The establishment of the Kingdom of Poland, which covered most of the territory of the then split Duchy of Warsaw, by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and its integration into Russia was believed by the empires to solve the Polish question. Unfortunately, the tsar started to violate the Constitution. In November 1830, an uprising broke out in the Kingdom in defence of the rights of its inhabitants and in the name of the independence of Poland. After it had been put down, the Kingdom met with repression from Russia and limitation of its autonomy, to which both emigrants and inhabitants of the Kingdom responded with creating secret organisations to prepare another uprising. One of them was established in 1835 by Szymon Konarski and his friends from the Young Poland. It was called the Association of the Polish People (Stowarzyszenie Ludu Polskiego) and was active in all of the Polish lands under the partitions. Its main aim was to liberate Poland in political terms and remove social divisions. The radicalism of its principles was an outcome of the Romantic fascination with the people as well as political calculation which assumed that in order to be successful the uprising needed the involvement of peasant masses.
As a result of the rivalry between the liberal and the democratic fraction within the Association, the radicals, dominated by the liberals, established a new organisation called the Universal Polish Nation Confederation in 1837. Soon afterwards, the Association of the Polish People was dismantled. Szymon Konarski was arrested by the Russians in 1838 and executed a year later.
