and a central bank with a common currency—preferably the French franc—for all participating European states. His focus on economics, statistics, and monetary policy rather than nationalism or sovereignty was an innovation for the time, though the text remained largely forgotten until its rediscovery in a library at the start of the 21st century.

Born into a notable Polish noble family in 1846, Szymanowski was the only surviving son of a Napoleonic officer and banker. Educated at a Jesuit college in Metz, France, he absconded at age 16 to join the 1863 January Uprising but was arrested in Kraków and returned to school, with no evidence that he saw combat. After inheriting the family estate in 1867, he married Julia Bożeniec Jełowicka in 1874, whose dowry temporarily eased the family's financial decline. By 1885, however, the family was forced to abandon their ancestral home, possibly due to confiscation linked to his political activities, and moved to Western Ukraine, where they lived in straitened circumstances for the rest of his life.

From exile, Szymanowski corresponded with unnamed political figures in Paris and St. Petersburg, advocating his macro-economic ideas. In 1890, he attended the Paris Antislavery Conference convened by Cardinal Lavigerie and subsequently published L'Esclavage Africain, proposing an African Central Bank to replace the trade in human beings with trade in natural resources—an economic solution to a moral evil. He also wrote two allegorical Polish poems, one on the creation and fall of angels and another on a Ruthenian princess, subtly urging cooperation between Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox Christians. He died in poverty in Kiev in 1901, and his grave has not survived.