This article reflects on the broadly understood functioning of Polish political émigrés at the time of the nineteenth-century national uprisings (1831–1870), and specifically those refugees who found themselves in Belgium. A pretext for embarking upon this topic was provided by the publication of a book by the Belgian historian Idesbald Goddeeris: La Grande Emigration polonaise en Belgique (1831–1870). Elites et masses en exil à l’époque romantique (Frankfurt am Main 2013). The study in question applied a prosopographic research method based on an extensive source survey conceived as a foundation for the formulation of theses and conclusions and often verifying mistaken convictions propagated in previous historical writings. The Great Emigration in Belgium is presented in an in-depth statistical and comparative approach referring also to other political emigrations of the nineteenth century. The reader has thus received a thorough description of the settlement geography, the reasons for choosing Belgium as the place of residence, professional and political activity, mobility, living conditions, and assorted factors determining the conduct of the émigrés in all the aforementioned aspects. The author also took into consider­ation the attitude of the host country towards arrivals from Poland — motives shaping the attitude of the Belgians — including the attitude of the political elites towards the Polish émigrés and the Polish question. Separate analyses deal with refugees in the 1831–1863 period and the post-January Uprising émigrés, who in numerous respects differed from their post-November predecessors. Polemical accents are discernible in assessments of the extent to which political factors affected the decisions made by the Polish émigrés, and the ultimate verification of the degree of the effectiveness of their efforts on the political arena, i.a. a different understanding of their independence or the subjectivity of their endeavours ­vis-à-vis suggested and divergent opinions about the instrumentalization ...