Poland is among the European states the one that has lived, from the modern age to the present, the most troubled existence. Crushed between two giants, the Russian and the German, canceled twice by the political paper and sometimes risen from their ashes and those of a continent upset by world conflicts that designated it the scene of the most serious human catastrophes of recent history, reconstituted by new frontiers, has recovered stability at the price of its political autonomy. Only the last twenty years, appealing to the determination and courage of all its social and intellectual forces, has regained full independence with the dissolution of the geopolitical system to whose crisis has made a decisive contribution. The course aims to retrace the most important events in the history of Poland to compare with those of continental Europe. Moments of union but also of division, of meetings but also of contrasts. Events that make Poland a laboratory? of unique ideas and institutional forms in the modern and contemporary Europe