Jarosław Dąbrowski
Jarosław Dąbrowski
1836–1871
✕ Killed in action
Organiser of the Polish rising of 1863 who became a general of the Commune and fell at Montmartre in Bloody Week
Arrested while preparing the 1863 uprising and sentenced to Siberian hard labour, Dąbrowski escaped. As a general of the Paris Commune, he fought Versailles forces and was mortally wounded on 23 May 1871.
Born into a Polish noble family in Zhytomyr, he became a Russian staff officer but was arrested in Warsaw while preparing the January Uprising of 1863, just before it broke out. Escaping on the way to Siberian exile, he reached Paris in 1865. In 1871 the Commune made him a general and gave him the western front at Neuilly and Asnières, where he was reckoned its ablest commander; on 21 May it was he who first reported that the Versailles army was inside the walls. He was mortally wounded on a barricade in the rue Myrha near Montmartre on 23 May.
Career timeline
- 1850s–1862Served as an artillery officer in the Russian army, graduated from its General Staff Academy, and joined a secret officers’ organisation after taking a staff post with the Warsaw garrison.
- 1862–1863In Warsaw, led the radical ‘Reds’ and helped establish the National Central Committee as he prepared an uprising. Arrested in August 1862, he remained imprisoned in the Warsaw Citadel when the January Uprising broke out in 1863.
- 1864–1865Sentenced to 15 years of hard labour in 1864, he escaped in Moscow while being transported to Siberia. He left Russia on a false passport and settled in France.
- 1871The Paris Commune made him a general and assigned him the north-western front, then appointed, dismissed, and reinstated him as commander-in-chief. Wounded in the abdomen at a barricade on 23 May, he died in hospital.