The Karpowicz family and the banker Tepper. Some notes on the Warsaw intelligentsia at the end of the 18th c. and the 19th c.

Abstract

The article concerns the impact of the bankruptcy of Tepper’s bank, which led to a huge economic crisis in Poland at the end of the 18th c., on the history of the Karpowicz family. Rele vant information comes from the preserved “Genealogy” of the Karpowicz and Tarczyński families.Donaty Karpowicz, bearing the Korab coat of arms, (1770–c. 1820), a doctor practicing in Szczuczyn Mazowiecki, inherited 300,000 Prussian thalers from his parents, depositing the sum in the bank of Piotr Fergusson Tepper, “the greatest banker of the North”. Tepper’s bankruptcy in 1793 resulted in a severe economic crisis, badly affecting the life of many families, including the Karpowicz family. The hardships of Donaty’s three sons and daughter, who were mostly connected with Warsaw, are representative of the generation whose youth was shaped by the November Upris-ing. The two older sons, Kacper (1802–1879) and Kazimierz (1803–1876), followed the fami-ly’s medical tradition, the youngest one, Augustyn (1815–1894), was a government clerk. They can be considered representatives of the emerging intelligentsia class. The older brothers took on various jobs to be able to study at Warsaw University; they also took care of Augustyn, who was orphaned at the age of five. Both the older brothers joined the November Uprising; Kacper served as a medical offi cer in artillery and Kazimierz as a lower-rank doctor (he was actually a pharmacist). Augustyn graduated from the Piarist School at Długa Street in Warsaw and became a clerk. The “Genealogy” details his thirty-three-years-long career (among his other posts he was a director in the offi ce of the Government of the Warsaw Province; he also worked in Deputacja Szlachecka [a nobility register office]). It also describes his mishaps and financial problems after 1861, when the authorities closed many offi ces and degraded Poles. For all his life Augustyn was certain that if not for his father’s unfortunate investment in Tepper’s bank his life and the lives of his relatives would have turned very different.