Despite or rather because of the Commonwealth's abysmal situation, something like a reform movement was emerging in the 1740s and 1750s. The very powerlessness of the state in the War of the Polish Succession of 1733—5, when the election of a Polish noble, Stanislaw Leszczyriski, was set aside by foreign intervention, was seen by some nobles as a humiliation, not to mention a harbinger of partition. Under Augustus III, an absentee king if ever there was one, Poland—Lithuania had in effect no government at all. For all the collusion by Poland's nobles in this anarchy, a few voices began to consider the alternatives.
Some of these reformers grouped at first around Leszczyiiski who, in 1735, as father-in-law to Louis XV of France, was compensated for his dethronement with the Duchy of Lorraine. Stanislaw's court at Luneville, near Nancy, became not only a beacon for Polish emigres but also a model of enlightened government in its own right. Stanislaw himself published a tract in 1749, probably ghostwritten, entitled 'A Voice Ensuring Freedom', which restated the basic principle 'that the Commonwealth was a political fatherland, defined neither by its ruler nor its ethnic distinction nor its geographical frontiers'.10 This restatement of the original idea of the 'commonwealth' as all politically active inhabitants of the state had an unquantifiable effect on the thinking of French political philosophers like Rousseau, in particular their changing interpretation of the term 'nation'.
In the Commonwealth, it is significant that the first serious calls for reform started to appear in the wake of the war of 1733—5. Historians are still divided as to when the thinking of the Enlightenment can be said to have had an influence. What is undisputed is that the number of the 'enlightened' in Polish society was small, probably never more than 2,000 individuals at any one point.11 Ironically, too, such reforming spirits could emerge only from the class responsible for the Commonwealth's decline, the nobility.
As in the Habsburg Monarchy, an important initial contribution was made by reformist Catholic clerics, who argued that the dead hand of the Church in educational and intellectual matters was as much a factor in Poland's decline as its economic underdevelopment and the dominance of the nobility. A central figure in educational reform was the Piarist priest Stanislaw Konarski, who received his education abroad and spent time at Luneville before returning to Poland in the 1730s. Konarski was supported in his vision of the need literally to educate nobles into a more public-spirited and enlightened attitude by the brother-bishops Andrzej and Jozef Zaluski, enthusiastic bibliophiles and disseminators of enlightened ideas. Together the three men published not only legal texts but also works of political philosophy and literature, and in 1747 the Zaluski brothers merged their personal libraries into a single collection of 180,000 books, housed them in a Warsaw palace, and donated this 'first public reference library on the European mainland' to the Commonwealth.12
Konarski and the Zaluskis also modernised the school system. Konarski's Collegium Nobilium, opened in 1740, aimed to give the sons of nobles a truly modern education. Even more radical was the transition effected by Konarski in the Commonwealth's 28 Piarist schools, from Latin to Polish as the language of instruction, and the introduction of such subjects as political philosophy, modern languages and philosophy. The rival Jesuit schools copied Konarski's methods and much of his curriculum in their own 66 institutions. Although confined exclusively to the noble class, this change in the pattern of education not only produced a generation of relatively modern-minded Poles by the 1750s but, by opting for Polish as the medium, also laid the foundations of a more broadly based conception of the Polish nation.
The relative dearth of such forward thinking helps account for the failure, in 1744, of the first serious attempt at political reform. This centred on the faction in the Sejm led by one of the wealthiest magnate families, the Czartoryskis, and their allies. The Czartoryski 'Familia' proposed sweeping changes: a larger army, to be financed by improvements in revenue collection; the lifting of economic restrictions on non-nobles; the limitation of the liberum veto; and the payment of salaries to Sejm deputies. Despite support for this programme among other factions, there was also opposition; the matter was settled when it became clear that the king of Prussia, in particular, wished that 'matters should remain in a state of some confusion in Poland'.13 As usual, a deputy was induced to apply the veto and the Sejm was dissolved.
Two decades on, when the death of Augustus III required a royal election, the pressure for reform was harder to deny and the Czartoryski Familia's candidate, Stanislaw Poniatowski, enjoyed a unique advantage. As the former lover of Catherine II of Russia, Poniatowski was deemed to be a pliant instrument of Russian policy and was backed by Russian troops. This, together with the exhaustion of the great powers at the close of the Seven Years' War, was decisive in ensuring that the Polish succession did not unleash fresh conflict. The young king, however, was no cipher but a committed adherent of enlightened thought, shaped by an intensive education, widely travelled and even more widely read, and an admirer of the more advanced political systems of Western Europe, especially Britain's. The very title he assumed at his election in September 1764, Stanislaw II August, indicated his ambition to reform the Commonwealth as Caesar Augustus had reformed Rome.
Stanislaw August was aware of the almost insuperable obstacles to change. A start was nevertheless immediately made in the Convocation Sejm of 1764, which was formally 'confederated' and hence legally free to adopt legislation by majority vote, unhindered by the veto. The new king won approval for measures originally proposed in 1744. In 1766, the government grasped the prickliest nettle of all, the abolition of the Iiberum veto. The response of Poland—Lithuania's neighbours was unambiguous. Prussia had already, in 1765, made impossible the operation of the Commonwealth's new customs regime by blockading the River Vistula where it passed East Prussian territory. Now, both Russia and Prussia demanded the retention of the veto; otherwise, as the Russian ambassador put it, he would see to it that Warsaw was torn down 'stone by stone'.14 Stanislaw August had little option but to dissolve the Sejm, but this was only the beginning. For some time the Russian and Prussian governments had been using the issue of religious toleration, for Orthodox and Lutherans respectively, as an excuse for interference in the Commonwealth's affairs. On this pretext, and profiting from the resistance to toleration from the almost exclusively Catholic Sejm, the two powers insisted on the calling of another confederated Sejm in the winter of 1767—8, during which Russian bullying reached new heights. Russian troops occupied Warsaw, the Russian ambassador kept careful watch over the proceedings and prominent opponents were temporarily deported to Russian territory. In the end the deputies reluctantly approved a series of laws which the Empress Catherine undertook to 'guarantee'. These enshrined yet again the elective kingship, the I iberum veto, the right of noble insurrection against royal power, the exclusion of non-nobles from land ownership and public office, and the continuation of serfdom. The Commonwealth's 'golden liberty' did not, it seemed, include the liberty to modernise.
The enforced settlement of 1768 produced a number of reactions welcome to neither Stanislaw nor Catherine. Before the Sejm had even risen a group of disaffected nobles and clergymen, who objected to both religious toleration and Russian interference, formed the Confederation of Bar in the south-east of the country; the aim of this ill-led but persistent insurrection was to depose Stanislaw August and somehow repudiate Russian tutelage. Almost immediately after, in April 1768, a savage uprising broke out among the Orthodox Ukrainian peasantry, enraged by the failure to address the question of serfdom as well as the threatening stance on toleration assumed by the Barists. Before the revolt was stamped out, with the help of Russian forces, in mid-1769, an untold number of people had been massacred: Poles, Ukrainian peasants and Jews. Finally, the continuing presence of Russian troops in south-eastern Poland, and the suspicion that Russia intended using the Commonwealth as a mustering post for invasion, led the Ottoman sultan to declare war on Russia in October 1768. This meant that Catherine could spare few troops for the suppression of disorder in Poland, and the Confederation of Bar maintained a low-level guerrilla war against those Russians in the Commonwealth for the next four years. To Catherine's exasperation, the Polish-Lithuanian government made little contribution to the campaign against the Barists, for fear of being seen to be fighting Poles.
The chaos in the Commonwealth gave Frederick II of Prussia all the justification he desired for territorial aggrandisement. Frederick actively sought to acquire Polish or Royal Prussia, the territory separating Brandenburg from East Prussia. This would not only unify the Prussian lands but would also give Prussia additional rich agricultural land and control of the lucrative trade on the River Vistula. It was only when the Russo-Turkish War threatened to touch off hostilities between Russia, Prussia's only ally, and the Habsburg Monarchy that Frederick put forward concrete proposals for a tripartite partition of Poland-Lithuania. This would compensate Russia for renouncing the Ottoman principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, whose mooted annexation was risking war with the Monarchy. It also forced a reluctant Maria Theresa to join in, for fear of being overshadowed by the territorial aggrandisement of her rivals. Agreement in principle on the territories to be annexed was reached in February 1772. It remained only to force the settlement on the Commonwealth, whose government, Frederick argued, had long since forfeited any right to be taken seriously as the guarantor of Polish liberties, not to mention Poland's internal stability. The Commonwealth, that 'land of fools, madmen and war', did not deserve to survive, a dismissive verdict which has tended to affect the judgement of historians ever since.15 In reality the Commonwealth did not have much choice in the matter. Stanisiaw August, with tiny forces at his disposal and much of the country either loyal to the Barists or already under foreign occupation, was in no position to resist the demand by the three powers to call a Sejm to ratify a done deal.
Once assembled, the Sejm was immediately forced to devolve the 'debate' on the partition treaties to a delegation of its members, most of whom were in the pay of the powers. It was the delegation which approved the treaties of cession, in August and September 1773, and which finally swallowed a constitutional reordering of the Commonwealth itself cooked up by the Russians. According to this, not only were the free veto and the elective kingship reaffirmed, but what few powers Stanisiaw August had left were also effectively abolished by the creation of a Permanent Council. This was to be composed of 36 members of the Sejm and answerable to that body, but it was in no sense a government and had no legislative powers as such. In theory, this represented the apogee of noble democracy, since not only the king but also the Council was accountable to the Sejm. In fact, the ultimate arbiter of what happened remained the Russian government.
By the terms of the First Partition (see Map 3), the Commonwealth lost more than a quarter of its territory as well as something like a third of its population. Russia was the largest gainer in terms of territory, while the Habsburg
Map 3 The Three Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Source: Redrawn from ‘The Russo-Polish Borderlands to 1795' from Seton-Watson, H., 1967, The Russian Empire
1801-1917, Oxford, 772.
Monarchy took over the largest number of inhabitants. In economic terms, the annexed lands were among the most valuable in the Commonwealth. In addition, the rump Polish state was choked off from the outside world through the loss of control over river routes and ports; Prussia in particular held the Polish economy in a vice. Neutered both physically and politically, Poland— Lithuania's prospects for any sort of regeneration looked minimal. In the next two decades, however, a brave attempt was made to modernise, fascinating precisely because the odds against its success seemed so long.
World History
