historian and journalist, was one of the leading representatives of the Cracow school of history.
He was born on November 20, 1826 in Bolechowice near Cracow. He attended the St. Anne Liceum in Cracow. In 1840 he took up studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University, and then at the Faculty of Law, from which he graduated in 1845. He took an active part in the Cracow uprising of 1846, working closely with the uprising's dictator, Jan Tyssowski. The course of events at that time convinced him of the destructive influence of revolutionary radicalism on social relations. He joined the editorial board of the Cracow-based conservative daily Czas, founded in 1848. However, he soon left after a conflict with the founder of Czas, Paweł Popiel, when the latter wanted to welcome Emperor Franz Joseph I, who was arriving in Cracow, with an editorial which Kalinka (and another member of the board, Maurycy Mann) believed was too loyalist. After settling in France, Kalinka became an associate of the Hotel Lambert, a group around Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. In Paris, together with Julian Klaczka, he edited Wiadomości Polskie, one of the best Polish periodicals of the 19th century. Despite the high level of the journal, there was little interest in it in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and due to the journal’s diminishing number of subscribers, it was closed down. In 1870 Kalinka was ordained a priest. He spent the last years of his life in Poland. He died in Lviv on December 16, 1886. Kalinka combined his pastoral duties with academic work. He became known primarily as the author of seminal works on Poland’s decline in the 18th century and attempts at its revival in the era of the Four-Year Sejm (Sejm czteroletni, 3 volumes, 1880-1888; Ostatnie lata panowania Stanisława Augusta, 2 volumes, 1868). They became the basis of an important current in Polish historiography, called the Cracow school of history, whose adherents opposed the views of Lelewel and his disciples, extremely popular at the time, identifying the causes of the downfall of the Commonwealth in an unfavorable combination of international events. Kalinka challenged this view, pointing to the internal causes of the weakening of Poland leading to the partitions and its disappearance from the political map of Europe. At the same time, he criticized some of the propositions from Michał Bobrzyński's Dzieje Polski w zarysie, which went even further in condemning the defects of the Commonwealth. Kalinka's noteworthy works include his historical polemic against Josephinism (Galicja i Kraków pod panowaniem austriackim, 1853) and his peak journalistic achievement Przegrana Francji i przyszłość Europy, where he presented the ominous consequences of the application of liberal and socialist theories in the political and social life of the Old Continent.