Industry, commerce and cleanliness: Franciszek Ksawery Bohusz in the Low Countries

Franciszek Ksawery Bohusz (1746–1820) was an educated clergyman who travelled across Europe between 1777 and 1778. During his travels, he also visited the Low Countries. During the expedition, he kept a diary, which he carefully compiled after returning home. The article answers the question about Bohusz’s way of portraying the Dutch reality against the background of earlier (mainly 17th-century) and contemporary (to him) accounts by Polish travellers. The imagological reflection used therein makes it possible to show continuity as well as change. Bohusz was concerned with what his predecessors had been interested in – architecture, works of art, people and their customs. In these parts, his diary does not differ from the memoirs of other travellers from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth a hundred or two hundred years ago and confirms the persistence of the stereotypical image of the Dutch in the Polish world view. However, new elements dominate. Franciszek Bohusz paid much more attention to legal, economic and social matters. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he was primarily concerned with political issues, especially the principle of unanimous voting. He reports with great interest on the local economy and trade, describing in detail the factories he saw and the canal-based waterway system, which he found excellent. He was also surprised to note that such a rich country struggled with the problem of poverty. He also described the methods employed by the local authorities to combat it. As a clergyman, he was interested in the worship of the various confessions whose services he attended. An interesting novelty of his writing stems from his sensitivity the arts and a certain painterly perception of reality.