Leopold Stanisław Kronenberg

Leopold Stanisław Kronenberg (born March 24, 1812 in Warsaw, died April 5, 1878 in Nice) was a Polish banker, investor, and financier, and a leader of the 1863 January Uprising against the Russian Empire.

Kronenberg came from a wealthy family of Jewish rabbis. His father Samuel Eleazar Kronenberg (1773-1826) was a native of Wyszogród who led a small bank in Warsaw. His mother was Tekla Levi (1775-1848).

Kronenberg had seven siblings: Ludwik, Rosalie, Stanislaw Solomon, Dorota (the mother of Seweryn Loewenstein), Marię, Henryk Andrzej, and Władysław Alfons.

After graduating from high school in Warsaw, Kronenberg studied at the University of Technology in Hamburg and at the University of Berlin. Having finished his studies in 1832 he returned to Poland and took up conducting business. In 1846 he converted from Judaism to Protestantism.

He married Ernestyną Rozalią Leo (1827-1893), daughter of Leopold August Leo, a prominent Polish Jew who had converted to Lutheranism. They had six children together: Stanisław Leopold (1846-1894), entrepreneur; Władysław Edward (1848-1892), musician and philanthropist; Leopold Julian (1849-1937), banker; Tekla Julię (1851-1852); Marię Różę (1854-1944), wife of Charles Zamoyski and the wife of Gustaw Taube, leader of a famous Warsaw literary salon; and Rosalie (b. 1857), the wife Aleksander Orsetti.

From 1839 to 1860, having obtained the concession of the tobacco monopoly in the Kingdom of Poland, Kronenberg amassed a considerable fortune which he used to develop the country's economy: sugar industry, construction of railways, commercial activities, and banking sectors. He was also involved in the rural economy by participating in the work of the Agricultural Society. In 1859, Leopold Kronenberg made his entry into the world of the press by buying the newspaper Gazeta Codzienna, renamed in 1861 as Gazeta Polska. It was a magazine with a liberal-democratic tint, whose editor was Józef Ignacy Kraszewski.

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