Jerzy Lukowski - Disorderly Liberty - The Political Culture of The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in The Eighteenth Century

DISORDERLY LIBERTY
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Disorderly Liberty
The political culture of the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth in the
eighteenth century
Jerzy Lukowski
Continuum UK, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
Continuum US, 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © Jerzy Lukowski, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
from the publishers.
First published 2010
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 4411 4812 4
Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand

Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwall, Great Britain
Contents
Preface vii
Abbreviations xiii
A note on Polish pronunciation xiv
1 The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania: an introductory survey 1

2 Ancestral legacies 13
3 The search for harmony 33
4 Keeping the faith 55
5 Towards successful counsels 77
6 Confrontations with the Enlightenment: Felix Czacki and the
Monitor, 1765, and the Zamoyski law code, 1780 99
7 Foreign aid 121
8 Marking time 149
9 Ferment 173
10 Judaica 205
11 Towards new Utopias 223
Epilogue 255
Appendix: The Constitution of 3 May 1791 261
Notes 273
Bibliography 315
Index 339
Jerzy Michalski
in memoriam
(9 April 1924–26 February 2007)
Preface
The eighteenth century was not a good time for Europe’s republics. They were
marginalised or in decline; or, at best, fictions in the minds of dreamers. ‘It is
astonishing that people regard republican government so highly, yet so few
nations benefit from it’, observed Montesqieu.1 In 1772, the largest of these
republics – the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania – suffered a massive loss
of territory to its three more powerful neighbours, Russia, Prussia and Austria.
It had been seemingly so long in decline that European chanceries adapted
relatively easily to its dismemberment. The Commonwealth of the Two Nations,
the Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów, was, after all, a passive political entity on
the receiving end of the attentions of more dynamic neighbours. Yet Poland
was, until the process of its disposal got under way, the largest state in Europe
after Russia. The republican ideals and the political culture of its ruling class,
its nobility, the szlachta, remain part of the historical legacy not only of what is
today Poland, but also of the successor states: Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus. This
book represents an attempt to bring that little-known past to a wider scholarly
audience.
Polish historiography has been peculiarly introspective. Excision from the
map between 1795 and 1918 has made the very question of Poland’s existence
both a terminus and a point of departure for those trying to write its history.
Following the Third Partition of 1795, it was a moot point whether a ‘Poland’
in any shape would, or could, emerge at all. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic
wars may have brought some hope of a national rebirth, but they brought even
greater disillusion. The Congress of Vienna at least created something called
the Kingdom of Poland, a small state under the supposedly constitutional rule
of the tsar of Russia. The tensions between constitutionalism and autocracy
erupted in the abortive insurrections of 1830–1 and 1863–4. Those who wrote
of Poland’s history lived through these traumatic events: whether they approved
or disapproved of the risings, they could not fail to be influenced by them and
by the issue of whether there would ever be a restored, independent Polish
state. The course of history turned them, whether they wished it or not, into
moralists. Where historians of France have to ask, ‘Why did the Revolution
occur?’, those of Poland had little choice but to ask, ‘What went wrong?’ From
there, it was but a short step to asking, ‘Who was to blame?’ For the scholars and
viii P R E FAC E
gentlemanly dilettantes who formed the Society of the Friends of Learning in the
then Prussian frontier town of Warsaw in 1800, the most they could expect was
the preservation of language and historical memory. Was this all that ‘Poland’
could ever be? Language continued to evolve – it was, after all, the writers of the
eighteenth century who conferred on it a new dynamism and plasticity. But what
was the meaning of its history? Joachim Lelewel, for some the most outstanding
historian of the nineteenth century, was suspicious of great aristocrats. Not only
had they brought about Poland’s plight, they seemed lukewarm or ambivalent
about, even downright hostile to, the Rising of November 1830 – in which he
served as a minister in the insurrectionary government. To him, aristocrats and
nobles had perverted a once felicitous communitarian democracy and turned
what should have been the birthright of all into the preserve of the few. Such
cultural and mental baggage affected all who wrote about the past, so much so
that Karol Boromeusz Hoffman (on the other side of the political divide from
Lelewel) observed in 1841, ‘We do not now write history as historians, but as
politicians; we do not investigate the past for the truth, but to find arguments to
support this or that opinion. For us, truth is a secondary quality and it would be
appear to be no sin to lie in the service of our particular party; so often, without
scruple, we twist historical facts to suit our inclinations and views.’2 When all that
truly belonged to the Poles was their past, it was bound to become a battleground
inseparable from the present, as debate raged on about whether Poland could be
resurrected, whether it should be revived or whether the Polish-speaking subjects
of Prussia, Russia and Austria should finally reconcile themselves to their fate and
accept what history had done to them.
History became a kind of national cultural, even spiritual, projection: a what
might have been if only Poland had survived, not only for historians, but for
almost anyone opining on the subject: novelists, artists or philosophers. Writers
deprived of their own country sought consolation in a mythical past in which
Poland was the antemurale Christianitatis, the ‘bulwark of Christendom’, not
only against the Islamic Turk, but the Orthodox Russian and even, at a pinch,
the Protestant German; and looked to an indifferent Europe which Poland had
for so long ‘protected’ to concern itself with their aspirations. Those who knew
better preferred to hold their peace.3 Heavy-handed censorship, notably after
1864 in the Russian-occupied territories, made serious research problematic.
After 1867, historical scholarship could flourish in the more relaxed atmosphere
of Austrian Galicia, but such freedom could give rise to vituperative argument.
Particularly bitter polemic surrounded the so-called Kraków School of histo-
rians, active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose most
outstanding exponent, Michał Bobrzyński, produced in 1879 his Outline History
of Poland – Dzieje Polski w zarysie, a blistering critique of Poland as a failed state.
Even among those prepared to accept Bobrzyński’s strictures, there was a strong
P R E FAC E ix
feeling that the circumstances were not right to give voice to them – after all, his
work appeared barely fifteen years after the emotionally visceral failure of the
‘January Insurrection’ of 1863–4. At least as hostile reactions greeted the iconic
series of paintings depicting the turning points of Polish history from the brush
of the Kraków artist, Jan Matejko. ‘It does not do to insult your mother’s grave’,
pronounced one eminent authority.4
Bobrzyński’s was the first scholarly synthesis of Poland’s history to be pro-
duced. That it was so long before such a work could appear demonstrates how
difficult it was to find a purchase on that difficult past and its elusive meanings.
Was Bobrzyński simply a Habsburg stooge who had bought into the Bismarckian
supremacy of the state? Was he an anti-democrat who had no time for liberal
ideas? Wherever any historian found himself on the political or historiographical
spectrum, such were the questions that would inevitably dog him. Nor did mat-
ters become any less complicated in the twentieth century. Poland was resurrected
in 1918, only to be pitched into a struggle for its existence with Bolshevik Russia
in 1920–1. Its interwar politics were as tortured as ever. It survived the ordeal
of the Second World War, to re-emerge with frontiers which had once more
been drastically redrawn; and for those historians not sympathetic to the new
communist regime, the immediate post-war years were as traumatic as anything
experienced during the upheavals of the previous century.5
All this is to say that to pick over Poland’s past is to enter an inadequately
mapped minefield. In comparison with the research conducted on western
European states, that conducted into Poland’s remains sparse indeed. The dom-
inant figure of eighteenth-century historiography is Władysław Konopczyński.
Born in 1880, died in 1952, his life reflected the vicissitudes of his country.
He began his scholarly career under Austro-Hungarian rule, fell out with the
Piłsudski inter-war regime, survived the Second World War despite three months
in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and died besmirched and reviled
by an unforgiving, mean-minded communist government.6 Driven by a self-
imposed duty to construct a platform of work on the eighteenth century, which
would make up lost historiographical ground, he was a man who tried to write
too much. His style is often maddeningly obscure – he did not always seem to
appreciate that not all of his readers shared his familiarity with the period. There
was little relating to politics and constitutional developments that he did not
touch upon. His work remains an indispensable entrée for any student of the
eighteenth century. His study of the liberum veto still remains a standard, even
though subsequent historians have done much to enlarge understanding of that
curious device. No one can study the trauma of the Confederacy of Bar without
reference to his magisterial work on the subject.7 Some of the leading post-war
historians – Bogusław Leśnodorski and Józef Gierowski (who picked up much
of their enthusiasm for the eighteenth century at Konopczyński’s illicit seminars
x P R E FAC E
in Sachsenhausen), Emanuel Rostworowski, Jerzy Michalski – were his pupils.

Much post-war historiography is a coda to what he wrote.
There has, at least for the pre-modern period, been something of a tendency
for Polish historians to move on as soon as one author has ‘covered’ a particular
subject. Too few have revisited and revised topics in the way that is taken for
granted in more richly resourced countries. For all the industrious devotion
of Konopczyński and others, huge gaps remain. The crucial parliament of
1788–92 was first subject to intensive scholarly investigation by the Reverend
Walerian Kalinka, whose unfinished two-volume history appeared as long ago as
1880–1 – one of the first reliable studies of almost any aspect of Poland’s history.
It had run to four editions by 1895. Later historians, most notably Bogusław
Leśnodorski, Emanuel Rostworowski, Jerzy Michalski, Zofia Zielińska and
Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz (to name but the most outstanding), have added
invaluably to our knowledge of key aspects of the Sejm’s activities, but Kalinka
remains the standard.8 Writing in Austrian Galicia, Kalinka did not have access
to the Sejm’s own archival record – kept inaccessibly, until 1964, in the Soviet
Union. Between 1955 and 1969, six volumes of materials pertaining to the Four
Years Sejm were published under the auspices of Polish government agencies. As
one of the editors delicately put it, choice of materials was perforce dictated by
‘the influence of non-scholarly motives . . . from an editorial point of view not
the most important ones’. It is nonetheless regrettable that the prohibitive costs
prevented its continuation.9 Russian archives, which contain vast amounts of
materials relating to Poland, began to be fully opened to researchers during the
1990s, but even now, such access can remain problematic.10
Kalinka aside, there is no comprehensive study of most of the parliaments
of the eighteenth century – including such key ones as the ‘Silent Sejm’ of 1717
or the Partition Sejmy of 1773–5 or 1793.11 Jerzy Michalski died before he was
able to complete his study of the important Sejm of 1776. Great swathes of the
century remain either a near terra incognita or cry out for reconsideration. The
interregnum of 1733–6 is a case in point; and the history of that of 1763–4,
though better served, is still far from fully explored.12 The searing experience of
the Great Northern War is by no means comprehensively covered, for all the ster-
ling work of Józef Gierowski and his associates.13 Jacek Staszewski, Jerzy Dygdała
and other historians at the University of Toruń have done much truly pioneering
work on Poland’s relations with Saxony and the regional history of Royal (Polish)
Prussia.14 No matter how good in parts the historiographic record is, nothing
hides the fact that it is still patchy. Most of the key political texts remain either
unavailable in modern editions or are accessible only as selections. In 1954,
Bogusław Leśnodorski and Helena Wereszycka produced what was, in its way, a
model edition of the key writings of one of the leading reformist thinkers of the
late eighteenth century, Hugo Kołłątaj (though in an ideologically less fraught
P R E FAC E xi
age, the tenor of much of their commentary would have undoubtedly been rather
different).15 Sadly, it is the only edition of its kind. As regards ‘modern’ editions,
the most important reforming text of the century, Stanisław Konarski’s On the
Means to Successful Counsels, languishes inexplicably in published extracts.16
Post-war Polish historical scholarship has, however, largely managed to drag
itself free of the neuroses of earlier times. After 1956, censorship was lessened,
party lines were gradually less stringently imposed, in part, possibly, because so
much appeared in specialist publications of necessarily restricted circulation.
Pre-industrial society was a relatively ideologically safe topic. From the 1950s,
Poland was the communist state most open to the degenerate west, whose perni-
cious influences seeped into and enriched its intellectual life, just as they had
done two centuries previously.17 Contemporary historical debate is largely free
of the passions of the past, certainly those of the nineteenth century. Tangible
expression of a consciousness of the damaging perspectives of the injured
nationalism of much previous historiography has come about in the work of
the Institute of East-Central Europe in Lublin, which was set up in 1992 to seek
contributions from historians of all the successor states of the former Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth towards a new history of the region.18
Much has been done in the work of political culture and political ideas. As
so often, the starting-point has to be Władysław Konopczyński, notably his
Polish Political Writers of the Eighteenth Century, published posthumously in
1966.19 An enormous amount of work has appeared since his death, covering
all aspects of noble ideology and culture. Particular mention might be made of
Janusz Maciejewski’s essay of 1971, which sought to rehabilitate conservative
republican ideas,20 but a greater awareness of the complexities of the subject
was inevitable. All the post-war historians previously mentioned have con-
tributed greatly to exploring the subject, few more so than Jerzy Michalski and
Emanuel Rostworowski, and, of a younger generation, Zofia Zielińska and Anna
Grześkowiak-Krwawicz.21 Wojciech Kriegseisen, whose painstaking research has
done much to illuminate the world of the szlachta, deserves further notice for his
pioneering exploration of the variegated world of Polish Protestantism.22
Mention, too, must be made of the contributions of historians working out-
side Poland, many of them with close family or other personal connections to
that country. The most magisterial survey of Poland’s past in English is Norman
Davies’ God’s Playground, the Polish translation of which, Boże Igrzysko, has
long been a best-seller. The present writer’s Liberty’s Folly: the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697–1795, can serve as an introduc-
tion to its subject. Invaluable and detailed studies of the closing decades of the
eighteenth century have come from Adam Zamoyski and Richard Butterwick.
Gershon Hundert’s studies of Jewish life offer insights into a world which the pre-
sent work can deal with only all too cursorily. Robert Frost and Andrzej Kamiński
xii P R E FAC E
have contributed to a wider historical perspective, while Karin Friedrich’s work

on Polish Prussia is a necessary reminder that ‘Prussia’ was something far wider
and richer than is often imagined.23
There is no overview of noble political culture as a whole for the eighteenth
century, certainly nothing to compare with what Edward Opaliński has done
for the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.24 The present work seeks
to present itself as a step in that direction. It has drawn extensively on political
texts, memoirs, correspondence and instructions from local political assemblies
– as well as the secondary literature presented above, though what has been
reviewed barely amounts to the tip of a scholarly iceberg. It is also in its own way,
a commentary on and perhaps even a guide to the history of the Rzeczpospolita
Obojga Narodów, the Commonwealth of the Two Nations, in the last hundred
years of its existence.
This book is the result of more years of research than I care to contemplate. It
would not have been possible without the award of a research readership by the
British Academy between 2003 and 2005 and its system of scholarly exchanges
with eastern European institutions, most notably the Polish and Lithuanian
Academies of Sciences. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to conversations with
many people. In Britain, to Karin Friedrich, Robert Frost and Richard Butterwick
(to whose observations I am particularly obliged); in Poland, Zofia Zielińska,
Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz and Wojciech Kriegseisen; and to Łukasz Kądziela
whose untimely death in 1997 robbed his country of one of its most promising
historians; in Lithuania, to Jūratė Kiaupiėnė. My chief intellectual debt however
is to Jerzy Michalski, who died in February 2007 and who for many years encour-
aged me in my work. This book, no matter how unworthily, is dedicated to him.
Abbreviations
AGAD Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw

ZP Zbiór Popielów (in AGAD)
BC Biblioteka Czartoryskich, Kraków
BJ Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Kraków
BPAN Biblioteka Polskiej Akademii Nauk, (formerly Polska Akademia
Umiejętności), Kraków
KH Kwartalnik Historyczny
LMAB Lietuvos Mokslų Akademijos Biblioteka, Vilnius
MDSC Materiały do dziejów Sejmu Czteroletniego, 1–5, eds. J. Woliński,
J. Michalski, E. Rostworowski; 6, ed. A. Eisenbach. Wrocław:
Ossolineum, 1959–69
PSB Polski Słownik Biograficzny, ed. W. Konopczyński et al. Kraków:
Polska Akademia Umiejętności, 1935-
VL Volumina Legum. 11 vols, St Petersburg – Kraków, 1859–89 edn
[Photographic reprint, 1980. Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa]
WAP Kraków Wojewódzkie Archiwum Państwowe, oddział na Wawelu,
Kraków
WAP Lublin Lublin, Wojewódzkie Archiwum Państwowe
A note on Polish pronunciation
Readers unfamiliar with Polish pronunciation may find the following guide
helpful. It is not intended for linguistic purists.
ą similar to the French ‘On’ if crossed with the ‘o’ of ‘home

ę similar to the French ‘On’ if crossed with the ‘e’ in ‘red’
ó u, as in ‘hook’
y i, as in ‘hit’
ci short ‘chee’ as in ‘chip’
si short ‘shee’ as in ‘ship’
Ć, ć ‘ch’ as in ‘chip’
cz ‘ch’ but harsher
c ‘ts’ as in ‘lots’, except in the combinations ‘ci’ and ‘cz’
Ł, ł ‘w’ as in ‘waste’
ń slightly softened ‘n’ – as in Spanish ‘ñ’
ś ‘sh’ as in ‘ship’
sz ‘sh’ but harsher
rz, Ż, ż as the above but with a ‘z’ sound (as in ‘Brezhnev’)
w ‘v’ as in ‘very’
zi pronounced as the first two letters of the French ‘gîte’
Ź, ź pronounced as the first letter of the French ‘gîte’
THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH
Map of Constituencies (palatinates and countries)
Riga
chief constituency boundaries COURLAND

boundary between the ‘Crown’ and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
boundary after the 1772 Partition

Upita
ZMUDZ
MILES
0 50 100 150 200 Wiłkomierz
WILNO
DUCA L Kowno
DANZIG
P R US S IA TROKI
Oszmiana
POMORZE Lida
MALBORK
GRODNO
CHEŁMNO
Wizna
M Wołkowysk NOWO
Ciechanów Łomża Słonim
INOWROCŁAW Dobrzyn
GNIEZNO PŁOCK
Różan Nur
Radziejów Bielsk
POZNAN Drohiczyn
BK Wyszogród Zakroczym
Liw
Sroda Gostynin WARSAW
SAGAN Mielnik BRZESC LITEWSKI
ŁECZYCA Sochaczew Czersk Łuków
KALISZ
SIERADZ
RAWA
PRUSSI AN
MONARCHY Wielun LUBLIN Chełm
Włodzimierz
SANDOMIERZ
BEŁZ
Łuck
KRAKÓW
Z
O LWÓW
Sanok Przemysl
RUS
Halicz
HABSBURG MONARCHY
INFLANTY
Polish Livonia
POŁOCK
Brasław
LUBIN Town giving its name to a palatinate
WITEBSK
Pinsk Town giving its name to a county
Smolensk PODOLE Name of palatinate or principality

Orsza
BK = BRZESC KUJAWSKI
O = OSWIECIM
M ścisław
Z = ZATOR
MINSK M = MAZOWSZE
GRODEK
Starodub
Rzeczyca
Pinsk
Mozyr
Chemigov
RUS S I A
KIEV
WOŁYN´ Kiev
˙
Zytomierz
PODOLE
Kamieniec Podolski BRACŁAW
OTTOMAN
LANDS
1
The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania:

an introductory survey
The values and attitudes towards politics and society of those who participate
in the political process – the political culture of any state – is conditioned by
its institutions and processes. Inevitably, that culture will make its own impact
on those institutions and processes. This is simply to say that republican states
produce a republican culture and, if that culture generates dissent, it will be a
dissent conditioned by the prevailing republicanism. The ideas of the Venetian
and Dutch republics or those of more-or-less self-governing Imperial cities
or city-states reflected the challenges facing them and the way in which their
political institutions coped. They did not necessarily produce coherent, unified
theories of republicanism – or, if they did, they often emerged slowly and in a
piecemeal fashion. Medieval and early modern republicanism was, at least in its
origins, primarily a civic culture, driven mainly by the struggle of cities or city-led
regions to retain their independence against often seemingly remorseless forces
from without – German emperors, Italian tyrants, Spanish monarchs. It could,
however, take wider forms: the French wars of religion were to a significant degree
a struggle by the noblesse to maintain old rights and liberties against an insidious
monarchy apparently bent on overthrowing ancient norms and customs for
its own self-aggrandisement. The enemy was above all a real enemy within the
monarchy itself, not a hostile menace from beyond the frontiers. It was much
the same in England during parliament’s struggles against the Stuart monarchy.1
It was also true across a great stretch of eastern Europe, from the Baltic
almost to the Black Sea, in the lands of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations,
the Polish and the Lithuanian: Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów, Polskiego i
Litewskiego. Formally brought into existence in 1569 by the Union of Lublin,
the two states of Poland and Lithuania had been in uneasy harness since 1386,
when Lithuania’s still-pagan ruler had been invited on to the Polish throne: the
price was conversion to Catholicism and the subordination of his Grand Duchy
to Poland. The 1569 Union cost the Grand Duchy dearly: King Sigismund II
Augustus transferred huge swathes of its lands, mainly in what is now Ukraine,
to Poland as a means of browbeating leading Lithuanian subjects into comply-
ing with his wishes. He had no legitimate heir and saw in closer union the sole
means of keeping his ancestral inheritance intact. Culturally and linguistically,
the Lithuanian nobility was polonised during the sixteenth century. Lithuanian
2 D I S O R D E R LY L I B E R T Y
was largely reduced to a peasant language. But the nobility retained their sense of
distinctiveness. There was intense resentment in the Grand Duchy at the way in
which it had been manoeuvred into a political (as opposed to a purely dynastic)
union, which the Lithuanians accepted largely because of their desperate need
for Polish aid against Muscovy. The Union of Lublin was an uneasy compromise.
The Poles never exercised as much influence as they had hoped. The two partners
accepted a common monarch, common monarchic election and a common
parliament, or Sejm. But Lithuania preserved its own hierarchy of central offices
and its own army. Periodically, throughout the seventeenth, and even the early
eighteenth, century, its politicians took decisions on foreign policy without any
reference to the Crown, Korona, as Poland proper was known; and a sense of
separateness persisted to the final demise of the Commonwealth.2
The fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries marked for Poland
itself a difficult and uncertain process, never complete, of the reconstitution
of a state, which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had undergone intense
territorial fragmentation. The wealthy Silesian lands remained out of reach. The
monarchs had to acknowledge the distinct rights and liberties of the territories
they sought to reassemble. The Jagiellonian dynasty always felt at something of
a disadvantage in reigning over the recently re-unified Polish lands, in which
its rulers constantly had to bargain with the aristocracy and Catholic Church
over their succession. The first of the dynasty, Władysław II Jagiełło (reigned in
Poland from 1386 to 1434) was illiterate; and until a canny and ambitious group
of Polish lords invited him to the throne, he was but heathen ruler of Lithuania,
Europe’s last pagan realm. Caught between the problems of preserving their
Lithuanian patrimony of hereditary but economically backward lands against
constant threats from Muscovy and Crimean Tatars, and trying to maintain
themselves in their wealthier Polish territories where their kingship was elective,
the Jagiellonians were unable to impose any real degree of centralisation on their
cumbersome patchwork of dominions.
The strength of regional and local privilege goes some way towards explain-
ing why the Crown’s constituent territories were extremely reluctant to look
on the bicameral Sejm, which emerged in the 1490s, as a body to take binding,
central legislative decisions. It could vote general taxation, but that taxation, and
indeed its enactments in general, were subject to the further confirmation of
the constituencies, which sent their representatives to it. These representatives,
significantly known as nuntii, posłowie, that is, ‘envoys’, were expected primarily
to uphold the interests of their immediate electors. Under Sigismund I (1506–48),
the practice began of envoys being supplied with a set of desiderata from their
own localities, which, in time, those localities came to look upon as binding.3
The Sejm took great care to try to mirror the nature of the Commonwealth it
represented. Membership of the commissions it spawned was almost invariably
T H E C O M M O N W E A LT H O F P O L A N D - L I T H UA N I A 3
drawn equally from the three great Provinces of Wielkopolska, Małopolska and
Lithuania; each took it in turns to supply the Sejm’s marshal, or speaker. In 1673,
the Lithuanians extended this principle of the alternata to ensure that every third
Sejm was to meet not in Warsaw, but in Lithuanian Grodno.4
The nobility, the szlachta, dominated Poland. Individual cities such as Kraków
or Lwów or Poznań enjoyed great prosperity but remained isolated urban islands
in a sea of enserfed peasantry, petty nobility and landed seigneurs. Only in Royal
Prussia was there to be found anything like the powerful clusters of towns,
which characterised the Rhine valley, northern Italy or the Netherlands. And
the Royal Prussian towns, led by the ‘great cities’ of Danzig, Thorn and Elbing,
saw themselves as both being of the Polish state, yet standing apart from it; their
main object was the preservation and development of their own commerce; the
interests of a wider Poland were a secondary matter. In the round, Polish towns
were politically weak; political power lay with the nobility. The Jagiellonians
could count on re-election as crowned heads – but they were well aware that
re-election was conditional on observing noble rights and privileges. When, in
1529, a group of senators – the aristocratic advisers to the king – agreed to the
election of king Sigismund I’s son as his successor, they provoked such an outcry
among the nobility at large that in February 1530, Poland’s parliament banned
all future royal elections vivente rege, during the reigning king’s lifetime.5
The republicanism that was to be the hallmark of the Polish nobility had
begun to take root. A network of political assemblies, the sejmiki, at which the
nobility congregated in the localities, had been consolidated by the early fif-
teenth century. The bicameral parliament, the Sejm, was composed of an upper
chamber, the Senate, centred on the royal council, and a lower chamber of nuntii
terrarum, the ‘envoys of the counties.’ Republican ideas – put crudely, the notion
that nobles should run their own affairs, free from outside interference – emerged
from a cauldron of tensions between ruler, great magnates and lesser nobles.
At one level, magnate potentates could always count on a following among the
smaller fry. At another, kings saw in lesser nobles a counterweight to over-mighty
subjects: King John Albert (1492–1501) had aided and abetted the emergence
of the Chamber of Envoys precisely as a check on too-uppity aristocrats. For
Poland’s nobles were numerous and disparate. They included thousands who in
other countries were regarded as peasants, but whose noble standing had been
confirmed by kings anxious to ease the processes of restoring a kind of unity
to once-fragmented lands. By the mid-sixteenth century, some six per cent of
the population may have had noble status – comparable to the nobilities of
Hungary and Spain. Most were impoverished, many were illiterate but taken
together, nobles were sufficiently numerous to constitute a mass electorate. All
felt themselves to be the beneficiaries of privileges accumulated since 1374, when
their recently elected king, Louis of Hungary (reigned 1370–82), agreed that, in
return for the nobility’s acceptance of one of his daughters as his successor, he
would seek no increases in tax without their consent. Under his successors, the
privileges of Czerwińsk (1422) and Jedlno (1430) promised the nobility freedom
from arrest, save after due process. The privileges of Chojnice and Nieszawa of
1454 bound the king not to impose taxes, issue laws or even call out the feudal
host without the nobility’s agreement; they permitted the nobility largely to
run their own judicial affairs at local level. Such concessions, stemming from
monarchs’ need for support for the future succession of their heirs or for military
resources, collectively contributed to convincing the nobility of their political
power and rights. They culminated in 1505 in King Alexander’s agreement to the
Nihil Novi statute – monarchs would from now on issue no legislation without
the agreement of the envoys to the Sejm.
The sixteenth century saw the crystallization of the social structures of the
nobility. The magnates of the Crown and Lithuania came to accept that they
would not form a separate estate – there would be no Polish Herrenstand or
House of Lords. Instead, all nobles were equals. This customary principle was
to be enshrined retrospectively in law during the seventeenth century.6 Equality,
said Jan Dębiński in 1727, was as essential to the well-being of the Republic,
as the balance of humours to the well-being of the body – if any one humour
should disturb the balance of the others, the body would rapidly succumb to an
invasion ‘of dangerous ills’. Office and dignity might confer greater significance
on their recipients, ‘but that one title of szlachcic alone, since all are equal in this
one title, as it were, comprehends all the honours of the Commonwealth. Senator,
bishop, prelate, they are all noblemen; it is in noblemen that the counsels and
defence of the Commonwealth consist.’ Because the laws forbade kings to abolish
old honours or titles, or to create new ones, the principle of equality was safe.
New hereditary distinctions would only provoke jealousy and discord and could
even be manipulated by kings or ambitious magnates to impose despotism. Even
those who did boast ancient princely titles derived no particular privileges from
them, beyond those of ordinary nobility. Only service conferred distinction.7 Jan
Stanisław Jabłonowski, in 1730, maintained that true equality prevailed only in
Poland, where all nobles could feel themselves part of the same family, call each
other brothers and equally value each other’s opinions. ‘Our equality is such that
every nobleman born is equal to a prince, a margrave and a count. Office alone
gives pre-eminence, hence our saying, “the gentleman on his little acre is the equal
of the palatine”. Our forbears understood they would make the Republic more
orderly by securing equality within it . . .’8
A statute or konstytucja of 1699 spelled out the position, correcting an enact-
ment of 1690 in which the term ‘lesser (‘mnieyszą’) nobility’ had been used: ‘by
the agreement of all estates, we abolish this word in perpetuum, acknowledging
that in aequalitate, there is neither lesser nor greater.’9 Nobles were banned
from accepting any forms of honorific titulature, beyond those conferred by the
holding of office or dignity – the only exception was for a handful of Lithuanian
families of ancient princely origin. The royal council, the Senat, was not a her-
editary body; while it formed a kind of upper house of the parliament, the real
legislative power lay with the ‘izba poselska’, the ‘Chamber of Envoys’, elected by
the nobility in their local constituencies of palatinates (palatinatus, wojewódz-
twa), counties (terrae, ziemie) and districts (districtus, powiaty). The sheer weight
of numbers of this gentry allowed them to impose themselves on an aristocracy
which well into the sixteenth century looked down on them as ‘ploughmen’ and
‘buckwheat-sowers’.10
There was to be no overt ideological alignment between great magnates and
the king. The active participation of a numerous nobility saw to that. As early as
1507, the cleric Stanisław Zaborowski, speaking for those who wished to recover
royal domain from magnate hands, produced a Tractatus de natura iurium et
bonorum regis, A Treatise on the Nature of the Rights and Properties of the King, in
which he argued that the monarch was primarily a steward and administrator
of royal estates and resources. ‘Tota communitas regni’, ‘the entire community of
the realm’ was the king’s ‘superior’. It was hardly an exercise in modern repub-
lican writing – Zaborowski’s arguments were grounded in the need to avoid sin,
protect the Church and appoint worthy clergy – but it clearly demonstrated
the monarch to be the servitor of the state.11 There was never to be any serious
political treatise produced in Poland, which was to argue in favour of anything
like absolutist kingship.
The abundant szlachta electorate was a very unevenly distributed one. There
were relatively few nobles in the Ukrainian or Belarussian marches; whereas in
the palatinate of Mazowsze, in the region of Warsaw, up to one quarter of the
population might have been plausibly regarded as enjoying noble status.12 They
exercised their voice through a range of local institutions, above all through the
local sejmik, which might, by the eighteenth century attract thousands of nobles –
though attendances of dozens or hundreds were more usual. Attendance at royal
elections could reach several tens of thousands. Participants varied from some
of the wealthiest and intellectually most sophisticated individuals in Europe to
impoverished illiterates incapable of pronouncing the names of the candidates
whom they were supporting. Accessions to local political leagues in 1767 show
noble illiteracy rates, insofar as the ability to sign their own name was an indic-
ator, ranged from two and seven per cent in some palatinates (Sandomierz,
Poznań, Kalisz) to almost eighty per cent in others (Lublin, Łęczyca). King
Stanisław August Poniatowski’s (reigned 1764–95) estimate, that around half of
the Polish nobility were illiterate, may not have been that far wide of the mark.13
Poles admired republican Venice – but the differences between themselves and
the Serenissima were so great as to leave it as an object of admiration, not a model
it was practical to transplant to the lands between the Black Sea and the Baltic.
Other states provided only dire warnings of growing kingly despotism or of a
gross inability to manage their own affairs in a civilised fashion. After the arrival
of classical humanism in the sixteenth century, the model to which they could
most closely relate was that of ancient, pre-Imperial Rome. No nobleman could
consider himself educated unless he had a fluent mastery of Latin, the language
of administration and law under the Jagiellonian dynasty. Latin also helped hold
the Respublica together – a kind of lingua franca to which all actively engaged
in politics, irrespective of their ancestral origins, be they Polish, Lithuanian,
Belarusian, Ukrainian, or even German, could subscribe. Parliamentary statutes
were drafted in Polish after 1543, but Latin remained widely used in adminis-
trative and judicial processes. Republican Rome’s history was to be studied in its
own language, not least in the Jesuit schools, which began to take root in the late
sixteenth century with their humanist curriculum. A despotic, imperial regime
eventually seized control in Rome: the szlachta would learn from its history to
ensure no such thing happened on their watch.14
Eighteenth-century reformers, with their tidy minds and their search for sys-
tem, looked back on the events that had brought about Polish and Lithuanian
union with some disquiet. Writing in 1764, César Pyrrhys de Varille, a naturalised
Polish citizen much attached to his adopted country, saw in the first two elections,
of Henri of Valois in 1573 and of Stephen Bathory in 1575, a missed opportunity:
instead of creating a carefully thought-out constitutional structure, the nobility’s
leaders had merely responded to events, ‘ the laws, framed according to the needs
of the moment, were isolated enactments, bereft of unity or symmetry’, leaving
behind a ‘feeble legislative chaos’ which had dogged the country ever since.15
The leading men of the first two interregna had constantly called on lesser
nobles against their rivals to enhance their own political influence. To win sup-
port, they promised ever-greater rights and privileges – ‘freedoms’ or ‘liberties’,
wolności. Liberty became the object of a kind of Dutch auction. Jan Zamoyski
had offered the crowds of petty nobles the ultimate prize: active participation in
royal election viritim, in person. It was a striking, concrete affirmation of where
sovereignty in the state truly lay: not with an aristocratic elite, not with the mon-
arch, but with the rank-and-file gentry. In later years, Zamoyski repented of his
demagogic rashness but his plans to row back and reduce the electorate came
too late. The political genie of what in the eighteenth century was being called
‘noble democracy’ had been uncorked.16
Polish republican ideas developed in response to threats, real and imagined,
from within the state – those threats were represented by the monarchy itself.
Unlike the conditions in which the more familiar (to a western readership)
medieval republicanism of the Italian cities developed, there was no seriously
perceived external menace to a polity which could almost, it seemed, afford
to ignore the rest of Europe if it wished. The last major threat to the Crown in
the fifteenth century had been tamed in 1466 when, at the peace of Thorn, the
Teutonic Knights had given up their wealthiest lands astride the lower Vistula,
which became part of the Polish realm as ‘Royal Prussia’. All that was left to the
Knights was the impoverished hinterland of the port of Königsberg, reduced, as
the duchy of Prussia, to the status of a Polish fief. Efforts by successive Grand
Masters to cast off Polish sovereignty failed; the adoption of Lutheranism by
Grand Master Albrecht von Hohenzollern led, after 1525, to even closer subor-
dination to Poland. Only in 1657 were the Hohenzollern finally able to shake off
the republic’s uncomfortable suzerainty. To the south, the Ottoman Empire was
a danger primarily to the Habsburgs. Sigismund I and Sigismund II took every
care to maintain good relations with the Porte. Periodically, vicious raids by the
Turks’ barely controllable vassals, the Tatars of the Crimea, penetrated deep into
Jagiellonian territories, but the bulk of these depredations was absorbed by the
sprawling territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The main challenge to
the Jagiellonian patrimony had come, since 1492, from the Grand Principality of
Moscow – but again, the chief target of Russian pretensions had been Lithuania,
rather than Poland itself. If Polish troops on occasion assisted the Lithuanians,
and if the progress made by Russian arms seemed fitfully unremitting, the fight-
ing, to most Polish nobles, seemed nebulously remote. Any day of reckoning
with Muscovy could be postponed and the Poles were confident that, when
it did come, they would be able to carry the day, as, indeed, successful Polish-
Lithuanian campaigns under Stephen Bathory (1575–86) and Sigismund III
Vasa (1587–1632) appeared later to confirm. Not only did the political future
of Poland appear secure, especially once the union of 1569 had brought it and
Lithuania much closer together, but at a time of chronic religious warfare,
Poland, in the eyes of many of its own leaders, seemed far more securely placed
than most of the rest of Europe. The agreement to differ in matters of religion
made between Catholic and Protestant nobles in 1573, under the aegis of the
so-called Confederacy of Warsaw, was concluded with a specific view ‘to prevent
any harmful unrest arising among our people, as we so clearly see is happening
in other realms’.17 The dangers from the outside world were overshadowed by the
seemingly more imminent perils of a putative despotism at home. Yet so confid-
ent were Polish nobles of their position that, barely a year after the massacre of
St Bartholomew, they were prepared to elect as their ruler Henri, duke of Anjou,
son of Catherine de Medici and brother of Charles IX, and widely suspected of
being one of the instigators of the massacre.
For, by the time Henri was elected, a wide-ranging machinery to keep mon-
archs firmly in their place had been created. During the Interregnum of 1572–3,
the nobility had constructed a constitutional framework designed, above all,
to secure the freedoms that together comprised what was being called Złota
Wolność, Golden Liberty. These were the so-called ‘Henrician Articles’, drawn up
for Henri in 1573. No king would henceforth attempt to designate a successor
during his own lifetime. He would keep the peace between the different religious
denominations. In matters of diplomatic relations and the levying and recruit-
ment of troops, he would consult with his councillors and the Sejm and would
undertake no hostilities without parliamentary approval. He would defend the
frontiers. In all consultations with his council, the Senate, he would seek the
fullest possible agreement, ensuring that no decisions were made which were
contrary to the Commonwealth’s freedoms, laws and liberties. At every Sejm,
sixteen senators would be nominated to permanent attendance on the king’s
person and to serve him with their advice, ensuring that nothing should be done
‘against our dignity and against the common law’. Parliament would normally
meet every two years or ‘in the pressing need of the Commonwealth’. It was not to
sit beyond a six-week term, and was to be preceded by local sejmiki, which would
elect envoys. The existing offices of state and court would be preserved and not
added to. Without parliamentary consent, no form of taxation was to be levied.18
Most of these constitutional restrictions reiterated and brought together existing
laws. It is not, however, entirely surprising that Henri of Anjou, having agreed to
these articles for the purposes of election, balked at explicitly confirming them
at his coronation. Unreserved confirmation came only with his successor, King
Stephen Bathory, in 1576. The articles included a ‘de non praestanda oboedientia’
clause, releasing subjects from their obedience if the monarch failed to abide by
his coronation promises – which also included a separate list of commitments
made by each individual monarch, known as the pacta conventa.19
With the seemingly relentless rise of unlimited, even tyrannical monarchy
elsewhere, and with the ever-present example of ancient Rome expounded on a
daily basis in schools and universities, the nobility were constantly kept on their
toes about what might happen in their own country. Ivan IV’s reign of terror
in Muscovy was hardly likely to endear men with a strongly developed sense of
their personal rights and immunities to the blessings of autocracy. The other and
rather more pressingly immediate threat from the outside world was portrayed
as coming from the Habsburgs. In one way or another they had been involved in
Polish politics for well over a century. They had considerable support among the
aristocracy and higher clergy: they could therefore be very plausibly used in the
cut-and-thrust of Poland’s demagogic politics as a warning against one of their
dynasty ever being elected to the Polish crown (as the Habsburgs were clearly
interested in doing well into the seventeenth century). They lent themselves to
portrayal as the suppressors of political liberties in Hungary and Bohemia (lands
which had been ruled by Jagiellonian kings until the battle of Mohacs in 1526).
As for France, it was, of course, home to a Valois dynasty prepared to countenance
the massacre of thousands of its subjects. It is scarcely surprising then that Polish
nobles viewed monarchs with intense suspicion, harbouring designs against

which careful precautions had to be taken.
Hence the Henrician Articles and the pacta conventa. They were there to ensure
that the monarch co-operated with the nation of the nobility, and even more to
ensure that he would be unable to roll back the freedoms which that nation had
secured over the past two centuries. The Sejm would be called often enough to
keep a check on the king, but would not sit long enough to allow him to use his
influence to subvert it. The Polish king was a princeps, a ‘leading dignitary’ not a
dominus, a ‘lord’; he ruled ‘not through the laws but under the laws’; he could do
nothing against the laws, nor enact anything within the state without the nobil-
ity’s assent.20 Rzeczpospolita – the word can equally be translated as ‘republic’
or ‘Commonwealth’. This was a republic with a crowned, elected head. That the
monarch was a threat to his subjects’ liberties was almost axiomatic. The effect
of the Henrician Articles, designed to protect those liberties, was, however, to
place monarch and subjects in perpetual antagonism, confirming the king as ‘a
foreign power’.21 Poland’s very constitutional arrangements made of the monarch
a threat to noble freedoms, setting the Republic’s stage for a perpetual struggle
inter maiestatem ac libertatem. Every king was a potential enemy who had to be
constrained.22
Rzeczpospolita, the republic the szlachta owned and worked, had different
layers of meanings: the state, the estates of king, senate and nobility assembled
in the Sejm, or the nobility as a whole:
This triad defines most concisely the concept of the state envisaged by the nobility, i.e.,
one in which the citizens regarded themselves not merely as a subject, but as the creators,
owners and heirs of the state.23
That state was the sum of its liberties; its raison d’être was their preservation.
Without them, the Commonwealth meant nothing. Even under Sigismund I
in the early sixteenth century, the most eloquent of szlachta orators, Stanisław
Orzechowski, argued that such was the extent of noble liberty that nothing in
Poland’s constitutional arrangements, with their mix of monarchy, oligarchy and
democracy, should be changed. Omnis novitas nociva est, ‘every innovation is
harmful’ came to be a standard maxim of Polish politics. The Sejm of 1669 made
of it almost a legal principle: ‘. . . every novitas in Republica cannot be without
danger and great upheaval . . .’24 If new laws were to be passed, their purpose was
to refine and clarify the old. A clear example were the measures introduced in
1607, which laid down how the mechanics of implementing the withdrawal of
obedience to royal authority enshrined in law in 1572.25
Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, one of the most popular texts in circulation
in seventeenth-century Poland was Justus Lipsius’ Politicorum . . . Libri sex, first
published in 1589. Surprising, because Lipsius was one of the great heralds of
absolute monarchy. Yet there was enough in his massive compilation of quota-
tions and adaptations of ancient authors to appeal to a Polish readership. While
Lipsius favoured strong monarchy, he did not altogether rule out the possibility
of viable republics. He urged his princes to remember that they belonged to their
‘Commonwealth’ (‘Respublica’), not the Commonwealth to them. He urged
uniformity of religion, but was prepared to tolerate religious differences if they
remained private – as almost certainly a majority of Polish nobles preferred, with
growing earnestness at a time of triumphant Catholic reformation. Most of all,
perhaps, his enormous work was a magpie-like compilation of ancient wisdom
from which readers could pick at will. It was not to be the last time that Poles
drew on the ideological resources of western Europe in order to accommodate
them to their own needs.26
From the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries, the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth was subject to extreme, prolonged traumas, which
only intensified the attachment of the nobility to its liberties. In 1648, a massive
cossack revolt threatened to rip the state apart. 1655 saw the beginning of the
so-called ‘Deluge’ (Potop), with at first seemingly irresistible onslaughts launched
by Muscovy and Sweden, followed by Transylvania, Brandenburg and others.
A population which probably stood at around eleven million in 1655 had, by
1667, fallen by between one quarter and a third: in some areas, the collapse
may have reached as much as one half. Urban life disintegrated. The only major
town to remain anything like intact was Danzig, behind its relatively up-to-date
fortifications, sheltered by the sea and by the benevolent commercial interest
of the Dutch and English governments and mercantile elites. The capital of the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Wilno, was destroyed by fire in the Russian onslaught
of 1655. During the Great Northern War of 1700–21, Russian troops largely
destroyed and burned Witebsk, Mohylew and Grodno, Lithuania’s other major
urban centres. In Poland itself, Kraków was a devastated city, its treasures and
especially its churches and religious houses systematically plundered by Swedish
and Transylvanian troops during the Deluge, to be ravaged again during the
Great Northern War only fifty years later. Its population barely reached 10,000
during the eighteenth century. After the 1650s, Warsaw was little more than a
ruined shell, devastated by Swedish occupation and military contributions and
looting by all sides. Its population and that of its suburbs plummeted from some
18,000 to around 6,000. The losses were made good by the end of the century,
just in time for the Great Northern War to inflict comparable damage. In 1734,
it may have numbered only 23,000 inhabitants, and even thirty years later, only
some 30,000. Until the First Partition, Danzig, with over 40,000 inhabitants, was
more important demographically than the capital, Warsaw. It was a measure of
just how catastrophically urban life had been damaged and how difficult recovery
was that Danzig’s population immediately before the Deluge had stood at some
77,000.27 As for Poland’s numerous Jewish communities, many emerged from
these wars so wracked by debts (they were seen as fair game for extortion, some-
times for extermination, by all sides) that they remained financially crippled to
the very end of the Rzeczpospolita.28
It is clear that the Deluge and the Great Northern War inflicted on the
Commonwealth a demographic catastrophe at least on a level with that of the
Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War. Insofar as recovery was under
way by the end of the century, it was more than undone by the Great Northern
War. Much about the impact of that conflict and the subsequent recovery remains
uncertain. If historians are more-or-less agreed that on the eve of the First
Partition of 1772, the Commonwealth boasted a population of some 14 million,
there is no such consensus as to the figure fifty years earlier.29 What the numer-
ical losses of the szlachta during the Great Northern War were, it will doubtless
be impossible ever to determine. One development that was clearly under way
for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the pauperisation of
large swathes of the nobility and their growing dependency on magnates for
service and livelihood. A second crucial development was that during the war,
Russia established itself as a ‘protective’ tutelary power over Poland – and had
no wish to see, nor would it allow, any initiatives to strengthen or reform it. As
for the nobility themselves, the lesson they drew was not that their state required
reform, but that their ancestral freedoms, protected by Divine Providence, had
weathered the storm and that it was their duty to continue to cherish, preserve
and defend them.
Recovery came quickest in the north, in Royal Prussia. The three ‘Great Towns’
of Danzig, Thorn and Elbing, dominated by German-speaking populations,
plugged into German and Dutch commercial and cultural connections, were
able to embark on a degree of recovery relatively quickly and even to particip-
ate in a modest, if genuine, efflorescence of cultural life by the 1730s, with the
development of something of a ‘public sphere’ of intellectual exchange, active
antiquarianism and development of learned societies. But the great mass of
Polish nobility stood apart from this. The German-speaking Enlightenment
of the Prussian towns, for all the genuine interest that it exhibited in the
Commonwealth’s condition and history, functioned in its own, largely separate
world. At best, the Latin works of the Danzig jurist, Gottfried Lengnich, most not-
ably his Ius publicum Regni Poloni of 1742, might attract some attention, but the
implicit criticisms of many aspects of political practice which this commentary
on Polish law and custom contained were hardly enough to ignite wider debate
and certainly offered no directives as to what shape change might assume.30
In one crucial aspect, in any case, Lengnich and his fellow intellectuals were
as conservative as the szlachta: while they might notionally hope for change in
Poland’s constitutional processes, they were adamantly opposed to any alteration

in the status of the Royal Prussian Respublica. To do so would be to erode their
own ‘liberties’.31 Such feelings were hardly peculiar to the Royal Prussian urban
elites: they were those of the szlachta itself.
2
Ancestral legacies
Most Polish and Lithuanian nobles lived in a pre-Copernican world. Those

who would have departed from the truths laid down by the Catholic Church
preferred to stay quiet or, in a Poland where most presses before the 1760s
belonged to ecclesiastic institutions, found little opportunity to challenge or
question accepted truths. Most either read nothing (because so many were
illiterate) or confined themselves to devotional works, almanacs and calendars,
with their prognostics, panegyrics and practical advice on the management of
everyday rustic realities. They were ground not in a ‘reflective’ culture, but above
all in a mythoepoic world of popular folklore.1 In 1743, a Saxon immigrant,
publisher and intellectual, Laurens Mitzler de Koloff, indefatigable pioneer of
enlightened (if mainly short-lived) periodicals, explained to the German liter-
ary reformer, Johann Christoph Gottsched, how public lectures on astronomy
in the University of Kraków had to be purged of Copernicanism by professors
who could believe in it only in the privacy of their own study.2 When, two
years later, the Reverend Benedykt Chmielowski published the first ever Polish
encyclopaedia, The New Athens or Academy of all the Sciences . . ., Constructed
for the Wise for Recollection, for Idiots for Instruction, for Politicians for Example,
for Melancholics for Amusement, he affirmed Copernican teaching to be ‘not in
conformity with Holy Scripture . . . condemned by Pope Paul V in 1616’ – but
at least he conceded that the Copernican system was still disputed as only one
of three viable cosmologies, alongside those of Ptolemy and Tycho.3 The best
that could be said of this kind of literature, and of many of the almanacs and
calendars the nobility bought, was that if these works did not seek to persuade
them of the latest advances in scientific thought, neither did they try to conceal
them. The great ideas of the day were not unavailable to the Polish nobility – they
were irrelevant.
Did this matter? After all, throughout Europe, it was only a small sprinkling of
nobles who kept themselves abreast of new scientific and cultural ideas; nor, by
and large, were the nobility particularly noted for their intellectual abilities. But
the Polish case was different: the nobility as a body considered themselves the
Commonwealth’s governors and legislators. Those who did harbour misgivings
about their condition faced a huge problem in taking the mass of their brethren
with them. Even the most powerful and most forward-thinking magnates were
wary of openly proposing any kind of radical reforms or simply failed to see how
they could credibly do so, fearing that their fragile followings and clienteles might
be all too ready to disintegrate at the prospect of change.4
Even relatively well-to-do noblemen were likely to live in a closed, parochial
world. In the reminiscences he composed for his children after 1801, Józef
Wybicki observed that he had received, by the standards of the time, a good
education at the Jesuit college in Danzig (though he loathed his experiences there,
marked by brutality, pettiness and the suppression of any signs of intellectual
independence). He remembered fondly a childhood spent on a small, remote
country estate in Polish Pomerania, marked by the innocent patriarchal and
bucolic virtues of his parents – but of ‘geography, history, mathematics and all
our literature’, he learned nothing. Aged only seventeen in 1764, he had already
embarked on a seemingly promising legal career in the local chancellery (he was
to become a judge the following year) – despite his ignorance of Poland’s ‘history,
its political laws or relations with neighbouring nations and their policies’.5 In
1790, Franciszek Jezierski, digging lower down still, looked with semi-affectionate
mockery to the palatinate of Lublin. Dozens of nobles, without a serf between
them, might ‘own’ a single village. In this milieu, the young ‘Jarosz Kutasiński’
had ‘no knowledge of szlachectwo, for I was acquainted with persons of no other
estate’. The family lived in a rickety shack made almost uninhabitable by vermin
in the spring. His father was ‘a man by birth, a noble through chance and opinion,
a farmer in fortune, if needs must a miller, a cobbler, a cooper etc., of necessity
a peasant who had to perform labour duties for the local court clerk . . . but he
was king of his estate with its revenue of 9 bushels, 3 pecks and 6 quarts of rye’.
The benefits of liberty were reduced to glorying in the deeds of remote forbears
and, for young Jarosz, after he was finally sent to school, consolation that no
matter how badly he performed at his lessons, he was of superior social standing
to some of his cleverer classmates. ‘I thanked Providence I was not descended
from Cham . . .’6
The liberties in which the Kutasińskis revelled were ancient, immemorial,
ancestral. Illustrious forbears had shed blood to secure and protect them.
Their achievement carried an enormous emotional charge. For some, Poland
had always been free. On the death of its legendary founder, Lech, some time
before 700 ad, ‘the Poles called a Sejm to Gniezno to decide the governance of
the Commonwealth’.7 To others, the idea of political freedom had originated
in ‘Christian liberty’, which came with Christianity in 966 ad. Truly significant
advances however came in the fourteenth century: first, under King Casimir III
the Great, who ordered the laws to be written down and codified, thus providing
a legal corpus which bound not only the subjects, but the kings themselves; and,
secondly, under Louis of Hungary, who, in 1374 agreed that the nobility could
not be taxed without their consent.8
ANCESTRAL LEGACIES 15
The emphasis placed on different enactments varied, but there was no doubt
of a series of ancestral milestones which cumulatively created ‘Golden Freedom’.
Łukasz Opaliński in 1648 and Stanisław Karwicki sixty years later pointed to the
significance of the Neminem Captivabimus nisi iure victum privileges of 1430–33
in blocking arbitrary imprisonment – no nobleman, unless caught in flagrante,
could be imprisoned save after due process.9 During the Sejm of 1754, the envoy
Józef Pułaski hailed Casimir IV’s grant of the Privileges of Nieszawa of 1454
which obliged the monarch to consult the nobility on summoning the pospolite
ruszenie (the feudal levy of the nobility), on declaring war and which gave the
nobility the right to elect the local, civil judiciary: ‘Three whole centuries have
now gone by since the democracy of the noble envoys first gained strength . . .’10
Szczepan Sienicki, in 1764, prefaced his Newly-devised Means of Concluding
Public Counsels with an extract from the statute of 1505, popularly known as
Nihil Novi: ‘Nothing new should be enacted without the common consent of
the [royal] councillors and the envoys from the localities’. On it ‘all the laws of
liberty and freedom rest’.11
There was however little or nothing in the way of any systematic examination
of the principles of liberty or politics. Virtually the only early eighteenth-
century analysis (if it can be called that) of political principles aimed directly at
a szlachta audience was to be found in the first Polish encyclopedia. Benedykt
Chmielowski’s New Athens allowed itself a cursory division of government
into monarchy, aristocracy and democracy and their debased forms: tyranny,
oligarchy, ochlocracy. He had almost nothing to say about them beyond char-
acterising them as rule by the individual, the few or ‘many among the common
people’. Quite where Poland fitted in he left unspoken: it was clearly some form
of mixed polity. The ‘Status politicus of Poland consists of three estates . . . the
royal, the senatorial, the knightly . . .’ Deeper investigation of the Polish polity
and its principles was unnecessary for a nobility which knew itself always to have
been its ruling element. Further analysis was otiose.12
The szlachta saw themselves as the beneficiaries of an unstinting royal generos-
ity. Royal grants of privilege were generally portrayed as voluntary, or at least,
willingly conceded, by rulers glowingly appreciative of their nobility’s virtues. On
the face of it this sat oddly with the remarkable lengths to which they had gone
to restrict the powers of their monarchs.13 This vision of generally benevolent
rulers was not one of how monarchy had been, but of how the szlachta wanted
it to be: wise kings, ruling in partnership with their subjects. The harmony
between the three estates of elected monarch, appointed senators and heredit-
ary ‘knights’ (rycerze)/nobles made the Commonwealth strong and stable. The
Jagiellonians could be portrayed as a model dynasty after 1572 not only because
they were extinct, but because they had accepted the principle of election; the
deeds of successive kings had been such that they had always been able to count
on the subsequent accession of their sons (the one supposedly Machiavellian

Jagiellonian, King John Albert had a conveniently virtuous younger brother,
Alexander, to succeed him in 1501). By the end of the sixteenth century, royal
‘generosity’ had conceded a huge range of ‘freedoms’: no laws or taxes could be
enacted without the nobility’s consent, no major foreign policy initiatives could
take place without their agreement; they were exempt from customs charges
on articles of personal use; non-nobles were excluded from all policy-making;
the peasantry were tied to the land with no right of appeal from patrimonial
courts. Bishoprics and most canonries were reserved for nobles. It is hardly sur-
prising that the szlachta did not want their rights and privileges to be in any way
curtailed. ‘Living in a Republic I command my liberty in my own hand and, in
a sense, I possess authority over that republic; whereas in a monarchic state, my
security rests in the hand of another.’14
The most valued aspect of Polish monarchy was its elective character. The
attachment of the nobility to royal elections, their view of them as one of the
principal sources of their liberty, if not the principal source, should come as no
surprise. Hard bargaining over the succession began in the fourteenth century,
and continued throughout the reigns of the Jagiellonians. But the nobility
were inclined to project it back, like their other freedoms, to the very earliest,
legendary, days of the Polish realm. In 1764, Szymon Majchrowicz S. J., dated the
principle of election to the legendary dynasty of Krakus. Piast, founder of the
first historical dynasty, was supposedly elected by a Sejm at Kruszwica around
842 ad, as indeed was Poland’s first historical ruler and Piast’s direct descendant,
Duke Mieszko I. ‘On this basis of free election, the Poles have, throughout all the
ages, built this precious construct of Golden Liberty.’15
The significance of royal elections did not, of course, lie simply in a suppos-
edly timeless pedigree. Jan Dębiński was entirely typical in seeing them a crucial
feature of Liberty itself. ‘To lose the free election is to destroy our chief Libertatis
columen . . . It is Liberty’s most profitable market-place, at which whatsoever she
may need we succeed in bargaining for.’ It was, after all, in interregna that the
Commonwealth could exercise its sovereignty in untrammelled plenitude: ‘What
privilegium can be greater than this: to choose one’s own ruler, to lay down the
laws for him?’ asked the author of A Free Voice, Freedom Securing (Głos Wolny
Wolność Ubespieczaiący) in the early 1740s.16
The szlachta made their republic: as its sovereign lords, they owned it and were
determined to preserve their ownership. Their laws existed to keep its component
parts in their place and to ensure its supposedly smooth functioning. When
Augustus II called an extraordinary general assembly of envoys and senators
(rather than a regular Sejm) in 1710, a suspicious electorate across Poland warned
it should take no decisions of constitutional significance without reference to a
Sejm.17 If senatorial councils called by the king were deemed to have exceeded
their powers, such as discussing materiae status, they could expect a sharp
reproof – such discussions were a matter for the szlachta at the Sejm, not for small
caucuses of ministers and royal advisers. The chronic inability of parliaments to
reach a successful conclusion made no difference to such reproaches.18
Szlachta orators made much of their equality. In reality, of course, aequalitas
was a fiction: not just because of the staggering disparities of wealth that existed,
but because the szlachta themselves both craved and rejected it. It was an ideal
to be aimed for, like so much else that the Rzeczpospolita stood for; but in the
real world, nobles could not ascribe titles to themselves fast enough, even if they
dressed them up as distinctions gained through service. If a humble ‘boundary
commissioner’ (komornik) was proud of his title, so was his son (komornikiewicz).
Individual sejmiki, at least notionally, tried to exclude landless nobles from the
right to vote. Newly-created nobles were barred from office-holding for three
generations. The nobility succeeded in blocking King Władysław IV’s plan for
an Order of the Immaculate Conception in the 1640s, but, amid the chaos of
the Great Northern War, Augustus II was able to set up, in 1705, an Order of the
White Eagle – there was never any shortage of takers.19
The great aristocrats of Poland-Lithuania exploited their landed wealth to
dominate the system and manipulated the rhetoric of noble equality and demo-
cracy to harness the szlachta at large to their ambitions. But their pre-eminence
was conditional on accepting the rhetoric of this noble democracy. To challenge
it was to court political death. The szlachta accepted the system because they, too,
profited from it. Many appreciated the depth of their dependence on magnates in
everyday life. But if the circumstances were right, they, not the magnateria, would
decide the fate of the nation. In the royal election of 1672, a veritable gentry
fronde took place, acclaiming its own candidate, Michael Korybut Wiśniowiecki,
over the heads of infuriated but helpless oligarchs. Then there was that intoxic-
ating, psychological sense of being free – whatever else was happening abroad, it
had to be worse. The Polish nation, said Augustyn Kołudzki in 1727 was ‘the freest
under the sun.’ Other voices echoed him. ‘We are happier in our liberty than all
other nations.’ ‘In substance, our form of government is the most praiseworthy
and nothing can be devised more useful for the general good or more secure to
liberty.’ God had blessed Poland above all ‘with its Golden, priceless liberty, which
has decayed in all other kingdoms’.20
Above all, liberty (or ‘liberties’ – the word wolność was regularly used as much
in the plural as in the singular) was contrasted with the harshness of servitude –
indeed, only through such a comparison, was it possible for many to be conscious
of its true worth. ‘We live’, wrote Łukasz Opaliński in 1648,
in security, knowing neither violence nor fear. The soldier does not despoil us, the tax
collector does not exploit us, our ruler does not oppress us, nor does he force us to
endure heavy burdens . . . Informers . . . harsh punishments, imprisonment, arbitrary

arrest, banishment, and, at the last, the death sentence, without the accused receiving a
fair hearing – all these things are foreign to us, even as we hate them. We occupy ourselves
with our Commonwealth, since it pleases us to do so. We take on obligations, without
being forced to do so, we do not discharge them without cause . . . We can lead our
private lives in safety, the conduct of office does not expose us to any fear . . . We have a
king, but we are neither his hereditary possession, nor his patrimony, and we are only
subordinate to his jurisdiction . . . He holds his power as laid down in law, but he does not
stand above the law, conscious that he has been given to the citizens, and not the citizens
to him.’21
‘Negative’ liberty, ‘freedom from’ was assured. It provided the basis for ‘positive’
liberty – the freedom to participate in making law and conducting government
– although most nobles saw freedom as a continuum of liberties from which
something wider and precious emerged. Liberty gave rise to freedom of speech
and expression, all supporting and maintained by equality, virtue, zeal for the
faith and the common good.
The political culture that these values and traditions represented is usually
described by the term of ‘Sarmatism’, after the Sarmatians, Sarmaci, the warrior-
group from which the szlachta had sprung, as affirmed by humanist historians
of the sixteenth century. The sense of Sarmatian exceptionalism and collective
self-glorification was hardly new – it, too, was part of the ancestral legacy.22 An
eighteenth-century Englishman would have recognised the heady force of such
luxuriating platitudes, though he would doubtless have been surprised to hear
them coming from the mouths of Catholic Poles. But there was more to it than
psychological satisfaction or complacency. Men of wit and education, even if
not necessarily of substantial wealth, did have genuine opportunities to better
themselves and even make it into the ranks of the senate. Social ascent was
accompanied by the acquisition of property and revenue: some fifteen percent
of the surface area of Poland-Lithuania consisted of so-called ‘crown lands’,
królewszczyzny, parcelled out as individual estates known as starostwa (literally,
‘elderships’). These originally formed an immense royal demesne, but, by the
later sixteenth century, were utilised as a form of remuneration and reward by
the monarch for supposedly deserving service – the panis bene merentium, ‘the
bread of the well-deserving’, conferred in life tenure. A law of 1632 specified
that such vacant properties had to be granted to a new tenant within six weeks
of the death of the previous incumbent. Their tenure could make an immense
difference to the wealth and revenue streams of even the richest magnates, let
alone ambitious parvenus.
The competition for office and crown lands was the principal driving force
of Polish politics. At the top of the heap, the king had to be very careful not to
offend powerful magnates by withholding office and crown lands; for lesser fry,
it was the magnates who acted as brokers in the grant of positions and starostwa
to ambitious gentlemen. The way in which the structures of politics had been
constructed by the end of Bathory’s reign was to turn them into a massive spoils
system. The nobility made their own laws, voted their own taxes, elected their
own judges, ruled their own ‘subjects’ (the literal meaning of the Polish word
for serfs, poddani). The role of the monarch in all this centred on his powers of
patronage, his ius distributivum, for it was he who conferred crown land tenures
and most central and local offices.
Ambivalence towards the monarch was scarcely surprising. He was the source
of beneficence, through his ‘distributive power’, his ius distributivum. But that
same power could be used to subvert, undermine and destroy the very liberties
the monarch was pledged to uphold, by corrupting individuals. Hence, the need
for a ‘free royal election’, to ensure that any abuses (exorbitantia) that might have
crept in under the previous ruler should be rectified: the slate would be wiped
clean, liberty refreshed and reinvigorated. Even amid the darkest moments of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a stream of more or less distinguished
writers kept up warnings that a determined monarch might exploit conditions to
impose ‘absolutum dominium’ – a greater threat than any other.23 Looking back
over Poland’s history in 1789, a relieved Adam Rzewuski expressed astonishment
that absolute rule had not so far been imposed, since, as far as he could tell, the
conditions to do so had long prevailed: ‘. . . I cannot understand why no Polish
king has not become all powerful.’ He surmised that it was only the self-restraint
of kings, much taken by the boundless loyalty of their subjects, that had pre-
vented them from pressing home their absolutist advantage.24
The ius distributivum was the last great prerogative that remained to Poland’s
kings. The nobility were as ambivalent about it as about monarchy itself. On
the one hand, the panis bene merentium was an entirely legitimate resource in
royal hands with which to reward loyal and selfless service. The king of Poland
was so securely bound by the laws, that he could only be a ‘A good father to his
country, for our king is not above the laws, but the laws are above the king.’ In
a free republic, men should respond to reward, not punishment, and therefore
the kings had such extensive powers of reward at their disposal.25 But monarchs
who abused this ‘affection’ were also a horrifying threat:
The king has above all the right of awarding all dignities, he makes whom he wishes
marshal, chancellor, hetman (generalissimo), senator, official. The disposal of crown
lands and leases is in his hands, he sates whom he wished with this, as we call it, royal
bread, he elevates those favourable to his interests and their associates, he does not allow
opponents of the court to raise their heads or rise in any fashion. He has these powers
so absolutely in his hands, that, taking counsel of no-one, he may give to one, refuse
another, by which our king may attain what he wills, especially in these times, when
ambition and greed prevail.
The author of this dire warning, Stanisław Dunin Karwicki, was surely too
experienced a politician not to appreciate he was grossly over-simplifying, but he
certainly reflected fears of the potential for corruption of royal patronage: writer
after writer echoed his words down the century.26 The extent of restrictions on
royal power in Poland was such that in order to make their rule effective, indeed,
even to be able to fulfil their own pacta conventa, monarchs were almost inevit-
ably bound to try to overcome or evade those restrictions. There was scarcely a
single elected monarch who did not, at the very least, seek in some way to violate
his election promises not to try to secure a successor during his own lifetime.27
The tangled constitutional trip-wires bound the monarch so tightly, that only
catatonic inactivity could prevent him from setting the alarms ringing.
Yet these tensions did not prevent Poles, from seeing their constitution as
the best regimen mixtum, combining the elements of monarchy, aristocracy and
democracy in an idealised balance.28 The szlachta, said the seventeenth-century
ideologue, Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro,
take care that the Republic should suffer no detriment, should the king threaten its lib-
erty. On the other hand, the ruler seeks to ensure that liberty, turned to licence, should
not threaten the majesty of the crown, should that liberty become excessive and impud-
ent. The Senate is there as an intermediary, supporting neither unlimited royal power
against liberty, nor the licence of the nobility against the monarchy. The Senate carefully
ensures that liberty and the supreme power should not enter into excessively dangerous
conflict, maintaining both parties in balance, so that one should not predominate over
the other, but that both exist on equal terms, so that the monarchy obtains its due and
that, above all, there should be no diminution of liberty, to the subversion of the laws.’29
Poland was like a body, in which the king was the head, guiding the whole: the
ministers, the sense organs; the szlachta its breast, proffering the voice of coun-
sel in peace and defence in war; peasantry and commoners the feet.30 This was
how things should have been: monarchy could be simultaneously idealised and
mistrusted, one of the many striking antinomies of the sprawling, paradoxical
‘monarchic republic’ of Poland-Lithuania.31
To be ‘Polish’ was to be noble. If Polish liberty was comparable only to that
of the ancient Roman Republic, it surpassed it in not extending to the common
people. Jan Dębiński was one of many voices warning that ‘plebeia libertas’ had
brought confusion and ruin upon ancient republics. Poland was fortunate in
vesting its liberty exclusively in the nobility, which kept it safe from the com-
motion and disturbances normally associated with the lower orders.32 There was
no better way to introduce absolutum dominium ‘than by promising the privileges

of liberty to our peasants . . .33 Denmark, where absolute royal rule had been
established in a coup in 1661, was used as a warning against the consequences of
any unholy alliance between monarchy and the lower orders, be they peasants
or townsmen.34
There remained one final, devastating line of constitutional defence against
the designs of monarchs and their ministers: the liberum veto. Traditionally, its
first use is dated to 1652, when the envoy Władysław Siciński objected to the
prolongation of the Sejm beyond its six-week term; and the speaker, or marshal,
of the Chamber of Envoys, Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro, and the Chamber
itself, acquiesced in the objection. The term ‘liberum veto’ actually described a
generic act of prohibition, well known before 1652. Jan Zamoyski was one of
the first to use the expression, in 1596, when he described the rights of envoys
in a letter to Vanozzi, secretary to the papal nuncio. He compared the power
of veto held by the envoys to that of the tribunes of ancient Rome.35 To block
legislation, objectors used formulae such as ‘Nie pozwalam!’, ‘I will not allow it!’
or ‘Sisto activitatem’, ‘I put a stop to proceedings’. The constitutional convention,
whereby legislation became valid only after a final reading of all agreed bills en
bloc during the last five days of the Sejm, greatly eased the task of objectors,
contradicentes. So powerful was the spell the veto cast that, for most would-be
reformers, if anything was to be changed, it should be Sejm procedures, but not the
veto itself.
The veto was a natural outgrowth of Polish politics. Poles were proud that
their Commonwealth was an association of free men and of free territories, which
had, in their eyes, voluntarily come together. Humanist scholars developed the
Sarmatian myth to help give the different noble groups with Poland-Lithuania a
much-needed sense of common identity. The Polish territories the Jagiellonians
ruled had come together precisely so that their existing rights and privileges
could be preserved, not so that they should be subordinated to a common centre.
The result, as Zygmunt Kretkowski, palatine of Chełm, observed in 1761, was
a federation of palatinates, each with its own particular rights and privileges.
Even kings of France and holy Roman Emperors regularly swore to uphold the
‘liberties’ of new territories that fell into their grasp – and their counterparts in
the Commonwealth of the Two Nations quite lacked the established purchase
on central power that a Habsburg or Valois or a Bourbon enjoyed. The szlachta
knew this and were determined to keep it that way – any concessions to monarchy
would open the way to tyranny and despotism. Even the least constitutional
alterations could have potentially devastating consequences for freedom.36
Whereas English commentators, living in one of the most centralised states in
Europe since Anglo-Saxon times, could take it for granted that their parliament
would be decided by majority vote,37 this particular ideological luxury was not
available to the politicians of the loosely-linked Rzeczpospolita. King Alexander’s

statute of 1505, Nihil Novi, did not have to mean unanimity of decision-making:
‘from now on, for all future time in perpetuity, nothing new should be enacted in
law, by Us and Our Successors, without the common consent of our councillors
and the envoys of the counties’.38 But the bonds holding together the Polish-
Lithuanian federation were too tenuous for the principle of majority voting to
be accepted. Insofar as pluralitas operated, it was too sporadic for any kind of
principle to be established.39 ‘Voting’ is something of a misnomer, a modern
rendering of ‘głosowanie’, which originally meant ‘speaking to a particular
matter’. The envoy used his ‘free voice’, his libera vox; enactment followed by
acclamation or acquiescence. In the sixteenth century and, indeed, for much of
the seventeenth, it was not so much accepted that a single individual had the
right to object, but rather, that all interest groups needed to be accommodated.
Legislation, as a result, was engineered by ingenious permutations of moral
pressure, evasion or obfuscation of the issues, rushed final readings of the vari-
ous bills, even tampering with their wording in the published texts, appeals to
envoys to cease their opposition, browbeating them, ignoring the objections of
small groups, or appeals over their heads to their constituents: anything, if only
to maintain the fiction of communis consensus. If the worst came to the worst,
the Sejm would simply disperse without agreement. Even before such inconclus-
ive assemblies began to mark the political scene from the 1530s onwards, the
occasional refusal of whole regions to send representatives to Sejmy did nothing
to enhance their authority. Yet politicians were not unduly perturbed – such
difficulties were part of the normal political process.40
Polish parliaments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries met far more
frequently than those of the Tudors or Stuarts – but it was their negative aspects
that became consolidated. Much rhetoric was spouted about the Sejm as the
‘manufactory of the laws’, officina legum. But the ‘constitutions’ of the 1572–3
interregnum period set a pattern: the aim of legislation was primarily the
preservation and extension of liberty. The Sejm enacted laws and voted taxes,
but always within the framework of the constitutional arrangements of the
later Jagiellonians and the first Interregnum. The creation of the noble-elected
courts of appeal, the Tribunals of Poland and Lithuania, in 1578 and 1581 under
Bathory was perfectly acceptable, for it involved the widening of noble liberties.
It placed Polish freedom ‘as if in the fulness of perfection’.41 There were those
who remained sceptical – many appreciated the absurdity of small minorities
holding up the wishes of the great majority. In 1616, the senator Maksymilian
Przerembski even advocated the introduction of majority voting – but this was
simply a step too far. A formal proposal to introduce ‘a restriction of the prin-
ciple of unanimity’, in 1647 was howled down.42 ‘To settle the affairs of the
Commonwealth by majority vote threatens the destruction of the liberties of the
szlachta estate’, protested envoys to the 1605 Sejm.43 In February 1717 a leading
adviser to Augustus II, bishop Konstanty Szaniawski, admitted that:
the greater part of the Commonwealth’s liberties date from the times of King Henri
and since then, they have degenerated into a veritable anarchy. Free royal elections have
become a pure chimera; Poland was better off under hereditary kings and could, under
them, call itself a free nation. Her freedom could still be preserved if we returned to our
old hereditary monarchy. The ‘Nie Pozwalam’, that is, the liberum veto at the Sejmy, has
become another absurdity – things are much better in England under its majority voting
. . . That is why the laws introduced in the Commonwealth from Henri’s time all require
reformation, and if, as a result, some tyrant were to emerge, always better to have one
than many.44
This remarkable confidence was delivered to a foreign diplomat, Georg Löllhöwell

of Prussia. A public statement would have probably led to Szaniawski being
lynched.
The Sejm itself could be political nightmare: its rules of procedure grew by
custom and were never closely defined. There was no quorum; envoys regularly
arrived late and were ready to insist on going over legislation already agreed.45
Electors were unwilling to accept laws that had not been acclaimed by a decent
number of envoys. The marshal, or speaker, had a sisyphean task to keep order.
Individual envoys could raise whatever points they wished at almost any time,
irrespective of the business under discussion. Marshals lacked the powers to deal
with unruly members of the public, usually other nobles, who would object to
any affront to their dignity. Without aristocratic and royal influence the Sejmy
would have ground to a halt – but within the heated demagoguery of noble
politics and factional rivalries, such factors only aggravated the suspicions of
the electorate. What is surprising is that, for so much of the sixteenth and earlier
seventeenth centuries, the Sejm was able to cope with the weight of problems
bearing down on the Commonwealth: taxes were voted, armies were raised,
enemies were crushed (Muscovites), fended off (Swedes) or faced down (Turks
and Moldavians). Szczepan Sienicki in 1764 saw in this a sign of particular Polish
virtue: of the thirty-three ‘successful Sejmy’ he counted between 1652 and 1736,
‘where, and in what other free nation,’ he asked, ‘could anyone show so many
successful parliaments, nemine contradicente?’46
The liberum veto formed part of an almost natural progression of liberties.
At most Sejmy, the king could probably count on the support of a majority of
envoys – reason enough to arouse noble suspicions. When Siciński’s individual
objection brought the first Sejm of 1652 to a halt, it elicited remarkably little
discussion. Another privilege had accumulated in the szlachta storehouse. It has
been pointed out that only one extensive theoretical work analysing the veto
was ever written, Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro’s Scriptorum seu togae et belli
notationum fragmenta of 1660, and that it may not have even been aimed prim-
arily at a Polish audience.47 Individual, social and regional privilege collectively
formed ‘Golden Liberty’. Fredro, he who had presided over Siciński’s Sejm a few
years earlier, in effect argued that Poland and Lithuania were subject to a different
set of political rules to other nations. He wrote against the background of the
massive conflicts of the Deluge:
Neither Poland nor any other country has hitherto endured worse times than these
. . . for indeed all Europe (the matter could pass for a miracle) fought with so many
armies on Polish soil and over Poland. These were Germans, Swedes, Danes, Muscovites,
Hungarians, Tatars, Wallachians, Moldavians and, moreover, the rebellious Ukraine
. . . Others served them with support, counsel, money, arms and promises – French,
Spaniards, English, Turks and Greeks. Yet we have seen how useful it was, that at that
time there was no functioning Sejm. Had it been in session, it might well, with all the
authority of its estates, have agreed to arrangements harmful to the Commonwealth, be it
out of fear of impending danger, of necessity or of absence of hope in a better to-morrow.
Fredro did not even see an empty treasury as a disadvantage, for it deterred the
monarch from any rash adventurism and made him dependent on the nobility for
taxation. That the laws were poorly enforced or even ineffective was ultimately a
blessing, for it brought about moderation in government, a genuine attachment to
it and did not drive powerful men to extreme actions against the well-being of the
state. Majority voting was entirely appropriate for a republic like Venice, relatively
small and with an all but powerless doge at its head. But Poland was different: it
was a huge, sprawling state, which took weeks, even months, to traverse. With its
very different regional traditions, it was bound to have a diverse set of interests:
the veto acted to force men to collaborate, to sink their differences, to reach com-
promises. At the same time, it formed a final line of defence against the corrupting
power of the court, for, if it were not checked, the monarch’s ius distributivum
would allow him to win over and subvert a majority among the envoys.
Fredro took it as axiomatic that the vast number of men were self-seeking
and liable to corruption. Following Sallust, much favoured in Poland for his
account of the Roman Republic’s suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy, he
claimed that each generation produced only a handful of truly great individuals
whose virtues preserved the well-being of the state. Where the majority vote
prevailed, there the corrupted majority would always outweigh the minority of
the virtuous.48 ‘The wise Fredro’, particularly esteemed as a political writer and
historian in the eighteenth century, wrote not only against the background of the
Deluge, but against the determined, if unsuccessful, efforts of King John Casimir
and his consort, Louise-Marie, to bring about a royal election during the king’s
own lifetime, a step they felt vital as a platform of future reform. Fredro and the
nobility agreed, and would have none of it. Hereditary succession would be but
the first step down the slippery slope to absolutum dominium.
Despite the sophistries and omissions of Fredro’s reasoning (he resolutely
failed to take into account the possibility that the veto might not be used by a man
of virtue), his arguments made some sense at the time. For the Commonwealth’s
parliament remained a just-about-workable institution into the 1720s. If one
Sejm failed, a fresh one could be called in its place (as indeed happened in
1652). It was far from apparent in the 1660s that Sejm-wrecking would reach
the proportions it did over the next century. Only in 1669 was a Sejm disrupted
before the expiry of its six-week term. No objector could sustain his position
without being sure of wider support in the chamber. Individual objectors, whose
main concern might in any case be simply to make a particular point, could
still be persuaded to retract. During the so-called ‘Silent Sejm’ of 1717, whose
proceedings had been carefully orchestrated in advance, no less a person than
the archbishop-primate of Gniezno, Stanisław Szembek, stormed out in a fury,
complaining under his breath of his ‘oppressam vocem’.49 During the reign of
Augustus III, when between 1738 and 1761 not a single Sejm concluded success-
fully, most were in fact filibustered to the end of their normal six-week term
without enacting any legislation, rather than disrupted outright. The veto was
extolled as Poland’s pupilla libertatis, ‘the apple of liberty’s eye’, yet its use carried
a constant stigma. It was seen as virtue’s last defence against despotism, yet on
every occasion it was used, that use was widely condemned.
Use of the veto spread, by the 1660s, to the local assemblies, the sejmiki.50 The
result was the non-filling of many elective posts or even the failure to return
deputies to the Tribunals or envoys to the Sejm. Alternatives existed to the Sejm
(and to the normal course of sejmiki): during interregna, and in periods of crisis,
such as the Deluge, the nobility formed leagues or Confederacies (konfederacje),
committed to particular ends, most notably the defence of the Commonwealth.
Although there was no formal mechanism for majority decision-making within
these leagues, in practice, those who signed up to them followed the lead of the
men at the top, who reached decisions by mutual discussion and consultation.
Confederacies did not exist simply to protect from external threats, they were there
also to safeguard its ancient laws and liberties against internal threats – from the
monarch, or from magnate factions, or to provide stable government after a mon-
arch’s demise. They flourished particularly in the second half of the seventeenth
century and the first two decades of the eighteenth. But they did not exist to alter
or reform: they were there emphatically to preserve the status quo, or, the status
quo ante. Their near-apotheosis came in 1666–7, when Jerzy Lubomirski, at the
head of a movement which in any other European state would have been branded
as treasonable and rebellious, destroyed the court’s hopes of securing a vivente rege
election. His actions won him a place almost on a par with Jan Zamoyski in the
pantheon of the nobility’s glorious ancestors. Even the Confederacy of Tarnogród
of 1715–17, which, exceptionally, did secure major political reform, repeatedly
claimed that it was striving only to restore the Commonwealth ‘to its ancient
forms of counsel and government’ including in this ‘the freedom of expression
[and] the right to forbid’ (‘libertatem sentiendi, ius vetandi’).51
The survival of the Commonwealth in the face of the huge shocks it endured
during the wars of the 1650s and 1660s, and the Great Northern War of 1700–21
was to leave much of noble society convinced that major constitutional reform
was unnecessary, or, at least, that the effort was not worth making. Fredro’s
distortions of reality were a necessary characteristic of a collective exaltation of
the virtues and freedoms of the republic, in which reality was simply material to
be accommodated to an ideal. Liberty, in a seemingly ever-more authoritarian
Europe, was surely worth preserving. It was easier and more desirable to forge
myths than to reform a system which embodied unmatched freedom, in which
every noble landowner was ‘absolute master of his estates’52 and beholden to
no one. To defend the Commonwealth, the szlachta could call on their own
resources, epitomised above all by their Confederacies.
Poland-Lithuania, at least to the end of the seventeenth century, was capable
of more than purely defensive reactions. It played a decisive role in the relief
of Vienna in 1683; and if that spectacular success was not to be repeated, the
Rzeczpospolita nevertheless played a vital role in the last great pan-European
crusade by diverting significant Ottoman resources from the Habsburg-led
thrusts into Hungary and the Balkans. The Ukrainian territories ceded to the
Porte in 1672 were recovered at the peace of Carlowitz in 1699. During the Great
Northern War, the effort of trying to control Polish territories fatally undermined
Charles XII’s capacity to deal with Russia. But in the new century, the challenges
confronting Poland were to alter dramatically, particularly with the rise of
genuinely permanent, massive standing armies among its neighbours, which
permitted them to project power and policy in a far more sustained fashion than
ever before. It was all very well for Stanisław Leszczyński to hearten his supporters
in 1734 with the thought that Poland’s situation during the Deluge of the 1650s
had been even more desperate than it was at present.53 In some respects, that
might even have been true. But, in 1717, the ravaged and exhausted society of
Poland-Lithuania had been prepared only to accept a standing army assessed at
24,000 standard units of pay – in practice, an outmoded armed force closer to
12,000 men. What had sufficed in the mid-seventeenth century could not pass
muster in the eighteenth.
The problems that beset Poland were seen as an inescapable part of freedom
itself. Jan Dębiński lived through much the same sorts of traumas as Andrzej
Maksymilian Fredro – internal disorder, civil war, foreign invasion. His reaction
was much the same. ‘. . . our Liberty is and must be an unquiet one, because
the character of liberty is suspicious and fearful; it is true that it must almost
perpetually must be troubled and foment trouble, but that stems from the fact
that it is a passion which abounds with a disquieting fear, it shudders at the very
mention of servitude and trembles at its very shadow.’ Poland’s freedom was like
a raging torrent, which could on occasion burst its banks and change its course,
doing much damage. ‘But . . . we prefer to endure the purgatory of this freedom,
even though it is very vexatious and in part harmful, rather than with others go
down the road of despotic servitude.’54 Freedom was a great gift; disorder was a
price worth paying.
If things were not as they should be, the answer lay not in measures, but men.
The difficulty was a moral one – the men of the present lacked the virtues of
their forbears. Pondering the growing fractiousness of the Sejmy in the 1640s,
Łukasz Opaliński could only envy the moderation with which the nobility’s
ancestors had made use of their liberty, instead of which, in his own day, Poland
was saddled with ambitious, self-seeking, ignorant politicians, indifferent to the
country’s needs.55 Well-intentioned patriots bewailed the loss of ancestral virtues
during the Great Northern War. The moral superiority of the nobility’s forbears
was self-evident to almost all authors of the eighteenth century, and even if they
did not believe in it, most felt bound to assert it. Writing amid the excesses of
Russian policing operations in Poland in the late 1760s, one author complained
that the degeneracy of the past fifty years had led to the overthrow of everything
the ancestors had achieved. The loss of ancient valour was repeatedly bewailed
in the disorderly years before the First Partition. Michael Wielhorski in 1775
criticised the nobility’s ‘fathers’ (late seventeenth century) for departing from the
constitutional principles of more virtuous ‘forbears’ (earlier).56
It was not as if, amid their introspection, the Poles were unaware of the outside
world. They travelled extensively, and even relatively humble gentlemen might
get to accompany magnate scions on their grand tours. Many took foreign ser-
vice: a few years in a regiment of the French army was a favoured choice. The
opening up of a Cadet Corps in Lunéville in 1737 by the Duke of Lorraine and
deposed King of Poland, Stanisław Leszczyński, allowed dozens of young Polish
noblemen to acquire an education abroad – as did the Saxon Wettin connection
between 1697 and 1763 (persisting even after the death of Augustus III), with
hundreds of noblemen and others travelling between Poland and Saxony. Rome
was a favoured destination, as one might expect for citizens of a strongly Catholic
country.57 Yet none of this was persuasive of any need for change at home. Venice
was prosperous but too different, the Dutch Republic more prosperous but
run by mere merchants, England more prosperous still, perhaps, but remote,
Protestant, and allowed commoners into its counsels. Most nobles were content
to sample the outside world but happier still to return to their own, convinced
of its particular libertarian virtues. The repeated failure of parliaments led to

petrification: since they could achieve little or nothing, politics was reduced to
the kind of blinkered manoeuvring in which local interests were pursued to the
detriment of true national politics.58 There was nothing else. If there were things
wrong with the reality of this world, they could be put right by a return to the
unsullied morality of yore. Society would then be as it ought to be.
In former times, in those happier ages, the poorer and indigent sons of the nobility had
this opportunity: that they attended the public schools alongside more notable lords,
be it to serve and to assist, be it to attend them at home under their care. As a result, the
public good of the Commonwealth flourished in other spheres . . . In consequence, civil-
ity, equality, old Polish sincerity blossomed among all the estates of our country, along
with mutual love and almost unanimous harmony between those estates . . .
The courts had functioned in an exemplary fashion, the churches and religious
orders had rejoiced in wise and pious clergy, great lords were attended by skilled
and wise noble administrators.59 This Utopian vision flew in the face of wider
European realities, but not necessarily Polish ones. It eschewed politics in favour
of immobility. It was as artificial in its way as the mythology woven around
monarchs and ancestors apotheosised after their death. But it was how so many of
its citizens felt the Commonwealth ought to be: a state dedicated to freedom was,
almost by definition, a good in itself and of its nature could only confer benefits
on its citizens. Freedom, as the highest good, justified such an idyll. Before the
1770s, Polish literature produced no Utopian literature. Revelling in the repeated
exaltations of their own freedoms, buttressed by the Henrician articles and the
liberum veto, the szlachta did not need Utopia – they inhabited it.60
There was no counter-current of literature favouring strong monarchic
rule. The so-called ‘Wilno Resolution’ of November 1700 (or possibly spring
1701) marked the only demand for the introduction of royal absolutism of the
eighteenth century. Its signatories rejected their ‘sweet and base liberty’. They
condemned the liberum veto as opening the doors to faction and intrigue from
Poland, poisoning the Grand Duchy, encouraging the powerful to lord over the
weak. ‘The freedom of the Polish lands’ was considered nothing more than ‘polit-
ical anarchy’, which should have no place in Lithuania. It was to be over sixty years
before anyone was to dare write of the veto again in such terms. The ‘Resolution’
went on, uniquely, to welcome Augustus II and his successors as hereditary rulers,
‘absolute and supreme lords’ of Lithuania, who were promised untrammelled
obedience. The real character of this curious document remains a mystery: was
it a forgery? No original was ever produced – its 42 supposed signatories always
denied putting their names to it. Was it an act of disinformation by the agents
of King Augustus II, trying to muddy the already murky waters of Lithuanian
politics so as to benefit royal rule? During heated exchanges at the Warsaw Sejm
of May-June 1701, no one admitted knowing anything. The Sejm ruled that any-
one copying or keeping the ‘Resolution’ would be sentenced to the amputation
and incineration of their hand. The Warsaw executioner burned the available
copies in the Old Town square.61 The ‘Resolution’ was utterly uncharacteristic
of anything in Polish political writing.
To most nobles, what liberty had come to mean was primarily the maintenance
of the status quo. In peacetime at least, there was much to commend it. The great
magnates could lord over their gargantuan properties, manoeuvre over royal
patronage and the exercise of influence. Middling nobles aped their betters. The
voluminous memoirs of Marcin Matuszewicz, fixer and lawyer, in the Lithuanian
palatinate of Brześć, are a never-ending tale of litigation, office-seeking, hang-
ing on (and jumping off) the coat tails of grandees, political gerrymandering,
breaking and making sejmiki; of drunken, brawling judges, heiress-hunting,
parish-pump politicking, formalistic pieties, bibulous guzzling and socialising.
My maxim in the management of sejmiki and my conduct in the palatinate was: to serve
all sincerely and willingly, to be mindful of no injury, to assist and even to forgive my
enemies, if occasion required. To charge little or nothing for my official duties, and even
to help out financially those who needed it. To arrive in time for business, despatch it
briskly, to save the parties expense . . . To keep open table at the courts and other gather-
ings, in Brześć, not only to provide good wine, but in copious quantities, in which I was
never sparing of my own health. Never to allow matters at sejmiki to come to a head, but
to listen carefully to everyone, to persuade objectors to desist, and often to overcome their
objections to candidates with my own money. To keep my word. If a sejmik concluded
successfully, I would rejoice with everyone. If it failed, then I would part on good terms
even with those who had disrupted it . . . All this assured me of true affection within
the palatinate.62
A serious-minded gentleman could find plenty of scope within the Commonwealth

to occupy his time and advance his interests, free from the cares of the wider
world. The disruption of Sejmy and, more particularly, sejmiki, was an incon-
venience, but it was also part of normal life, particularly to men of Matuszewicz’
generation (he was born in 1714). In 1699, Jakób Boczyłowic’s conduct manual
even provided a standard letter warning of such disruption:
My dear, much-esteemed Sir,

God have mercy, that our policies, supported by the highest reasoning and lofty
arguments, have yet all the more speedily fallen to the lowest depths, into the immense
abyss of our country’s ruin. Since the sejmiki have been disrupted, the hopes we had for
the public weal have collapsed. We await what follows.63
Kazimierz Wieruszewski’s popular and much re-printed textbook of 1720, Polish

Fame, supplied stock arguments for using the veto, should tax rises be proposed
(they would inevitably lead to absolutism).64 Disruption was normalised into
the day-to-day routines of the Republic.
In 1732, the French ambassador, the marquis de Monti, raised the matter with
his Polish friends:
they consider only their own private affairs and if the dangers in which they find them-
selves are mentioned, they will agree, but, at the same time, they will add that Poland has
always been ruled in this fashion and that it is in the interests of Europe that its present
form of government remain unchanged . . .65
In fact, ever since 1667, permutations of Poland’s neighbours had undertaken

among themselves to maintain Poland’s constitution intact and to oppose all
reform. While the Poles were not, prior to 1768, party to any of these agreements,
they would not necessarily have found them disagreeable. They kept liberty and
veto safe.66
Political and constitutional change would require a sloughing off of an ances-
tral edifice sanctified by the blood of innumerable generations. That legacy was
a truth far more potent and emotionally appealing, far more comprehensible to
innumerable nobles than abstract theories of some form of social compact (for
which there was no place in the Commonwealth before the 1770s). Panegyrics
and dedicatory almanacs heaped praise upon illustrious ancestors, real and
concocted. Wieruszewski’s Polish fame, in its model speeches of congratulations
on appointment to public office, laid greater emphasis on the virtues of forbears
than the merits of the actual recipients.67 What the weight and force of ancestral
service could mean was exemplified by the Rzewuski dynasty. Stanisław, Grand
hetman (generalissimo) of the Crown under Augustus II, wrote in his testament
to his son, Wacław:
I leave you in a free republic, governed by wise laws. Let it be your life’s aim to bequeath
it to your grandsons, as your fathers established it. Respect noble equality, defend liberty
. . . Be ever ready to spill all your blood for the holy faith, for the freedom of royal election,
for the powers of the hetmanship and for the liberum veto.68
This was precisely the heritage to which Wacław stayed true and which he in turn
passed on to his son, Seweryn. The stubborn, bone-headed attachment to the
past and rejection of change that the Rzewuskis demonstrated throughout their
lives was reinforced both by their assured access to the highest offices of the land
and by the ‘martyrdom’ for faith and liberty which Wacław and Seweryn were
to endure in enforced exile in Russia between 1767 and 1772. It was as though
the whole ambition of the family’s first-born was to become ‘virtuous ancestors’
themselves. What they really wanted and strived for was the immobility of the
present to remain forever undisturbed. The well-rehearsed parading of the sins
of absolutum dominium and the freedom-nurturing sacrifices of former genera-
tions allowed of nothing else.69 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth remained
unique, the home of liberty and the object of the care of Divine Providence.
3
The search for harmony
Every nobleman at the sejmiki, remarked Jan Stanisław Jabłonowski in 1730,

‘enjoys the prerogative of a minister of state, that is, a councillor in public affairs
and, moreover, the censor of kings, ministers of state, of the Senate, the Chamber
of Envoys, the Tribunal and the entire realm; but he can also speak to and enact
the correction of old laws and frame new ones and remedy his own particular
wrongs and oppressions and those suffered by his friends.’1 The law required the
consent of all; a law could be blocked, and a Sejm or a sejmik disrupted, by a single
individual. Every nobleman was an almost sovereign legislator.
Practical politics inevitably placed restrictions on the way in which men
thought and wrote. It was easy to deplore and to deride the obvious shortcomings
of the political process: bribery, corruption, drunkenness, sycophancy, the pande-
monium and disorders and the chronic recourse to the liberum veto.2 It was one
thing to bewail the deficiencies of Golden Liberty, it was quite another to question
what were taken as its basic principles: the liberum veto; free royal election; noble
equality; the indispensability of serfdom; the furtherance of Catholic dominance.
Most commentators saw no realistic alternative to the political present in which
they found themselves. In a polity created by self-sacrificing virtuous ancestors
and blessed by the benign gaze of Providence, it was not at all clear what could,
or should, be changed. It is not entirely surprising therefore that the political
literature of this period is marked, above all, by conservatism and timidity; not
so much by a failure of the political imagination, as its absence. Questioning and
criticism were self-avowedly peripheral, where processes had fallen out of their
due place and course, where they had literally become ‘exorbitantia’. Otherwise,
at most, writers might indulge in hints, nudges, ambiguities. Commonwealth
politics admitted of nothing more taxing or constructive.
In 1699, as the recently elected Augustus II was consolidating his rule, there
appeared a work entitled De Vanitate Consiliorum, On the vanity of counsels.
Its true meanings remain a subject of controversy, as they were surely meant
to be. The doyen of Polish historians of the eighteenth century, Władysław
Konopczyński, portrayed its author, Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski, one of
the grandest of Poland’s grandees, as a self-indulgent constitutional nihilist,
who sought to mock the pointlessness of ‘counsel’ (rada – the word means both
counsel and council), specifically (though not exclusively) of parliamentary
counsel/council and thereby perpetuate an anarchic condition which suited men

like himself extremely well.3 Yet less jaundiced interpretations of De Vanitate are
possible. It can just as well be taken as a literary conceit, bursting with paradox
in the manner of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims. The work proved to be one of
the most successful and enduring exercises in Polish political literature, with at
least twenty-six editions over the next century, including printings in Austria,
Bohemia and Germany, the latest in 1795. No other Polish political tract of
the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries enjoyed such success.4 Many of its
observations on the frailty of human counsel, the self-seeking of politicians, the
difficulties of military endeavour, of implementing laws and enforcing taxation,
or simply of conducting normal politics had a universal applicability. Augustus
II made frantic efforts to have it suppressed – to no avail: he could not even
stop copies being printed in his native Saxony. De Vanitate clearly alluded to his
grandiose plans (and presciently cast doubt on their feasibility) to strengthen his
own position unilaterally by an offensive against Sweden in alliance with Russia.5
Lubomirski offered no suggestions as to what shape reform should take: if he
was cynical of the motivations of kings and advisers, he expressed little sympathy
for the anarchy that the nobility had caused. ‘Do you not know, that it is the gen-
ius of this Commonwealth to go freely to its ill; and to allow itself to be dragged
only reluctantly for its good?’ It is even possible to read parts of De Vanitate as
a plea for absolutism, or at the least, much stronger monarchic rule – but other
passages convey concern for the loss of liberty. Lubomirski was at least as likely
to have given the nobility to understand that continued anarchy would inevitably
yield to absolutism. If he wanted anything, it was a harmony between the three
estates of king, senate and nobility. ‘Firstly, I will frame laws’, says Vanitas. ‘Rather’,
responds Veritas, ‘make men. It is much easier to hand down lessons, than to
create good morals.’ Men all too readily twisted and misinterpreted the laws to
their own advantage. The result was discord, which threatened the survival of the
Commonwealth. The sole antidote was to respect genuine virtue and to acquire
love of the monarch. Otherwise, harmony would be imposed from above.6
De Vanitate reflected a truth: confronted with the trammels of their constitu-
tional politics, Polish politicians had little real notion of how to overcome the
difficulties of the state. Given the brute fact of the liberum veto, and the general-
ised refusal to question its rationale, harmony, unity and unanimity had to be set
as political goals. There was little that could be done in the way of change, given
the shortcomings of human nature. Fatalism, and the failure of state institutions
interacted to produce inertia, tempered by a consoling consciousness of divine
protection.7 For a comfortable, cynical aristocrat, ambivalence was a useful
course to set, especially in 1699, when it was far from clear whither Augustus
II’s grandiose ambitions would lead. De Vanitate Consiliorum could read as both
an advice book to a ruler and as a warning to the nobility of what their ruler’s
THE SEARCH FOR HARMONY 35
aspirations might mean. Its author, conscious of Poland’s deficiencies, was not
prepared to go beyond mocking, ambivalent hauteur – for what, after all, could he
hope to achieve? It was safer and more realistic than advocating positive change,
which could only have drawn on him the opprobrium of his fellow-nobles. Most
other observers of any note who launched into print under Wettin rule echoed
Lubomirski’s strictures on the loss of ancestral virtues.8
Lubomirski’s cloudy ambiguities re-surfaced in a work published in 1741,
perhaps the most accomplished Polish exercise in Latin versification produced
during the eighteenth century, the Sarmatides seu Satyrae of Antoni Poniński.
His never-completed epic poem concentrated predominantly on moral failings.
Satire VIII bewailed the shortcomings and corruption of Poland’s supreme court,
the Tribunal, but had no suggestions as to how these might be remedied.9 Political
reform did not feature. In 1743, less mystifying than Lubomirski, Franciszek
Radzewski in his Political Questions Indifferent . . . Examining the Condition of
the Polish Commonwealth was again not prepared to advocate particular policies
outright. He raised some ten major issues in politics, including interregnal,
military and fiscal reforms, royal marriages, the role of the pospolite ruszenie (the
noble levée-en-masse), to each of which he gave (usually) two different answers,
with supporting arguments on both sides.10 Throughout his long active political
life (he was born in 1672 and died in 1748), Radzewski was a strong supporter
of Stanisław Leszczyński against both Augustus II during the Great Northern
War and against his son, the future Augustus III, between 1733 and 1736; he had
been marshal of the Election Sejm of 1733, which had acclaimed Leszczyński as
king. He had experienced enough, from the glories of John Sobieski’s reign to
the humiliations of the Wettins’, to know how fragile was the nobility’s control
over its own Commonwealth. His responses to the problems he expounded
were judiciously balanced. Only anyone familiar with his career would have
known where his convictions truly lay. As it happened, Antoni Poniński’s career
was almost a mirror image of Radzewski’s. Poniński was a stalwart supporter
of the Saxons – he was, indeed, marshal of the 1733 anti-Sejm, which elected
Augustus III. Despite their very divergent political paths, and their reservations
on the state of the Commonwealth, neither could find a way to advocate reform.
The same ideological impasse characterises Wojciech Bystrzonowski’s extra-
ordinarily popular The Pole, the man of decorum in his correspondence, the man
of tact in his addresses, a humanist in his discourses, a statesman in his speeches,
held up as an example to our youth, a school textbook which went through at
least sixteen editions between 1730 and 1757, and which showed much the
same refusal as Radzewski’s work to opt for concrete solutions. Criticism of
the veto was there – but oblique. ‘Gentlemen, what is happening? Do right and
the laws allow a brother-nobleman to submit his free voice to an examination?’
expostulated a nobleman when challenged over his use of the veto. ‘Under which
of the Crown’s laws is the voice of the liberum veto to be subjected to inquisition
or torture? . . . It is good enough for a free nobleman to say: this is what I wish,
my will is my reason.’ Readers had to make up their own minds – Bystrzonowski
would make nothing explicit.11
Polish noble society was not implacably set against change: it was firmly
opposed to change which ran beyond the limits of its own views on freedom.
Thus, the proceedings of the Silent Sejm of 1717 were initially viewed as an out-
rage to legality. In 1718, the nobility of Kraków strongly condemned the Sejm
as an affront to noble liberty; but by 1736, they regarded its enactments as a
hallowed ‘ancient custom.’12 They could do this in part because, good Catholics
that they were, they could not but approve of the restrictions imposed in 1717 on
Protestant nobles, but also, more importantly, because the constitutional reforms
of the Sejm, even though in some respects drastic, slotted neatly into the noble
view of liberty. The Sejm limited the size of Poland’s army to a notional 24,000
units (porcje) of pay, which in, practice, produced a force of some 12,000 men.
The army was billeted on specific crown estates earmarked for its support. For
the first time since they had come into being, sejmiki were banned from tamper-
ing with parliamentary taxation: only specified local taxes remained under their
control. At one level, this was an immense shift: sejmiki had regarded it as part
and parcel of their rights to accept, reject or replace taxes voted by the Sejm.
Now, they had lost that power. But at another level, this gave the war-weary
nobility what they wanted: certainty over the place of a very much reduced army,
the satisfaction that its financing had been resolved and assurance of an end to
arbitrary military contributions. They were left free to concentrate on what really
interested them – home-grown issues.
Poland and its laws remained an ancestral construct to be revered and pre-
served, a venerable pile (‘gmach’) with which it was dangerous to tamper, a sickly
patient whom any excessively strong cure might kill.13 Politics continued to be
seen in idealised, generalised terms: the lack of harmony between the estates
and the decay of ancestral virtue which had once made the Commonwealth a
vigorous state remained the principal threat to its well-being. The result was a
riotous, anarchic freedom in which the Poles were their own worst enemies. But
restore harmony and virtue, and the ancestral achievement could be reinvigor-
ated and retained, the liberum veto would resume its rightful place, as a final and
legitimate defence against royal absolutism.
Whence came discord? Two main sources were typically identified, foreign
influence and the tensions between magnates (panowie) and the great major-
ity of less wealthy nobles. Outside influence was at its most pernicious during
interregna. A succession of writers fired off tirades against the election of foreign
princes. Such kings, usually brought up ‘in despotico dominio’14 dragged Poland
into unnecessary foreign wars, cared nothing for its freedoms, sought only their
own advancement and that of their families and generally brought in undesirable,
demoralising influences. Franciszek Radzewski was not alone in bemoaning
the ‘foreign interests’ which had made ‘many Poles into Frenchmen, Germans,
Spaniards, Italians, &c.’15
This was one problem with a solution: restrict kingship to Polish candidates.
Jerzy Dzieduszycki, author of the most extensive work on royal elections, the
‘treatise on the election of Polish kings’, written in 1707 and circulating widely
in manuscript, would not have banned foreign candidates outright, but insisted
they incorporate their own lands into the Rzeczpospolita and subject them to its
laws and privileges – a formula for self-disinheritance. This would effectively
ensure that the sole candidates would be native Poles, eager to demonstrate their
superior virtues in a society of peers, familiar with the laws and traditions of
their Commonwealth. Dzieduszycki, following Augustus II’s forced abdication
by the treaty of Altranstädt of 1706, almost certainly had a name in mind – that
of the amiable, thirty-year old Stanisław Leszczyński, elected as a Swedish-backed
anti-king in 1704, a Polish king over the water for all those dissatisfied with their
current monarch, the best ruler they never had, a role in which he was destined
to make a truly regal career.16 For Dzieduszycki and for others, the mere election
of a ‘Piast’ (the name of Poland’s first royal dynasty) would secure a wider moral
reformation.
In focusing attention on the problems surrounding royal election, one con-
sequence was simply to distract from other weaknesses in the state, and at the
same time to provide an all too simple panacea: if only a native Pole would be
elected king, all would be so much better in what only human frailty prevented
from being the best of Commonwealths. Monarchy itself represented a threat,
but, again, one that could be much reduced by restriction of the choice of
monarch to Piasts. For all these commentators, notwithstanding the dire pic-
ture they painted of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations’ affairs, there was
at bottom little in it that needed to be altered. Only Franciszek Radzewski was
prepared to offer some challenge to the principle of ‘free’ royal election itself, in
suggesting that if a Piast were elected, he could be succeeded by the election of
a suitable member of his family, not least because it would help to cut out for-
eign involvement in interregna. So concerned was he by the violence and chaos
that accompanied royal elections that he was prepared to consider choosing the
monarch by representatives, rather than viritim. Characteristically, he refused to
state his own preference. And he avoided altogether the delicate issue of whether
a successor should be elected during the reigning monarch’s lifetime.17
Lack of harmony also arose from the tensions between magnates and lesser
gentry. The issue came out with particular clarity in the closing years of Augustus
II’s reign. Between 1726 and 1730, all four hetmanships, Poland-Lithuanian’s
supreme military commands, fell vacant. They carried enormous patronage and
influence. Their award was in the king’s gift – but the 1717 Sejm had specified
that these particular offices could only be awarded at a fully constituted parlia-
ment, after the election of its new marshal. The vicious in-fighting among the
great families centred on the king’s wish to award the grand hetmanship of the
Crown, the most powerful of these offices, to Stanisław Poniatowski, a key ally
of the Czartoryski family, a mainstay of Augustus’ political support in Poland.
The king’s expectation was that the family would, after his death, support the
candidature of his son, electoral prince Frederick Augustus. The result was years
of systematic disruption of parliaments by the Czartoryskis’ opponents. The Free
Voice of a Nobleman, published in 1732, exploited Poniatowski’s comparatively
modest material circumstances to portray the opposition to his appointment
as an affront to noble equality, ‘which is the soul of liberty.’18 The same point
was made in the following year by Stanisław Konarski’s anonymously produced
Conversation Between a Certain Landowner and His Neighbour Concerning the
Present Circumstances of 1733. Without equality, Polish liberty meant nothing.
The attack on Poniatowski was an attack on the ordinary szlachta by lords who
despised them. It was all very well for them to glory in the services of their forbears,
but ultimately, what counted was the merit shown by individual noblemen, not
the achievements of great dynasties’ forbears.19 Neither text, however, proposed
any solutions to these conflicts, beyond reasserting the values of noble equality.
The anonymous author of the Eclipsis Poloniae of 1709 (often attributed to the
vice-chancellor of Lithuania, Stanisław Szczuka) did attempt such a solution – a
national system of news and information dissemination via local postmasters.
At the same time, schools should extend their curriculum to ‘the most exact
teaching of geography and political history’. This represented an attempt to make
the structures of the Commonwealth function in the way that they should have
done, if only its ruling estate were endowed with the talents and skills of the
virtuous forbears who had produced the system. No longer would the nobility
be an ignorant mass, swayed by the first rumour, quite incapable of running
the great construct they had inherited. Renewed intellectually and morally, they
would be able to form their own (sound) judgements, without being deceived by
the magnates into backing their specious intrigues, The szlachta would be what
they should be – the true rulers of the Rzeczpospolita.20 Moral improvement
would come about through the revival of the popisy, the annual reviews and
military exercises of the noble levy, but which had long fallen into disuse. Failure
to participate would lead to the confiscation of the defaulters’ estates. ‘Through
these musters, affection will increase among our leading citizens, the unworthy
will be intimidated by the threat of revenge against traitors.’ They would serve
as a final line of defence. Most importantly, ‘The nobility will not succumb to
decay and idleness, but, mounted and armed, will always preserve the virtues
of the knightly estate’.21 Reformers of the later eighteenth century were to place
enormous faith in the power of re-education, but amid the chaos of the Great
Northern War, the solutions proffered by Eclipsis Poloniae must have seemed,
even by Polish standards, wildly optimistic.
Echoes of its concerns surfaced over twenty years later, in Jan Stanisław
Jabłonowski’s Scruple Without Scruple in Poland, or the enlightening of our Polish
nation of its more common sins, yet not regarded as sins; a tract which simply exam-
ines these sins . . . By a certain Pole guilty of these sins, but now penitent. Presented
for his own reformation and that of others. The ‘sins’ he condemned were a mixture
of personal, moral, institutional and economic failings, deficiencies that the Poles
refused to acknowledge as such, enveloping them in the rhetoric of liberty.22
Like the author of the Eclipsis Poloniae, Jabłonowski saw Poland’s lamentable
performance during the Great Northern War as stemming from internal disunity.
A major cause of that disunity lay in the malicious and frivolous dissemination of
misleading or downright mendacious news and rumour, which prevented men
from making rational decisions and prolonged domestic quarrels and confusion.
His main concern was, however, that it was royal ministers who were the victims
of such disinformation, making it impossible to establish any confidence bet-
ween them, lords, Panowie and the nobility at large.23 This, Jabłonowski, dared
to opine, was the result of recklessly embraced freedom of speech: ‘The estate of
nobles regards it as the primary essence of liberty to say what they please about
those equal to themselves in nobility but superior to them in office and fortune.’
He would have clearly liked fully unfettered political discussion to be restricted
to the council chamber: it was not something to be practiced by the wider noble
community, which would only abuse it. With the decay of the times, the szlachta
had grown too backward, immature and morally inadequate to use wisely a
freedom which more virtuous ancestors had derived positive benefits. He did
not deny that the great aristocracy had serious failings. He was unusually open
in berating Poland’s magnates for their hypocrisy as they sought only to enrich
themselves at the expense of the state, under cover of ‘the customary expressions
of love of their country, defence of faith and the laws’.24 But he set far greater
store on the faults of the ordinary gentry.
Once more, the solution lay in a harmonious, divinely sanctioned society, in
which the nobility, repenting of their ‘sins’, co-operated with (that is, accepted
a de facto subordination to) a benign aristocracy, ruling in co-operation with a
well-intentioned monarch. Divine Providence might help bring the necessary
change about – after all, it was through such illumination that Jabłonowski him-
self confessed to his own sinful shortcomings, ‘something I repent in a Catholic
manner.’25 Jabłonowski himself could offer no concrete proposals, apart from
wishful moralising. The defects of the body politic were not systemic, rather they
were ‘sins’. As for his criticisms of the nobility, he had second thoughts. Shortly
after his treatise was published in 1730, he made desperate efforts to recall it. Like
so many of his fellow-magnates, he did not wish to compromise himself with the
gentry, before whom, as he himself admitted, panowie were often powerless.26
Lurking behind such preoccupations, and occasionally coming to the fore,
lay concern at the decline of Poland’s international standing. Since the 1670s,
all of the Commonwealth’s neighbours – Sweden, Brandenburg-Prussia, Russia,
Austria, the Ottoman Porte – had made periodic agreements among themselves
to preserve its liberties intact.27 Jerzy Dzieduszycki feared that foreign powers
would have come together to partition Poland, if only they could agree among
themselves. Instead, they encouraged its ‘disorderly liberty’. ‘We are the subjects of
all other powers and citizens of all Europe, for without a ruler, we are neither at
liberty nor in thrall, yet we serve whoever pays us.’28 If others were not prepared
to go so far as to warn of Partition, they had little doubt that neighbouring pow-
ers found the Rzeczpospolita’s disorderly liberty highly congenial.29
In 1733, the Commonwealth did indeed experience a massive humiliation at
the hands of those neighbours. On the death of Augustus II in February 1733, in
an astonishing degree of unity, the overwhelming majority of nobles rallied to
Augustus’ old opponent, and now father-in-law to Louis XV of France, Stanisław
Leszczyński. But with no effective Polish army, his supporters were unable to
prevent his expulsion from Warsaw by Russian troops and the election, by a small
rump, of Frederick Augustus of Saxony as Augustus III.
The interregnal troubles gave birth to a most eloquent statement of Poland’s
sovereignty. Stanisław Konarski’s Epistolae familiares sub tempus interregni a. 1733
(Letters to Friends During the Interregnum of 1733) were a pamphlet of a sort not
hitherto seen in the Commonwealth. Responding to heavy-handed Austrian and
Russian hints to elect Frederick Augustus, the Epistolae based themselves on the
conventions of international law, not homely sentimentalities about the virtues of
a Piast ruler. ‘The Commonwealth is mistress of its own laws, independent of any
order from foreign princes . . . It is entitled to erect, to define and to abrogate its
own laws.’ It alone knew where its true interests lay. No other power could claim a
better right to define them. It did not seek to interfere in the affairs of others and
was entitled to receive the same consideration from them. Naked force could be
the only basis of any other power’s claim to dictate policy to Poland.30 Konarski
was, of course, aware that naked force could be enough. He desperately and vainly
hoped for significant French aid. Above all, he hoped to jolt the nobility out of
their blinkered concern with their parochial liberty, into a sense of responsibility
for national sovereignty and independence.
The more they threaten . . . the more appropriate that free nations, free citizens, entirely
free electorates should bring themselves to show that they are free to do [what foreign
states forbid]. Let them show they are not subject to the yoke and slavery of any [foreign]
ruler; let them show that they live in a free and independent Commonwealth; let them
show that they can be neither ruled by foreigners nor that foreigners have the right to
command them.31
Substantial numbers of Poles did indeed fight against the Russian-imposed

Augustus III, but, by 1736, the pro-Leszczyński confederacy of Dzików had to
come to terms with a second Wettin king. In a republic without even the rudiments
of an effective bureaucratic and military machine, Konarski’s rhetoric was power-
less. As for Leszczyński, he was to live out his days (he died in 1766) contentedly
as a benign roi philosophe, titular king of Poland and ruling duke of the duchy
of Lorraine, in which the real governing was in the hands of French intendants.
For all the consciousness of dangers threatening the state, the established nos-
trums of ancestral liberty could not be shaken off. Concern at divisions within the
nobility served as a substitute for tackling concrete and crucial problems. It was
all too easy to believe that a Piast king would solve everything. No one questioned
the veto directly. Jabłonowski’s attitude was characteristic: ‘Our honest forbears,
who established the liberum veto for all time, saw in it Troy’s sacrum palladium,
whose preservation would ever keep Troy from perishing; they set it up as a curb
on kings and over-mighty lords, should they ever wish to attain by force what
was illegal and unjust.’ In that ancestral past, the veto had supposedly been used
with a sense of gravitas and responsibility.32 Franciszek Radzewski took a similar
line, hoping that in time, the veto would be used without ‘abuse’.33 Neither he
nor Jabłonowski examined the nature of the veto in any depth: it was simply a
given, integral to the Commonwealth’s freedom.
Yet Radzewski did make one significant suggestion: that the veto be abolished
at the so-called ‘relationary’ (relacyjne) sejmiki, to which envoys supposedly
reported on their conduct at the Sejm. The choice was something of a red her-
ring. They were notorious for their failure to meet and ineffectiveness when they
did meet. Radzewski would have liked to have the ban on the veto extended to
other sejmiki, especially those electing to local and judicial office (albeit, oddly,
not those electing envoys). His argument was striking and simple: ‘What is more
valuable, the liberty of a single nobleman who wishes to disrupt the relationary
sejmik, or the well-being of the entire palatinate?’34 This was not a question of a
man of virtue standing up to save the community, as posited by Andrzej Fredro
some eighty years earlier. Here was the lone individual protesting against the
will of the united constituency and the constituency was expected to give way. It
would have been entirely logical (perhaps even obvious) to broaden this argu-
ment to apply to the Sejm and to the enactment of legislation in general. But this
was not a step Radzewski was prepared to take. Indeed, he explicitly denied that
it was his intention to argue for ‘the abolition universaliter of the liberum veto’.35
The veto was too much of a totem of liberty to challenge outright.
In 1756, one of the highest-ranking men in the land, Crown field-hetman
Wacław Rzewuski, brought out his Thoughts on the Present Circumstances of the
Commonwealth. ‘The failures of Sejmy can only bring upon our country univer-
sal disaster, foreign and civil war,’ he warned.36 Yet he never once mentioned
the veto. For the time being, it was enough that just one Sejm should succeed.
He had the highest hopes of an organ to which, in truth, he ascribed almost
thaumaturgical powers. That one Sejm would ‘without fail’ remove domestic
discord; reform the judiciary; ensure respect for the laws; increase yields to the
treasury, ‘significantly’ expand the army, secure prosperous towns and transform
the economy, and even exclude the Jews from commercial activity. The means
which Rzewuski proposed to attain this flourishing cornucopia were impeccably,
if impractically, unimpeachable. ‘Let us extend our hands to one another, unite
our hearts and minds.’37 He portrayed the Senate as a wise, saintly and far-sighted
areopagus, moulded by the king’s prudent appointments, a mechanism balancing
the power of the monarch against the enthusiasms of the nobility. ‘Our country
needs nothing more than our complete confidence in this most excellent estate
. . .’ If only the ‘lesser brethren’ of the szlachta would love their ‘elder brethren’
in the Senate even more than they already did, the result would be ‘the strongest
sense of obligation and the closest union between the estates . . . which would
maintain our parliaments to the universal contentment and joy of all.’ It was not
the veto which was at fault: what was wanting was harmony. Restore that and all
would be well.38
Men actively created myths that made real reform all the harder to contem-
plate. It was not only a distant, ancestral past that was sanctified and sanitized. So
was living memory, even the present. So anxious was Jerzy Dzieduszycki to decry
foreign domination and to praise the virtues of a native ruler, that he completely
disregarded the turmoil that had wracked the reigns of Poland’s two most recent
‘Piast’ kings, Michael Korybut Wiśniowiecki and John Sobieski, reigns at least as
troubled as those of any of the foreign rulers that he criticised. ‘Szczuka’s’ Eclipsis
Poloniae claimed that Sobieski’s virtues were such that in his reign ‘everything
. . . was constituted in orderly fashion . . . The dignity of the Senate remained
intact, the freedom of the nobility and the security of all were preserved. We all
drew on our revenues, in war and in peace, without hindrance and each one of
us enjoyed honest dignity.’ Of the bitter divisions, the mangled Sejmy, the near
civil strife, the increasingly unsuccessful foreign policy, there was not a hint.39
Wacław Rzewuski could barely contain himself in singing the praises of the
blessings of peace under Augustus III.40 It was impossible to know from this
text, written by one of the principal dignitaries and most prominent politicians
of the Commonwealth, that Augustus had come to the throne as a result of a
bloody civil war, that Polish neutrality during the Russo-Turkish war of 1735–9
had been violated with impunity by the protagonists, and that the ‘peace’ Poland
experienced during the Silesian wars owed more to its inability to pursue any
form of foreign policy than to any services by Augustus III (who, in his capacity
as elector of Saxony, had involved himself in the wars, supporting first Frederick
the Great, then Maria Theresia, with disastrous results for his electorate on both
occasions). The greatest myth of all, of course, was belief in the liberum veto.
Different, indeed provocative, in tone was the Polish Freedom Examined in a
Conversation Between a Pole and a Frenchman of 1732. Its underlying message
was that the Poles should elect as successor to Augustus II his son, electoral
Prince Frederick Augustus. Its warnings that Polish liberty had degenerated
into licence were scarcely new. But this pamphlet went a stage further: it dared
to suggest that liberty, Polish-style, was an illusion. No wonder its author, now
established to have been Crown Referendary Antoni Stanisław Dembowski,41
preferred anonymity. ‘After looking in detail at your freedom, I do not find it to
be anything as extensive as you believe it to be . . .’ To the amazement of his Polish
interlocutor, the Frenchman actually claimed a wider degree of freedom for his
own countrymen. In their fear of absolutum dominium the Poles confused royal
with tyrannical and despotic power. Far from exercising the powers of life and
death over their subjects on a whim, French kings did nothing save after taking
their councillors’ advice and by adhering to due process. Of course, the ultimate
decisions lay with the king, but his ministers could express themselves freely to
him. The King of France was in a position to take decisions for the good of his
people. The dichotomy that Poles perceived between a monarch at odds with
his subjects’ liberty was a false one. In the first instance, they were fooling them-
selves in their glorification of their royal elections. The right of each nobleman
to elect his king was meaningless: in reality, royal elections were not free. The
Poles would do better to have royal elections by majority vote – there was no
reason why freedom should suffer through this. It was perhaps the first piece
of political pamphleteering which urged the nobility to examine some of their
most cherished myths and phobias: be it royal elections, the nature of absolutum
dominium, and even the nature of the Polish victory at Vienna in 1683, which, it
pointed out, could not have happened without German help.42
Yet Polish Freedom Examined was hardly anything other than a superficial exer-
cise. As propaganda supporting a Wettin succession it could only deepen noble
suspicions of the machinations of an already highly suspect monarch. Its argu-
mentation was often shallow. The Polish discussant was suspiciously ready to give
ground: not only did he readily agree that royal elections by majority vote would
be beneficial, he even extended the use of the majority principle to ‘all business in
the Sejm’.43 If much-cherished norms were questioned, it was not in any system-
atic way – it would take much more to persuade the szlachta that the answers
to Poland’s problems required more than the restoration of ancestral virtue.
To a lesser extent, the same problems were true of Stanisław Konarski’s
Conversation Between a Certain Landowner and His Neighbour of the following
year. Ostensibly a defence of the royal ius distributivum and of noble equality, it
dealt with much larger issues, notably the effectiveness of parliament. Konarski
took the conventional line that the veto was an ancestral device, which in its
early days had been infrequently used: it followed from the Nihil Novi statute
of 1505 (which he misdated to 1504), to be deployed for the first time in 1536,
although its use, or rather abuse, by a single individual came only in 1652. ‘At
times, the disruption of Sejmy had a good effect, for our ancestors resorted to
such a dangerous remedy only in the most extreme circumstances, and then, very
rarely.’44 But the truly significant point that Konarski made was that where a law
stood in the way of the good of the Commonwealth, then it had to be put aside.
In this case, he had in mind the requirements about the award of the hetmanships
at a Sejm only after the election of a new speaker, but it was also clear that the
narrow, legalistic ground that he was exploring was one he intended to apply to
the workings of the Sejm as a whole. Like Radzewski some twenty years later, he
mooted, but would not take further, the idea that the good of the whole could
not be allowed to be halted by the interest of a minority or individual. If the veto
had once been used ‘well’, it could be so again.
Two tracts from the Wettin era stand out as elaborate proposals, unpreced-
ented in their scale, for a comprehensive reform of the Rzeczpospolita. The first
was Stanisław Dunin Karwicki’s ‘Exorbitancies of all three estates briefly gath-
ered together’ which first circulated in manuscript form around 1703, and was
published posthumously in an expanded Latin version, De ordinanda Republica,
in 1746 (the two are sufficiently congruent to be regarded as one work).45 The
second was widely ascribed to Stanisław Leszczyński, A Free Voice Freedom
Securing, Głos Wolny Wolność Ubespieczaiący, published in Nancy, probably in
1743, although his authorship has been questioned and the matter remains
unresolved.46 ‘Leszczyński’ never mentions Karwicki’s work, but there are too
many similarities between the two to be coincidental: the ‘Exorbitancies’ had a
considerable influence on the Głos Wolny.
For both writers, trust in the efficacy of Divine Providence, or the conviction
that ‘By anarchy, Poland stands’, ‘Polska nierządem stoi’, were illusions that the
nobility had to jettison, if they were not to fall prey either to absolutism or to
foreign domination and partition.47 Both tracts proposed solutions to Poland’s
problems that went beyond the hand-wringing pleas for the restoration of ances-
tral virtue. ‘Leszczyński’, for all the respect he showed the ancestors, reproached
his readers for an excessive attachment to the ways of the past, catastrophic at
a time when other European states were casting aside such anachronistic ties.48
Both wanted to reserve the throne to Piast candidates, although only ‘Leszczyński’
was prepared to advise abolishing viritim election; and both made positive
proposals for the reformation of electoral procedures.49
Both authors asked their readers to take stock of the basic principles underlying
their Rzeczpospolita. Its ‘forma mixta’, far from combining the best elements of
the three fundamental forms of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, pitted
them against one another. ‘Poland’, observed Karwicki, ‘is both a monarchy and
a republic. The rules of monarchic government are one thing, those of a repub-
lic another. In the latter, freedom seeks its own preservation, in the former, the
maxims of kingship are entirely contrary, and since each seeks its own interest,
endless confusion must result.’ ‘Leszczyński’ agreed that ‘this incompatibilitas
Monarchici & Democratici status constantly gives rise to internal division, colli-
sions, civil wars and other revolutions; the source of this is that neither monarchy
nor liberty have the due form that will safeguard each . . .’50
The main source of domestic frictions, indeed, for Karwicki, the root cause of
Poland’s problems, was the noble estate’s mistrust of the royal powers of patron-
age, the ius distributivum over most central and local offices and the immense
leaseholds of the crown lands, the królewszczyzny. The resentments generated by
royal favour had led, in the final analysis, not only to disruption of Sejmy, but
had even, in the past, contributed to extensive losses of territory as disgruntled
magnates refused to place their services at the Commonwealth’s disposal. The
nobility at large lost faith in those who gained royal reward. Karwicki painted a
chilling, if much overblown, picture of the potential for subversion and corrup-
tion of this, the last great royal prerogative.51 ‘Leszczyński’ would have removed
the royal powers of appointment to all save military and ecclesiastical posts,
and assigned crown lands to the treasury to fund official salaries. Once kings
could no longer bestow these leaseholds, a major source of resentment against
them would be automatically removed – from those disappointed in their hopes
of this particular ‘reward’. Subjects would be attached to their kings for their
virtues rather than for the rewards they gave. The king would be so placed that
‘doing good to all, he could do harm to no-one.’ ‘Leszczyński’ proposed that the
so-called ‘Table lands’, royal estates whose revenues went directly to the monarch,
should also be taken over by the treasury, and be replaced by a civil list. A new
basis of trust would emerge in place of the chronic tensions between ruler and
ruled. The king could do no harm, all sides could give their full attention to ‘the
common good’. Even bad kings would rapidly come to see that they would gain
nothing by any machinations against the state, for its and their interests were too
intimately intertwined. A new unity ‘without which there is no salvation’ would
ensue among a hitherto divided nobility. The long-sought-after concord within
the state would finally be established.52
As befitted a truly republican form of government, royal powers of appoint-
ment would be largely replaced by a system of election to office by the sejmiki.
Karwicki, a Protestant, would have gone as far as allowing the sejmiki to elect
bishops and even the primate.53 The king would still be able to name ministers,
but only on the advice of his ministerial council. In the De Ordinanda, the central
ministerial posts were made elective at the Sejmy.54 Though bereft of their powers
of patronage, kings would nevertheless now command a genuine and greater
respect among the nobility; a new confidence within the nobility, especially
between ordinary nobles and the more powerful, would be restored. ‘Better to
have a figurehead king and a living Republic, than a figurehead Republic and a
living king.’55
Once concord among the nobility were restored, the way would be clear for
effective Sejmy. ‘If any exorbitancy in the noble estate is of greatest danger to
liberty and our country, it is the disruption of parliaments . . .’ It could lead only
either to absolutism or to being carved up by neighbouring powers.56 ‘Where,
in truth,’ asked ‘Leszczyński’, ‘is this Commonwealth? It is surely at the Sejm.
And when the Sejm is disrupted . . . where are we to find this Commonwealth?’
It was all very well to trust in Divine Providence, but Divine Providence ruled
the world through order and Poland could be no exception.57 He and Karwicki
put forward elaborate proposals for more effective parliamentary machinery.
Karwicki wanted annual Sejmy, sitting for as long as business required, instead of
the current six-week sessions. He would have created three parliamentary cham-
bers in which envoys and senators sat jointly. The first would prepare legislation
on the basis of the sejmiki instructions, the second would actually frame the
legislation and the third would deal with all fiscal business. Every constituency
would have its envoys spread among all three chambers and each would decide to
which chamber its envoys should be assigned. For particularly important matters
and the enactment of extraordinary taxation, the three chambers would come
together. New standing orders would ensure the proper despatch of business
and envoys would be answerable for their conduct to reinvigorated ‘relationary’
sejmiki, which would assemble within three to four weeks of the end of the parlia-
mentary session.58 Only truly independent country gentlemen could share in this
system. Landless nobles or those in the employ of others and serving soldiers, that
is, those most susceptible to corruption or intimidation would be barred from
active participation in the sejmiki. ‘He who serves loses his freedom.’59
Karwicki’s recast Sejm, his devolved elections and curtailment of the royal
distributive powers were meant to align much more closely the interests of landed
nobles and magnates, and, above all, to put the nobility firmly in control of their
own state. Envoys were to have no say of their own – they were unequivocally
the mouthpieces of their electorates. ‘The nobleman at a sejmik is unburdened
by any outside mandates or instructions; he brings with him his own free judge-
ment and is entirely independent in what he thinks and says. But a landed envoy
is entrusted with the instruction and mandates of his palatinate, which he is
obliged to discharge in faith, honour, conscience and on his oath; he brings to
the Sejm a mind and a freedom to initiate proposals or to vote constrained by the
opinions of his fellow-nobles.’60 Karwicki hoped that the nobility would persuade
themselves that parliament existed not simply to vote taxation. It was not just
there to protect the nobility’s freedoms, it was there to do things, ‘to satisfy the
electorate’s demands’. Prolonged Sejmy, which could no longer be corrupted by
a rescinded royal patronage, were not the threat to liberty that the liberum veto,
by its mere existence, implied. To believe, as so many did at present, that Sejm
disruption safeguarded liberty was a ‘chimera polityczna’.61
The veto itself would stay. ‘His free voice is the adornment of a Polish noble-
man and a pillar of noble liberty. Take away his ius vetandi and his nie pozwalam,
then all the laws of arbitrary government will establish themselves and the
szlachta will become the equals of the nobilities of other nations which live
under absolute rule.’ But the veto was being chronically abused in liberty’s name
and had to be reformed.62 The idea that one virtuous envoy would save the
Commonwealth and its freedom from disaster when all others were self-seeking
and corrupt was an illusion. ‘Death to us and our country, should such times ever
come. For each state flourishes not so much through good laws, as through good
and upright citizens.’63 By his sole veto, one errant envoy could inflict intolerable
damage, which subsequent Sejmy might only with difficulty repair; by contrast,
if a Sejm enacted a bad law, it would be much easier for subsequent Sejmy to
amend it. Karwicki proposed converting the veto from a device for wrecking
the whole Sejm to a block on individual bills.64 The Sejm’s marshal would call a
plenary session of the parliament to try to persuade the objector to desist. If he
refused, the offending bill would be held over to the next parliamentary session.
In the meantime, because an envoy was the mouthpiece of his constituency,
it would be the constituency and the Province to which it belonged (that is,
Wielkopolska, Małopolska or Lithuania) which would adjudicate on the validity
of the objection in a specially convened court, elected by the sejmiki: the body of
envoys themselves could not do so, ‘for a peer has no jurisdiction over his peer.’
In the later De Ordinanda, Karwicki suggested that protesting envoys should
justify their stand by reference to their instruction and that, moreover, all the
envoys of a constituency should agree that the use of the veto would be justified.
Protestors adjudged to have abused their veto because they had been bribed or
out of self-interest would be punished by loss of all capacity to serve in office
‘or as seems appropriate’. Once a few unfounded objections had been punished,
Karwicki felt that recourse to the veto would become far less frequent. ‘And so the
ius vetandi will remain intact and punishment will be visited on malefactors.’65
Elections at sejmiki, especially of envoys should, felt Karwicki, be conducted
by majority secret vote, since elections themselves did not involve ‘materie
status’ – and the veto was supposed to be used only to safeguard the interests
of the state. Envoy elections were to be held before instructions were drafted,
but the results announced only after the drafting was complete, so that disap-
pointed candidates would not be tempted to wreck the instructions, or insert
self-interested clauses into them. The instructions themselves were to be enacted

by unanimity: Karwicki accepted that an individual protest could disrupt a sejmik
(oddly, he does not seem to have envisaged restricting the veto to individual
points of the instruction), but even if this happened, the envoys should still
attend the Sejm ‘to look to the interests and good of their palatinate and of the
Commonwealth as a whole’,66 in which role they could presumably have still taken
a real part in the proceedings. The veto at constituency level would be effectively
circumvented.
Karwicki extended the principle of majority election to the monarchy. His
reasoning was wholly pragmatic. In reality, elections had always been decided
by the stronger party. To adhere to unanimity would only encourage domestic
conflict. The nobility would be given a real say if initial recommendations for a
new monarch were made at constituency level: the candidate with the most votes
(cast by secret ballot) would be deemed its choice and his name would be taken
by the current envoys and senators to the Election Sejm (if two candidates tied,
both names would go forward) – viritim voting would disappear. The Election
Sejm would proclaim the candidate with the most votes king, after weighting
them in proportion to the amount of tax paid by each constituency (Karwicki
had already proposed that the number of envoys each constituency could return
should be proportionate to the tax paid); constituencies could even increase their
weighting by volunteering to pay more taxes. All nobles were equal, but those who
shouldered greater burdens were entitled to greater consideration. By restricting
royal candidatures to Piasts, Karwicki reckoned that no interregnum, from the
death of the previous king to the coronation of his successor, should last longer
than eight weeks. Such fixed electoral procedures would greatly reduce the perils
to which interregna left the Commonwealth exposed.67
These proposals might seem impossibly cumbersome. Yet even to begin to
convince a society that was almost pathologically suspicious of threats from
the monarchy, or, indeed, from any form of central authority, to its rights
and liberties, proposing such elaborate safeguards was inevitable. Whatever
Karwicki’s protestations of eschewing Platonic utopias,68 his tract starkly revealed
a fundamental difficulty confronting all would-be reformers: any far-reaching
overhaul of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was an impossibly utopian
undertaking. Reconciling the untrammelled freedom of the individual who, ‘on
his own properties is absolutus Dominus’, ‘acknowledging no superior power over
himself ’ with effective government in the Rzeczpospolita 69 required the squaring
of a political circle; without an imposing nexus of checks and balances the noble
electorate could not begin to be persuaded that its freedoms would not suffer. But
the more imposing these checks and balances, the more ‘Platonic’ and ‘chimeric’
they would inevitably seem.
The same problem marked ‘Leszczyński’s’ Free Voice, not least because it took
a much wider approach, looking on society as a whole, not simply catering to the
narrow interests of the nobility. Although there would continue to be a central
Sejm, government was to be brought much closer to the szlachta electorate, in
that each of the three main provinces (as opposed to just the Crown and the
Grand Duchy) would have their own array of ministers and their own army.
The fundamental confusion of monarchic and republican government would,
as with Karwicki, be resolved by stripping the king of his distributive powers.
‘Leszczyński’ proposed at one and the same time to strengthen the rank-and-file
nobility’s proprietorship of the state and to integrate it into the monarchy by
making senators elective (by a majority ballot) at the sejmiki, from among a choice
of four candidates put forward by the king: senators would thus cease largely
to be beholden to the monarch, while his right to choose from those presented
would offer him some compensation for his loss of patronage.70 ‘Leszczyński’
acknowledged that ministers attracted as much suspicion as the king and that
they had often misused their powers. In future, they would be both checked and
assisted by four ministerial councils, of the army, treasury, justice/chancery and
polities or ‘general good order’. Ministers’ life tenure would end – they could hold
their posts only for six years, though the tenure could be renewed by the Sejm.71
To make the Sejm effective, its proceedings would be conducted in secret to
ensure soundness of decisions and to exclude the chaotic interventions of the
public; the marshal had to be given real power to steer and order debates. It would
sit for six months each year, from October to March. The role of the envoys was
vastly enhanced: from now on, each palatinate would elect eight envoys, together
with four substitutes to stand in case of death, illness or unavoidable absence.
The increased numbers were necessitated by a new, extended range of envoys’
responsibilities. The new parliament would create separate ‘general deputations’
to cover the activities of the four ministerial councils: each would be composed
of two envoys from each constituency and from senators nominated by the king.
In effect, there would be four separate chambers of the Sejm, each meeting on a
different day of the week, with a plenary session on the fifth day, to pass laws on
the basis of preparatory work in the separate chambers – ‘Leszczyński’ blithely
expected that the plenary session would simply accept or reject the chambers’
proposals without further debate. When the Sejm was over, half of each palati-
nate’s complement of envoys would remain in attendance on the ministry whose
work they had covered – the others would return to sit on a palatinate council,
which was responsible for implementing the Sejm’s decisions at local level. The
legislature would act as its own executive – indeed, since the palatinate council
would also take over the role of the courts of first instance, the legislature would
also act to some extent as its own judiciary.72 These proposals were, of course,
produced some years before Montesquieu’s celebrated views on the importance
of the separation of the powers, but that a Polish nobleman should contemplate
combining the jurisdictions of the central organs of the state to any such degree
was probably a reflection of the despair felt at the dysfunctionality of so much
within the Rzeczpospolita.
Like Karwicki, ‘Leszczyński’ had to face up to the veto – and like Karwicki, he
could not bring himself to say anything against it. It was not his intention,
God forbid! to infringe the liberum veto, it is the privilege of our freedom, an honour to
the name of nobleman, it is even the particular means in some circumstances of saving
our country; and though malevoli often misuse it . . . I however prefer periculosam
libertatem, quam quietum servitium; for the abuse of something that is precious does not
detract from its value. And so, wishing sacrosancte to conserve the liberum veto in omni
authoritate, we must try to ensure that no occasion or pretext is furnished of harmful
contradiction . . .73
For the sejmiki, he adapted Karwicki’s solution: envoys would be elected (by
majority vote) after the drafting of their instruction and even if, by use of the
veto, no instruction were agreed, the envoys could still represent their electors at
the Sejm. But, in principle, objections could be raised only to individual points
of the instruction – and such discarded injunctions would be sent on to the Sejm
anyway, as the unofficial postulates of the palatinate – ‘in this way, the freedom to
speak and to object would be fully preserved.’ In practice, by a route somewhat
different to Karwicki’s, the veto at sejmik level would be rendered meaningless.
Moreover, in a significant, if discreetly presented departure from Karwicki,
‘Leszczyński’ changed the nature of instructions: they would be ‘desideria’ and
as such, no longer binding.74
As for the veto at the Sejm ‘it should never extend to shutting down its activ-
ity, for that would be a despotic power in the hands of every citizen to close the
mouth of the entire free nation and remove from the Republic the authority to
take counsel for itself ’. No law, ‘Leszczyński’ claimed, justified such a blanket
disruption. The wrecking of an entire parliamentary session could never be of
benefit to the nation. Likewise, it was (after Karwicki) absurd to believe that one
man alone could possibly save the Commonwealth from itself if all the rest were
bent on its ruin. Objections could be allowed only against agreed bills; they had to
be taken seriously and debated; if the objector could not be persuaded to retract,
the bill had to be dropped from that parliament.75
‘Leszczyński’ was prepared to go a long way towards challenging entrenched
attitudes. He wanted to abolish the gentry’s outdated levée-en-masse, the pospolite
ruszenie. It was absurd to believe that such a primitive, untrained force could
possibly hold its own against professional armies – the sooner it was abolished
and replaced by a modernised force of 100,000 men, the better (he did not rule
out replacing the feudal host with some kind of better-trained noble militia).76
He wanted to end the gentry’s customs exemptions; he hoped that they would be
prepared to pay a ten per cent tax on incomes, though he accepted that it would
be passed on to their serfs – his main purpose was at least to get the nobility to
accept the principle for a permanent tax, payable by all, as a basis for a more
rational fiscality. Writing of the need for such a system, the Free Voice argued that
‘if we were to apply, without reserve, our general will (‘wola nasza powszechna’)
to this examination [of the natural economic produce of Poland]’, a sound fiscal
system could indeed be set up.77 The notion of the ‘general will’ was to have a
significant ideological career in Poland a generation later, but that it should sur-
face in a Polish work composed in the late 1730s and early 1740s, years before
Montesquieu considered it in his Spirit of the Laws of 1748, let alone Rousseau’s
extolling of it in The Social Contract of 1762 is not the least of the mysteries
around this treatise.78 Perhaps even more surprisingly, ‘Leszczyński’ wrote of
the ‘particular will’, ‘wola partykularna’, that is, the self-interested individual
will, as being the obstacle to salutary change – indeed its free rein had brought
about Poland’s anarchy.79 Perhaps the Głos Wolny did influence Rousseau (he
knew the French version, La Voix Libre), who over twenty years later was also
to argue that men could in fact distinguish between their self-interest and the
general good of society, between their particular and the general will. Rousseau
envisaged the general will forcing the particular to be free of its particularity to
work towards the common good; the Głos Wolny could only appeal to a largely
uncomprehending noble audience, the forcing of whose particular wills was out
of the question.80
‘Leszczyński’ did not confine himself to strictly constitutional considerations.
He questioned the whole socio-economic basis of the Commonwealth, in what
was the first and most extensive critique of its kind. Without serf labour, the
nobility would be nothing. As matters stood, the only difference between Poland’s
serfs and slaves was that the former did not wear shackles. This was both ‘contrary
to conscience and also contrary to sound politics’. If the peasant unrest endemic
in the Ukraine should ever spread throughout Poland, there was a real danger it
would be exploited by a monarch to impose ‘absolutum dominium’. He decried
the nobility’s powers of life and death over their serfs as shameful. Government
existed for the security of all. He advocated replacing the serf-master relationship
by a legally enforceable contractual one, which would involve an emancipation
of the peasantry, and replacing labour obligations with agreed rents in cash and
kind. Once peasants were given the opportunity to better themselves economic-
ally, not only would seigneurs gain from higher rentals, but Poland’s stagnating
agriculture would be turned round, foreign colonists would be more readily
attracted and a general demographic and economic recovery would follow.
Commoners should be entitled to follow whatever craft or trade they wished.
Peasants would be afforded justice by the right of appeal from seigneurial to the
regular courts which the nobility thus far reserved for themselves – ultimately to
the supreme courts of appeal, the Tribunals (the writer clearly had some know-
ledge of peasant lawsuits in French courts). God, after all, had given freedom
to all, regardless of social distinction – ‘by what right can we take that away?’81
Fear of strong kingship remained the common feature of political thinking.
Why not, then, abolish the monarchy altogether? The nobility had no stomach
for such a step, almost as radical in its own way as the establishment of absolut-
ism would have been. For the role of the king remained vital. Without him, the
patronage machine that drove Polish politics would have seized up. For all the
suggestions of transferring his patronage to Sejm and sejmiki, these institutions
remained so liable to disruption that there could be no confidence in their abil-
ity to deliver the appointments and benefits to which the nobility’s movers and
shakers felt entitled. In 1764, there did indeed appear a unique ‘Moralisation on
the condition of the Commonwealth’, a manuscript whose author, now identified
as Jan Nepomucen Poniński, did urge abolition of the monarchy. This, he argued,
would also free the nobility from their dependency on the magnates. Abolition
of the royal distributive power was not enough – no monarch could be trusted.
With its elimination, ambition and private interest would disappear – it would
even be possible to introduce a majority-voting Sejm which would be immune
to disruption, and which could consequently take over the administration of
the ius distributivum, acting on the recommendations of the electorate.82 The
dating of this tract is significant. In October 1763, Augustus III had died. His
sickly successor, Frederick Christian I, died in December, leaving a thirteen-year
old son. Wettin supporters, Poniński included, were in total disarray, unable
to mount any effective resistance to the Czartoryski family and their Russian
backers, and the empress Catherine II’s preferred choice of Poland’s future king,
her former lover, Stanisław Poniatowski the younger. The ‘Moralizacja’s’ remedy
against Russian interference lay in an appeal to faith, freedom and ancestral
valour, with the assurance that the powers of Europe, once they saw the Poles
helping themselves, would rush to support them against those destroyers of the
continent’s equilibrium, Russia and its Prussian ally.83 It was wishful thinking; its
constitutional suggestions were simply a spoiler against a successful rival. There
is nothing to suggest this tract had any wider influence.
But no political tract of the Wettin era achieved anything positive, beyond
providing inspiration from one author to another. These various writings did
not build up anything like a head of steam for reform: the very nature of Polish
politics vitiated any impact they might have had in that direction. They were
scripts in a vacuum. All who dared seek change were mortally handicapped by
the near complete absence of any supporting framework. Failed Sejmy, whether
disrupted or filibustered, were the norm. Political life was based on two-year
cycles of parliamentary ineffectiveness, an endless present of a non-functional
status quo. Political and constitutional non-achievement was the norm, no mat-
ter how much individuals might lament parliamentary disruption. For change
to occur, for its desirability to be appreciated, at least a critical mass within the
szlachta had to be won over. If the old order was blessed not only by ancestral
sacrifice, but also by divine approval, or even afflicted by divine punishment, then
there was little that mere men could do to bring about change, or indeed, even
contemplate what kind of political change might be made, beyond a return to
some mythologised past. Even if the proposals for the reform of Sejm procedures
advocated by Karwicki or ‘Leszczyński’ could have been implemented, they would
have given a new respectability to the liberum veto, precisely because they aimed
to strip it of the ‘abuses’ that had supposedly accrued around it. They could only
have produced a cumbersome and vulnerable state organism, more concerned
with protecting ‘liberties’ than the state itself – even if the veto were never to be
used. And these were the most far-reaching proposals mooted – Lubomirski,
Dzieduszycki, Radzewski and the others barely tinkered with the edges. If, on
occasion, they happened on a promising line of intellectual attack, they shied
away from pressing it home. Jabłonowski may have been prepared to maintain
that ‘the law and the Sejm are what an absolute monarch is in his lands’ but he
made no effort to elaborate on this striking affirmation of putative parliamentary
power.84 Karwicki, Radzewski, ‘Leszczyński’, Konarski, even Bystrzonowski, found
it intolerable that an individual should be able to place his own interest above that
of the Commonwealth – but that did not lead them to denounce the veto as such.
As Augustus III’s reign neared its end, there was little sign of szlachta willingness
to face up to the fundamental problems of the Commonwealth.
4
Keeping the faith
The szlachta’s world of ancestral virtue and heroism received validation, approval
and correction from God Himself. The Catholic Church was an integral part
of the Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów, as much in a physical and spatial way as
culturally and intellectually, to a degree extreme even by the standards of the early
modern age. Sejmiki normally met in churches or in churchyards; monasteries
and religious houses frequently served as depositories of noble archives and legal
records. Sejmiki and Sejmy opened with a hearing of the Catholic mass. Virtually
every instruction issued by a sejmik to its envoys began with a solemn injunction
to preserve the liberties and standing of the Catholic faith. The Commonwealth’s
seventeen Roman Catholic bishops were ex officio members of the Senate. Every
second Crown chancellor was drawn from their number. During interregna, the
archbishop-primate of Gniezno was, as interrex, acting head of state. Clerical
deputies sat on the Tribunals of the Crown and Lithuania, assisting in judging
civil disputes between clergy and laity. Poland’s printing presses were largely run
by the clergy. The great Confederacies of the eighteenth century were formed
not only for the preservation of liberties, but for that of the dominant, Catholic,
religion.1
The clearest statement of this identification came in 1764, when Szymon
Majchrowicz S. J. dedicated his Happy Endurance of Kingdoms or their Miserable
Fall, for Free Nations to Behold, That They Might Preserve their Inestimable
Happiness to the ‘Most Illustrious Estates of the Commonwealth’.2 This mam-
moth (some 1,500 pages) exploration of the workings of Divine Providence
throughout human history cast the szlachta as the new chosen people, defenders
of the state, succourers of the serfs, protectors of the nation, to whom God had
entrusted the task of preserving their country ‘in its full and ancient Golden
Liberty’.3 Others – Jews, Byzantines, Crusaders, the quondam Catholic kings of
northern Europe had benefited from the selfsame divine gift of golden freedom,
złota wolność, until their corruption and faithlessness brought about its loss.4
By contrast, in Poland, it had always been preserved. It had avoided ‘the dread-
ful errors of Mahometanism, heresy, Lutheranism, Calvinism and Jansenism’,
harbingers of mass damnation.5 God had showered down blessings on the Poles,
who had consistently fought as much for their Catholicism as for their country.
During the 1650s, His inscrutable judgements allowed Poland to be wracked
by Cossack revolt and the invasions of the Deluge, but they had also enabled it
to survive and even deliver Christendom ‘from patent pagan slavery’, through
Sobieski’s victory at Vienna in 1683.6
Majchrowicz crowned Poland’s moral superiority with divine approval – there
was therefore nothing positive it could learn from the example of other nations,
save take note of salutary warnings against straying from the straight and narrow.
Lauding the supposedly peaceable reigns of Augustus II and his son, he sacralised
out of existence the Great Northern War and the violent interregnum that placed
Augustus III on the throne.7 They might as well have not happened. There was
not a trace in his work of the repeated violations of Polish neutrality that had
marked the Seven Years War, be it in the shape of Russian transit marches (a ‘way-
side inn’ as contemporaries described the Commonwealth), Prussian military
plundering and the flooding of the country by Frederick the Great’s mass coinage
counterfeiting. The conflict was not a temporal, political event, but a divine
punishment and admonition to Catholic slackers to mend their ways.8 At the
time that Majchrowicz was writing, Russian troops were suppressing resistance to
the election of Catherine the Great’s preferred candidate for the throne, Stanisław
Poniatowski, but not on his pages.
Politics were not primarily a matter for secular activity, but a mechanism for
God’s intervention in the affairs of men. To divert from God’s path, to follow
‘false wisdom and hypocritical Machiavellian ratio status’ invariably called forth
the same retribution: loss of ‘Golden Freedom’, either through subjugation by
other powers, or by the tyranny of their own kings: the fate of Sweden, Denmark,
Hungary, Bohemia and Germany.9 As for the singularly wretched British Isles,
by James I’s reign, ‘the whole kingdom of England, with its adjoined realms of
Scotland and Ireland, groaned under this lack of faith’ and, for good measure,
‘the posterity of these once illustrious citizens married with and mixed with
the Jews.’10 At a time when across the continent, not least in Catholic states, the
Catholic Church found itself beleaguered as never before by the doubts of phi-
losophers and the demands of an assertive state, Majchrowicz tried to persuade
his readers that only the Church offered a route to temporal, as well as spiritual,
salvation. God would inspire statesmen who honoured him with true ratio status,
that is to say, piety, prayer, avoidance of gaming and debauchery, observance of
the laws of God, the Church and one’s own country. ‘It is through this that the
ancient Poles preserved, to our own day, freedom and happiness; for as long as all
this flourished in the castles, palaces and courts of all Christian nations, they were
happy; but when they rejected it, misfortunes, decline and fall ensued.’11 These
politics of theological fantasy were also the politics of the Polish Commonwealth.
In 1772, just as Prussia, Russia and Austria were finalising the First Partition,
Majchrowicz produced a supplement to his work, in which he warned that the
turmoil of the past ten years represented divine chastisement – if only more Poles
K E E P I N G T H E FA I T H 57
would repent and return to the piety and virtues of their ancestors, Poland could
yet flourish, or, at least its inhabitants could attain eternal Salvation.12
Majchrowicz was not alone. Such distinguished writers as Andrzej Maksymilian
Fredro and Wespazjan Kochowski in the later seventeenth century gloried in the
importance of divine protection for Poland.13 Jan Dębiński (much esteemed
by Majchrowicz) in 1727 saw in the Commonwealth a reflection of the divine
order of the universe: yes, Poland was troubled and disorderly, but these were
but the troubles and disorders reflected in the seemingly erratic paths of the
planets in God’s firmament.14 In 1767, the Franciscan Florian Jaroszewicz in
his Poland, Mother of Saints portrayed the country as a veritable cornucopia of
holiness. He detailed, with monotonous similarity, the beatific lives of hundreds
of individuals, predominantly drawn from ancestors of the leading families of the
day.15 Benedykt Chmielowski’s encyclopaedia, The New Athens, had mercifully
restricted its entry ‘Poland, country of saints’ to some seven pages. By contrast,
there was barely a politician of any note (and many of no note whatsoever) in
whose ‘piety’, świątobliwość, Jaroszewicz did not revel. Thus Michael Pac, Grand
Hetman of Lithuania during the Great Northern War, a man notorious for his
corruption and venality, was praised, in a characteristic entry, for his sanctity
and for ‘being, above all, ever mindful of God and his conscience’.16 To have lived
and to have belonged to a more-or-less distinguished family secured a measure
of sanctity.
No political work of the first half of the eighteenth century could seriously
envisage a Poland that did not enjoy at least conditional divine endorsement.
Genuine reformers had little choice but to appeal to religious support for their
plans. ‘Leszczyński’, author of Free Voice, Freedom Announcing agreed that only
Divine Providence had preserved Poland – but it was a mistake to continue to
trust in its open-ended, continuous protection.17 No state that was not based on
the principles of the Holy Faith and the gospels could last. A free republic could
not look to good governance through strong kingship, and so, ‘the observance
of a Christian politics is most necessary’.18 The Głos Wolny ascribed a particular
role for the clergy. If the holy Catholic faith was the true basis of temporal well
being, it was naturally the clergy who were best placed to preach obedience to
it. Not only should they preach the gospel, thereby contributing to a necessary
reformation of manners, but they should start off by reforming themselves. This
meant eschewing excessive wealth and pomp, ensuring a decent standard of living
for all clergy, and putting their wealth to genuinely charitable and welfare use;
and finally, because they were part of the state, it would mean contributing to
the maintenance of an expanded army.19 The szlachta always favoured sharing
the burden of taxation with others.
The most ambitious role for the clergy was expounded in a work which saw
three editions between 1750 and 1753 – Stefan Garczyński’s sprawling Anatomia
Rzeczypospolitey Polskiey, although the many criticisms that he also permitted

himself of the clergy won him few friends among the ecclesiastical hierarchy.20
Garczyński was a lay senator, palatine of Poznań, who enjoyed a generally muted
political career. His properties lay close to Poland’s western border. Educated in
Breslau, he was much influenced by developments in neighbouring Brandenburg-
Prussia. Prussian colonisation, settlement and educational policies – the drive
by the Hohenzollern to create the gute Polizeistaat – made a huge impression
on this conscientious landowner who could not rest easy at the thought of an
impoverished Protestant state enjoying a seemingly much greater degree of social
harmony and domestic prosperity than his own Catholic Commonwealth, vastly
more extensive and endowed with much greater resources. For this deeply reli-
gious man, Divine Providence constantly intervened in the run of human affairs.
His real interest was moral reformation, which would allow demographic and
economic regeneration to make of Poland a formidable, albeit pacific republic.
God and His works permeate the Anatomia. Miracles were commonplace.
Poland had been powerful and prosperous in the fourteenth century under
Casimir the Great, who had consciously set out to replicate the divine order on
earth, forging a harmonious relationship between the estates of nobles, towns-
men and peasants. That happy concord had long since gone awry as Poles had
failed to honour the Creator.21 Instead they now wallowed in selfishness and lux-
ury, while the less fortunate stewed in oppression, squalor, idleness, beggary and
drink. Little wonder then that God so frequently punished Poland.22 The chief
symptom of the country’s plight was its relatively meagre population, which,
unless remedied, would forever keep it weak and impoverished. The chief single
cause of this was the inhabitants’ widespread neglect, as Garczyński saw it, of
their children. In Christ, God had taken human form; it was incumbent on men,
therefore, to honour and look after their own bodies. The nobility’s oppression
of the peasantry, aimed at squeezing out the maximum in labour services, only
led to poverty, fecklessness and idleness. By contrast, the German states, so much
less favoured by nature, flourished because all social groups kept to their allotted
place: no estate aggravated any other. The result was the order and harmony that
God wished.23 The depredations of foreign powers against Polish territory were
a sign of God’s displeasure. Foreign intervention during the 1733 interregnum
was divine punishment for oppression of the serfs. Garczyński even warned that
the country was menaced with foreign annexation – divine punishment for the
neglect of basic education in the population at large.24
Garczyński reserved his particular wrath for the neglect and squalor in which
so many Polish children grew up. For him, cleanliness was most emphatically
next to godliness: Christ himself had washed the feet of the apostles, yet Poland’s
repellent serfs, the ‘feet’ of the body of the Rzeczpospolita, reduced to their con-
dition through the exploitation of their avaricious, self-seeking noble masters,
thronged the churches in filthy, malodorous congregations.25 He condemned the

nobility for the preference he claimed to detect among them to keep their families
small, if possible, restricting themselves to one son. This only encouraged the
lower orders to follow suit, even by resorting to abortion, and to show a general
neglect for their offspring.26 Likewise, God did not take lightly the nobility’s
oppression of the towns: ‘We often complain at neighbouring powers, that
they violate our rights with drawn sword, but we do not consider that our own
unjust oppressions, which we inflict on our towns despite their legal immunities,
call down God’s just vengeance.’27 The wider consequences were depopulation
and a stagnant, decaying economy, in which no one had any incentive to work,
over-reliance on imports and a feeble agriculture which could not provide the
markets for a healthy industrial production. Urban commerce was dominated by
impoverished, parasitic Jews existing on the thinnest of profit margins.28 There
was virtually nothing in this state, for which so many of Garczyński’s contempor-
aries claimed divine protection, to please the Almighty.
The remedy, as for the Free Voice, lay in Poland’s clergy. Garczyński was clearly
impressed by the way in which the clergy of Brandenburg-Prussia, including the
Catholic clergy of Silesia, had been co-opted into the service of the state and the
creation of a seemingly industrious, even educated population which knew its
place in the social order. What could be done in Silesia and Brandenburg could
be done elsewhere. He hoped that the intervention of the pope and his nuncio
would galvanise the bishops and parish clergy to doing more than just preaching
an ethereal message of salvation.29 Ecclesiastics had to be reminded that they had
a duty to care for the physical, as well as the spiritual, welfare of the peasantry in
particular. Indeed, for Garczyński, the boundary between the spiritual and the
physical was a fluid and open one. What honoured God above all was a flourish-
ing, happy, healthy and industrious population, making the most of its talents.
It was incumbent on the clergy to urge and instruct their flocks in cleanliness
and hygiene, to ensure that there was an elementary teacher (‘bakałarz’) in every
village, to instruct the otherwise feral offspring of the peasantry ‘not so much in
learning, as in the acquisition of restraint, politeness and modesty’. His duties
were to extend to instructing the children in the basics of religion and also in
reading. Such a teacher should be financed from the various fees which clergy
levied on their parishioners and from which the latter received no tangible
returns.30 To counter the idleness, scrounging and beggary everywhere prevalent,
‘the clergy, in their homilies, their catechising and particularly in confession . . .
should commend labour, from which there will be great profit to God’s church
and hence to our country.’ Labour, as well as creating a physically healthy popu-
lation, fostered the virtues of humility and obedience and kept men from the
distractions of vice.31
The creation of an industrious, productive and willing peasantry required
more than just clerical admonition. Oppression by landowners had to end. The
clergy could give a lead by reducing labour obligations on their own proper-
ties and by urging temporal seigneurs to do the same.32 In the first instance,
Garczyński wanted an all-round reduction of peasant labour services by at least
one day per week. He even went as far as recommending that seigneurs who
failed to do this should be hauled before the consistorial courts (although he
specified no form of sanctions). Ultimately, the Sejm should regulate labour dues,
restricting them to a maximum of three days per week for the most substantial
peasantry, a measure he claimed would rapidly restore Poland to the prosper-
ity it had enjoyed before the wars of the 1650s.33 A diligent and clean, healthy
workforce would transform the agricultural economy, and, in its train, revive the
towns. A more discerning, sanitary and pious peasantry would provide a healthy
market for a domestic textile industry. The population would grow; even the Jews
(whom Garczyński also lambasted for the squalor in which their children sup-
posedly grew up) could be converted to Christianity.34 Social harmony between
the estates would be restored. Poland would become stronger and richer, more
capable of fielding large, regularly paid armies, which would put an end to the
humiliations that foreigners inflicted on it. Best of all, the Commonwealth would
be able to reverse the moral decline of many years and become pleasing to God.
Garczyński looked to God to save Poland, if only the Poles would make
themselves worthy of that salvation. His grand vision was essentially an attempt
to provide an answer to the problem that so many Polish writers identified, of
a widespread falling away from the harmony and mores of the ancestors, but to
which no one had so far provided a solution, beyond much hand-wringing. A
similar concern with trying to revive stagnating economies characterised many
Catholic intellectuals at this time, but in no sense should Garczyński be seen as
echoing the concerns of reformers in Italy or the Iberian Peninsula. He made no
reference to the writings of men such as Scipione Maffei or Ludovico Muratori.
He drew his ideas from Scripture and patristic and devotional literature and the
world around him. Unlike the Italian reformers, Garczyński was less concerned
with reducing the number of holy days, than that the peasantry should diligently
observe those that existed.35 The only secular authorities whom he invoked
were the writers of ancient Greece and Rome. He was above all an erudite, pious
Sarmatian tackling a Sarmatian problem: how to bring moral betterment about
in the world he knew and whose loss he feared.
Garczyński had almost nothing to say about constitutional reform. It was a
secondary issue, irrelevant to the transformed society he hoped for. He bewailed
the ineffectiveness of sejmiki and Sejmy and condemned their disruption as ‘a sin
contra Spiritum Sanctum’.36 It was, above all, a moral fault, which would be auto-
matically rectified as his renewed Commonwealth took shape. He did not even
mention the liberum veto. He looked forward to the flourishing of ‘unanimitas’
under Augustus III, and in the supposedly peaceful conditions of his reign he saw
a chance for his proposals to make headway.37 He was one of a growing number
of would-be reformers who drew attention to the plight of the peasantry – his
work is probably the longest political tract of the century to deal with the prob-
lem – but precisely because his ‘solutions’ utterly failed to take into account any
need for practical, political reform, his work reflected a religious syndrome, not a
secular politic. There was nothing wrong, indeed, it was entirely laudable, to look
to a Sejm to reform serfdom. But the Sejm of the 1750s was a dysfunctional body,
which no amount of pleading for moral reformation could cure. Garczyński was
a prime example of a good man trapped in the gilded, providential cage of the
Rzeczpospolita, cut off from the secular discourse that might have framed a very
different politic.
Garczyński was unusual in that, although he disapproved of Protestantism, he
openly advocated the immigration of Protestant settlers, whose industriousness
appealed to him and which he hoped would serve as an example to the Catholic
population. But he had no intention of extending any form of wider political
rights to them.38 To most Catholic szlachta, the place in their polity of Protestant
and Orthodox nobles, which had been diminishing since the seventeenth century,
had to diminish further. It had not always been so. In 1719, an indignant canon
of Wilno cathedral, Jerzy Ancuta, invoked the authority of none other than
Theodore Beza to condemn the ‘diabolical freedom’ with which diverse faiths
had seemed to be running riot in the newly formed Commonwealth. There his
approval of advocates of Calvinism, ‘the spawn of Mahometanism and atheism’,
ended.39 Poland’s toleration had stemmed from necessity rather than principle.
In 1573, the ‘dissidentes de religione’, ‘we, who disagree on religion’, had agreed
to put aside their differences in the interests of domestic peace, ‘forestalling any
harmful sedition that might arise among people . . . we will not shed blood or
impose any penalties amongst ourselves for reasons of differences of faith or
alteration in our churches . . .’40 Every Polish king swore in his coronation oath
to preserve that peace. From the very outset, this enactment by the Confederacy
of Warsaw had provoked enormous controversy among both the Catholic clergy
and many of the szlachta laity. It was the most open-ended of understandings,
with no specific commitment to maintaining anything other than denomina-
tional tranquillity. Beyond that, no statement of political or religious principle
was involved. It was a pragmatic response to a situation at a time when Lutherans,
Calvinists, Orthodox, even Antitrinitarians enjoyed great political weight and
held some of the highest offices of state.
Over the next century, Catholic Reformation had clawed back lost ground.
The nobility flocked to the Jesuit colleges, of which there were some seventy
by the end of the seventeenth century. The last major Orthodox patron, Prince
Konstanty Ostrogski, died in 1608. Prince Bogusław Radziwiłł, Calvinism’s
last great supporter, died in 1669. The assault on the legal status of Protestants
had begun in earnest in 1632, when a ban was placed on the construction of
Protestant places of worship (zbory) in royal towns. Antitrinitarians (with the
approval of Lutheran and Calvinist envoys) were banished in 1658. Apostasy
from Catholicism was made punishable by exile between 1668 and 1674. In
1669, non-Catholics were formally banned from standing as candidates for
the throne. By the late seventeenth century, the ‘dissidentes de religione’ of the
Confederacy of Warsaw had come to mean Protestants – a minority very much
on the defensive. Between 1590 and 1764, the number of evangelical parishes
in the Commonwealth had shrunk from around 800 to eighty. The protectors
of Lutheranism were primarily the three ‘great cities’ of Royal Prussia, Danzig,
Thorn and Elbing, but they had no capacity to defend it outside their province.
In much of northern and western Poland, Lutheranism was kept alive and well as
a result of German immigration, and may actually have been expanding. But not
among the nobility, who formed only a minority among Protestants – perhaps
some 600 families in the early eighteenth century, or between 3,000 and 4,800
persons – out of a total number of predominantly Catholic szlachta of some
800,000. As for Orthodox nobles, their presence was barely detectable.41
The conflicts of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries could hardly
fail to scar and imprint themselves on relations between the denominations. The
war of the Holy League against the Ottoman Porte inevitably intensified Catholic
feeling, but what had really produced a sense both of exceptionalism and of
intense defensiveness were the emphatically religious struggles that tormented
the Polish homelands. Lutheran Swedes and Saxons, Orthodox Russians and
Cossack rebels, and, for that matter, Islamic Tatars and Turks, had swarmed over
Polish territory. Catholic churches, along with Jewish synagogues, had been a
particular object of profanation and depredation. In Ju1y 1705, Peter the Great
and his officers killed three Basilian monks and savagely assaulted several others
at St Sophia’s church in Połock after they had been tactless enough to refer to the
Orthodox as ‘schismatics’. Russian troops looted the church and turned it into a
military magazine.42 The Confederacy of Dzików’s comments on the actions of
Saxon and Russian troops in 1734 came as no surprise:
enemy licence, with the uttermost contempt for our religion, plunders God’s temples in
Poland and Lithuania, and has so often and in so many places sacrilegiously thrown the
most blessed SACRAMENT from the altar to the ground, has dragged out the bodies of
the saints from their holy resting-places, has clad itself in the vestments of the church, has
turned the sacred vessels to contempt and mockery, imprisoning, beating and murder-
ing our priests, violently defiling marital beds and everywhere allowing itself the freest
exercise of its own faith.43
What proved the last straw for the position of Protestant nobles was the Great
Northern War. Polish society was ripped apart, torn between Augustus II and
the Swedish-backed anti-king, Stanisław Leszczyński (who was quite incapable
of restraining Swedish and therefore Lutheran depredations; Augustus was no
better at restricting the outrages of his own Saxon – and therefore also Lutheran
– soldiery). Native Protestants, almost inevitably, tended to side with Charles XII
and Leszczyński. They provided an easy scapegoat in the aftermath of the con-
flict.44 The Confederacy of Tarnogród, which restored internal peace to Poland
between 1715 and 1717 did so largely at their expense. The construction of new
Protestant places of worship was forbidden (although the right to hold private,
domestic services was specifically safeguarded), even on noble property. Any such
places of worship constructed since 1632, including those on szlachta properties,
were to be demolished. Assembling in larger congregations and the bringing in of
‘heretical teachers [and] preachers’ were made punishable by fines, imprisonment
and ultimately banishment. Future appointments to office or leases of crown
lands were not to be given to Protestants to the detriment of Catholics.45
Protestants supplied a convenient and increasingly clear ‘other’ for Catholic
szlachta. That unheard-of restrictions on the construction of zbory on noble
properties were deemed perfectly acceptable was a measure of the repugnance
in which dissenters were generally held. That Lutheran and Calvinist nobles
were able to cling on to any form of public office, despite all restrictions, was a
constant irritant to an overwhelmingly and demographically expanding Catholic
majority. At the heart of the dispute lay the issue of the interpretation of the
1573 Confederacy of Warsaw. As Catholic publicists never tired of pointing out,
dissenters’ grounds for appeal for toleration under the terms of the Confederacy
were limited: the Confederacy had merely committed itself to preserving inter-
denominational peace. Such was the thrust of the two principal attacks on the
Protestants in the eighteenth century, by Jerzy Ancuta, whose Full Rights of the
Catholic Faith appeared in Latin in 1719; and by Józef Andrzej Załuski in 1731
in his Two Swords of Catholic Relief . . . Against the Offensive Attacks of the Polish
Dissenters.46 Załuski borrowed heavily from Ancuta; both drew extensively on
writings reaching back to the 1573 settlement itself. Both regarded dissenters
as traitors and subversives, going so far as to suggest that it was ‘probably’ king
Sigismund II’s tolerance of dissent that brought about the extinction of the
House of Jagiellon.47
Virtually all of Poland’s discontents could be attributed to the dissenters.
In 1709, in a barely coherent tirade, the author of Eclipsis Poloniae denounced
in Protestantism a force that threatened not merely Poland, but the peoples of
Europe. He claimed that ‘Neither Luther nor Calvin were concerned to found a
new faith, but rather did they wish to devise new means of strengthening rulers’.
Kings and princes repudiated their obedience to the papacy, while ‘preserving the
appearance of upholding some form of Christian rite, they could seize for them-
selves the great wealth of the Church.’ Protestants encouraged both revolt against
righteous authority and the repression of liberty, all under the show of religion.
He commended Louis XIV for finally extirpating Huguenot conspiracy.48 These
Protestant machinations undermined the unity of Christendom. They encour-
aged rulers to think more of amassing wealth and territory than propagating
the faith. The great anti-Turkish league of the late seventeenth century had been
distracted from its task. A Europe in thrall to Protestant rulers had been content
to allow Poland to defend it against the Ottoman barbarians; those Protestant
rulers had then abandoned Poland and, in the course of the Great Northern War,
despoiled it. Nevertheless, the Eclipsis Poloniae expressed the hope that the Holy
League might yet be resuscitated. This was the voice of Poland as the bulwark,
the antemurale or propugnaculum, of the true faith against the hostile onslaughts
of a pagan, heretic and schismatic world.49 Even as the Rzeczpospolita turned
inwards and became ever-more defensive, that same voice continued to ring out
as clear and strong as ever.
One reason for the venom with which Protestant nobles were attacked was
their persistent survival. The laws against them in 1717 had been deliberately
vaguely framed because one of their architects, Konstanty Szaniawski, bishop
of Brześć Kujawski, hoped to enable judicial tribunals and officials to interpret
them in the narrowest and most disadvantageous way to the Protestants. But it
could work the other way around. In practice, especially under King Augustus III,
dissenters continued to be appointed to officerships in the army (several reached
the rank of general) or to offices in the customs or postal administration,
prompting much grumbling from the sejmiki. Some of the most lucrative crown
land leaseholds were awarded to dissenters. In the province of Royal Prussia they
continued to enjoy a special status, guaranteed them by the treaty of Oliva of
1660 (the treaty had been formally incorporated into Polish law), in that it had
stipulated that the places of worship which they had held in 1655, the year of
Charles X of Sweden’s invasion, were to be retained intact in perpetuity. The town
councils of the ‘three great cities’ of the region, Danzig, Thorn and Elbing, were
dominated by Protestants – in Royal Prussia, it was Catholics who were more
likely to complain of discrimination by Protestants.50 The Sejm of 1733, which
confirmed the laws of 1717, and went on to specify the exclusion of dissenters
from the Chamber of Envoys and the Tribunals, did not prevent the return of
dissenter envoys (by Catholic electors) to the Sejm of 1735 or their participation
in the royal elections of 1733 or 1764. Protestant nobles continued to attend and
be active in their local sejmiki. The 1726 Sejm actually rejected proposals for
the destruction of all dissenter churches repaired over the previous decade.51
Individual Catholic landlords remained more than happy to settle Lutherans
on their lands and Lutheran immigration – of commoners, of course – reached
new heights after 1717. The activities of individual Lutheran townsmen and the
circulation of Lutheran literature (much of it in German) among them were of
little interest to the szlachta.52
Chmielowski’s New Athens reflected a widespread attitude. He loathed heres-
ies, notably Lutheranism and Calvinism, as ‘weeds, nettles’ – ‘would that the earth
were rid and empty of them’. In a properly constituted state, there should be
only one religion – it ‘made men brothers . . . a single, unbroken body.’ He would
have liked to have seen them expelled from Poland and Lithuania, as the Arians
and Socinians had been. He praised Załuski’s Two Swords of Catholic Relief. On
the other hand, consciences could not be forced – ‘It is necessary to persuade,
not tyrannize . . . for nothing is as much a matter of the will, as Lactantius says’.
Examining the causes of the ‘ruination’ of a Commonwealth, he enumerated
‘the TYRANNY of RELIGION, that is, the deprivation of liberty in rebus Fidei
[in matters of faith], forcing, not inviting, to the [Catholic] faith, persuading by
arms, not by reasoning . . .’ He resigned himself to a toleration ‘under stringent
laws’. That apart, ‘Commonwealths built on the foundation of holy RELIGION
do not decay.’53
Chmielowski’s guarded tolerance was one Catholic nobles could share because
Protestantism was very much on the defensive. The laws issued from 1717
onwards ensured that its political position began to deteriorate markedly at
just the time that toleration was becoming respectable elsewhere (even if the
new fashion was rarely underpinned by concrete legislation). The Polish stance
was, however, no longer good enough for Europe’s chattering classes. In a highly
exceptional cause célèbre in 1715, the Crown Tribunal sentenced Zygmunt Unrug
to have his tongue torn out, his right hand and head severed. It had convicted
him of atheism, on the basis of his notebook, which fell into the wrong hands.
The ruling did nothing to inspire confidence in Catholic forbearance (in fact the
sentence, against which even the papacy protested, was not carried out: Unrug
fled to Saxony and was amnestied twelve years later).54 The ‘bloody judgement’
of Thorn of 1724, when ten leading Protestant burghers were sentenced to death
after an anti-Catholic riot helped damn the Commonwealth’s reputation.55
Conversely, Poland’s reputation for intolerance filled its Catholic apolo-
gists with deep anger. The English penal laws, far harsher than comparable
Polish legislation, were a particular object of indignation, not least because
English diplomats made occasional representations on behalf of the dissenters.56
Polish Catholic tracts were of course directed towards a domestic readership;
their comparisons between the legal conditions of religious minorities in Poland
and elsewhere could serve only to fuel resentment against dissent. They could do
nothing at all, however, to win over an outside world set on believing Poland to
be an inferno of Catholic oppression.
The szlachta dissenting minority proved far more important than its numerical
insignificance warranted. Hankering after past glories, its leaders appealed to

non-Catholic powers to support redress of their grievances. When, in 1764,
Catherine the Great of Russia, to assure herself of a dependable agency in
the Commonwealth, sought to restore the old political role of the Protestant
nobility, her calculatingly enlightened mind failed to appreciate how much she
was playing with fire. She succeeded in pushing the majority of nobles into a
still-greater attachment to their Catholicism – and with that, a conviction that
the mere fact of defending their faith would assure them of divine protection.
Russian force majeure obliged the Sejm of 1767–8 to open up all offices of state
to dissenters. The Confederacy of Bar, launched in February 1768 in reaction to
Russian policies and to royalist attempts at reform, condemned the concessions
as an ‘insult to and degradation of the Holy Roman Catholic faith, a rescind-
ment of our ancient laws, of Jagiellonian statutes and of Crown and Lithuanian
constitutions.’57 Ancuta’s treatise of 1719 was reissued in Polish translation in
1768 by a Lithuanian worthy, who praised his exposure of ‘the treasons and
mendacities of the dissenters’.58 A wave of exalted prophecies swept the country,
whipping up enthusiasm for the confederates’ cause and foretelling victory and
liberation.59 The countless homespun manuscript writings and verses that these
events provoked bear ample witness to the depth of feeling aroused. Copied
from noble household to noble household, faithfully recorded in commonplace
books, these texts portrayed the Confederacy of Bar’s cause as a war of liberty
and faith against tyranny, occupation and Protestantism. God would send Moses
himself to restore the old laws; God would help to expel the oppressive, traitorous
Lutherans and Calvinists; the szlachta’s forbears had always been ready to sacrifice
everything for faith and freedom and their descendants would show themselves
worthy successors; with God’s help or that of the Virgin Mary or the of the saints,
the king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, protector of Protestants and oppressor of
the Catholic faith, would be expelled or punished. Russia would be vanquished.
Many of these authors saw the struggle in the very same terms as Majchrowicz:
a conflict between good Catholics and their malign opponents, the travails of
Poland a sign of divine punishment, though faith would (hopefully) win out.60
I stand to arms at God’s command

I quit my rank for heaven’s reward
I die for freedom, I hold fast my faith, I am a sacrifice
The cross my buckler, salvation my plunder . . .61
Martyrdom, not constructive achievement, justified politics.

Religion also gave its sanction to the liberum veto. Andrzej Maksymilian
Fredro and, a century later, Szczepan Sienicki, a minor, if prolix, official from
Masovia, voiced the same concerns that removal of the veto would threaten
Catholicism. An anonymous clerical publicist in 1764 feared its abolition would

pave the way for the expropriation of ecclesiastical wealth by the laity.62 For
Szymon Majchrowicz, the veto was part of a divinely sanctioned world order,
and its loss was brought about by sin and heresy.63 Jerzy Ancuta and Józef Załuski
signalled their approval for the veto, claiming that it was only with the arrival of
Protestantism that its abuse and the frequent disruption of Sejmy had become
established.64 Szczepan Sienicki conceded that the abuse of the liberum veto
had led to the Rzeczpospolita’s degradation – but that did not mean it should
be abolished. On the contrary, God’s greatest gift to Poland was the ‘libertas
sentiendi’, that is, the ‘free voice . . . according to the laws.’65 Any suggestion of
majority voting horrified him. The ‘free voice’ was the liberum veto. Divine
sanction stood behind it. Poland’s was a flawed polity, because it was lacking in
brotherly love. To allow that love to flourish, ‘God, most mysterious in his rule
of the Polish Commonwealth, bestowed on it the law of freedom of expression
and the law of veto.’66 Poles had abused the veto, so it was right that it should be
reformed; but to abolish it would be to flout God himself.
Poland as a moral enterprise, blessed by God, wanting only because of human
failings, was something that clergy and laity alike could believe in. At the Grodno
Sejm of 1718, it was Ancuta who had successfully proposed a motion excluding
from the Chamber of Envoys the last Protestant envoy, Andrzej Piotrowski
(Ancuta was not even a member of the Sejm, but a spectator – but this kind of
thing was possible in the Commonwealth’s parliaments).67 Józef Załuski was,
from 1728, grand Referendary (referendarz wielki) of the Crown, in which capa-
city he heard appeals from peasants on crown estates; more importantly, in 1758
he was made bishop of Kiev and thus a senator; his brother, Andrzej Stanisław,
had a rather more distinguished career, as bishop of Kraków (from 1746) and
chancellor of the Crown. The Załuski brothers were at the heart of Polish polit-
ics, typical of the interaction of the lay and the ecclesiastic, the spiritual and the
temporal. Both were famed for their erudition, though Józef trumped his late
brother when, in October 1767, he found himself among a select band deported
to Russia for opposition to concessions to the dissenters. Majchrowicz was a
highly regarded preacher, the ‘Polish Bossuet.’68 Men at all levels of church and
state, enjoying considerable moral authority, lent their authority to Poland’s
unreformed political regimen, and, if occasion required, furnished living proof
that the deeds and the cause of virtuous forbears could still be matched by the
men of the present.
The only institution that could take any kind of lead in the paralysed
Commonwealth was the Catholic Church: even so, it had to tread cautiously over
political or constitutional terrain. That reform-minded lay-politicians looked to
it for some kind of lead was scarcely surprising (even if it also smacked of des-
peration). The clergy were the most educated people in the country: a majority
of its bishops had degrees in canon and civil law or some form of university
study behind them, often at non-Polish universities.69 Clergy, indeed, played a
dominant role in the production of writings that could be regarded as in some
sense ‘enlightened’: they accounted for over one half of such writers born before
1709, and up to two-thirds of those born between 1710 and 1749.70 The teaching
regulars in particular enjoyed widespread foreign contact and familiarity with the
burgeoning cultural changes of central and western Europe. The Załuskis may
have been adamantly opposed to political rights for Protestants, but that did not
stop them from being in regular correspondence with Christian Wolff – bishop
Andrzej even hoped to persuade him to teach at Kraków University. For all that
Józef Załuski regarded Voltaire and Rousseau as ‘modern deists’, he translated some
of their works into Polish.71 In a state as ‘free’ as Poland, it was inevitable that this
clergy should be divided in its attitudes to politics, society and religious issues.
It was the Załuskis who consciously set out to lay the groundwork for a revival
of literary and intellectual life in Poland. As early as 1728, Józef sketched out a
Programma litterarium ad bibliophilos, typothetas et bibliopegos (A Programme of
Literature for Booklovers, Printers and Collectors) (fully published in 1732) where
he proposed a compilation of bibliographic and source materials and translated
works which would help improve literary style and composition. He and his
brother went on to accumulate a library, which, by 1761, consisted of more than
200,000 printed works and over 10,000 manuscripts. Housed in the Daniłłowicz
Palace in Warsaw (the premises were shared with the capital’s Jesuit College), it
opened to the public in 1747 (after the Russian capture of Warsaw in 1794, most
of the collection was taken to St Petersburg, to become the core of the future
Russian Imperial Library).72
Worthy though the Załuski library was, it was notoriously poorly frequented
(which did nothing to stop it from being plagued by thefts).73 The Załuskis did
indeed pursue their Programma Litterarium with great energy, encouraging both
Poles and immigrant intellectuals to bring out literary and historical source col-
lections as well as editions of poetry and prose. Insofar as these developments
affected the szlachta, it was in the field of education, in which two religious orders
specialised: the Jesuits and the rather less celebrated and less well-endowed ‘clerks
regular of the Pious Schools of the Poor of the Mother of God’, more succinctly
known as the Piarists. A true, if slow, sea-change began in 1740, when the Piarist
Stanisław Konarski, a man who combined piety, patriotism and political nous in
equal measure, set up an elite boarding establishment in the capital, the Collegium
Nobilium, offering a ‘modern’ curriculum, including foreign languages and nat-
ural sciences, comparable to what was being offered in the Ritterakedemien and
finishing schools of western Europe. A diplomat as much as a cleric, a friend of
Fontenelle and Rollin, Konarski was determined to import to Poland the new
principles without which he was convinced its much-vaunted liberty could not
survive. With his eye for the realities behind the rhetoric, he felt there would be
no chance of reform unless the aristocracy showed the way. He appreciated the
need for lip service to szlachta equality, but he was well aware of how little that
meant in daily practice.
Konarski was heavily involved in the doomed candidature to the throne of
Stanisław Leszczyński in 1733. His travels, especially to Versailles, to secure
support for the would-be king who had the overwhelming backing of the native
electorate, but who was quite helpless before armed Russian intervention on
behalf of the elector of Saxony, convinced him of the utter powerlessness of a state
which even its supposed friend, France, regarded with contempt. He devoted his
career to a wearisome assault on the deficiencies of the Commonwealth. A man
of immense caution and common sense, it was not until 1761–3 that he was to
publish his On the Means to Successful Counsels, the first and most far-reaching
ideological attack on the liberum veto, though he began work on it as early as
1744.74 Both Szymon Majchrowicz and Szczepan Sienicki published their mas-
sive elucubrations as a response to Konarski’s work. To Konarski, pedagogy was
the key to change. If it had been the intention of the Piarists’ founder, San José à
Calasanza, to bring education to the poor, the Order had found that its survival
depended, in the real world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the
patronage of the rich and powerful; and that included the provision of exclusive
education for their sons. Hence the foundation of their Collegium Nazarenum
in Rome in 1622. Konarski was there in the 1720s, when it was under the
administration of Paulino Chelucci, humanist and mathematician, exponent of
a tolerant Catholicism cautiously ready to take up the writings of the moderns.
Further study in Paris convinced Konarski of the need for an education which
had to accommodate itself to the secular pressures of the world, as adumbrated
by the rector of the Sorbonne, Charles Rollin.75 On his return to Poland in 1730,
his distant relative Józef Załuski co-opted him to bring out a hitherto lacking
compilation of Polish laws, known simply as the Volumina Legum (The Volumes
of the Laws): most of the work appears to have been done by Konarski and fellow-
Piarists, in whose print-shop the work was published. The first volume appeared
in 1732, followed by a further five by 1739, giving Konarski an unparalleled and
invaluable knowledge of Polish law.76
Unable to achieve anything in the barren fallows of Poland’s politics, Konarski
concluded that he had to begin with the absolute basics – the education of the
nobility. His first major pedagogical work, De emendandis eloquentiae vitiis
of 1741 appeared barely a year after he had presided over the opening of his
boarding school (though the new, purpose-built site was ready only in 1754).
The success of the Theatine Order in establishing such an elite establishment in
the capital in 1737 acted as a goad and an incentive. The Jesuits, too, were giving
active consideration to the modernisation of their leading Polish colleges.77 These
renovated schools played up the role of modern languages and social skills for
the elite, placing less emphasis on a predominantly Latin-humanist curriculum.
In practice, it was a question of exhibiting the same kind of openness to new
writing and the new sciences which was already being displayed by the teaching
orders in western Europe, most notably in the Jesuits’ own college of Louis-le-
Grand in Paris.
Though much instruction continued to be in Latin, beyond the beginners’
classes, French and German were obligatory (and required extra payments).
Dance, military drill, riding, fencing and instruction in Italian were also optional,
purchasable extras. Pupils were encouraged to converse among themselves in
these foreign vernaculars. Close supervision and pastoral care of the students was
the key feature. Their letters home were subject to review by the College author-
ities. A stringent regime was enforced of early daily prayers and divine service,
five days of schooling, two days of recreation, though even these were not wholly
free of academic obligations. Much of it consisted of elements of the traditional
Latin humanist schooling, but it also included for the first time, formal lessons in
Polish history, sanitised use of texts by Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Voltaire and other
moderns. Corporal punishment was kept to a minimum – Konarski claimed
he would have eliminated it altogether if he could. Classes were encouraged to
debate contemporary political issues and to contemplate the prospects of polit-
ical reform – a theme maintained in the mock sejmiki and theatrical productions
periodically held in the Collegium Nobilium.78
Konarski hoped to produce a patriotic, pious, politically engaged honnête
homme – his was an enlightened and muscular Catholicism. When his college’s
new buildings opened in September 1754, he marked the occasion with a major
address, De viro honesto et bono cive ab ineunte aetate formando (On Making a
Good Man and Good Citizen from an Early Age). This ceremonial oration was also
composed as an educational text, and was used as such in Piarist establishments
outside Poland.79 Religion was to be put at the heart of honest political principles.
His De emendandis eloquentiae vitiis (On Correcting the Deficiencies of Rhetoric)
of 1741 was a necessary precondition of his future work. It was a scathing, ridi-
culing attack on the practice of both Latin and Polish baroque oratory, as it was
fashionably practiced since the late seventeenth century. The object was above
all to secure a classical, Ciceronian clarity, purged of the striving for effect, the
elaborate counterpoint of verbal symmetries of accumulated sub-clauses and
parentheses, the interminable and distracting gilding of Polish sentences with
Latin phrases, the showy erudition, which passed for good practice.80 While this
is not the place to pass judgement on the evolution of language and style that took
place in Poland in the 1730s and 1740s, there is no doubt that Konarski latched
onto a wider desire for literary and cultural reform which a Poland recuperating
from the Great Northern War and the interregnal conflict of 1733–36 could
espouse. There is certainly a striking difference in the nature of literary language

that prevailed in the Commonwealth between the early and mid-eighteenth
centuries. Konarski’s own prose became much more fluent and, by the 1760s,
largely lost the macaronisms which attended his earlier writings.81
Konarski was conscious of the need to avoid controversy. Nothing made the
point more clearly than the Ordinationes Visitationis Apostolicae pro Provincia
Polona . . . Scholarum Piarum (Rules of the Apostolic Visitation of Piarist Schools
of the Polish Province), the new regulations which, with the blessing of Pope
Benedict XIV, Konarski was able to impose on the schools of his order’s Polish
province in 1754. Teachers were to avoid anything that might question the role
of the monarchy or nobility, which might indicate a penchant for one noble
faction rather than another, and certainly to avoid (at least for the time being)
any discussion of such controversial issues as the liberum veto or the value
of royal elections.82 The regulations even carried discreet injunctions against
child abuse.83
Konarski himself, however, did not shun from a cautious and indirect and
implicit questioning of the prevailing political ethos, at least not in his Collegium
Nobilium, where he and like-minded Piarists could best exercise a direct control
over the curriculum. His De emendandis eloquentiae vitiis was far more than a
plea for stylistic clarity. Ever since classical times, he reminded his students and
readers, rhetoric had formed the foundation of the arts of government. Without
a clear, disciplined style, the conduct of the affairs of church and state would
only suffer. Far too much of what was praised in Polish speaking was overblown,
bombastic show, striving for effect but saying nothing of substance. Simplicity
and directness, no matter how arid they might at first appear, were always to be
preferred to verbosity and effect. But just as they were to purge their language,
men should also be prepared to strip themselves of the illusions with which they
surrounded their values and look at things as they were.84 The model speeches
Konarski provided were far more than exercises in oratory. They dealt with the
real problems facing the Commonwealth. Without specifically mentioning the
veto, he condemned the wrecking of Sejmy and the country’s general lawlessness,
its rampant corruption, the general decay of public spirit, the endemic conniving
with Poland’s neighbours and the vocabulary of freedom: ‘Fine words, base deeds,
yet nowhere does tongue match heart so little’.85 He warned seigneurs against the
exploitation of the peasantry, from whose toil their wealth ultimately derived. ‘It
is not right that you should heap benefits on churches and chapels while your
serfs die of hunger.’86 The De Viro honesto in 1754 echoed the themes of the De
emendandis, laying emphasis on the primacy of public service. Instead of the
customary self-congratulation on Polish liberties, Konarski went out of his way to
stress a quality that was singularly lacking in the Rzeczpospolita: loyalty, and even
obedience, to the monarch, which he elaborated at almost unheard-of length. It
was the first virtue that he planned to instil into his young aristocratic sprigs.87
The normative political tension inter maiestatem ac libertatem was a pernicious
evil to be discredited. King and nobles could subsist in harmony.
A final pendant to the De emendandis eloquentiae vitiis was Konarski’s De arte
bene cogitandi ad artem dicendi bene necessaria (On the Art of Sound Thinking,
Essential to That of Speaking Well) of 1767. Both works, despite being written in
Latin, were specifically meant to be applicable to the vernacular. De arte bene
cogitandi reiterated many of the arguments deployed in Konarski’s earlier works
in favour of a clear rhetorical style. He was particularly keen to reinforce his
point that overblown, labyrinthine syntactical constructions reflected a defect of
the intellect, not simply of oratory.88 He urged more strongly than hitherto the
importance of self-criticism on a nobility too prone to take any dissent as a per-
sonal insult. His readership was to be made to appreciate the range of deficiencies
of the Polish state, with a view to their obligation to remedy them – on the basis
of the broad education on offer in the leading Piarist (and also, by now, Jesuit)
schools. Rhetoric was not enough: thorough knowledge and application were
essential.89 In the same year that the De arte bene cogitandi was published, the
royally-backed periodical, the Monitor, with which a number of leading Piarists
were associated, was urging the need for a more enlightened attitude towards
Poland’s serfs.90 In the model speeches he provided, Konarski felt emboldened
enough to take up the same subject, though at considerably greater length than
he had earlier. He produced a stingingly critical resumé of the Polish state,
pleading for the emancipation of the peasantry while at the same time assuring
the nobility that a freed peasantry would be more productive and bring greater
returns to their landlords’ coffers. The rhetorical models that he produced (all
the while stressing their ancient, republican provenance, for nothing else would
as yet do to convince a classically besotted audience) had a direct bearing on the
deficiencies of Poland and the need to remedy them.91
Both inside and outside the Piarist Order, Konarski’s ideas encountered
considerable hostility. The new texts and the new application to real life and
politics that instruction in them required came as an unwelcome and disturbing
imposition to many teachers who found it easier to teach the standard classical
curriculum as an encomium on the Commonwealth, not a criticism of it. The
Lithuanian province of the Piarist Order was strongly inimical to his ideas, and
even in the Polish province, it is unlikely his school reforms would have got
through without papal support. The Jesuits, at first alarmed, were convinced by
the success of the Collegium Nobilium to follow suit. Since in western Europe
their order had long been teaching modernised curricula, it was relatively easy for
them to adapt. In terms of provision of instruction in the natural sciences, at least
in their reformed, more progressive colleges in Warsaw and Poznań, the Jesuits
were easily able to outpace the Piarists.92 The works of the Jesuit, Franciszek
Bohomolec, on Polish language and style (unlike Konarski’s, mainly in Polish)

showed that the Piarist did not have a monopoly on linguistic improvement. The
moralistic plays, which both men wrote for performance in their elite schools,
sought to put their linguistic preachings into practice.93
In reality, both orders were divided about the new teaching: there were
many who regarded it as offering far too many concessions to the ‘moderns’.
Majchrowicz’s Happy Endurance of Kingdoms, besides being a panegyric to
the unreformed, ancestral Commonwealth, was a rejection of the reforms that
Konarski and many of Majchrowicz’s own fellow-Jesuits regarded as essential.
With the advent of a new regime in 1764, which made no secret of its aim to
introduce ‘a new form of the Commonwealth’94 conservatives had cause to
be worried. The new educational ideas and programmes, with their qualified
espousal of the ‘moderns’, threatened to open the doors to perdition in a state
locked into a deep providentialism. The encouragement of curiosity, feared
Majchrowicz and his kind, might undermine the Catholic faith and the author-
ity of the Church. Too many questioned, even in Poland, the existence of Hell
and Purgatory, the value of confession or indulgences. Fashionable new ideas in
religion had brought downfall to so many Christian kingdoms. It was not the
growing role of Russia and Prussia in Polish affairs, which ought to cause alarm.
‘Poland has no cause to fear neighbouring nations, nor foreign powers, nor the
treasons of enemies – it only has to fear immorality and sin.’ For Polish virtues
were beginning to weaken; discontent and discord were abroad.95 Even among
those purest of God’s creatures, women, there were signs that fashionable
irreligion was making its way.96 Catholic governments elsewhere were greedily
eyeing ecclesiastical wealth in general and that of the Jesuits in particular. The
present generation’s reluctance to spend as generously on churches as their
forbears made Majchrowicz fear for the future.97 Just as bad, if not worse, for
all too many Catholics, ‘It is the fashion and faith to-day to discuss religion
as much as possible, but to live and believe as one pleases.’ The much-praised
‘new learning’ was in no way superior to ‘the proven old’. What made French
better than Latin?98 Satan was at work, true religion was besieged ‘by the
deists, those fashionable politicians of to-day’. Men scoffed at miracles, even
at Transubstantiation.99 ‘The unvirtuous Voltaire, or some similar Jansenist,
deist or Calvinist, so long as he writes in French or English, stands higher than
St Augustine, Chrysostom, Gregory, Thomas Aquinas and others sent by God
to instruct the world.’100 ‘He who holds himself wiser than a simple preacher,
let him remember, he is not wiser than God, Who speaks through the simplest
preacher.’101 The new-fangled education was the thin end of a wedge bringing
such evils in its train, and all the more dangerous for being targeted at the
aristocratic elite. Things were so bad that even the Jews gave their children a far
better religious upbringing than Catholic Poles.102
Quite how serious a threat the forces of enlightened darkness represented in

Poland was another matter. There was very little in the way of anti-Christian rad-
ical literature in circulation and much of what did circulate no longer survives.
From the 1550s to the 1650s, Poland had enjoyed an unsavoury reputation among
right-thinking Christians as home to the Unitarian Socinians, whose writings had
indeed informed some of the more radical streams of European Protestantism.
But at the Sejm of 1658, Catholic, Calvinist and Lutheran envoys had come
together to decree the expulsion of the ‘repugnant and insane Arians’.103 The
expulsions were so effective that there was never any real chance of such a source
of home-grown religious subversion reviving. Thorough-going rationalism was
confined to a few isolated individuals. Poland’s last overt atheist, Kazimierz
Łyszczyński, was burned at the stake in 1689. Copies of his De non existentia Dei
(it is difficult to imagine a more provocative title) were also consigned to the
flames, so effectively that only a few fragments of the work survive.104 On the
other hand, perniciously ‘Spinozist’ ideas circulated across Europe throughout
the eighteenth century. They may have gained little purchase in Poland and
insofar as they did, no one was prepared to expound them as clearly as the unfor-
tunate Łyszczyński had done. Echoes can be found in the allegorical musings
on religion of Antoni Poniński’s Sarmatides of 1741, safely veiled in confusing
opacity. If the work contained what might be construed as deistic criticisms of
Catholicism, these were balanced by even harsher strictures against Lutheranism
and Calvinism, as opening the doors to atheism. Indeed, he sought seemingly to
combat atheism by resort to the consensus gentium argument on the validity of
religious belief. But only seemingly: in his critique of Catholicism’s detractors,
there was sufficient ambivalence to permit readers scope to draw very different
conclusions from those Poniński appeared to embrace.105 Yet there was no overt
onslaught against Christianity or Revelation here, in a work of only exiguous
circulation.
Very few corners of western and central Europe were free of an uncomfortably
persistent religious radicalism. Polish bishops and senior clergy could scarcely
have failed to be concerned. Eighteenth-century Europe was permeated by
centres of heterodoxy, some close to the Commonwealth’s own borders. Ducal
Prussia and Saxony seemed uncomfortably prone to harbouring dangerous reli-
gious notions.106 It is hardly surprising that the very ‘reason’ by which the new
learning set so much store aroused Szymon Majchrowicz’s suspicion.
Others feared not so much that the new schools offered curricula different to
the tried and tested six or seven years’ hard grounding in classical and humanist
Latin that had been the staple fare of Polish education since the sixteenth century;
but that they aimed at a particular segment of the nobility, not the nobility as
a whole. This modern education singled out a materially privileged group and
so was, of its nature, a challenge to the long-standing fiction of noble equality.
Once that principle of equality was surrendered, then the szlachta ceased to be
something special, a unique brotherhood of equals, among whom alone true
liberty was found.107 Konarski’s De viro honesto acknowledged the need to assure
an education to all nobles, poor as well as rich, but justified an education aimed
primarily at the sons of the ‘distinguished’ nobility by arguing that these were
the future helmsmen of the state – the proper education of just one of them
might bring benefits to thousands of others.108 But the hostility the new schools
aroused was real, extending beyond crusty clerical pedagogues into the wider
world of the nobility, where change of any kind remained at best, suspicious, at
worst, anathema.
The prospects of success for any amount of pedagogic engineering were
hardly favourable, even in an age optimistic enough to harbour grandiose
expectations of education. Yet, in the most unpromising circumstances, Konarski
had succeeded in creating his Collegium Nobilium, having started with virtually
no external financial support whatsoever. He had achieved his goal through a
combination of personal stubbornness, divine aid and the generosity of indi-
vidual patrons. He had shaped a paradigm for reforming the Commonwealth. Its
situation was seemingly constantly deteriorating, each generation leaving it worse
than it had found it. Yet despair would lead nowhere. ‘We must never despair
for our country. Our country needs good citizens.’109 Konarski’s sheer, dogged
persistence was the most valuable quality he brought to the Rzeczpospolita.
5
Towards successful counsels
The publication of O Skutecznym Rad Sposobie, On the Means to Successful

Counsels, began anonymously in 1761, but the author’s identity was never in
doubt. Marcin Matuszewicz noted in his memoirs that, ‘the first volume of a book
by the Piarist, Father Stanisław Konarski, came out, on the subject of conducting
public councils . . . It was a work which was extremely wisely written, so much
so, that everyone wanted to acquire its further tomes.’1 It had been some fifteen
years in preparation. The finished work comprised four volumes. The first dis-
missed a range of widely touted ‘remedies’ for ‘abuse’ of the veto as inadequate
or useless. Volume two, which also appeared in 1761, elaborated a detailed and
systematic demand for the introduction of simple majority voting – the first such
in Polish history. The third volume, published in 1762, was in part a history of
Sejm ineffectiveness and disruption since the sixteenth century, in part a defence
of majority voting, and, in part, a discussion of the role of the monarch under
a regime which decided by pluralitas. Volume four (1763) reiterated previous
arguments, took on board objections and presented a comparative summary
of the constitutions of Europe’s parliamentary institutions and proposed a new
form of government.2 O Skutecznym Rad Sposobie was much more than a con-
stitutional treatise. It was a handbook of political morality, one which rejected
the attachment to a world of ancestral myths and ideals and fictitious Arcadias
of ‘Gentlemen-brothers’ and sought to expose political conduct to the icy blasts
of reality. Konarski was no adherent of Machiavelli, yet in his impassioned pleas
to treat politics as they were, instead of how they should be, he was the closest to
him that Poland had produced.
‘All the never-ending misfortunes and disasters of the Commonwealth stem
solely ex mala consiliorum forma – from the bad form of its counsels.’ Konarski,
an admirer of Montesquieu, endorsed his analysis of the importance of institu-
tions in shaping the destiny of nations, even though, good Catholic churchman
that he was, it was the Montesquieu of the Histoire de la grandeur et décadence
des Romains, not of the De l’Esprit des Lois (placed in the index in 1752) whom
he used as his major reference-point. If Poland were to survive, its Sejmy had to
function effectively: not occasionally, but consistently, always.
To believe that the veto would save the Commonwealth from disaster when
all else had failed was to believe in a non-existent eventuality. Far from the veto’s
being a weapon in the hands of the man of virtue against forces threatening the
Commonwealth, ‘no Sejm, from the moment their disruption began, was ever
wrecked out of love for, and in the interests of, the Rzeczpospolita, but each was
ever destroyed for selfish motives, harmful to our country, be it at the behest
of our own grandees, or of foreign powers, or of our own court circles . . . and
ever to the greater hurt and destruction of the Commonwealth.’ Corruption,
not virtue, underlay the wrecking of parliaments. To think otherwise was to
believe in fairy tales.3 If the threat of monarchic absolutism was real, the fault
lay with the szlachta themselves. Parliamentary disruption created a vacuum,
which the court had no choice but to fill, even despite itself.4 To Konarski, the
threat from outside powers was far greater than that posed by endogenous
absolutism. ‘We ground our hopes of surviving in our anarchy on a very weak
foundation to believe that our neighbours . . . will not permit us to perish.’
Ratio status, ‘the canons of Machiavelli’, led each state to seek its neighbour’s
weakness and destruction. Only strength, not weakness, earned security and
respect.5
Konarski’s unprecedented forensic analysis of the Sejm invested it with a new
importance. The Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów was, in the minds of its noble
citizens, nothing if not the sum of their rights and privileges. Its parliament
existed to preserve their liberties, corporately and individually. All else was
secondary. Konarski sought to coax his readers to see their parliament in a new
light: no longer a defensive device for the protection of liberties, but an active
organism, taking control of and directing the Commonwealth. Republics would
be free, for as long as they were ruled by the people or by their elected representa-
tives. That was, however, the whole point – that they should rule.6
The very existence of the liberum veto implied that liberties had to be
protected from the Sejm itself. Yet the nobility constantly complained of the
non-implementation of their own laws. In the absence of any effective executive
machinery, this was scarcely surprising. Konarski argued that the supervision
and enforcement of its laws was, by default, also the responsibility of the Sejm. It
was more than just a legislature. It was also, or at least it should be, the supreme
executive. ‘The Sejm is ever the legislator, defender and executor of every law.’
‘No-one, in our state, has this power [of enforcing the law] save parliaments
alone.’7 The idea of parliament as legislature and executive was indeed far-
reaching, far beyond anything the nobility had contemplated.
In this free realm, where kings rule over us, but have generously transferred many of their
rights and powers to the Republic . . . we have no single, absolute ruler and despot, though
in no way can we conduct government without such: instead, we have the assembled
estates, consisting of our king, the Senate and the envoys representing the szlachta estate.
That is, in a word, we have above us our Sejm, so that at it we should be ruled by our king,
T O WA R D S S U C C E S S F U L C O U N S E L S 79
and, so to say, by our own selves, chosen by our own selves, and be obedient to them. The
Sejm is our monarch and our absolute master, our supreme ruler.8
This was to accord parliament a dominant role, which it had never possessed,
expressed in terms that were both striking and horrifying. No longer would
it be a congress of mandated individuals; instead, it would become an active,
corporate, unified entity such as it had never been. Envoys had always been at
least notionally expected to abide by the instructions of their constituencies.
Though Konarski was prepared to keep these, and even wanted to enhance the
electorate’s role in framing them, it was not the place of these local bodies to
decide the great affairs of state. Such a devolution of responsibility was utterly
impracticable – only the Sejm was competent to handle them.9 The Sejm had
always been weak: it had to be made strong.
The quest for harmony and its partner, unanimity, had to be jettisoned. Men
had to look on themselves as they were, not as they fancied themselves to be.
Konarski agreed with Karwicki and ‘Leszczyński’ that if only one man stood at
the Sejm between the Commonwealth and its destruction, it would be imposs-
ible for that individual of heroic virtue to achieve anything.10 It was all very well
to lament the decay of morality and mankind ‘but these are difficult to reform;
we may complain at them, but we are incapable of changing people.’ Men of
unalloyed virtue were in any case rarities. Most were a mixture of good and bad,
the equivocal and the ambivalent, inevitably preferring private to public interest.
‘We are men, that is enough.’11 Yet the majority of participants in the Sejm, even
when things were at their worst, meant their country well. But because they were
mere men, total agreement would always elude them. The aspiration to unanim-
ity was absurd. Disagreement on any issue was normal and human. Unanimity
required of God a continuously miraculous intervention. It was high time that
Poles abandoned their self-deluding grandiosity, that they alone could attain a
concord impossible to others.12
Let us despatch such blessed congresses and parliaments to Plato’s Republic, to More’s
Utopia, to Voltaire’s El Dorado, to the wise Montesquieu’s Troglodyte commonwealth
. . . to islands beyond the bounds of the human race or borne upon the air, for here on
earth, amongst twelve most excellent men, there was a Judas to be found.13
If other free states could manage and secure their freedom without unanimity,
there was no reason why Poland should not be able to do so.
Konarski sought to prepare his readers gradually. In volume one, he examined
at length thirteen ‘of the most principal means which our politicians are apt to
put forward as ways of maintaining our parliaments’.14 Greater efforts by court
or magnates; agreeing at least on lesser issues; disregarding objections over minor
matters; new procedural rules – all was to no avail. True, there were extraordinary
devices, such as confederacies, which allowed the veto to be overridden, but they
were beside the point. It was precisely the normal, run-of-the-mill parliaments
which had to conclude successfully, not just those to which recourse was had
amid dire emergencies.15 The idea, floated by Łukasz Opaliński in the seventeenth
century, and more recently by Karwicki and the Głos Wolny, that the veto could
only be valid if interposed for sound reasons of state, or that its user should
be automatically put on trial to justify himself, was worthless. It was on a level
with suggestions that disruption was permissible only when it was justified in
law. Any protest could always be dressed up with a public interest argument or
sound legal grounds be put forward for it.16 It was not illegal to disrupt Sejmy;
an envoy was under no obligation to justify himself – on the contrary, any
attempt to force him to do so would be an egregious violation of the very liberty
the nobility were bound to uphold. Harsher laws against corruption would be
utterly useless – Poland had enough of them already. For as long as Sejmy failed,
so would all else.17
The veto was more than just an implement of constitutional destruction: it
was also an instrument of moral devastation. ‘Unanimity’ was nothing if not
dishonest.
Am I some American aboriginal . . . that I cannot see how those sejmiki and Sejmy that do
succeed have been made to do so? Has but one ever concluded by [genuine] unanimity?
have not men ever been intimidated or shouted down, so that weaker objections are less
regarded, or protestations ignored, or evaded through some trickery?
How often were the views of single, or even a few, protestors really respected?18
The veto rendered the operation of trust in public life almost impossible.
Matters had come to such a pass that men refused to distinguish right from
wrong. ‘When these people [Sejm wreckers] sell their voices to powerful lords, or
sell the interests and liberty of their country to foreign princes, when they leave
provinces and all fellow-citizens open to the enemy . . . they maintain not only
that they are free from sin, but free from fault. That they turn upside down the
laws of God and men, that they perjure themselves, is nothing to them.’ It was
the powerful who benefited most from anarchy, deliberately seeking, Konarski
asserted, in an echo of Montesquieu on the decline of the Roman republic, to
attain their goals by encouraging corruption, greed, mendacity – the very faults
so evident in Polish public life. Apart from the internal insecurity, occasioned by
domestic violence and marauding foreign armies, trade and urban centres were
in decay, intellectual life was timid and stagnant, the peasantry were impover-
ished. There were those nobles who genuinely believed that the disruption of
Sejmy and sejmiki was indeed the highest prerogative of a nobleman. This was
the same as ‘the right to put towns to the torch, to destroy churches, to devastate
the country and its properties, to murder on the highways . . .’19 Almost as if to
prove his own point in spite of himself, he lavished praise on Jerzy Lubomirski
for his supposed defence of liberty in the 1660s against the intrigues of king John
Casimir’s queen, Louise-Marie. Konarski either could not, or dared not criticise
this particular icon of liberty. That Konarski could write as glowingly as he did
of a man who in any other state would have been accounted a rebel and a traitor
spoke volumes for the very point he was trying to make.20
There existed, Konarski claimed, no legal basis for Sejm disruption. He quoted
chapter and verse from the tomes of the Volumina Legum to demonstrate that no
statute explicitly authorised Sejm wrecking. ‘No such written law exists, it is but a
custom that has been introduced, it is, if we wish so to describe it, some kind of
customary law.’ It was ‘but a chimera, not founded on any ancient law . . .’21 He
was on shaky ground. Custom can carry greater weight than law and there was
much in the Commonwealth of the Two Nations that was derived from custom.
In any case, Konarski was being disingenuous. The laws he cited, reaffirming or
safeguarding the libera vox, were quite clearly meant to, and understood to, mean
the veto as it functioned in untrammelled plenitude.22
To persuade his readers, Konarski resorted to a variety of more-or-less radical
expedients. The least unsettling was an appeal to the past, in which he sought to
outflank the veto’s defenders. ‘Consider that from the establishment of the first
foundations of our country’s liberties under king Louis [in the late fourteenth
century],23 the state for several centuries knew no disruption of parliaments
and concluded its counsels by majority vote.’ For as long as majority voting
prevailed, Poland was at its most expansive, powerful, prosperous and victorious.
Disruption was ‘a recent invention, unknown to our forbears.’24 Of course, it all
depended on which forbears: to try to discredit the veto, Konarski had to appeal
to more distant, and hence more respectable, ancestors. He tactfully praised their
military virtues and their commitment to liberty, a commitment that ironically
prevented them from placing their freedoms on a rational, orderly basis. Poland’s
form of government lacked order and system, without which it could not survive.
The very defence of liberty had diverted ancestral attention from developing it
in a coherently constitutional fashion.25
Konarski pushed the origins of Sejmy back to the year 1140. They had
always concluded successfully, he maintained, because there was no veto. He
even claimed that the ancestors had voted by division.26 The first Sejm to fail,
in the sense of dispersing without enacting any form of legislation, he dated to
1536, ascribing it to the intrigues of Sigismund I’s queen, Bona Sforza and her
magnate allies. Thereafter, Sejmy began to disperse without enacting legislation
with increasing frequency. ‘Our forbears always concluded their counsels by a
majority.’ The veto had developed as an aberration, ‘which our fathers and we
have utterly transformed into a single liberum rumpo’, that is, not the freedom to
forbid, but the freedom to destroy.27 The distinction between ancient ‘forbears’
(‘przodkowie’) and more recent ‘fathers’ (‘ojcowie’) allowed ancestral reputations
to survive intact.
Konarski was ready to be less respectful of tradition. No law could be justi-
fied that went against the laws of God. Law was there for the common good.
Parliamentary destruction brought only disaster. Bad laws could not be allowed
to stand. ‘It is not fitting that the ius vetandi should ruin the salutary counsels of
our country and in this way destroy our country.’ It was an ‘absurdum’, ‘contrary
to reason’. If such laws existed, ‘they would not be worthy of the human mind,
they would not be worthy of the Polish nation and its Commonwealth . . .’ Even
if a statute clearly authorising parliamentary disruption had been enacted, ‘you
would, at the very least say that those legislators had departed from all reason
and that there could be no law more unworthy, more incomprehensible, more
harmful to their country than this.’ It would be ‘a monstrosity, not a law’.28 Yes,
Rome had had a tribunician veto (to which the szlachta were wont to compare
their own), but it was not as extensive in its force as its Polish counterpart, its use
was much more restricted and, according to Konarski, it was the reason behind
the collapse of the Roman Republic.29
The veto and the ‘free voice’ were co-terminous. The ‘głos wolny’ was also the
‘nie pozwalam’. Its very raison d’être was the preservation of what existed – in a
very real sense, ‘głos wolny’, the ‘free voice’, had to be the same thing as the liberum
veto.30 Konarski tried to redefine the ‘głos wolny’ – into the right of free speech
in general, no longer something there primarily to protect the past. ‘We must so
conduct our counsels that free speech (‘głos wolny’) and the right to speak freely
in all matters should be preserved intact to each individual’, a right which did not
exist under absolute forms of government. The distinction had to be hammered
home. Free speech ‘is not the freedom for each to destroy Sejmy and sejmiki, a
perverse interpretation which agrees neither with reason nor human nature. You
are not the only one who loves his country so much that no other can equal your
love for it, you alone are not possessed of views so wise that your opinion should
be the best, and that of others count for nothing.’31 If the veto had any justifica-
tion, it was only if it was used with the force of a majority of the assembly.32 Its
use by one man, or a minority, to overthrow the opinions of dozens, perhaps
even hundreds, was nothing short of the grossest tyranny, masquerading under
the guise of liberty and equality. ‘We so expansively and rightly proclaim that
we will tolerate no absolute ruler over us . . . And yet we so miserably, so basely
submit ourselves to so many absolute masters, men who sometimes lack wit, or
who are sometimes bought by others for the ruin of ourselves and our country.’33
True freedom was the freedom to give counsel, to conduct legal process, to
look to all the interests of the state and to do so in all security; it included the
capacity to defend one’s country against external danger. None of these desider-
ata were even possible where the veto prevailed.34 Pluralitas – majority voting
– presented by Konarski as a return to ancient, ancestral practice, would remedy
all. ‘The consent of the estates of the Commonwealth to war, taxes, laws and a
thousand other matters is perfectly well founded on general agreement of the
more weighty, that is, the greater, number.’ Those states that practised plurality
in council remained ‘illustrious, free, prosperous and strong’, just as Poland had
once been, before the veto.35 Reform the Sejm and all else would follow. ‘For
without the Sejm, we will be unable to do an iota of good for our country.’ 36 Of
course, plurality was not without its deficiencies – no form of earthly government
was. But compared with the catastrophes that were overtaking Poland, plurality
could only be an improvement. Plurality and freedom were not only compatible,
but without the majority vote, freedom could not subsist. Majority voting at least
allowed the voices of all to be heard – they could not be cut short and silenced
through one man’s veto. The individual, simply by being able to express himself
without the veto’s guillotine, would gain in weight and dignity. The nobility as
a whole would benefit: magnates would have to take the szlachta seriously, to
court them for support as politics became more meaningful; and the magnates
themselves, in an orderly, no longer anarchic, republic, would find their credit
and authority enhanced.37 The liberum veto, ostensibly directed towards the
best of all possible worlds, condemned Poland to the worst. Sound politicians
should aim for ends that were not the best imaginable or most desirable, but for
those that were possible – majority voting would permit this.38 Of course, bad
men would be returned as envoys, but, in the real world, they would always be
outweighed by those who had the country’s best interests at heart. In any case,
as Sejmy ceased to become vacuous talking-shops and were transformed into
effective legislatures, the quality of men attracted to them would improve.39
Konarski’s ideal was the English parliament, on which he was well informed
by Prince Adam Czartoryski, scion of one of the Rzeczpospolita’s greatest famil-
ies and ardent anglophile. He drew heavily on the constitutional commentator,
Gaspard Réal de Curban, whose monumental La science du gouvernement was
being widely read across Europe.40 He also analysed the forms of government of
Republican Rome, Sweden, Venice, Genoa, Switzerland and the Dutch Republic,
but none of them received the same degree of scrutiny as he expended in twenty-
four pages of his fourth volume on England.41 The praise he heaped on England
was, in the Polish context, unprecedented. In 1740, Stanisław Poniatowski the
elder, expounding a programme of economic revival, had pointed to England,
together with the Dutch Republic, Venice and Switzerland as states similar to
Poland, yet which were well-ruled, but he had steered clear of any details.42 As
well he might have, for England was tarred with Protestantism, regicide, the mar-
tyrdom of Catholics, a state whose representatives periodically caused irritation
by their impertinent and hypocritical appeals on behalf of Poland’s Protestants.

Britain’s spectacular military successes during the Seven Years War and the
encomia heaped on its freedom-orientated constitution by Montesquieu, the
admiration it aroused in the worldly Czartoryskis and their allies – all this cleared
the ground for its rehabilitation. Konarski conceded it had its faults, but they were
no worse than any other form of government. Yes, its kings were able to secure
control of parliamentary majorities – but they were unable, however, to use
those majorities to strip the English of their basic freedoms. Indeed, they could
never be sure of retaining their grip on their own partisans – George II, after all,
was forced to dismiss Walpole, despite his confidence in him; William III could
never be sure of any majority. The parliament of ‘those great republicans and
that great English Commonwealth’ was his near-constant point of reference.43
The doctrine of royal unaccountability, which allowed the odium for mistaken
or ill-intentioned policies to fall on ministers, while respect for the crown and
the dignity of the throne were preserved inviolate, found much favour with
Konarski. He did not deny or hide the extent of corruption in English public
life – his picture is far less flattering than that contained in Montesquieu’s De
l’Esprit des Lois. But that corruption was insufficient to erode England’s power,
riches and freedoms.44 Those freedoms were at least as long-lived as Poland’s,
pre-dating even the Magna Carta. The kings of England could not tax as they
wished. It was ‘the greatest secret of state’ of England, that though its monarch
had far more extensive powers than his Polish counterpart, he had no control
over taxation, but had to argue for and, through his ministers, answer for it.45
English-style simple parliamentary majorities, maintained Konarski, should be
not so much introduced as re-introduced in Poland, a return to its own ancient,
ancestral constitution.
It was going to be no easy leap to ditch unanimity for the mature parliamentary
system he sought. Konarski considered the possibility of qualified three-quarters
or two-thirds majorities. It would be impossible for the court to corrupt men on
this scale, especially if the size of the Chamber, closer to the English model, were
increased from around 180 to 500 envoys. But on purely pragmatic grounds, he
opted for simple majorities – a preponderance of one would be enough. Qualified
majorities were complex, inefficient, open to dispute and their use would only
encourage ill-intentioned minorities to mobilise all the more energetically to
block otherwise salutary legislation. If simple majorities were good enough for
other free states, they should be good enough for Poland.46
Simple reassurances regarding the behaviour of majorities elsewhere were
not likely to calm an electorate whose birthright consisted of almost paranoid
phobias about the corrosive potential of the monarchy to corrupt through its ius
distributivum. Much of volume three was couched in terms of a debate between
shades of republican opinion on what to do about those distributive powers.47
Konarski personally seems to have inclined to the view that the corrupting power
of the court was much exaggerated, but he accepted in the end that the concerns
it provoked had to be addressed. In a memorandum he drafted for the French
court, on behalf of the otherwise supine grand Crown hetman, Jan Klemens
Branicki, in the summer of 1762, he made clear he accepted that royal patronage
powers had to be removed from the king.48 He followed the line of Karwicki
and ‘Leszczyński’ in pointing to competition for royal favour as the chief factor
behind disrupted parliaments, and even civil strife, by those disappointed in their
expectations.49 He was ready to settle for election to senatorial office by sejmiki.
To avoid corruption or intimidation, such election would be by secret ballot. The
role of the king would be to confirm those elected in their posts. The king would
continue to appoint ministers. Some crown lands would be set aside to furnish a
civil list, but most were to be sold off to raise capital for a state bank and to pro-
vide resources for official salaries.50 Men would thus be appointed to the senate
by judgement of the szlachta, that is, on their own deserts, not on their capacity
to win over the king. Election to office would even serve as a further reassurance
that the court could not corrupt majorities and that the place-hunting venalities
– and their potential for corruption – of England would be avoided.51
This final act of despoliation of royal prerogative was meant to reassure the
nobility that a radically reformed, active, effective Sejm was possible. Parliament
would sit no longer for the customary six-week session, but for as long as neces-
sary and liable to recall at any moment over its two-year term. It would receive
proper standing orders, its marshal would be empowered to maintain true
discipline.52 Konarski inflicted a final humiliation on the veto, the quondam
‘palladium’ of Poland’s liberty: those who sought to reinstate it in any form would
be deemed ‘enemies and traitors to their country’. Bills would become law as soon
as they were approved, without the need for the final block-reading of legislation
that caused so many problems. The majority vote would be introduced into the
sejmiki, whose procedures would also be reformed among more disciplined
lines.53 Perhaps as a sop to traditionalists, or perhaps because he genuinely
believed it, Konarski added his voice to the traditional call for the revival of the
popisy, the annual military musters of the nobility, to form a kind of national
militia. ‘Which popisy would infallibly revive in the noble estate the ancient spirit
of our ancestors in defence of religion and our country’s liberties.’54 Indeed, once
Poland’s institutions were made workable, wider, moral revival would follow.
Successful Sejmy would attract better men who were presently deterred from
entering public life by the chaos which made anything constructive impossible.
Within ten years, the whole tone of public life, he reckoned, would be massively
transformed for the better.55
Konarski envisaged a permanent cabinet, in the shape of a ‘Council of
Residents’, composed of the primate, of at least twelve senators, the principal
ministers of state and twenty-four elected szlachta representatives, with executive

power only, sitting under the king as chairman. The Council would answer to
the Sejm. The senators and elected nobles would sit for twelve months. The king
would nominate the senators; ministers entered ex officio. The envoys would elect
representatives (who could include nobles not serving as envoys) during the final
sittings of each fresh Sejm. A double complement would be nominated, to allow
a new batch of senators and envoys to take over after twelve months. The Sejm
would also authorise the appointment of a reserve body of senators and noble
representatives, to fill in for any absences among the regular ‘residents.’ The forty-
five councillors would be assigned to four principal ministries of war, finance,
justice and police; the king would appoint two members from each department
(of whom one would be a non-minister or non-senator) to make up an ad hoc
body for any discussions with foreign representatives. The Council would spend
most of its time divided among the four permanent departments, although the
king, on the primate’s advice, could also call it to plenary session on matters of
major import. A different minister or senator would be selected, by lot, to chair
each department each week, and would report to the king, whose approval was
necessary to validate all resolutions. Collectively, its task would be ‘to watch, to
warn and to avert anything that might be done contrary to the statutes of the
Sejm and the laws of the Crown and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.’
All local officials and private citizens and sejmiki would be entitled to approach
the appropriate department on business within its remit. Individual departments
would alert the king of any threats or illegalities. The Department of Justice
would have no power to involve itself in lawsuits, but it would conduct the trials
of judges accused of corruption. The Council as a whole was to undertake the
supervision of agriculture, industry and education, and to watch for threats
of foreign aggression. One of the major tasks of each department was the
preparation of legislation for the next Sejm, for which it was eminently more
qualified than the provincial nobility. Local instructions would stay, but would be
presented separately to the Sejm. Everyone, not just the nobility, but also ‘private
persons, societies, towns and townships’ would be free to submit their desiderata
via the Council of Residents for parliamentary consideration. A tentative step,
perhaps, towards making the Sejm a less exclusively noble club. The Council’s
departments would remain in session during the Sejm, indeed, their members
could continue to occupy their places there, in order to explain and enlighten
their fellow-parliamentarians over their proposals. The departments would
meet at least four times per week. Konarski claimed that it was highly likely
that departmental meetings would conclude by general agreement – but he also
specified that a secret ballot could take place and the majority decision would
be binding, even on the king.
Formally, of course, this unwieldy executive was weighted in favour of the
rank and file nobility, whose representatives would outnumber the senators and
ministers both within the departments and the council as a whole. With the king’s
role safely reduced, majority voting could finally be extended to royal elections,
not one of which had ever truly witnessed the ‘unanimitatis chimera’, to eliminate
the strife and blood-letting that invariably accompanied them as disgruntled
rivals sought to make good their claims. Indeed, given the checks imposed on
the kings and the final reduction of their distributive powers, Konarski was even
prepared to suggest bringing elective monarchy to an end altogether and restor-
ing hereditary kingship.56
It was an almost impossibly cumbrous mechanism that he proposed, with
much that was unsaid about the workings of government and policy. If Poland’s
counsels were made effective, then the Commonwealth would clearly need a new
form of government – the present ad hocery practiced by king and ministers
would no longer suffice. A ruling class, which had never known the realities of
successful government, had to be persuaded of its virtues. Konarski had to ensure
active participation of the nobility in the innermost workings of state, and assure
it of a predominant voice there, in order to convince it that what other countries
took as normal ruling procedures were equally necessary in Poland – hence his
prolonged disquisitions on the constitutional workings of other republican states.
It had to be made clear that no one region of the Commonwealth would domin-
ate the rest – careful procedures for reflecting regional balances at all levels had
to be built in. Complexity was unavoidable – it was part of the reassurances that
the nobility had to be fed. Perhaps the chief point of his mechanisms was to be
their function in educating the nobility in the mundane realities of government.
Konarski placed a constant emphasis on attendance: the lackadaisical approach to
governing had to be replaced by a committed professionalism. Public responsibil-
ities could no longer be shirked, as they so easily were in anarchy. It was the duty
of the szlachta estate, as a ruling group, ‘not to think only of their fields and cattle
. . . but to apply themselves to learn the Commonwealth’s needs and serve it.’57
Konarski was anxious to demonstrate that his was not an isolated voice. At
the end of volume two, he printed thirty-nine letters of support and encourage-
ment he had received from leading ecclesiastical and lay senators, ministers and
dignitaries of the realm, men of all political orientations. At the end of volume
three, he provided a further twenty-two letters from such eminent worthies. Yet
he was clearly aware that he would not have an easy time. His preface addressed
the ‘non-reader’, asking him either to refrain from passing judgement altogether,
or at least doing him the courtesy of perusing his work to the very end before
passing judgement. His correspondents were aware of the indignation his work
had provoked in many quarters and Konarski himself admitted it had brought
down him ‘insults and obloquy’, much of which, he suspected, did indeed come
from those who had not bothered to read what he had written.58 Many of these
attacks are lost, but those that do survive concentrate above all on one thing: the
liberum veto. Konarski was concerned not only to demolish it, but to build up a
picture of a viable, functioning parliament and government. To his opponents,
the attack on the veto was all. It is a moot point whether they could even bring
themselves to understand his broader vision of a state, which went beyond the
contemplation and preservation of its ‘freedom’ purely for its own sake.
Even before the publication of volume four, Felix Czacki launched an anonym-
ous and vitriolic onslaught. He described Konarski’s work as ‘full of venom’, and
condemned majority voting as ‘the poison of liberty’. The transformation of
parliament and state that Konarski called for left Czacki unmoved – to him, it
was meaningless. The failure of Sejmy was regrettable ‘but we remain with our
liberties and freedoms intact’; Konarski, as a clergyman, would have done better
to ‘zealously urge to repentance, to old Polish virtue, to the maintenance of the
true faith and its rites’.59
The most powerful broadside came from that pillar of Sarmatian rectit-
ude, Crown field hetman Wacław Rzewuski. He was among those who had
congratulated Konarski on his work – but that was before the appearance of
volume two with its open support for majority voting. In his Thoughts on the
Sure Preservation of Sejmy and the Liberum Veto, Rzewuski accepted Poland’s
desperate condition, just as he had bewailed it eight years earlier in his Thoughts
on the Present Circumstances of the Commonwealth.60 At least in his tract of 1764,
unlike its predecessor, he brought himself to mention the veto. He agreed that
parliaments had to succeed,
but not otherwise than with the maintenance and safeguard for the future of the Liberum
Veto, which is the surest and closest guardian not only of our liberties but of our faith
and without which, in a short space of years, our most cherished freedoms would shrivel
and fail and heresy, already not a little spread among us, would dominate and would
gradually wholly uproot our holy faith . . . The Liberum Veto is so necessary for us,
that we should defend and protect it with our lives if we do not wish to perish and our
freedom turn into slavery.
His solution was to restrict the veto to individual bills. Any envoy could use his
veto once and once only (a limitation he left unexplained). He would be required
to remain present throughout the whole Sejm and would have to swear he was
motivated purely by concern for his country, not by any private advantage. The
bill could no longer be discussed by that Sejm. As for Konarski’s proposals on
wider parliamentary reform, he showed little interest. The absurd (to Konarski)
final five-day block-reading of legislation would remain, during which it would
be open to members of the senate to use the right of veto against any individual
bill. As an additional ‘precaution’, anyone accused of using his veto corruptly was
to be tried by a special session of the Sejm under treason charges; if an ecclesi-

astical senator was found guilty, he was, after suffering whatever penalties the
Sejm court adjudged, to be handed over to the pope for further sanction.
These proposals would of course have reduced the Sejm to an impotent
charade. At one moment, Rzewuski accepted that the majority of envoys meant
their country well, the next he rehearsed the tired platitudes about the sole man
of virtue rescuing the Rzeczpospolita from a corrupted majority. Konarski had, in
his analysis of Sejm disruption, already demonstrated the pointlessness of oaths
and trials. Rzewuski’s proposals would, if anything, have strengthened the veto,
by making explicit the right of senators to exercise it (something over which there
was considerable uncertainty) and by investing it with a new aura of reasoned
concern for the Commonwealth. He expressed his deep respect for the author of
On the Means of Successful Counsels, but in asserting that the veto had to be kept,
‘but so only used for the good and not the harm of our country’ he showed that
he did not or would not understand a word of what Konarski was talking about.
Yet because Rzewuski was such a moral authority in his own right, because he
was playing to a conservative majority, his arguments carried a weight out of all
proportion to their intrinsic fatuity.
Konarski reognised this. His reply, Thoughts on the Thoughts, pointed out that
Rzewuski’s arguments ultimately rested on the disinterested sincerity of would-
be objectors. In careful language, he repeated his arguments about the uselessness
of oaths and trials. The hetman’s proposals would do nothing to alleviate Poland’s
anarchy. Sejmy which could not be broken, but which could achieve nothing,
were of no use.61 However, confronted with someone of Rzewuski’s standing, he
was prepared to make concessions. Even in volume three, where he had shown a
readiness to contemplate the use of qualified majorities of three-quarters, he may
have felt some need to accommodate old fears, before he had reasserted himself
in volume four.62 Konarski was a man anxious to maintain good relations with
all political parties – and, in 1764, in the midst of a fraught interregnum after the
death of Augustus III the previous year, he may have felt that appeasement of old
attachments to the ‘monstrous idol’ of the veto was called for. So, he agreed that
a number of key issues might remain subject to the veto: raising the army above
40,000 men (for fear of alarming Poland’s neighbours); anything questioning
any ‘manifest cardinal law of our liberty’ such as abolition of royal elections or
an increase in royal power; the declaration of war; anything pertaining to the
Roman Catholic faith.63 Rzewuski pounced on these damaging concessions with
glee. If Konarski was prepared to admit the veto on some materials, he should
be ready to do so for all.64 The idea that the veto and effective parliaments were
incompatible he magnanimously took to be ‘an amusing joke’ – after all, if one
objector succeeded against one hundred supporters of a bill, only the bill, not
the Sejm, would fail. Finally, ‘in the simplicity of my heart’ he was convinced
‘that the Polish and Lithuanian nation will never consent to the total abolition
of the liberum veto, nor to an absolute, uncircumscribed plurality. Our faith, our
freedom, our ancestral laws, all that is dear and sincere to us will never allow it.’
Attacks on Konarski came on other fronts. That song to Golden Liberty,
Szymon Majchrowicz’s Happy Endurance of Kingdoms, reflected ecclesiastical
fears that the abolition of the veto would indeed open the way to a weakening
of the position of the Church and Catholicism in general. The most extensive
riposte, however, came during 1764 from Szczepan Sienicki, chancery official
of Różan in Masovia. The three volumes of his New Means of Concluding Public
Counsels explicitly sought to reinforce ‘the cardinal laws of liberty, Libertatis
Sentiendi and Juris Vetandi’.65 Sienicki wrote as a man fully conscious of the
dangers facing his country. As a resident of Masovia, he was more exposed than
most to the armed violations to which Poland was subjected, especially from
Prussia, and which continued for months after the end of the Seven Years War.
He appreciated that Poland would be utterly incapable of resisting any territorial
claims that Russia, Prussia or other powers might make against it, ‘which would
do great harm not only to our liberty, but also . . . to our holy religion.’66 His other
fear, inevitably, was the traditional bugbear of absolutism, only all too probable
if Poland did not cast off its anarchy and put an end to the endless disruption
of its Sejmy. And yet, any solution had to be reconcilable with the liberum veto.
Poland had been built up over the centuries by the present generation’s ancestors,
who had sacrificed themselves by the hundreds of thousands, even millions, for
it. They had been ready to sacrifice their lives and fortunes for the veto whose
abolition ‘in this decaying age’ was being proposed.67
Sienicki rejected Konarski’s argument that the głos wolny equated with the
freedom of speech. The right to speak freely on its own was useless: it had to
be accompanied by the capacity to prevent harmful decisions. It was the only
effective way of resisting the strong and the powerful. Konarski was wrong to
claim that the veto had no foundation in law – although Sienicki granted that
its blanket application to wreck entire parliaments was a pernicious abuse.68
He even claimed that since Konarski himself had accepted that there had been
instances before the crystallisation of the veto of Sejmy dispersing fruitlessly, that
majority voting itself could be no guarantee that they would in future conclude
successfully.69 On the other hand, he did not attempt to refute the Sejm by Sejm
analysis of volume three of On the Means to Successful Counsels in which Konarski
sought to demonstrate that no parliament had ever been disrupted to Poland’s
benefit. For all his genuine fears of what might befall Poland, when it came to
the preservation of liberty, Sienicki remained firmly lodged in the world of the
ideal and the fanciful, of what conceivably might occur, rather than of what had
truly happened.
Yet Sienicki’s work involved a deeper analysis of the veto than any, other than
Konarski’s own, that had been produced since Andrzej Maksymilian Fredro’s
Fragmenta of 1660, an examination forced on him by the breadth of Konarski’s
attack and his own dogged attachment to a cherished ancestral bequest. For
Sienicki, the veto derived from one of the legislative keystones of Polish lib-
erty – King Alexander’s statute of 1505, Nihil Novi: ‘we deem it equitable and
reasonable . . . that nothing new should be enacted into the common law and
public liberty by ourselves and our successors without the common consent of
our councillors and the envoys of the counties’. Sienicki referred to this law on
at least seventeen occasions, making of it the centrepiece of his whole opus.70 It
was the basis of Poland’s liberties and of the veto. Ironically, Konarski himself had
made exactly the same point some thirty years earlier, in his pamphlet of 1733,
Conversation Between a Landowner and His Neighbour – Nihil Novi conferred on
each envoy the right of veto – and, in the course of his On the Means to Successful
Counsels, he was obliged to reject charges of inconsistency with the observation
that the wise man should be prepared to change his mind.71 Nihil Novi, argued
Sienicki, explicitly required communis consensus and that meant that each envoy
possessed the right of veto. Communis consensus did not mean, as Konarski
claimed, majority voting – it directly rejected it. Indeed, majority voting had only
encouraged divisions in the past: King Alexander had engineered Nihil Novi as
an antidote to the disorders and unrest fomented under the old majority voting
system.72 If, as Konarski advocated, a simple majority of one was enough to
enact a law, dangerously divisive fissures would inevitably follow. Small major-
ities threatened to divide and wreck the state. They might even jeopardise the
position of Catholicism. To Sienicki, majority voting was a kind of constitutional
automaton, which would automatically swamp the views of the minority without
giving them a fair hearing (disregarding Konarski’s repeated assurances that this
was anything but the case, and that it was, on the contrary, the veto itself which
blocked all free debate).73
If the state was not to be torn apart, a means of safeguarding communis con-
sensus had to be found. Sienicki’s solution to this conundrum, one of which he
was inordinately proud and which, in his view, was divinely inspired and thus
far superior to Konarski’s, amounted to little more than a re-working of the
hoary suggestion, going back almost to the first use of the individual veto, that
the objection should be subject to some form of review. In any wider discussion,
urged Sienicki, all men fell into one of three groups: those in favour of a proposi-
tion (asserentes), those opposed to it (contradicentes) or those with no fixed view
on it (indifferentes). This would now be mirrored in the procedures of the Sejm,
which would cease to be subjected to blanket disruption. From the outset of the
Sejm, every third senator and envoy would be designated an indifferens – though
any other individual could, at his request, be numbered among the indifferentes.
It would be the role of these neutraliści, ‘neutralists’, not to vote, but to debate,
advise and try to reconcile disagreements between the rest, that is, between the
asserentes and contradicentes. As successive bills were discussed, so the remaining
envoys and senators would, in their turn, fill the role of indifferentes – in practice,
claimed Sienicki, it would be impossible to work out in advance who would be
an indifferens for which individual bill, so impossible to corrupt them. It was
in the supposedly conciliating role of the indifferentes that Sienicki saw as his
main contribution to reconciling communis consensus with the liberum veto.
‘The world has stood for almost 7,000 years’ yet in all that time, never had his
device of ‘neutralists’ been used.74 Only individual bills could be questioned; the
objector had to lodge his arguments in writing, within one day of his original
objection. Any objector, be he envoy or senator, was entitled to exercise his veto
as often as he wished, up to the third and final reading of a bill. Within three days
of presentation of an objection, it would be judged in a peaceful and conciliatory
manner in special, parallel session of the Chamber of Envoys and Senate, which
would examine and debate the written submission of objection in detail ‘in order
to secure general agreement’.75 Thus thrashed out, an amended bill would be laid
down for a second reading. If the objector persisted, and if a (simple) majority
backed him, the bill would fail; but if the majority supported the amended bill
and the objector stood firm, he would have to submit a more detailed statement
of his position. Written counter-objections would also be submitted and all
this would be read out to the envoys and senators on the following day. Those
individual envoys and senators who had the right to vote would do so openly,
in turn; and if nine-tenths of the combined vote went in favour of the bill, it
would pass – otherwise, it would either be dropped altogether or deferred to the
next Sejm. There could after all, be no doubt, that a nine-tenths majority was
communis consensus – indeed, if nine-tenths of the Sejm backed a bill from the
outset, the veto could not be exercised.76
Sienicki’s was a heroic exercise in a petty, quasi-Ptolemaic pedantry, aimed
at saving the appearances of the veto and of communis consensus. It testified
to a gut attachment to the liberum veto and to the utter unreadiness of a mid-
dling, reasonably well-educated nobleman to begin to appreciate the demands
of the practicalities of effective parliamentary conduct – to such a pass had a
generation of failed Sejmy brought the Commonwealth of the Two Nations.
Despite his protestations that his proposals were entirely practicable, in reality
the cumbersome adjudication proceedings would have bogged Sejmy down
far more than they already were. Sienicki did not look on his envoys as men
of passion and feeling, but as one-dimensional characters who would readily
assume the role of his indifferentes when asked and would not be influenced by
any external allegiances they might have in this role. He gave no consideration
to the paralysing consequences of there being more than one objection to a bill.
But even on his own terms, his elaborate voting cycles were redundant. ‘General
agreement occurs only when there are very many in favour of a measure and very
few opposed to it.’ By contrast, a mere majority of one was sufficient to secure
pluralitas. Yet although he clearly considered that communis consensus was best
secured by a ninety per cent support for a given measure, he conceded that a
lesser proportion might also be valid. ‘If nine out of ten [parts] of the Sejm agree
a measure (it could be eight parts or even fewer . . . though I would not wish it
to be fewer than six parts) . . . then any such measure is decisively enacted . . .’77
Had Sienicki been able to pull clear from the painstaking pettifoggery of his
proposals, it might have occurred to him that a qualified majority of sixty per
cent was not much removed from the simple majorities that Konarski advocated
– indeed, at one point, Konarski, as we have seen, was prepared to sanction
recourse to majorities of three-quarters. Communis consensus was, for Sienicki,
the overwhelming harmony that the szlachta had for so long imagined essential
to the conduct of politics; for Konarski, communis consensus was a device to get
things done with an almost brutal efficiency, which the Rzeczpospolita’s politics
totally lacked.
Part two of Sienicki’s work was published in August 1764. His fears of partition
at the hands of Poland’s neighbours did not resurface. A new regime, propelled
by a Confederacy led by the Czartoryski family, pushed through a series of
reforming measures at the Convocation Sejm of May 1764. All Sienicki’s fears of
absolutum dominium were aroused. The reforms were modest enough: execut-
ive, controlling commissions, with collegiate powers of decision, were attached
to the hitherto irresponsible offices of the hetmani (Poland-Lithuania’s highest
military officials) and the grand treasurers. The prolongation of the Confederacy
beyond the Sejm allowed the veto to be put into abeyance. The new treasury
and military commissions worried Sienicki. The court, he felt, would always be
able to win over a majority of the new commissioners with favour and reward
and then proceed deliberately to disrupt Sejmy to enable them to usurp its role
(even though the court would also be able to count on permanent parliamentary
majorities).78 The hint of effective government re-awoke the most fearful fantas-
ies of the szlachta’s Arcadia.
Konarski himself hoped that his proposals would be fully implemented during
the imminently expected interregnum.79 Augustus III died on 5 October 1763.
In January 1764, Konarski submitted another memorandum to the French
ambassador, the Marquis de Paulmy, in which, as in the ‘Branicki’ memor-
andum of 1762, he summarised his arguments in favour of majority voting and
urged French support.80 He may have been hoping that the French government
could use its influence on its allies, Austria and Russia. He placed particular
emphasis on an argument that he had made in his Successful Counsels, that
Poland’s neighbours need have no cause to fear the introduction of orderly
government. It would be quite absurd to assume that the Commonwealth would
ever be capable of posing any kind of threat. If, on the other hand, anarchy
continued unchecked, an absolute monarchy might indeed emerge, which
would pose a real menace to its neighbours’ interests.81 This was a hopelessly
optimistic reading of the situation, designed primarily to reassure the szlachta.
The Czartoryskis did indeed seize control during the interregnum, because
they had Russian military backing for their candidate, Catherine II’s ex-lover,
Stanisław Poniatowski. They did indeed hope to remove the liberum veto – but
the empress was adamant that it should stay. The reforms that were introduced
at the Convocation and Coronation Sejmy of May 1764 and January 1765,
centring on the military and treasury commissions that so alarmed Szczepan
Sienicki, were of a peripheral nature. As for the veto, the Czartoryskis did
smuggle through a major limitation on it in their legislation on the treasury
commission – bills presented by it were to be decided ‘figura iudiciaria’ ‘in the
manner of the courts’, that is to say, by a majority vote: that such an important
measure had to be hidden from their own protector by such obscure phrasing
was very revealing of the Czartoryskis’ limited freedom of action. What was more
important was that after the end of Poniatowski’s Coronation Sejm, the general
confederacy which the Czartoryskis had created to push their reforms through,
remained in being: for as long as it did so, the veto would be not rescinded, but
in abeyance.82
The attempt by the reformers during 1766 Sejm to clarify the terms of the
1764 legislation backfired spectacularly. Their opponents connived with the
Russians and the Prussians, whose diplomats warned they would put Poland
‘to fire and sword’ if a bill promoted by Michael Wielhorski, restoring the veto
in full, were not passed.83 Yet, despite the enactment of that bill, not a single
parliament was to fail for the rest of the Commonwealth’s existence. How far this
had to do with Konarski’s writings is debatable. If there was much opposition
to his ideas, there was also clearly much support. For many, he was pushing at
an open door. It is quite clear that Russia and its ally, Prussia, were genuinely
concerned at the extent of support for majority voting during the interregnum.84
The record of the 1766 Sejm shows that the great majority of envoys gave their
endorsement to Wielhorski’s bill only with the utmost reluctance, ‘nearly all
covered their faces in sad silence, saying nothing, some declaring, “Would I
were not an envoy”’.85 But the main reason why Sejmy succeeded and the main
reason why they on occasion enacted truly major legislation after 1764 was
ultimately because Russia, in trying to mould the satellite state it wanted, found
it had no choice but secure its goals through parliament – in no other way could
laws be enacted. In 1766, the Russians destroyed the early reform aspirations of
Poniatowski’s reign – but such a crude, blanket destruction did nothing to assist
the hopes that Catherine the Great harboured of controlling and manipulating
her intended vassal-state. She saw in bolstering the position of Protestants a
means of creating a reliable political agency, which would always look to her for
support. She obliged the parliament of 1767–8, under threat of military reprisals,
to accord the Protestants the right of access to all political offices; but that same
parliament also introduced limited restrictions on the veto, at least to the extent
of stripping it of its blanket, disruptive effect. Minor legislation, amounting to
little more than administrative tinkering, would in future be decided by majority
vote. This, in turn, necessitated the introduction, for the first time in Poland’s
parliamentary history, of a formal voting procedure, in place of acclamation.
This painfully slow advance was, however, vitiated by Russian insistence on
extracting wider rights for the dissenters. That a tiny Protestant minority should
secure a potential access to office grotesquely out of all proportion to their
numbers, combined with the affront to Catholic feeling, created outrage. Further
insult came with the insistence on a Russian guarantee of the new constitu-
tional arrangements. The measures were enacted only under military pressure
(Russian troops blockaded Warsaw) and the deportation of a number of highly
placed nobles to the Russian interior: Kajetan Sołtyk, bishop of Kraków; Józef
Załuski, bishop of Kiev; Wacław Rzewuski, field-hetman of the Crown; and his
son, Seweryn.86
The upshot was an anti-Russian, anti-dissenter, even anti-royalist backlash in
the shape of the Confederacy of Bar. Between 1768 and 1772, Poland was gripped
by a widespread, if often confused, guerrilla action against Russian control.
From October 1768, Russia found itself at war with the Ottoman Porte, alarmed
at the intensity of Russian activity in Poland. Against Turkey, Russia’s military
performance was spectacular, but the distracting conflict meant it was unable to
regain control in the Rzeczpospolita. There were moments when it seemed the
Austrian Habsburgs would get sucked into the conflict, perhaps even Prussia
and France. Russia, Prussia and Austria finally resolved the difficulties between
them – at Poland’s expense. In August 1772, by the conventions of St Petersburg,
the three powers deprived Poland of approximately a third of its population and
territory – the blow, which had for so long been a stock jeremiad in the armoury
of political hand-wringing over the Commonwealth’s prospects, had become a
reality. Stanisław Konarski died on 3 August 1773 – in time to see what he had
so feared come to pass. The strife-torn, debilitated state could neither resist nor
recover from such losses. Between April 1773 and April 1775, a cowed confeder-
ated Sejm ratified the partitions and endured the mammoth task of enacting
the constitutional settlement on which the three partitioning states, in practice
mainly Russia, insisted. A further confederated Sejm had to be called in 1776 to
complete the task.
As far as the veto was concerned, the situation remained unchanged from
1767–8. Majority voting would continue to be restricted to the most minor
business. Catherine the Great accepted that her support for the dissenters
was counter-productive and much of the legislation in their favour was dis-
mantled. In any case, the majority of those agitating for these rights found
themselves under Prussian rule. Poland received a new central executive, the
so-called Permanent Council, with little more than the powers of a governmental
night watchman. Between 1778 and 1788 parliaments confined themselves, of
necessity, to largely routine administrative business. The partition Sejm signifi-
cantly constricted the royal powers of appointment, though without abolishing
them completely. Its sole major, positive achievement was the creation of the
Commission for National Education (Komisja Edukacji Narodowej) carved out of
the resources of the Jesuit Order, which was abolished by Pope Clement XIV in
July 1773.
The confederated Sejmy of 1767–8, 1773–5 and 1776 met under Russian
duress. All passed major legislation, no matter how unwelcome. If the non-
confederated parliaments of 1778 to 1786 achieved nothing of note, beyond,
in 1780, spectacularly rebuffing plans for watering down serfdom, at least they
were undisrupted. Whereas under Augustus III, a political generation elapsed
which had never known a successful Sejm, after his death a generation followed
which was habituated to parliaments doing things, no matter how much it may
have disapproved of them. In 1765, the Monitor had claimed that ‘the reflections
of more sensible patriots’ had persuaded many of the soundness of Konarski’s
arguments.87 But it was habituation, rather than the direct impact of his writ-
ings, which killed off the veto. If individual sejmiki continued to insist on its
preservation, it largely ceased to be a subject for serious debate. It vanished from
the political agenda. Jan Poniński’s anonymous ‘Moralisation on the condition of
the Commonwealth’ of the 1763–4 interregnum, while demanding the abolition
of the monarchy, took it almost for granted that decisions would be made by
majority vote.88 Before the appearance of Konarski’s book, this would not have
been a tenable position – but it was now at least intellectually possible to assume
the veto would cease to exist. The only other major political treatise of the 1760s,
the naturalised César Pyrrhys de Varille’s Lettres sur la constitution actuelle de
la Pologne et la tenure de ses diètes, had comparatively little to say on the veto.
Though it urged a general reform of Poland’s government, including a plea for
majority decision-making, its main concern was with royal elections (most of
it was written during the 1763–4 interregnum).89 One of the last echoes of On
the Means to Successful Counsels was sounded in the 24 July 1773 number of the
Monitor, probably written by Lorenz Mitzler de Koloff, one of a series of articles
on ‘the happiness of Poland’:
It is clear to-day that all the disasters, machinations and misrule which Poland has experi-
enced have arisen from this source [the liberum veto] and that through these words a
kind of anarchy was introduced years ago into Poland. . . . Our forbears grounded the
liberum veto on very unsound principles, believing every nobleman partaking in counsel
for the common good to be a good patriot and an honest man.’
He could only hope that it would be the partitioning powers that would cure the
ills that the Poles themselves had been unwilling to do.90
6
Confrontations with the Enlightenment:

Felix Czacki and the Monitor, 1765,
and the Zamoyski law code, 1780
The mid-eighteenth century saw something of a cultural and economic boom in

Warsaw. King Augustus III’s enforced residence from 1756 to 1763, when he was
forced from his electorate of Saxony by Prussian occupation during the Seven
Years War to take shelter in his neutral Polish kingdom, gave its capital the air of a
genuinely royal residential city. His successor, Stanisław August Poniatowski, was
not only permanently resident, but eager to nurture his country’s cultural and
literary life. The gradual repair of the economic damage of the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries created a sense of well being among middling nobles
and magnates. The cultural initiatives of the Załuski brothers and leading Piarists
and Jesuits had produced a language drawing on its own resources, no longer
reliant on Latin for support, reaching back to its Renaissance past and to other,
contemporary vernaculars, chiefly French, in order to crystallize an up-to-date
vocabulary which grasped for the future and sought to break out of the past.
Inevitably, a city in which a German monarch resided pulled in German
residents. Among the attractions was the relative absence of formal censorship
in a state which was, for all its imperfections, ‘free’ to a degree few others were
– although given that for most of the first half of the eighteenth century, the
only two printing presses in Warsaw belonged to the Piarists and the Jesuits, the
dissemination of texts hostile to the Catholic Church was unlikely.1 The Załuskis
were quite ready to extend their friendship, patronage and contacts to those
willing to co-operate with their ambitious plans for cultural revival, provided the
position of Catholicism was not questioned. Polish magnates recruited German
scholars and managers to tutor their sons and help with the running of their
properties. According to some contemporary estimates, over half of Warsaw’s
inhabitants were German.2 In 1759, Michael Gröll arrived from Nuremberg to
open a bookshop, selling not only books, but organising subscriptions for the
periodicals that a new generation of literary entrepreneurs felt it worth their
while to float. He also used the capital’s religious presses and presses in Dresden
and Leipzig to publish works in Polish, German, Latin and French.3 Polish books
were produced by the print shops of Leipzig, Dresden, Nuremberg, Breslau and
Königsberg and in Poland’s own German-speaking centres of Danzig and Thorn.
Much of this production relied heavily on the support of individual magnate
patrons and was almost entirely loss-making. Gottfried Lengnich, with close
ties to the Załuskis and leading Polish politicians (he was briefly tutor to the
future king, Stanisław Poniatowski) was fascinated by the law and history of
the Rzeczpospolita as a whole. But selling his forensic studies to the nobility was
an uphill task. It was doubtful if his Ius Regni Poloniae (Law of the Kingdom of
Poland) had sold even a hundred copies twenty years after it first appeared in
1742. Of the initial 1,500 subscribers to a work which should have been as useful
to the szlachta as Konarski’s and Załuski’s Volumina Legum, which began coming
out after 1732, barely a third were to discharge their payment in full.4
It was an erratic and uncertain market. It was not until the 1770s that Warsaw’s
privately owned presses (there were at least seven by 1780 and the number
continued to grow) and bookshops enjoyed any real degree of prosperity. Most
print shops had a bookshop attached. The most important independent book-
shop, run by K. B. Nicolai from 1732 to 1770, when it was taken over by Michael
Gröll, specialised in the import of foreign works.5 The First Partition hit Poland
badly economically, yet it seems to have had little long-term impact on the steady
expansion of the capital’s book trade. Although it was not until the 1770s and
80s that the translation of foreign works of a serious nature began on a signific-
ant scale, it was possible to obtain most foreign-language titles in Poland by
the 1760s.
Periodical production, though still largely dominated by the Piarists and
Jesuits, intensified in the late 1750s. A key figure was Lorenz Mitzler de Koloff, an
archetypal Enlightenment man, doctor, musicologist, litterateur and inventor. He
had been brought to Poland in 1743 by Jan Małachowski, aristocratic industrialist
and future Crown chancellor, as a tutor to his son. Poland fascinated Mitzler.
With the support of Józef Załuski, he set up his own press in Warsaw in 1756,
the first layman to do so in the eighteenth century. From 1763, he began the
systematic importation of French literature. Though he relied heavily on the sup-
port of wealthy magnates, he put much of his own money into over-ambitious
publishing ventures, such as Wawrzyniec Rudawski’s monumental Historiarum
Poloniae ab excessu Vladislai IV ad pacem Olivensem usque libri IX seu Annales.
He wrote ruefully of his losses to Udalryk Radziwiłł: ‘I was mistaken in thinking
that such a useful work will be bought in Poland; I see that they will much more
readily pay 50 ducats for a barrel of Hungarian wine than a few ducats for a
useful book.’ There was a consuming public, but it consumed the wrong things.
Nevertheless, he still planned to bring out a thirteen-volume edition of Polish
medieval chronicles (of which he was to publish five between 1761 and 1777).6
One of Mitzler’s avowed aims was to dispel foreign ignorance of Poland. In
1753, he brought out a German language periodical, the Warschauer Bibliothek. It
closed in 1755 – after attracting no more than seventy subscribers. Undeterred, he
set up a Latin Acta Litteraria Regni Poloniae et Magni Ducatus Lithuaniae in 1756,
C O N F R O N TAT I O N S W I T H T H E E N L I G H T E N M E N T 101
concentrating on Polish history and law. Despite the financial backing of one
of Poland’s wealthiest magnates, Józef Alexander Jabłonowski (nephew to Józef
Stanisław, author of Scruple without Scruple), lack of interest led to the closure of
the Acta in 1763. In 1758, Mitzler redirected his attentions to the Polish-speaking
market, with his Nowe Wiadomości Ekonomiczne i Uczone, or New Economic and
Learned News, retailing information on medicine, economics and philosophy. By
1761, it was moribund, although Mitzler continued to bring out the occasional
issue until 1767. Together with another German, T. Bauch, Mitzler launched the
first moralistic Polish-language periodical, Patriota Polski, patterned on England’s
Tatler and Spectator. Twenty-four issues came out between 1761 and 1763, before
production costs and poor subscriptions led to its abandonment. Pitched at
townsmen, the market proved too small; the Polish nobility had no interest in
being lectured to on morality by German burghers.7
These ventures may have failed – but that they were being made at all shows
that some, at least, believed a more receptive climate was opening up. The election
to the throne in May 1764 of Stanisław August Poniatowski let in a blast of fresh
intellectual air. For two short years after his elevation, before the dead hand of his
Russian protectorate disabused him, the optimistic Poniatowski nursed the hope
that he could bring about a wider revival in the Rzeczpospolita’s condition – his
regal name ‘August’ echoed that of Augustus, renovator of the Roman world. In
1765, he created a Cadet Corps – Szkoła Rycerska – designed to give select young
nobles a modernised military education, although it taught a much wider curicu-
lum.8 Two further major cultural institutions were both closely associated with
the king. One was Poland’s first National Theatre, which opened in November
1765. Augustus III had welcomed Italian opera and made performances open to
the respectable public. The Teatr Narodowy was very different. A native theatrical
tradition barely existed, apart from amateur performances in magnate theatres,
often staging plays written by magnates themselves, and the plays put on in Jesuit
and Piarist schools.9 Stanisław August’s theatre was consciously didactic, staging
performances which were meant to encourage new attitudes and ideas, urging on
the nobility a re-examination of ‘Sarmatian’ ways and advocating the embrace
of a wider European culture. His new theatre put on a fashionable French reper-
toire, Italian comic opera; it also brought to the stage new Polish productions. In
1766, envoys to the Sejm were given free tickets to performances of Franciszek
Bohomolec’s Ceremoniant, an adaptation of Philippe Destouches’ Fausse Agnès,
in which the boorishness of provincial nobility was much ridiculed. Some of the
earlier plays, heavy-handed send-ups of the nobility, were more likely to offend
than to convert.10
Similar reformist aspirations shone through the Monitor, a twice-weekly
periodical commenting on literature, fashion, politics and social concerns. It
was to last for two decades, from 1765 to 1785 – good by European standards,
unprecedented for Poland. It succeeded where the initiatives of Mitzler and

Bauch had failed partly because it was aimed specifically at the szlachta market,
because it was largely written by men of noble origin and partly because of the
influential patronage it enjoyed.11 There had appeared, in 1763, a small run
(seven numbers only) of flysheets under the Monitor heading, edited by the
future king’s cousin, Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski. It condemned anar-
chy and extolled a public service ethos, trying to persuade its readers that true
freedom required an active engagement in politics. Published in support of the
Czartoryski family’s drive for power, it was careful to restrict its criticisms to
general, moralising terms. Written in an elegant vernacular, it said little that had
not been said before (the second issue’s praise of liberty was unexceptionable,
for example) – but the general tone implied that change had to come quickly and
that matters could not continue as they were.
Altogether more pointed was what some called the Monitor-son. It was the
new king’s mouthpiece. Its first editor was Ignacy Krasicki, the foremost poet
and writer of a revived literary tradition, a Polish Voltaire without the malice.
The king himself supplied the occasional, anonymous contribution. The Monitor
pulled together a team of talented writers, politicians and literary figures, nobles
and clergymen. Lorenz Mitzler de Koloff was the sole commoner associated with
it. It sought a Poland that was politically effective, and welcoming to ideas and
arrivals from western Europe. Serfdom would be, at the very least, ameliorated,
and, at best, abolished. Agriculture, trade and industry would flourish. Both
Poniatowski and Czartoryski were ardent anglophiles. An idealised England was
their paradigm, built on Stanisław Konarski’s rosy foundations. ‘We Poles, who
in the arts and sciences have not yet matched the English, can and should work
long until we equal their attainments in learning and the arts.’12
Among the Monitor’s sources of inspiration was Addison and Steele’s Spectator,
which reached Poland in its many French translations, though the Monitor was a
much more consciously political undertaking than the English periodical. English
society was, of course, vastly different from that of Poland: dynamic, fired up by
trade and consumption, urbanising, industrialising and inventing – a far cry from
the immobile agrarian ideals of an introspective nobility which imagined itself
to be blessed by Providence, with their view of their defenceless country as an
essential part of the balance of power and the ‘granary of Europe’, the Poland to
which the merchants of Europe supposedly beat their eager paths. The Spectator
club of six included one merchant, Sir Andrew Freeport. The Monitor’s club was
joined by a merchant only in 1772, the Englishman, Sir Jędrzej Freport [sic]: in
1765, polite, noble society had no room for any merchant, certainly not for a
Polish one. Mitzler de Koloff may have been a crucial partner in the undertaking
but his was hardly a marketable name among the szlachta. Mitzler was in any case
ennobled in 1768. Without nobility, entrepreneurship counted for nothing.13
The Monitor had a subscribing readership of some five hundred, scattered

across the Commonwealth. It offered an invaluable window onto the new
regime’s way of thinking. Among the doubters was Felix (Szczęsny) Czacki, a
well-to-do landowner who had marked his opposition to all forms of ‘novitas’ in
his responses to Stanisław Konarski. In 1758, his Complaint of the Poor Nobility
Against the Boarding-schools had offered a splenetic onslaught against the Piarists’
Collegium Nobilium as detrimental to noble aequalitas. His Interesting Letter
Against the Author of a Book on Preserving Sejmy of 1762, one of the first attacks
on Konarski’s On the Means to Successful Counsels, was at least equally exercised
by the new elite schools.14 It is not surprising that this particular guardian of
ancestral purity should have taken it on himself to engage with the Monitor in its
first year, writing thirty-nine letters in response to the seventy-eight issues that
appeared between March and December 1765. These letters, never published and
quite probably never even sent,15 may have served as an aide-memoir for Czacki
and like-minded friends, or may have been a much-extended version of an entry
in the commonplace books, the silvae rerum, which the nobility loved to compile.
Whatever its purpose, this one-sided correspondence revealed, as nothing else,
conservative and enlightened Poland at odds.
The Monitor hoped to contribute to ‘the improvement of government . . . to
enlighten as to morality, the arts and sciences, manners, reason and widen the
intellect’. There was much in such a wide programme that Czacki could agree
with, above all in its pleas for a more exacting personal morality. Condemnations
of idleness, flattery, mendacity, pride, oppression, hypocrisy and calumny, calls
for the extirpation of vice and the cultivation of a Christian morality were hardly
desiderata anyone could oppose. Czacki agreed on the need to refine and improve
the Polish language. He was even prepared to accept that education should
embrace new subjects such as physics, mathematics and modern languages –
French, German, Italian (saving the continued primacy of Latin).16
When it came to politics, Czacki and the Monitor parted company. The journal
openly supported Poniatowski’s plans to bring ‘Poland out of the bondage of
its misrule and ignorance’. Social immobility and the weight of a noble ruling
estate resting on the supposed attainments of glorious ancestors condemned
the Commonwealth to economic and political stagnation. To Czacki, this
made its views ‘like Lutheran sermons, whose moral content is often well put
together, but on matters of faith or civil government, are often blasphemous’.17
In denouncing vice, the Monitor had primarily the nobility in mind. A letter
from ‘Próżniakowski’, ‘Vainson’ appeared in number six of the Monitor (20 April
1765), bewailing a law enacted by the Coronation Sejm which allowed non-noble
lawyers to plead in hearings before the chancellors’ courts (which heard cases
arising from royal towns) and in the judicial sessions of the new military and
treasury commissions. ‘Vainson’ complained that faced with competition from
industrious and learned townsmen, well-born advocates such as himself would

no longer be able to attend balls, play cards, drink, visit fashionable ladies and
enjoy the social round, but would be reduced to honest work for their upkeep.
Czacki was outraged. The ignorant ‘Próżniakowski’ was a shameful caricature.
‘It is as if idleness, negligence, drunkenness, deceit, philandering are to be found
among the szlachta alone . . . and as if virtue, loyalty, sobriety and application
belonged solely to persons of the urban and peasant estates.’18
Unimpressed by the Monitor’s denials that it was programmatically anti-noble
and that it merely sought to redress the injustices done to commoners, Czacki
claimed its record demonstrated precisely the opposite. For him, Monitor did
indeed maintain that the nobility despised virtue; it sought to debase szlachectwo
by advocating mass ennoblement of foreigners and persons of low birth, for
services of a mundane, rather than outstanding nature; it wanted to deprive
the nobility of fitting employment by opening up governmental and adminis-
trative posts to commoners; it wanted to put an end to the jurisdiction of noble
landowners over their serfs.19 The ready admission of newcomers could only
demean the nobility.20
Czacki was right. The Monitor did want a different nobility, open to the outside
world, educated, refined, tolerant, genuinely observant of Christian precepts,
dedicated to service to the state and society, securing its place in life through
merit and convinced of the need for wider social justice. The new szlachta would
preside over the expansion of trade and industry and the placing of national
prosperity and well being on a genuinely secure footing. One of the main planks
of its programme was wider immigration and ennoblement of foreigners. The
condition of the Polish economy urgently required the input of expertise and
capital from abroad, which would simply not be forthcoming if Poland did not
become more welcoming. Poland’s towns were in deep decay, its road and river
communications neglected, its agriculture woefully unproductive. To all this,
the Rzeczpospolita’s noble rulers demonstrated a blithe insouciance amid an
anarchy which made them an object of scorn throughout Europe. Poland needed
foreigners, ‘often more skilled and more industrious than we are’ yet it could not
attract them if it persisted in barring them from ennoblement. At the very least,
they should be allowed to purchase land (ownership of land had been barred to
commoners since 1496).21 Protestant settlers had to be offered more than bare
sufferance to practise their faiths. How men worshipped was a matter to be left to
God’s judgement – ‘provided a man is obedient to his country’s laws, he should
not be molested.’ 22 The wishful simplicity of these hopes aside, their authors
were determined to coax the szlachta into embracing a new, eighteenth-century
world of change.
To Czacki, this only meant ‘the destruction of the old Commonwealth and the
erection of a new one; as the cornerstone of this new edifice [Monitor] places the
admission to public counsels of the common people, something which has led
to the enslavement of all free nations; it wants to admit them to the prerogatives
of the nobility, which is an injustice, that the undeserving share them with the
deserving.’23 Czacki’s nobles were not parasitic idlers but men of Catholic virtue.
‘Only labours and burdens fall to them, where other estates have only benefits. At
their own expense, the nobility take to horse at the republic’s need, they devote
effort and money to the discharge of public office and the conduct of public
assemblies, the nobleman contributes to the army as does the townsman or
peasant.’ They sacrificed their ‘life, health and fortune’ to their judicial obliga-
tions. The tax reliefs the nobility enjoyed were a reward ‘for the burdens they had
borne in defence of their country’ though, if need be, they were quite prepared
to pay taxes if the defence of their country and their religion truly required it.24
For though he agreed with Monitor that nobles who traded purely on the merits
of their ancestors merited no respect, to him, most nobles deserved their pre-
eminence because they united their own merits to those of their predecessors.25
In principle, Czacki was prepared to welcome deserving foreign immigrants
and even to see them ennobled, provided it was for signal military service.26 But
the Monitor exaggerated Poland’s ills – they could be readily enough cured by
promoting the nobility to administrative office. There were plenty of poor and
deserving nobles in Poland – no need for significant immigration. It would be
enough to provide wider educational facilities for them.27
As for religious toleration, Czacki saw no reason to go beyond the status quo.
He denied that Protestantism brought any economic benefits. Catholic states, he
insisted, were as prosperous as Protestant ones.28 Catholicism, ‘our true, genuine
faith’, was the greatest impetus to virtue, yet the Monitor was deliberately denig-
rating it. It ‘shamelessly permits every god to be honoured, so long as the nation’s
laws are obeyed. This is to acknowledge no GOD, but to allow obeisance to many
GODS.’ To ruin Catholicism was to ruin liberty.29 Czacki was scathing of the
Monitor’s suggestions that the Jesuit and Piarist orders should send their teachers
to study in Protestant countries, as well as in France and Italy, ‘to England, its
air heavy with godless deviance, visiting only the heretical academies of Leyden,
Göttingen, Leipzig, Halle.’ Catholic institutions could provide Polish teachers
with all the instruction they needed. He feared the impact that ‘the godless
metaphysics of Locke, or the materialism of English academies’ might have. He
feared, too, the influence of Rousseau (whose Émile issue 32 of the Monitor had
praised at length) ‘most notorious for the malicious bile of his ingenious ideas’,
whom even Protestant countries rejected.30
The Monitor set far too much store by material prosperity. Sparta survived
for centuries, making use only of iron coinage, but once specie and luxury
were introduced, virtue was destroyed and the state collapsed, a fate shared
by Carthage and Rome.31 Czacki had no objections to ‘middling trades’ and
‘decent crafts’, for such ‘modest’ enterprises ‘bring only necessary wealth, they
add strength, eradicate idleness, the source of all iniquities’. His quarrel was with
‘superfluous trades’, which fostered luxury and ‘soften the mind and destroy vir-
tue, which is the foundation of free nations’. The expansion of commerce which
the Monitor praised would bring about ‘diversity of faiths and the reduction of
the prerogatives and benefits of the noble estate.’32 Monitor painted an unduly
black picture of Poland’s economic condition. It was, after all, ‘the granary of all
the Belgic lands’, therefore its agriculture was far superior to that of the United
Provinces.33 The great grain export prosperity of the early seventeenth century
was long past, but its memory lived on among the apologists of the old order.
Unless the old nobility preserved their primacy, liberty, which in the full mean-
ing of the word was for the szlachta alone, would disappear. Caesar, destroyer
of freedom, deliberately set out to exterminate Rome’s senators and nobles.34
History clearly showed that to elevate commoners and foreigners was to sub-
vert liberty and pave the way for tyranny.35 ‘In England, there is only the empty
name [of liberty], where towns and peasants make up the lower chamber of
public counsels, alongside the nobility.’ No government had ever ‘contemplated
extending freedoms and benefits to plebeians, save when they wished to oppress
the noble estate and destroy freedom.’36
As for the argument that the emancipation of the serfs would benefit the
country as a whole, Czacki was unimpressed. History showed that the weaken-
ing of noble privileges only undermined freedom – not least in France, where
the parlements’ opposition to royal absolutism, for all their zealous words, was
ineffective. The serfs deserved the nobility’s gratitude for their labours, they
should not be exploited – but the best they were entitled to expect was ‘the love
of one’s neighbour’ that Christianity’s tenets demanded of their seigneurs. The
punishment of unjust seigneurs was best left to God. To go beyond this would,
once again, only threaten wider destruction. ‘What confusion would follow, what
damage to the szlachta estate, if the peasantry had the freedom to summons their
own seigneurs to the courts . . . These people are so easily aroused, as numerous
examples attest, and the szlachta estate, constantly humiliated, would be ruined
and with the ruin of its citadel and defence, freedom itself would fail.’37
Czacki invoked Cicero and Plutarch to proclaim that the state could stand
only by preserving its old laws and customs. In this way the fortunes of Egypt
and the liberty of Carthage, Athens, Sparta and Rome had long flourished. It
was no injustice to peasants and townsmen to keep them in the station allotted
them by laws of centuries’ standing. ‘It is dangerous for the laws to be moved
from their due place’.38 What most alarmed him was that the changes he feared
had already begun. The Coronation Sejm had ennobled numerous foreigners and
commoners of shady and dubious background. ‘The basest kind of people’ were
being elevated to szlachectwo; ‘just how many of them are so deserving or superior
to the old nobility in virtue?’ The Convocation Sejm’s ennoblement of fifty Jews
showed to what depths the Commonwealth had sunk – characteristically, Czacki
did not say that the Sejm also rescinded the old Lithuanian law which conferred
noble status on Jewish converts.39 The new treasury and military commissions
marked a dangerous increase of royal power, for their close proximity to the
king meant that they would bend to his influence; the king would ensure that
Sejmy would appoint to them the men he wanted. The new general customs duty
enacted by the Convocation Sejm infringed nobles’ customs exemptions – if such
privileges were not safe, what was?40
Worst of all, the liberum veto was being circumvented. In number sixty of the
Monitor, a Chinese observer, Yunip, struck by the general economic decay, did
not take long to track down ‘the source, whence all this ill comes. This source is
nothing else than dissolute and licentious liberty.’ ‘Real and true liberty’ should
work towards the common good, eschewing all that was contrary to the law and
the nation’s security, ‘but Polish liberty, is, on the contrary . . . the prerogative of
the nobility, whereby every szlachcic can do as he pleases, whether in conformity
with the law or not, whether or not it detracts from his own or others’ security,
so long as he gets what he wants. It is from this perverse view of freedom that
the wretched condition in which this country finds itself derives. The essence of
this liberty are those words . . . “I allow nothing”, which strike me as giving rise
not to freedom, but to slavery.’ To Yunip, it seemed strange that ‘in a country
where they so revel in liberty and write so much about it, those who are heavily
enslaved, regard themselves as being most free.’41
Czacki’s response to this was a paean in praise of the veto. What could a
Chinaman, born and bred under a despotic government, possibly know of
liberty? ‘Enfeebled virtues and force setting itself above the laws’, not the veto,
gave rise to misrule. ‘If in our present state, when one man by his protest may
reject violently imposed legislation, we would have long been lost had we had
majority voting.’ As to the failure of every Sejm under Augustus III, save that
of 1736, to conclude successfully, ‘no real harm has arisen in consequence’.
On the contrary. If these parliaments had concluded by majority vote, Poland
would surely have been dragged into its neighbours’ wars, either ‘to our utter
destruction’ or would at least have suffered as had ‘monarchically ruled nations
without the niepozwalam’: France, which had lost extensive territory in America;
Germany, which had endured such loss of life and England ‘weighed down by
debts’. In the Roman republic, tyranny had crept in when the tribunician veto
was flouted. Majority decision-making in parliament would be dangerous even
if Poland’s kings did not have extensive powers of patronage and corruption at
their disposal. Moreover, the rot had already set in. The confederated Sejmy of
1764, which had decided by plurality ‘have sanctioned illegalities with the dignity
of the law . . . enlarged the powers of kingship, overthrown the rights of liberty.’42
These Sejmy only showed how wrong Konarski had been in his On the Means to
Successful Counsels.43
Czacki did not really debate with the Monitor. He recycled platitudes.
Confronted with how the Commonwealth could cope with its neighbours’
aggressions, his response was to ignore them or to lapse into a resigned quietism.
He made no reference whatsoever to the territorial violations suffered during and
after the Seven Years War. While he praised the martial qualities of the nobility, he
disregarded the abysmal nature of Poland’s military endeavours since the Great
Northern War. The sixtieth issue of the Monitor, in which Yunip had condemned
the veto, also warned that Poland was little more than a slave to its neighbours.
Czacki made no response on that score, but elsewhere (after years of Russian
military presence and Prussian border violations), he had warned against pro-
voking ‘peaceful and strong neighbours’. There were occasions, however, when
‘such calamities afflict the Commonwealth, that no help can avail it; in such
times, the putting aside of public duties, the work of bringing up children in
virtues and knowledge, devotion to reading good books and writing necessary
admonitions is not to waste time, but to yield to circumstances’. He probably
had in mind his own withdrawal from public life in the face of a distasteful new
regime. In extremis, Poland’s needs in war and peace would remain provided for
by its nobility, ‘only do not deprive them of their due benefits and privileges.’44
Felix Czacki lived in a world whose realities he rejected. Every measure of
the interregnum was portrayed in the worst possible light, all tending to the
strengthening of the king and the overthrow of freedom. His true abode was a
non-existent one, the bucolic, unchanging Catholic society of his own fantasising
and the conjuring of pastoral poetry. ‘The best-arranged state is that in which
each estate keeps to its own obligations and makes use of the benefits proper to it,
without interfering with the obligations and benefits of other estates.’45 He took
the Monitor to task for its use of celniejsza szlachta, ‘more distinguished nobility’,
yet he himself implicitly recognised that such gradations existed, despite the
supposed equality of all nobles. He complained that no longer were the sons of
poorer nobles brought up and educated and provided with employment in the
houses of great lords.46 He praised the joys of rural life, ‘the simplicity of heart
and the innocence of citizens dwelling in the villages’, which Horace himself, so
much favoured by the Monitor, had praised for the absence of greed, envy, riches
and treason. He could agree with the Monitor’s demands for improved personal
morality, because that was what was supposed to exist in such a setting. He could
agree with the demands for an improved education and improvements in the
Polish language because this Arcadia would be Polish – even though he took care
to argue that Konarski’s role in the improvement of Polish and Latin style had
been exaggerated.47
In politics, however, Czacki could agree with nothing. Practical politics barely
existed. Poland had nothing to learn from anyone, save the republics of antiquity.
The examples of France, Britain, or the Dutch Republic meant nothing. The
sole contemporary state that he admired was Venice, which alone preserved its
thousand-year old laws and institutions under the aegis of its venerable nobil-
ity.48 His ideal Poland was an inchoate wish-list of contradictory desiderata on
which the Realpolitik of others was about to wreak terrible damage.
Czacki’s encounter with the Monitor was a private affair. Fifteen years later,
another encounter with Enlightenment ideas wracked the noble nation as a
whole. The Sarmatian idyll had been savaged. The Confederacy of Bar, formed
in 1768, reacting to heavy-handed Russian intervention and to royalist reform,
plunged Poland to new depths of anarchy. The tensions it sparked between
the great continental powers were resolved only by the First Partition of 1772,
which cost the Commonwealth a good third of its population and territory. The
Commonwealth was as helpless as ever. The parliaments and sejmiki of 1773–5
and 1776 met under Russian gunpoint. Poland’s commerce was squeezed by
punitive tariffs imposed by its neighbours. St Petersburg was more the coun-
try’s capital than Warsaw. Nevertheless, some positive developments emerged:
in the wake of Pope Clement XIV’s abolition of the Jesuit order in 1773, the
Sejm created, in effect, an education ministry, the Commission for National
Education (Komisja Edukacji Narodowej), with responsibility for secondary and
university-level education. Those in charge of the Commission, no matter how
unrepresentative of Polish noble society as a whole, were convinced of the need
to change that society – had they been able to achieve what they wished, much
of what the Monitor had pleaded for in 1765 would have been implemented. The
1773–5 Sejm also set up something like a standing, modern central executive
body, the Permanent Council (Rada Nieustająca). Republican conservatives were
much gratified by a drastic reduction in the king’s powers of patronage, large
swathes of which were passed on the Sejm.49 Those of less hidebound persuasion
pinned their hope on a measure introduced by the Sejm of 1776, which entrusted
a reform of Poland’s tangled judicial processes to ex-Crown chancellor Andrzej
Zamoyski. His brief received considerable flexibility in that he was instructed to
be guided by ‘natural justice’ and ‘to amend all things which might leave citizens
and judges in doubt as to their duties’.50
The injunction to bring rationality and order to judicial processes also
afforded an opportunity to regulate relations within and between Poland’s social
groupings. Zamoyski was one of the greatest landowners in Poland. He had long
sought wider modernisation. An education at the Habsburgs’ military academy
at Liegnitz, extensive travel in France and Spain and military service in the Saxon
army had given him a broad European outlook. At the 1764 Convocation Sejm
he had proposed an extensive programme of political, judicial, economic and
social reform. Yet his immense popularity among the nobility derived less from
his reformist views than his resignation of the chancellorship in the wake of
Russian outrages against Polish citizens in October 1767. He was also a model
landowner in his paternalism and in his readiness to introduce a careful trans-
ition away from labour dues to cash rentals on some of his estates – it earned
him a glowingly good press from that indefatigable English traveller, William
Coxe, although the real progress made was more limited than Coxe made out.51
Like so many Poles who accepted the need for reform, Zamoyski was much taken
with the ideas of French physiocracy, which reached a peak of influence in the
1760s and 1770s.52 That doctrine insisted on the removal of constraints and bot-
tlenecks to the productivity of agriculture, which it viewed as the power behind
all economic activity. In the Polish context, that meant, above all, the elimination
of serfdom.
This was, of course, quite at odds with the views of the nobility as a whole, for
whom serfdom was an essential prerequisite of a liberty which only they could
appreciate, as well as the very basis of their economic existence. The 1776 statute
gave Zamoyski a free hand to select ‘the most enlightened and the most virtuous
citizens’ to assist him with the drafting of the proposed legal code. He was careful
not to confine himself to those who wished to discard the Rzeczpospolita’s old
order wholesale, instead seeking a judicious balance of viewpoints.53 The most
radical of his assistants was Józef Wybicki, who, at the Sejm of 1767–8, had been
one of the few envoys who dared openly to condemn the deportations of Polish
subjects to Russia (an ordeal for which he steeled himself by an intensive reading
of Plutarch’s Lives).54 An early participant of the Confederacy of Bar, he came to
be appalled by the narrow-minded fixations of even well-meaning insurgents. He
was brought to conclude that the whole episode was a disastrously mistaken ven-
ture, squandering energy and patriotism which deserved more constructive ends.
In 1770–1 he studied at the university of Leyden, where he was much influenced
by the ideas of Montesquieu, Hume, Bolingbroke, Rousseau and comparable
thinkers. These interests were strongly reflected in his Political Thoughts on
Civil Liberty, published in 1775–6, a work which attracted comparatively little
notice amid the traumas of those years.55 His Patriotic Letters of 1777, addressed
to Zamoyski, intended to prepare noble opinion for the publication of the
ex-chancellor’s proposed Code, marked a head-on confrontation between new
European ideas and the old nostrums of Sarmatia.
Wybicki was not the first, but he was the most forthright of those who, in
the aftermath of the Partition of 1772, sought to cure his fellow-nobles of their
dogmatic attachment to a mythologized, ancestral past. ‘It is necessary to root
out prejudices’ he proclaimed. Poland was a state that had failed – not because
of the depredations of its neighbours, but because of the shortcomings of the
Poles themselves.56 Unless the szlachta faced up to this, their Commonwealth
was doomed.
Wybicki’s moralisings were couched in a new language: not that of Christian

virtues, but of abstract political concepts and statistical and empirical evidence.
He challenged his readers to consider what a state should be for. Providence had
destined man to be a social animal. It was the duty of each to uphold the bonds
of that society. Driven by a Rousseauesque amour propre, evolvingly complex
societies would have fallen in on themselves had they not been able to repair the
faults of individuals by the enactments of wise lawgivers. Society needed laws as
an antidote to human weakness. In Poland, the dominance of the nobility was so
extensive as to stifle all notion of ‘the public good’. Even amid the worst disasters,
individual interest, not the collective good of the whole, dominated.57 Unless
this was remedied, Poland was doomed to depopulation and impoverishment.
Wybicki, like so many eighteenth-century theorisers, had a simple measure of
the well being of any state: ‘its population is acknowledged as the first and most
essential interest of every nation.’58 By this yardstick, Poland, for all its natural
resources, was among the poorest states of Europe, comparable only to Spain
in its disdain for agriculture and industry, enduring an economic decay on a
level with Turkey’s. It could not flourish because its society had divided itself
so sharply into the free and the unfree, ‘one estate living in limitless liberty, the
other placed in limitless slavery and misery.’ Barely one fifth of the populace, he
reckoned, owned any property at all. By Wybicki’s calculations, based on hearth
tax returns, the population within the new borders stood at under 5.4 million, or
an average of 352 persons to every square mile (approximately one seventh of the
English equivalent). If that density could be brought up to some 600 per square
mile – still significantly short of the levels of France even during the worst of its
seventeenth-century conflicts – the population would stand at over nine million.
Such was the gulf between a glittering potential and the miserable reality.59
It was no good for the nobility to fondly imagine their country as the granary
of Europe. Mountainous Switzerland and muddy Holland were more product-
ive. England, so much smaller than Poland, easily exported three times as much
grain.60 At the root of the problem were the ingrained beliefs in the excellence of
Poland’s form of government and liberty. For as long as these persisted, Poland’s
downfall was inevitable.61 There could be no such thing as a perfect government:
‘each is the work of men and its character must reflect the weaknesses of its crea-
tors.’ The best government could only be the one with fewest deficiencies, that
which ‘more closely unites the wills and strengths of all in society, which more
readily assists man’s natural freedom and more certainly secures the property
of every individual.’ Even an absolutist regime could fulfil the necessary criteria
for good government.62 Poland did not. The nobility complained of the idle-
ness, inefficiency, vices and drunkenness of the peasantry, yet these all stemmed
ultimately from the oppression with which the szlachta afflicted their subjects.
Nature made and meant all men to be free. That laws on serfdom were an old
and venerable ancestral creation did not make them right. Serfdom was a form
of slavery; seigneurial rule over serfs was tyranny.63
A properly constituted society, that is, one whose purposes accorded with
those of divine providence, acted as an antidote to and restraint on human
passions and failings. Strong government, almost ipso facto seen as an evil by the
Poles, was a desirable response to a medieval anarchy, a means of enforcing the
laws which were a necessary curb on human passions: where Poland’s neighbours
inhabited the eighteenth century, Poland languished in the tenth. Such an unre-
formed mode of rule simply laid the country open to any better-organised (and
thereby morally superior) outside power.64
The emancipation of the serfs would not only allow the Poles to restore their
economy and secure a flourishing population, it would be the key to the wider
redemption of their society. An economically active middling estate could not
emerge in current conditions. If just laws could be enacted, Poland would become
a magnet for the colonists it so desperately needed. Justice and security for all,
those qualities the szlachta’s ancestors had so singularly failed to introduce,
would stimulate economic activity, commerce, industry and boost monetary
circulation. The country would find itself on an upward spiral of prosperity and
virtue, home to flourishing arts and sciences and earning the respect, not the
contempt, of other powers.
There would be only winners in Wybicki’s rosy new world. Of course, the
social order and the subordination that went with it would remain intact. It
was certainly not his intention to create of an emancipated peasantry ‘a new
estate in the government and a part of the national authority’ (as in Sweden),
nor even to confer rights of citizenship on them. ‘I would not wish them to
groan under the yoke of an oppressive seigneur, but neither do I wish to remove
them from under the hand of a just master.’ Peasants should be assured of the
security of their own private property, so long as by their honest labours they
had earned it. Emancipation should come, but it should be neither immediate
nor sudden. The crucial thing was the provision of security and justice – and
that would mean the regulation of seigneurial authority by the state. Relations
between peasants and landowners should be put on a contractual footing.
Emancipated peasants would work willingly and productively. A more indus-
trious peasantry would benefit the nobility by boosting landed revenues, an
enriched nobility and peasantry would stimulate the market for industrial and
artisanal products and the economy as a whole would prosper. Two generations,
he reckoned, would be enough for the transformation.65 Though Wybicki
identified other drags on Poland’s development, notably the Catholic Church,
whose rights and jurisdiction he wanted curtailed and the role of the papacy
limited to purely spiritual matters,66 the focus of his concerns was always serf-
dom. Nature, reflecting the designs of Providence, intended men to be free.
If societies refused to allow nature’s aims to be realised they would suffer the
consequences.
Zamoyski’s law code was published in 1778, although its presentation to the
Sejm was deferred until 1780. Much of the spirit of Wybicki’s Patriotic Letters was
reflected in the final draft. The Code did not accord anything like the same weight
to the peasantry that Wybicki had done, yet, as Zamoyski noted in his preamble,
‘It is difficult to ignore the persons of the peasants; I could not accept that we,
in this age, should wish to deny them security and justice for the labours they
perform to maintain us.’ He extended to them the protection of the laws, albeit
leaving them ‘in their old agricultural condition. Whoever should read my article
on them without prejudice, will acknowledge, that by according them justice and
property, I have assured the country and every landowner of greater and more
certain benefits.’67 This was, to put it mildly, disingenuous. If article XXXI, ‘On
peasants’, had been implemented, serfdom would not have vanished overnight,
but gradually, over one or two generations, just as Wybicki had postulated.
The thrust of Zamoyski’s treatment of serfdom, even as he claimed to be
affirming its status, was to treat it as an anomaly, an exception to the natural
order. It was to be regulated by the ‘Supreme Authority’ and any infringement of
that regulation would lead, in any particular case, to emancipation both of the
individual serf and his family. Serfs, glebae adscripti, ‘tied to the soil’, were defined
as ‘sons whose fathers are settled on a rural estate, without a contract, equipped by
the manor with stock and inventory and performing labour service’. On the other
hand, a whole range of peasant labourers and farmhands, a majority of the rural
population, settled only in cottages, without any manorially granted equipment
or animals, were to have their duties regulated by oral or written contracts. They,
and all their children, would be free to leave as non adscripti glebae on expira-
tion of their contracts. At a stroke, the mass of petty peasantry who had always
been regarded as serfs and who had discharged the innumerable lesser, ancillary
duties without which the rural economy could not function, were to be deemed
emancipated. Moreover, once a serf was emancipated, emancipation could never
be undone. If a serf should abscond, under a law of 1368, which Zamoyski resur-
rected, his old seigneur would have only twelve months’ grace to reclaim him; and
after four years, the absconder and his family would become formally free. If a
serf girl ran away to marry a man whom her master had forbidden her to marry,
and the ceremony went ahead, her seigneur lost his rights to her.68
Serfdom was also attacked more directly. Where a serf had three or more
sons, only the first and third would remain glebae adscripti. Once the second
and younger sons reached the age of ten, their father could freely, without
reference to the seigneur, place them outside the village to acquire ‘learning,
arts and crafts’ – so as to boost industrial and artisanal activity, and encourage
commercial and economic growth. Such younger children ‘will acquire true
freedom’. Even if these children remained on the estate as peasants, they would
still be free, either as peasants, or, if they chose, could at a later time leave to take
up municipal citizenship. The peasant, not the seigneur, would decide on his
daughter’s marriage; peasant widows could re-marry freely.69 Landowners who
infringed or disregarded peasant contracts were liable to be summonsed before
the gród courts – the first time peasants had ever been given the right to bring
such summonses to these hitherto exclusively noble courts of first instance.
Capital punishment (as opposed to a fine) awaited any landowner who beat a
serf to death (even if as a result of an authorised beating administered through
an official) – and the victim’s entire, extended family would be emancipated,
as well as receiving financial compensation from the perpetrator’s estate.70 The
sale or alienation of serfs separately from land was forbidden as invalid of itself,
an affront to the laws of nature. Such serfs, along with their wives and children,
were automatically emancipated, since their landowner, by his unnatural act, had
forfeited all rights to them.71
Free peasants could undertake virtually all forms of economic activity – and
because they were free, any legal disputes involving them would be heard not in
the seigneurial courts, but in the grody, with a right of appeal to the courts of
second instance, the county courts (ziemstwa). This was an unprecedented exten-
sion of state justice to a class hitherto almost wholly at the mercy of seigneurial
jurisdiction. In all criminal cases, be it over serfs or domestic servants, the state
courts, not the seigneury, would judge. Judicial officials bribed or otherwise
influenced by landowners were liable to dismissal and fines.72
This may not have amounted to the direct abolition of serfdom, but it so
weakened the institution that it is hard to see how it could possibly have survived
for any length of time. The Code made freedom, not servitude, the norm of
human existence. If nothing else, the way was open for the first time for a mass
of litigation brought by aggrieved peasants before the state.73 Zamoyski claimed
that the obligation, imposed by his Code on the newly-created Commission of
National Education, to set up a school for the peasantry in every parish, in order
to bring the peasantry out of their ‘dark . . . simplicity’ would endow them with
a greater knowledge of their obligations towards God and seigneur.74 In reality,
it was at least as likely to make them aware of their new rights.
Nor was this all. The Code sought to redefine the positions of both nobles and
townsmen and to nudge the nobility away from rural stagnation towards more
dynamic, utilitarian activities. The szlachta would remain the ruling class, but
one marked by a modernised public service ethos, which was totally at variance
with their inherited stagnation. In the towns, noble ‘liberties’ (jurydyki), proper-
ties exempt from municipal jurisdiction, lost their privileged status. From now
on, they would be subject to the taxes, levies and dues of any normal municipal
property. No longer could their noble owners withhold taxation from them or
use them to set up artisanal and commercial activity to undercut that of urban
guilds or corporations. The aim, said Zamoyski, was merely to restore the towns
to their ancient rights and to enable them to regain their former prosperity, no
longer choked by the exemptions of the nobility.75 But the effect would be to
reduce the nobility overnight to the level of their social inferiors. In towns, nobles
would be municipal citizens first and nobles second.
The nobility would be reshaped into a utilitarian ruling-cum-service class.
Ancestral laurels, real or imaginary, handed down over generations, would count
for nothing. The acquisition of landed property to the value of 200,000 zlotys
would secure ennoblement. Such advance would be open to all who ‘discovered
mineral and salt deposits in the lands of the Commonwealth, or distinguished
themselves in learning or some particular art, from which there ensued public
benefit to the nation as a whole . . .’76 Riches and utility (the two were much
the same), not blood sacrifice, would form this new nobility. The masses of
poor nobles who were such an embarrassment to the enlightened mind would
gradually cease to be, for the testamentary subdivision of properties smaller
than one village would come to an end. One sibling would be entitled to buy
out his brothers’ shares and they would be free, like the younger sons of serfs,
to seek their fortunes elsewhere.77 To make of the nobility a more dynamic and
entrepreneurial, or, at the very least, useful and non-parasitic class, a range of
occupations would be formally opened to them. Medicine, painting, music,
engraving, building, construction and architecture could all be freely practised.
Nobles could also make and sell, without loss of status ‘physical, geometric and
astronomical machines’ as well as practise typography and printing. The ban on
the conduct of privileged economic activity from noble urban property would
not extend to those who ‘would introduce factories and manufactures’ in the
event of townsmen failing to do so.78
There was more. The nobles found their traditional hold on local government
and the law under scrutiny. ‘The fate of the country, particularly in a republican
government, depends on the education and the shaping thereby of the hearts of
young citizens . . .’ The chancelleries attached to the local administrative-cum-
judicial institutions of grody and ziemstwa constituted the traditional ladder
of advancement into legal and public life. From now on, any young nobleman
seeking such a career would first of all have to undergo a formal, four-year course
of instruction under the guidance of the chancellery head, the regent. This would
involve not only practical instruction, but a structured course of jurisprudence
and law, based on the Commonwealth’s own laws, Justinian’s Code and on the
work of Pufendorf and Grotius. For one hour a week, the regent would instruct
his charges in the principles of politics and the historical evolution of Polish
law. He would place particular stress on the importance of the separation of the
powers, as adumbrated by Montesquieu. He would explain how ‘the abuse of
our political laws has produced confusion and anarchy, and relate the history of
our decline, to which we have come through the misguided understanding of
freedoms, unwilling to endure subjection to the laws.’79 The local establishment
was being asked to undertake a searching critique of the ancestral liberties of
which they had for generations been so proud and looked on as the very cynosure
of freedom. Everything they had believed in about their own society they were
now being asked to reject – for it all amounted to what Wybicki had condemned
as pernicious, illusory prejudice.
These proposals had no chance of enactment. Too many powerful vested inter-
ests were opposed to it. The Catholic Church was determined to resist all attempts
to sever direct papal jurisdiction over it or restrict its existing rights. Worse,
Zamoyski had proposed that ‘sects’ with an established presence in Poland would
continue to be tolerated – even those such as Quakers, formally banned by law.
True, new sects were forbidden, as were atheism and blasphemy; apostasy from
Catholicism remained punishable by exile and confiscation of property, but this
was hardly enough to compensate for the damage the Church saw being done.80
The nuncio and most of the senior clergy were hostile. The Church’s prin-
cipal apologist, Wojciech Skarszewski, ambitious canon of Kamieniec Podolski,
proved astonishingly adept at defending its position by use of the most pro-
gressive Enlightenment jargon and even harnessing such luminaries as Voltaire,
Montesquieu, Locke and Hume in its defence.81 The Russian ambassador
would have none of the proposals – the inroads against serfdom could hardly
be welcome to Russia, which had long suffered a chronic haemorrhage of serfs
from its western borderlands to Poland. The Code’s condemnation of all unau-
thorised contacts with ‘neighbouring powers’ as treasonable must have looked
suspiciously like an attempt to undermine Russia’s guarantee of the Polish
constitution.82 Such heavyweight opposition alone would have been enough to
doom Zamoyski’s proposals. Yet the chief opposition came not from the papal
nuncio or the Russian ambassador or senior clergy. It came, overwhelmingly,
from the nobility.
‘The emancipation, or rather, the unleashing, of the serfs is the subversion of
an age-old order, its subtle purpose is the impoverishment of the szlachta estate
and threatens the fatal destruction of public security . . .’, warned the mainly petty
gentry of the sejmik at Radziejów in northwest Poland, in August 1778. They
insisted that the just-published law code be held over for the deeper examination
by the constituencies. Their near neighbours in the county of Dobrzyń agreed
that if the Code was ‘contrary to old law, or in any way, either in particular or in
general, burdensome to citizens’ it should be opposed or at least changed ‘for the
better’. The szlachta of Ciechanów, Liw and Nur in Mazowsze would not hear of
peasant emancipation as ‘opposed to the nobility’. The alarm was echoed across
the country. No assembly approved Zamoyski’s Code in 1778. At best, a number
of sejmiki tactfully insisted on deferring the business to the 1780 Sejm, so as to

enable them to examine his ideas at their leisure.83
When the proposals finally came before the Sejm two years later, the mood had
hardened. The Lublin and Sandomierz nobilities were in the van of resistance,
insisting on outright rejection. The nobles of Łęczyca disarmingly admitted that
they had not actually read the Code, but had received ‘news’ that it aimed at the
‘alteration of our cardinal laws and national customs’ and ordered their envoys
‘not to allow’ anything contrary to them. The Ciechanów nobles condemned the
‘projects’ of Zamoyski as ‘in all respects burdensome to the nation and should
be wholly rescinded, even at the cost of the disruption of the Sejm.’ As for ‘noble
privileges, decreed from our earliest kings’ they were to be ‘in no wise infringed’.
A few sejmiki were prepared to accept what was ‘necessary and useful’ in the Code,
but to reject all that was ‘harmful and injurious’ – in other words, it could pass
only in eviscerated form.84 The szlachta of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were
especially hostile, fearing not only the erosion of serfdom, but also the weakening
of their provincial privileges under a Code that would introduce uniformity of
law and practice across the Rzeczpospolita.85
The most extensive of the many tracts denouncing Zamoyski’s proposals
was drawn up by a committee of nobles of the palatinate of Lublin, under the
leadership of Tomasz Dłuski. A point-by-point commentary on the Code, there
was much that it did the ex-chancellor the courtesy of agreeing with – but on
the main questions, it was totally at odds with him. The landowners objected to
Zamoyski’s proposals to regulate the legal profession, fearing they would allow
greater opportunities for townsmen to practise the law. The bar was virtually
the only remunerative profession open to the nobility, to whom commoner
competition would be ‘an obvious injury’.86 Providence assigned to each his
place in society and men should be content with that. The proposals for more
formal legal training ran up against an obvious practical difficulty – the present
low-level of legal knowledge among its practitioners. ‘To-day, we would find very
few chancellery heads with any knowledge of Justinian, Pufendorf and Grotius.’
As for the Code’s efforts to protect the towns against unfair noble competition,
the Lublin nobles argued that if nobles were to be made subject to municipal
law, they should also have the right to enjoy its benefits. Dłuski and his friends
opposed any state incursion into ecclesiastical jurisdiction − Poland was so weak,
that it could not afford to alienate even the papacy by any unilateral action.
The real concerns, of course, came over serfdom and the extent of noble
jurisdiction. Too much in the Code seemed to point towards an extension of
the power of the state over noble properties, towns and subjects. The very term
employed by Zamoyski to designate the government, the physiocratic Najwyższa
kraiowa zwierzchność, ‘the Supreme National Authority’, was sufficiently new
and uncertain to be unsettling. The claims for the state to have a say in relations
between seigneurs and serfs, masters and servants, were intolerable. Serfs
oppressed by a landlord’s officials should seek redress from him, not from the
gród courts. ‘Otherwise, a seigneur would stop being a seigneur and serfs stop
being subjects.’
Everything about Article XXXI, ‘On peasants’ aroused the deepest suspicions
– Dłuski wanted it scrapped in its entirety. ‘Any alteration of ancient laws and of
a form of government established for centuries, at which no one is complaining,
on the contrary, all strongly support it, can only be proposed to the manifestly
greater benefit of the country.’ But these proposals only introduced ‘confusion in
a significant part of our internal government, losses for landowners and could
lead to public danger for the country.’ Zamoyski’s definition of serfs was too nar-
row, since ‘in the territories of the Commonwealth all peasants have been and are
tied to the land on which they have been born and raised.’ Making of serfs only
those born on the same estate as their father, or those whom the manor furnished
with tools and livestock, and who owned labour services, was far too restrictive
and damaging to landlord interests. The education (and departure) of younger
sons of peasants as craftsmen and artisans would be a pure loss to the landowner.
There should be no statute of limitations on the recovery of absconding serfs.
Only peasants formally emancipated were free – all others were the subjects of
a seigneur. Indeed, if a seigneur did plan the emancipation of his serfs, the local
gród court should satisfy itself that he was ‘of sound mind and not a wastrel’, since
the freedom he conferred would be to the detriment of his posterity.
Serfs were simply not capable of benefiting from liberty. Dłuski, rising to the
challenge of enlightened correctness, was happy to mobilise progressive vocabu-
lary in his cause. There was a time, before the establishment of government, when
‘men could be and could call themselves free’. But in the present day, all, even
kings, were subject to the law. ‘Enlightened people’ (which would include the
generality of landowners) were governed by a sense of religion and of honour.
‘What could peasants, reared in the greatest simplicity, who have neither of these
qualities, do with freedom?’ Even under a seigneurial regime, they could not be
restrained from crime and rebellion. If they found themselves on occasion under
a harsh master, ‘their condition might differ as to its means from that of the most
distinguished persons living under a harsh monarch, but it will not differ in its
result, yet such oppressions must be endured as a sacrifice to the general form
of government.’ The bigwigs of Lublin did not wholly rule out change for the
future, but that future was safely distant. ‘It is not our intention that Polish serfs
should never be admitted to a moderate liberty. But two conditions are lacking
for this: the first, the matter of their education as children and the second, an
increase in the size of the armies of the Republic, fear of which would dampen
their rebellious spirits, and both of these require time.’
To the dynamic vision of society proffered by Wybicki and Zamoyski, Dłuski
and his friends could offer only the immobility of the present and the past. After
bewailing the shortage of employment opportunities for the szlachta, they went
on to criticise the range of professions to be opened up to them – building-work
and carpentry should continue to derogate from nobility. The Code’s proposals
to put an end to the subdivision of small noble properties and the accompany-
ing pauperisation of their owners were rebuffed – but with the admission ‘it is
difficult to remedy this’.
The argument found in both Wybicki and the law Code, that a higher degree
of social mobility was essential to secure Poland’s prosperity, was rejected.
It was obvious that there had once been a more populous peasantry. ‘The
Commonwealth does not have enough people for its agriculture, its crafts, manu-
factures and commerce . . .’ Idleness and drink were the problems holding back
small-town development. Social immobility should be reaffirmed – men should
dutifully discharge their station in life. ‘It is the work of Supreme Providence to
decide who is to come into the world in which estate, and each should accom-
modate himself to this disposition.’
Józef Wybicki abandoned his plans to stand as envoy at the joint sejmik of
the palatinates of Poznań and Kalisz in 1780 when he was warned of threats
against his life. The Sejm rejected outright the Code, which he had supported
with such rash optimism. It forbade its future reintroduction.87 The outraged
envoys trampled copies underfoot. Zamoyski cannot really have been surprised.
It was all very well for plutocratic landowners such as himself to experiment
with serf emancipation and cash rentals, but it was quite another matter to visit
such experimentation on middling and petty nobles for whom serf labour dues
were an economic mainstay. The instructions of the sejmiki at this time abound
with complaints about serf abscondment and the difficulties of recovering them;
of the constant menace in border areas of serfs being enticed to flee over the
frontier. Many landowners lived on the edge of an uncertain existence after the
First Partition, their exports and revenues squeezed by the new punitive tariffs,
particularly those imposed by Prussia along the vital corridor of the Vistula.
Every ounce of serf input counted – what Zamoyski proposed was a wholly new,
massive social experiment, according a restless, idle, perverse, reluctant, drink-
sodden, ignorant, brutalised peasantry rights it had never had and which the
overwhelming majority of seigneurs did not believe it could use, or would use
to its detriment. Zamoyski, Wybicki and their few supporters saw in physiocracy
the way to economic salvation and future prosperity. To the overwhelming mass
of the nobility, however, such advocates seemed bent on wrecking the social
order. The Partition had stripped the Commonwealth of a people and territory
– Poland’s own reformers now threatened to destroy a whole mode of exist-
ence. Much stronger governments, those of Prussia or the Habsburg monarchy,
encountered huge, almost insuperable, difficulties in ameliorating serfdom. In
Poland, with a feeble government dependent for its existence on the sufferance
of Russia, which, in its turn, regarded serfdom as indispensable; with a suspicious
nobility fearful for its economic survival, such outlandish, if fashionable, ideas
had no chance of acceptance.
7
Foreign aid
In a huge state lying on, or perhaps beyond, the borders of ‘civilised’ Europe,
‘every emissary of the Enlightenment in Poland felt he was failing his vocation
if he did not bring with him a plan for the abolition of serfdom and did not
confer on it a strident publicity.’ The temptation to ‘reform’ the Commonwealth,
at a time when the even more remote and savage Russia was supposedly being
moved into the ranks of cultivated nations by its enlightened rulers, was irresist-
ible.1 While many Polish would-be reformers admired the English constitution
adumbrated by Montesquieu, the sentiment was hardly reciprocated. The Ancien
Régime’s most widely read and distinguished political pundit may have had
little to say about Poland, but what he did say was both unflattering and took
for granted that his negative views were commonplace. ‘Most imperfect of all is
the aristocracy in which the part of the people that obeys is in civil slavery to the
part that commands, as in the Polish aristocracy, where the peasants are slaves
of the nobility’; ‘the independence of each individual is the purpose of the laws
of Poland, and what results from this is the oppression of all’.2 Poland furnished
a useful stereotype of decay, failure and retribution, milked for all it was worth
by Frederick of Prussia and Catherine the Great to justify their interventions in
its affairs and the First Partition.3
For all its imperfections, the Rzeczpospolita was a republican undertak-
ing. It could equally interest, even inspire, those who mistrusted absolute
monarchy. Louis de Jaucourt, in his article ‘Pologne’ in volume XII of the
Encyclopédie, published in 1765, while unsparing of Polish serfdom and urban
decay, allowed himself fulsome praise for the nobility’s supposed ‘good morals’.
The Commonwealth was a land of paradoxes. Jaucourt praised the openness
of its parliaments ‘because it is the public good which is discussed there’, their
importance in subordinating the king to the laws and to the scrutiny of the
envoys. He lauded the virtues of landowners supposedly conscientiously in resid-
ence on their own estates, even as he complained of the debilitating influence of
the luxury which had insinuated itself since John Sobieski’s reign. It was a land
given over to obedience to papal authority and faith in miracles, yet also one that
had developed a tolerance rarely met elsewhere (Jaucourt was writing before the
Catherinian-inspired propaganda of the mid-1760s assailed its tolerant image).
‘A plenitude of slavery and an excess of liberty dispute, as it were, which shall
destroy Poland . . .’ If only the nobility would surrender their exclusive dominance
of the state, all might yet be well. A gothic, barbarous nation maybe (but had not
all nations once been like this?) awaiting only reformation and improvement.4
Jaucourt drew mainly on Gabriel Coyer’s Histoire de Jean Sobieski, published
in 1761, when it ran to three editions. While Coyer marvelled predictably at
Poland’s poverty and lack of commerce, these were of little importance to him.
He regarded the tone of even a defective republican form of government as far
superior to that of a hereditary, absolute monarchy: on the one hand was a free
people, electing its own ruler, whose position – rightly – was never easy: ‘The king,
the law and the nation, three forces which constantly weigh against one another,
an equilibrium difficult to maintain.’ Absolute government was fortunate in that
it could benefit from a ‘monotony of passive obedience’. It was to the Poles’ credit
that they had revolted only against those kings who were unworthy or oppressive.
In their early beginnings, the monarchies of all Europe’s principal states, not just
Poland’s, had been closely circumscribed by their aristocracies. The subsequent
expansion of monarchic power in those states had been illegitimate.5
The Poles’ chief failing was the enslavement of the common people, reduced to
the level of ‘cattle’.6 Politically, of course, they were crippled by the liberum veto.
But Coyer was impressed by the fact that the nobles who sat in parliament or in
the law courts were as likely to rally (admittedly, chaotically) to the defence of
their country.7 He praised their martial simplicity under Sobieski, but deplored
its erosion by the insidious spread of luxury under Augustus II. Likewise, he com-
plimented the Poland of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the country
‘where one burned fewer people than elsewhere in the world for being mistaken
in dogma.’8 In his analysis of the clashes between King Sigismund Augustus and
the szlachta in the 1550s, Coyer praised the senator Rafał Leszczyński, ancestor
of Stanisław, duke of Lorraine and Louis XV’s father-in-law, who had reminded
his king that ‘the Poles glory in cutting down the pride of kings . . . The king your
father listened to our counsels; and it is our duty to ensure that from now on you
heed the counsels of a republic of which you seem not to know that you are but
its first citizen.’ Coyer pointed out to his readers that, under the pacta coventa, the
Polish king ‘releases his subjects from their oath of obedience, should he violate
the laws of the Commonwealth. ‘But even if the king were to be stronger than the
law (something very difficult in Poland), the thread of oppression would break
at his death, without passing into the hands of his successor. The interregnum
would intervene.’ While Coyer admitted that the sordid, venal realities of Polish
elections were far removed from what they should have been, he praised the
Tribunals for dispensing a justice independent of the crown.9
Coyer’s work scandalised the French government in a way comparable to
Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques some thirty years earlier. He showed just how
subversive republicanism could be within the context of French absolutism.
FOREIGN AID 123
Malesherbes, who as directeur de la Librairie, was in charge of book censorship

between 1750 and 1763, may have looked favourably on the Encyclopédie, but
Coyer’s Sobieski went too far. It offended ‘by the enthusiasm with which the
author speaks incessantly of liberty and of republican government. One knows
one cannot write the history of a king of Poland without speaking of the attach-
ment of the Poles to their liberty, but it has been impossible to approve a French
writer coming back constantly and insistently to extol the least republican
advantages, especially while disguising its great inconveniences . . .’ The Histoire
de Jean Sobieski was banned on 29 March 1761. Privately, Malesherbes advised
Coyer to remove himself to Voltaire’s Ferney, which he indeed did, before finally
ending up in Nancy, received into Stanisław Leszczyński’s Royal Academy.10
It was unfortunate for the Poles and their reputation that the interest which
French society began to show in the 1760s was exploited by Catherine the Great,
through her contacts with the philosophes, Voltaire especially, for her own propa-
ganda purposes. In particular, it was easy to portray mainstream Polish resistance
to granting concessions to religious dissenters as an act of anachronistic intoler-
ance in an increasingly enlightened Europe – never mind that that Europe had
far to go before its own laws on religious minorities extended the same freedoms
as those still harboured in the Commonwealth.11 The fly in Catherine’s ointment
was one Claude Carloman de Rulhière, an employee of the French Foreign
Ministry, who had been attached to the French embassy in St Petersburg at the
time of her seizure of power in 1762. She was desperate to keep his ‘Anecdotes
sur la révolution de Russie, en 1762’ under wraps. Rulhière agreed not to publish
during her lifetime (publication was to come only in 1807), but his anecdotes
and sections of his more extensive Histoire de l’anarchie de Pologne, which he was
compiling in the late 1760s and early 1770s, circulated freely in manuscript. His
own readings from both works became something of a salon favourite. Heavily
influenced by Polish republicans, the Histoire de l’anarchie de Pologne reflected
the extremes set out by Coyer and Jaucourt. Above all, it praised the ancient
simplicity of Polish mores in a way that Rousseau, whom Rulhière knew well,
might have extolled those of Sparta and Rome.12
For all that aspects of the Rzeczpospolita could be used to embarrass France’s
absolute monarchy or even to peddle downright subversive ideas, Poland-
Lithuania was too notoriously dysfunctional to serve as a paradigm for others.
From the 1760s, Poles themselves began to look to the outside world for models.
Stanisław August and his Czartoryski relatives would have liked to have imple-
mented their own Glorious Revolution and introduce a British-style constitution,
but such aspirations proved utterly unrealistic. It was not reformers, but the
conservative insurgents of the Confederacy of Bar who most systematically
looked to the outside world for help – to France. To its government for military
support; to its philosophes for advice on republican reform. In January 1770,
the first port of call of Bar’s principal diplomatic agent, Michael Wielhorski,
was the abbé Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. By the end of August, Mably was able
to deliver to Wielhorski his manuscript ‘Observations sur la réforme des loix en
Pologne’, which formed the bulk of a work Mably was to publish in 1781 as Du
gouvernment et des lois de Pologne. After Mably, Wielhorski called on Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, whose Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne was complete in
manuscript by April 1771, though it appeared in print only in 1782.13
It would be going too far to say that Mably and Rousseau taught the Poles to
contemplate their political ideas through the prism of western European concepts
– the Piarists, headed by Stanisław Konarski, had already begun that process; but
the pair certainly gave it a powerful new impetus. Their two treatises, coming
to very different conclusions, represented the first detailed, intensive subjection
of Polish republican ideas to the abstract analysis of European enlightenment.
Both works assumed that reform would be possible only if Russia were to be
defeated in its gruelling conflict with Turkey – despite the stunning Russian
victories achieved even before Mably had completed his ‘Observations’, there
was a widespread belief that the sheer strain of a war fought over unprecedented
distances would, at the very least, compel Russia to accept a peace of exhaustion.
Should the Turks suffer decisive defeat, Mably did not dare contemplate the
consequences.14 Rousseau, too, counted on a final Turkish victory.15 Both men,
persuaded by Wielhorski’s portrayal of the Barists’ virtuous heroism, assumed
that the reforming impulse would come from the confederate leadership – they
had no notion of how divided that squabbling congeries was.
Mably identified the Poles’ main problem as their own ‘bad laws’. ‘All the
Republic’s misfortunes stem from the deficiencies of its constitution.’ Rousseau
agreed,16 though for him other factors were more important. He looked on
Poland primarily through his Social Contract, to which he repeatedly referred
throughout the Considérations. For him, Poland’s ‘root failing’ was that it was too
big. Extensive states were those in which despotisms flourished – it was astonish-
ing indeed that Poland had so far escaped this fate. Without any irony, he even
suggested that Poland’s neighbours would put pay to the dangers of excessive
size. Reform required giving ‘the constitution of a great realm the consistency
and vigour of a small republic’. The Commonwealth should be converted into
a federation of three provinces, in which Małopolska and Wielkopolska would
formally receive a status on a par with that of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
However, Rousseau would clearly have preferred what he regarded as a more
effective federation along Swiss lines, made up of the thirty-three palatinates.17
Though Mably proposed a much more centralised government, he too was
prepared to allow each palatinate a significant degree of independence, to the
extent of allowing it to disregard Sejm legislation which it found objectionable.18
Mably and Rousseau sought to suggest ‘Polish’ solutions wherever they could.
FOREIGN AID 125
But there were limits. Both were dismissive of Wielhorski’s argument that the
European balance of power would ensure the Commonwealth’s long-term sur-
vival.19 They praised the szlachta’s love of liberty, their patriotism, their defence
of their country. But Mably especially feared the strength of old prejudices and
unless the Poles were willing to overcome them, his advice would only be wasted.
‘Old prejudices’ and the ‘new laws’ which Poland needed were bound to be at
odds. He counted on the example of the enlightened leadership of Bar and on
its ability carefully to manage national prejudices.20
The main problem lay in the nobility’s refusal to admit wider rights for peas-
ants and townsmen. Whatever reforms might be enacted, Poland would remain
weak for as long as it was ‘a republic of the gentry’. Give commoners an interest
in the Commonwealth’s well-being and it would flourish. Townsmen, even Jews,
had to be allowed to purchase landed property.21 Mably suggested a start could
be made by involving townsmen in a reformed local judiciary. The long-term
aim, however, was to create a solidly based ‘third estate’ ‘which is everywhere
destined to be the greatness and the glory of nations’– a judgement which
can only have appeared bafflingly incomprehensible to his intended audience.
Suspicious though he was of the supposedly demoralising impact of trade, Mably
nonetheless accepted that a moderate amount of commerce, which served men’s
needs rather than their baser passions, was essential – but at the moment, Poland
lacked even that.22
As for serfdom, its abolition would transform the Commonwealth. Poland
was being ‘punished’ for violating the laws of nature in not treating its peas-
antry as men: it could not rely on them to defend it in its time of need. Mably
accepted change had to be brought about gradually – it was the petty nobility
who would above all resist any reform, but if they could be brought to see their
true interests, they would appreciate that a more prosperous peasantry would
be their ally against their own oppressors, the magnates. Only through peasant
emancipation could the Commonwealth begin to build solid hopes for its future
security. In any case, in the longer term, even Poland’s nobility would be unable to
control the peasantry they treated as an enemy. A start could be made by granting
emancipation to all serfs who had completed twenty years’ service in a militia.23
Rousseau, as the author of the Social Contract, can hardly have approved of a
state in which a significant proportion of the population was held in near-slavery.
But, as consultant to the Confederacy of Bar, he accepted that he had to work
with the materials available. He was already well disposed towards some aspects
of Poland. Indeed, in his Social Contract, he quoted with approval a classic sound
bite which he had found in the Stanisław Leszczyński’s Free Voice: ‘Malo pericu-
losam libertatem quam quietum servitium’, ‘I prefer dangerous liberty to tranquil
servitude’ (the ‘virtuous palatine’ who had devised this irresistible epigram was
Leszczyński’s own father, Rafał).24 Jean-Jacques saw a nation of three orders:
‘nobles, who are everything; bourgeois, who are nothing; and peasants, who
are less than nothing’. The restriction of the nation to the szlachta was ‘a great
evil’.25 However, his regard for the nobility’s virtues led him to be a little more
accommodating than Mably to their shortcomings. He accepted that the serfs
were, in the main, too degraded and vicious for wholesale emancipation in the
foreseeable future – he even, albeit very reluctantly, accepted that it might never
be ‘practicable’, but even if that were to be the case, at least the prospect of such
emancipation had to be created. He proposed a variety of incremental expedients,
which might bring about a significant degree of emancipation ‘without any
noticeable revolution’, beginning with the immediate freeing of all peasants who
had assisted the Confederacy of Bar. But the chief step towards long-term reform
should be granting the peasantry and non-nobles in general access to immediate,
impartial state justice.26
Rousseau envisaged a more immediately realisable process of incorporating
townsmen into the political nation. A start could be made by forming them into
a national militia. Military promotions should be made purely on merit – towns-
men would begin to feel they had a greater stake in their country. He hoped that
bourgeois representatives could be admitted to the legislature in their own right,
but, more pertinently, he urged a programme of ennoblement – of individuals,
of groups, and of entire towns. Townsmen, too, who had lent Bar their assistance
ought to be ennobled forthwith. Ultimately, despite the reservations he unwill-
ingly swallowed about the practicability of serf emancipation, he would have
liked to see peasant representatives elected to the legislature.27 Of course, taken to
its limits, such a process would drastically alter the character of the Rzeczpospolita,
but Rousseau was quite prepared to see ennoblement and emancipation as
Poland’s particular route to democratisation. The Commonwealth had to find
its own solutions without regard to what other nations were doing.
Mably and Rousseau were in agreement on the social changes necessary
in Poland: a greater share in public and political life for the bourgeoisie and
emancipation of the peasantry. Both were aware that such changes would take
years, even decades, to implement and that they were bound to incur the hostil-
ity of many, even most, of the nobility. Only Rousseau, however, sketched out
a programme of educational reform to prepare the szlachta for these changes.
Although he did not prescribe a detailed curriculum, his was to be a patriotic
education, aimed at acquainting its recipients with an intimate knowledge and
love of their country. The education of Frenchmen, Russians, Englishmen or
Spaniards merely turned them into the same sorts of men: the education Poles
received was to turn them into Poles. Where Mably thought Poland so decayed
and backward that its education had to be rescued by calling on foreign teachers,
Rousseau insisted that only Poles be allowed to teach. Schools would be state-
directed, with a uniform programme free of all social differentiation (although
FOREIGN AID 127
it was the nobility who, initially at least, would be its chief recipients). The sons
(neither Rousseau nor Mably had anything to say about girls’ education) of poor
nobles were to benefit from state scholarships. The schools were to be very much
an integral part of public life: pupils should be prepared for a role in government
by duplicating the institutions of public life at school level, with public debates
and martial exercises. Even those who preferred to educate their children at home
were to be expected to send them to take part in these. Prizes would be awarded
not by judgement of the teachers, but by the acclamation of the assembled public.
Games and physical exercise would banish vice, prepare young bodies for their
future role as defenders of their country. The virtues of patriotism, so successfully
cultivated by the ancients, so enervated by the mistaken maxims of contemporary
education, were to be revived by this programme of muscular generalities, to
reward Poland with ‘its second birth’.28
Mably and Rousseau parted company in their political and constitutional
solutions. In one sense, Mably was the greater ‘realist’ in that he genuinely tried
to provide workable, constitutional solutions to a situation he probably suspected
at heart to be hopeless. The confusion immanent in the government had to be
eradicated by a clear demarcation between the legislative and executive powers As
matters stood, king and Senate participated in the legislature: their roles had to
be teased out, and legislation clearly vested where it belonged: in the szlachta. The
king and Senate were to form an executive that knew its place.29 The influence of
over-mighty nobles would be checked by removing the Senate’s legislative role
and turning it into a predominantly executive body under royal presidency. The
cumbersome, undisciplined procedures of the Sejm had to be improved and,
above all, the liberum veto had to be abolished.
Mably understood Polish ambivalence towards the veto. It was something ‘by
one of those contradictions of the human spirit which one finds everywhere’
which the nobility both revered and loathed. Such was the capacity of royal pow-
ers of patronage to subvert the Sejm that the veto had almost necessarily emerged
as a defence against absolutism, but at the cost of bringing about anarchy. It
was ‘absurd’ to expect a large body of men to reach unanimous agreement. The
veto made of each citizen ‘a despot who spoils and opposes the general will of
the nation’.30 These were the same arguments that Konarski had deployed at
much greater length, though there is no evidence that Wielhorski brought his
writings to the attention of his enlightened consultants. Mably conceded that
the Poles’ attachment to the veto had to be accommodated. He suggested that
it might only be exercised if all the envoys of a constituency agreed it should be
used – such instances, he thought, would be rare and in time, the veto would
simply die of desuetude. If necessary, he urged with touching Machiavellianism,
an envoy could always be bribed not to support his colleagues. Mably feared the
veto would be particularly hard to eradicate from the sejmiki, if only because
its exercise gave a sense of self-worth to the petty nobility. He suggested that
individual sejmiki should divide into separate ‘bureaus’ to prepare business: the
exercise of the veto would be valid only if endorsed by one of these ‘bureaus’. Even
then, it should apply only to individual articles rather than to the instruction as a
whole; the objectionable articles could, in any case, be forwarded to the Sejm as
individual desiderata separate from the main instruction. If the election of envoys
were blocked by the veto, the constituency could be represented by its principal
officials – Mably reasoned that the electors would be less inclined to use the veto
simply to ensure that it was elected representatives who were returned.31
Weakening, or even eradicating the veto, would not of itself cure Poland’s
government of its defects. The veto was only a symptom of a defective constitu-
tion.32 Legislative and executive had to be clearly defined and separated. The
Sejm should have a totally independent existence of its own: it should convene
automatically every two years. A formal royal summons would be required only
for extraordinary Sejmy. The six-week cap on its sessions was to be abolished:
law-making should be a prolonged, deliberative affair. Legislation and ‘all the
rights of sovereignty’ would be the province of the szlachta’s representatives
alone. The capacity of the sejmiki to act as a wrecking influence would, in addi-
tion to the regulation of their veto rights, be additionally restricted by confining
their instructions to local matters: individual palatinates had no business taking
decisions on issues which properly belonged to the nation as a whole – though
Mably allowed instructions on national issues for extraordinary Sejmy. Improve
Sejm procedures, entrust the marshal and other officials with real disciplinary
powers, prepare bills through specialised committees, embrace majority voting
and an efficient legislature would follow.33
Poland of course lacked anything like a strong executive: it now had to be
furnished with one of ‘irresistible force’.34 It was true that ‘the executive power has
been, is and forever will be the enemy of the legislative power’, but subordinate
the former firmly to the latter, and it could be kept in its due place. Ministers and
senators, presided over by the king, would form that executive. The king would
be deprived of his distributive powers. The Senate would be made elective, with
new members to be elected by the Sejm and existing senators. The final choice
would rest with the king, from three nominated candidates.35 Subordination
of the executive to the legislature would be ensured by having the Sejm elect
ministers (from among senators) for a four-year term. Deserving ministers could
be re-elected. But their powers would be closely circumscribed, since individual
ministers could take decisions only with the (majority) advice of a minister-
ial council of six senators, again, elected by the Sejm. At each Sejm the three
longest serving councillors would stand down and be replaced by three newly
elected senators. All ministerial councils would report to the Senate. They and
the plenary Senate would prepare business for the Sejm. The minutes of their
FOREIGN AID 129
deliberations would be open to public scrutiny. The king’s role would be reduced
to that of a presiding chairman of the Senate, obliged to put his signature even to
decisions he disagreed with and even to appoint an individual whom he found
objectionable, if his name were submitted to him three times.36
Such a divided executive, with a rotating, elective, Sejm-determined member-
ship would, Mably argued, be extremely unlikely to pose a serious threat to the
legislature.37 So keen was he on the separation of the powers, that he rejected the
presence of any envoys on the ministerial councils, although, rather oddly, he was
prepared to allow senatorial decrees to have the force of a provisional law, subject
to confirmation by the nearest Sejm (he made no provision for recalling a parlia-
ment which had been prorogued within its two-year term).38 The establishment
of orderly government would help bring about a gradual improvement in public
morality, not least in that election to office would lead men to conduct themselves
virtuously to secure the approbation of their fellows. The new range of duties
conferred on the Senate would transform it from the ‘nothing’ it was at present:
subordinate to the reformed legislature, but with real authority.39 Confederacies
had to be put aside. Like the liberum veto, they had rescued Poland from arbit-
rary rule, but they also furthered disruption and anarchy, a legitimisation of
civil war, a dangerously extreme remedy justified only by a highly defective form
of government. Once Poland had ‘reasonable laws’, it should no longer resort
to confederacies.40 The Commonwealth would have finally received the clear
delineation of powers its government lacked.
There remained the monarchy, of which Mably was as mistrustful as any
Polish republican. The king was, or at least ought to be, the ‘first citizen’, yet the
Poles had given him ‘rights incompatible with the liberty which they love’. As a
consequence, the king was regarded as ‘a domestic enemy, to be ever mistrusted’.
Yet a king was necessary, in order to keep magnates in check and to represent
the majesty of the state.41 In principle, elective monarchy was preferable to
hereditary, but in reality, Poland’s interregna had been the occasion for foreign
intervention, and hatreds and intrigues that poisoned the Commonwealth for
generations. A hereditary monarchy was the lesser of two evils. Take away the
means for a hereditary ruler to do harm, and the Poles would have nothing to
fear. He would have to be carefully supervised (by the Senate) and his powers
reduced to a minimum, not least by the removal of all patronage. He should be
kept financially on a short leash, with a ban even on the state’s taking over of debts
incurred by the royal family. The nobility’s own chronic mistrust of the monarchy
would stand it in good stead. Under these conditions, the king’s person could
safely be declared ‘inviolable et sacrée’. Indeed, if the constitution were properly
engineered, there would be no need to call the ruler to account.42 Those states
that complained of the despotism of their monarchs usually had themselves to
blame for allowing it in the first place – England, for example. To make a Piast
king would provoke excessive intrigue and tensions. He warned against giving
a hereditary crown to Frederick Augustus III of Saxony, the preferred choice of
many of the confederates – as hereditary, absolute ruler of a wealthy state, he was
too dangerous. Mably suggested that archduke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, uncle to
Frederick Augustus, as the best candidate, who he felt would be seen favourably
by Austria (he was married to a Habsburg archduchess). Poland would need all
the friends it could get.43
Much of what Mably wrote Rousseau could agree with. The Commonwealth’s
executive and legislature were insufficiently demarcated, the Senate’s role should
be administrative, not legislative.44 Poland was unique in that its legislature had
lost its authority without being subjugated by the executive. Parliament’s frequent
convening had kept it in being, although unable to command obedience. It was in
the nature of executive authority to seek to dominate others, yet without a strong
executive, the Sejm could not be obeyed. Rousseau’s answer, like Mably’s, was
to fragment the executive into senatorial councils attached to each ministry, to
restrict terms of office within them and keep it in dependence on the legislature.
Although Rousseau claimed to favour a clear separation of executive from legis-
lative, he was far less doctrinaire about it than Mably. Senators, as nobles, could
vote on legislation, but strictly as members of the Sejm, not as senators. Their
votes would go into a common pool with those of the envoys, but collectively they
would have no separate weight or power by virtue of belonging to the Senate.45
He devised an integrated system of elections to office at every level, linking
sejmiki with Sejm and Senate. The king would lose his patronage powers: unlike
Mably, Rousseau had doubts as to whether he should be left to make a final choice
from candidates presented for a post. Without the power to do harm, the king
would no longer wish to do so. On the other hand, it was wrong to reduce the
head of an extensive realm to a cipher. A harmless vestige of his old powers could
be allowed him – Rousseau suggested that the nomination of bishops (except
for the primate, who as interrex should be elected by the Sejm) should remain
within his gift (Mably had made no separate provision for their appointment).
Rousseau also left at monarchic disposal purely titular posts and, curiously, the
chancellorships – on the grounds that the role of chancellors was to act in the
royal capacity of judge – the reason, indeed, why kings had been instituted in
the first place, even if they had lost sight of their judicial role. On the other hand,
the chancellors would be constrained by councils of elected assessors.46
On key points Rousseau assumed a position much closer than Mably’s to
the szlachta’s traditionalism. He praised confederacies, comparing them to the
dicatorships of ancient Rome. They were a weapon of last resort against mon-
archic machinations and foreign invasion. Few free states appreciated just how
fragile their liberty was – the Poles were unique in having developed, in the con-
federacies, a final, emergency line of defence. They need only clearly define the
FOREIGN AID 131
conditions under which these leagues should be called upon. He warned against
a hereditary throne. Indeed, in the long term, Poland would be safer under an
elective monarchy ‘with the most absolute power’ than under a hereditary one
with virtually no power at all. He advised enacting a law specifically forbidding
the election of a king’s son as his successor, a measure that would deprive the
monarch of all incentive to work towards arbitrary rule.47
The advantages of interregna outweighed the disadvantages, for it was
ultimately the interregna which undercut royal striving towards absolutism, by
depriving each successive monarch of any foundation a predecessor might have
built up towards stronger personal rule.48 Royal elections should be reformed,
not abolished. The choice of candidates was to be restricted to native Poles,
specifically to the palatines of the Senate. An Election Sejm would be called
immediately on the death of a king and it would then put forward the names
of three palatines chosen by lot (thereby eliminating all intrigue), from whom
the Sejm would on that same day make a final choice, by majority vote, of the
new monarch. Thus, the candidates came from a pool of pre-approved talent
(the palatines), men of mature years who had reached their position through
a process of public scrutiny, approbation and election. Since all palatines had
an equal chance of acquiring the kingship, they and those aspiring to their
positions would all be encouraged throughout their public careers to win their
fellow-citizens’ esteem by the exercise of virtue and virtuous emulation. Rousseau
even envisaged the possibility of a probationary period, after which the new king
would be confirmed, or not, in his role.49 The new ruler, bereft of all power and
incentive to aggrandise himself, as president of the principal departments of
state, would have every incentive to work for the good of the Commonwealth;
he would be virtually obliged to act as supervisor of the various departments of
government to ensure that they discharged their obligations and kept within the
bounds prescribed by law.50
Along with confederacies and an elective monarchy, the liberum veto was to
remain. It was not ‘an intrinsically vicious right’, but became so only if abused,
transformed into an instrument of oppression.51 This could be remedied.
The veto should be restricted to the szlachta, as the true political nation and
sovereign power, and barred to senators. Moreover, its use should be confined
to ‘fundamental points of the constitution’, not to the whole range of ‘adminis-
trative’ business, which had to be clearly differentiated from the constitutional
essentials.52 In the Social Contract, Rousseau had argued that every society had to
show unanimity at least once, in agreeing to set up its basic political architecture.
By the same token, he now went on, abrogation or alteration of fundamental
constitutional principles also required unanimity.53 However, the right of veto
should be exercised not by an individual envoy, but by the constituency, through
its instructions. Use of the veto was a weighty matter – so much so, that for it
to be beneficial, it had to be made dangerous to its user. Rousseau proceeded

inconsistently to treat such protestations precisely as individual initiatives, rather
than collective constituency undertakings. He proposed that the user of the
veto should be judged by a court of the great and the good, specially convened
six months after his exercise of the veto. If found guilty of misusing it, he could
only be sentenced to death. As for the enactment of non-constitutional busi-
ness, Rousseau suggested a system of qualified majorities, ranging from simple
majority voting for elections and ‘current and passing business’, of two-thirds for
‘matters of state’ and of up to three-quarters for ‘legislation’ (he did not define
these categories more closely).54
The conduct of the envoys was ultimately to be determined by their electors.
There were no concessions to Mably’s view that the great affairs of the realm
were a matter for its sovereign legislative assembly, not for provincial sejmiki.
The small polity of the Social Contract relied as much as possible on the direct
contribution of all its citizens. In a large state such as Poland, representative, as
opposed to direct, democracy was unavoidable.55 The cornerstone of Poland
à la Rousseau were to be the sejmiki, in effect, the governments of the thirty-
three smaller states making up the new federal organism. The Poles had failed
to appreciate their importance: ‘if Confederacies have saved your country, it is
the sejmiki which have preserved it . . . they are the true Palladium of Liberty.’
Instructions to envoys had to be made mandatory, a requirement removed under
the reform legislation of 1764, by the characteristically oblique measure of no
longer requiring envoys to take an oath to adhere to them.56 In part, this was a
measure against the possibility of envoys being corrupted – an ever-present dan-
ger: the sejmiki, unlike individual envoys, were virtuous. Rousseau pointed to the
‘stupidity’ of the English in failing to constrain their MPs with such instructions.
More importantly, mandatory instructions would ensure that the laws enacted
by the Sejm would genuinely reflect ‘the wills (volontés) of the nation’, not the
view of particular envoys. They would be accountable to their relationary sejmiki,
which could inflict punishment, ranging from exclusion from future election to
the death penalty, depending on how far they had violated their mandate. Where
urgent business not covered by the instructions cropped up, envoys could decide
on their own initiative, provided their decisions did not run counter to any sejmik
instructions.57 Once a law had been enacted, it had to be obeyed – Rousseau was
stricter on this than Mably: at most, a disgruntled sejmik could make protesta-
tions to the next parliament.
Binding instructions and answerability of envoys to their electorates were
only part of a battery of measures to ensure that the national will should be
expressed unblemished, untainted by corruption. Rousseau praised the Poles for
their biennial Sejmy – these, unlike their English equivalents, were much more
difficult to subvert. The current six-week term should be quite adequate for the
FOREIGN AID 133
discharge of business (hence, less time to corrupt envoys), though it should be

readily prolonged if necessary, or an extraordinary Sejm could be called. It was
essential that a fresh Sejm be summoned every other year and no Sejm’s term
should be extended beyond two years.58 Rousseau’s educational provisions aimed
to create patriotic citizens who would in some measure be proof against corrup-
tion. But his entire cursus honorum, starting with the awards granted at public
school exercises, was a system designed to focus men’s amour propre on virtuous
conduct and the well being of the state. At every stage, progress and promotion
would depend on the scrutiny and approbation of fellow-citizens, who would
collectively fulfil the role of the morality-guarding censors of the Social Contract.
It was uniquely in Poland that a virtue and patriotism approaching that of the
ancients could be created, while the rest of Europe wallowed in a degenerate
cosmopolitan uniformity which would bring about its doom.59
Instructions and relationary sejmiki would guard the conduct of envoys. As
for senators, the most important ones, of palatine rank, should be elected by the
sejmiki. Rousseau would have liked to put a limited term to the palatines’ tenure
of office, but since bishops were appointed for life, he felt that such a limitation
would excessively favour ecclesiastical influence. All aspirants to public office
had to undergo rigorous preparation. He urged a register to be kept of all nobles
eligible to participate in the sejmiki – but to be eligible, they had not only to be
landowners (by no means necessarily substantial ones), but also to have a know-
ledge of (reformed) Polish law, in which they were to be examined (by ‘an exam
which is no mere formality’) to qualify for registration. All who wished to go on
to public office should undertake a preliminary career as lawyers and assessors,
or even as judges, in the lower courts, or in the financial administration: all posts
which would both allow them to demonstrate their competence and, above all,
integrity, to others. Imposing the same demands on rich as well as poor would
reinforce noble equality. In a state where such equality was a basic principle,
everyone would start their career in the same way – from the very lowest offices.
This subaltern service should last a minimum of three years.60
Every promotion and advance would depend on the scrutiny and judgement
of fellow-citizens. To this end, all entering public life were to be divided into
three classes. Those who had successfully completed a minimum of three years
service in junior positions, after a rigorous review of their conduct by their
sejmik, would be awarded the title Spes Patriae (‘Hope of his Country’). This
was a prerequisite for service as envoy or judge in the Tribunals. Those who
completed three terms as envoys to the satisfaction of the relationary sejmik, (or
presumably an equivalent period of service on the judiciary) would be honoured
with elevation to the rank of Civis Electus, ‘Chosen Citizen’. They could no longer
hold envoyships or deputyships, but only they were eligible for election to the
Senate, by the Chamber of Envoys. Initially, they could be elected only to the
rank of lesser or ‘deputy-senators’, restricted, in the first instance, to a two-year

term. Not all cives electi of course could expect such elevation – but they would
also serve to provide college principals and school inspectors, a measure of how
closely Rousseau identified state, politics and education. Deputy-senators, unlike
palatines and bishops, without life tenure, would serve to fragment the role of the
senate in its executive role, thereby heightening its dependence on the legislative
power. Because they could be elected, and re-elected, only by the Chamber of
Envoys, they were a form of representative of the legislating nobility, with a direct
interest in satisfying the legislative, as much as the executive. They could be re-
elected twice more, provided that they received a certificate of approbation from
the Chamber of Envoys after each term. Those who completed three such terms
would then be elevated into the category of custos legum, ‘Guardian of the Laws’.
It was from these that the senior, non-ecclesiatical senators, the palatines and
greater castellans, could be chosen to serve for life. It was from among supernu-
merary ‘guardians’ that the ‘College of Magistrates’ in charge of the educational
system would be drawn, under the presidency of the primate, the sole ecclesiastic
who would be allowed to sit on that body. Rousseau, in his complex system of
interacting checks and balances, seems himself confused, or undecided. Having
earlier come down in favour of the election of palatines by the sejmiki, he now
entrusted their choice to the Sejm (whether by the envoys alone or jointly with
the senators is not made clear). The real point was that ‘after fifteen or twenty
years of effort, continuously under the public gaze, there will remain to them a
still great number of years in which to benefit their country with their talents,
their experience and their virtues . . .’ If entry into public service began from the
age of twenty, Rousseau estimated that the earliest age at which a man could
become palatine would be thirty-three, though in reality, a mature and vigorous
forty was more probable. The palatines would form a pool of tried and tested
virtue and talent – and to ensure that they retained an incentive to continue to
exert themselves for the Commonweath’s well being, it was from among them
that the new monarch would be elected. Rousseau even advised the Barists to
retain King Stanisław August, the object of their loathing, as a useful stopgap – if
his scheme were implemented, the pool of custodes legum would assuredly secure
a more worthy successor.61
Rousseau assigned a key role in the government of palatinates and in the
re-shaping of society to his cives electi. Those not occupied as deputy-senators
would, in each constituency form a ‘censorial committee’, functioning as a pen-
dant to the sejmik. Meeting twice a year, it would invite participants from all
social groups to attend, including the parish clergy and peasantry. On the basis
of their reports it would draw up assessments of the condition and needs of each
parish, to be forwarded to the sejmik for further consideration. The committees
would also draw up lists of outstanding and deserving persons across the social
FOREIGN AID 135
spectrum, to forward to the king and senate to reward. They would decide on
scholarships for poor nobles within the new schools. But their most important
task would be to decide who were the deserving peasants, distinguished ‘by good
conduct, good comportment, good morals and care for their family’ and by the
sound discharge of all the obligations of their estate. These names would be
submitted to the sejmik, which would emancipate a fixed number among them
and devise compensation for their seigneurs. In the fulness of time, whole villages
might come to be emancipated. In other words, the ‘censorial committees’ would
have a key function in the emancipation and integration of a reformed society.
The peasantry would be given a real incentive to love their country. It might
eventually be possible, barely noticeably, to confer on the peasantry ‘the right
given them by nature’ to participate in the administration of their own country
by sending their own deputies to the sejmiki.62
Despite his reluctant concession that emancipation might prove impractic-
able, Rousseau regarded it as necessary if only because without the peasantry,
Poland could not survive. Neither he nor Mably believed the Commonwealth to
be capable of fielding a professional standing army which on its own was capable
of resisting its neighbours. Mably suggested that it could support a regular force
of 50,000 men, but it had to be backed up by ‘a military nation’ of citizens-in-
arms. All nobles should assemble each year to undertake one or two months of
martial exercises. He commended the idea of a conscript peasant infantry of
between thirty and forty thousand men, to be emancipated after twenty years
service. The prospect of liberty offered a means to energise the mass of peasants
out of their apathy and indifference to their country.63
Rousseau failed to see the point of a regular army at all – no such force could
possibly defend Poland from its enemies. It was a law of nature that the weak
would always be overcome by the strong. Poland had to find its strength not in
(suspect) professional troops, but in the totality of its people. If it was at present
dangerous to include the serfs in a national, Swiss-style militia (though it would
be a ‘happy moment’ when that finally took place, with their enfranchisement)
it was possible, he maintained, to arm the townspeople. Drill exercises should
be conducted every Sunday and a system of permanent militia regiments could
be introduced, whose personnel would gradually be rotated, allowing the whole
population to receive a basic military training over twelve to fifteen years. Officer
appointments should be made purely on merit, allowing the bourgeoisie to
secure positions of command, tightening their affection for and attachment
to their Commonwealth. The szlachta should play to their traditional military
strengths – as cavalry. He even urged them to destroy their enemies by luring
them into the depths of Poland’s interior, wearing them down and picking them
off in the fashion of the ancient Parthians. A true citizen army, imbibed with
‘that patriotic intoxication which alone can raise men above themselves’ and
without which liberty was meaningless, could even be entrusted to the com-
mand of its own king, who simply could not use such an army against his own
people.64
That ‘patriotic intoxication’ was to be formed by more than education and
emancipation. It had to be reinforced by communal spectacles, festivities, power-
ful symbolisms. Hence the stress Rousseau placed on public games, examinations
and ceremonial gatherings. On the other hand, cards, theatre, comedy, opera were
to be banned as effeminising and distracting. The szlachta’s officials would be
distinguished by symbolic, visible marks of esteem. Rousseau would eschew the
rubies and jewels of Europe’s chivalric orders as signs of royal favour or trinkets
for women. The szlachta’s marks of distinction would be altogether more manly.
Those who had successfully completed the first stage of their public careers would
display a medal of gold, bearing their name, their province, the date of their
reception into their order and the bold legend Spes Patriae. Cives electi would
bear a comparable medal of silver, the Custodes Legum one of blue steel. Poles
already had the ‘happiness’ of a distinctive national costume: king, senators and
all public officials should wear it at all times; native subjects dressed in French
fashion should be barred from court.65
Mably and Rousseau were adamant that, provided the Turks defeated Russia,
their proposals were practicable. Mably, in particular, had a hopelessly unrealistic
view of the machinations of European powers – he envisaged, for example, that
Frederick the Great, who was to be the principal actor in the First Partition, had
no interest in weakening Poland (though he did suggest the Barists could even
win his support by abandoning to him ‘some territories’). While Rousseau felt
the Poles could depend on Turkish support, he warned them not to trust any of
the European nations.66 Mably’s and Rousseau’s assessment of Poland’s inter-
national situation, even if wildly misconceived, highlighted an uncomfortable
problem which dogged all would-be reformers. Neither could come up with a
satisfactory answer to how neighbouring powers, principally Russia (beyond
defeat by Turkey) could be persuaded to permit reform in the Commonwealth.
Mably felt Poland should make clear it eschewed all aggressive intent. Likewise,
Rousseau urged a formal renunciation by the Poles of all wars of conquest and
suggested that the adoption of a reformed republicanism might even be welcome
to governments incapable of appreciating the value of liberty, which would dis-
miss such reform as ‘visionary lunacy’.67 Such counsels amounted to little more
than whistling in the dark: Prussia and far more so, Russia, had too much at stake
to allow Polish reformers a free hand. Ultimately, the non-aggression gambit was
a variation on a long-cherished view among many Poles: that the survival of the
Commonwealth was a necessary part of the European balance of power and that
it was this which would ensure its survival.
Principal informant to Mably and Rousseau was Michael Wielhorski.
FOREIGN AID 137
Inveterately hostile to King Stanisław August, he peddled an optimistic vision

of the Barist cause to his philosophe acquaintances. Mably, though mistrustful
of the Commonwealth’s magnates, nevertheless looked to them to give a lead in
reforming the state, if only because, he argued, it was they who had most to lose
should Poland be partitioned and were less likely to lose economically from serf
reform than petty nobles.68 He and Rousseau fell for Wielhorski’s portrayal of
Bar’s leadership as an enlightened grouping determined to see reform in Poland –
not the self-deluding shambles it really was.69 It was mainly individuals associated
with the king, and pupils of Stanisław Konarski, who accepted the need for more
radical change. Only a handful of confederates came round to the same view.70
Wielhorski made no effort to familiarise his Parisian contacts with Konarski’s
ideas: if nothing else, a man who had restored the veto at the 1766 Sejm could
only have found them highly embarrassing. In 1776, the sixty-seven year old
Mably took up Wielhorski’s invitation to visit Poland. His visit, from June to April
1777, proved a chastening experience – the men of ancient republican virtue
Wielhorski had so praised did not exist. Poles were at least as disappointing as
the rest of humanity. Mably was amazed that his host’s acquaintances blamed
everyone but themselves for the catastrophe of the Partition. He returned to
France more pessimistic than ever about Poland’s prospects.71
Neither Mably’s leaden prose nor Rousseau’s dazzling argumentation pro-
duced any direct consequences, yet it would be unfair to portray their tracts as
wasted rhetoric. In one respect they were extremely important for the future
development of Polish political ideas: they imparted a new and sustained analytic
approach to szlachta republicanism. Polish politics were subject to a forensic
dissection of what they were in their own right. Whatever incidental compli-
ments the two philosophes paid to the szlachta’s forbears, they saw those politics
not as a hallowed ancestral legacy, but as a construct in need of enlightened and
modernising overhaul. If Polish authors had pointed to the need to alleviate serf-
dom, none had done so in such a developed and challenging fashion, questioning
the very roots of a noble society wedded to its own national exclusivity. Mably
was the first to challenge that much-vaunted Polish dictum that so appealed
to Rousseau: ‘Malo periculosam libertatem quam qietum servitium.’ If Stanisław
Leszczyński’s father had lived under a properly constituted government, he would
never needed to voice such a sentiment.72
Rousseau’s influence was to prove the greater. It may have had something to
do with his energising style – Mably’s tedious elucubrations sank almost with-
out trace. But the main reason was surely that Rousseau saw that the szlachta’s
attachment to a liberty which was misguided, flawed, even perverted, involved
a deeply-charged emotional bond which brute military force could not destroy.
Hence his celebrated advice, if all else were to fail, ‘ensure, at least that they [the
Russians] cannot digest you’.73 The attachment to liberty, pride in the past, the
‘patriotic intoxication’, which Rousseau so commended were indeed to help the

Poles retain their Polishness after the Partitions. These were not matters in which
they needed instruction from the citizen of Geneva. But Rousseau’s ideas also
fertilised Polish republicanism more immediately. In his proposals, he was far
closer in spirit than Mably to what the szlachta believed in. Mably attacked the
practice of elective kingship, Rousseau sanctified it. Rousseau’s concept of the
‘general will’, appearing in the Considérations as the ‘the wishes/wills of the Nation’,
helped turn the old notion of sejmik instructions as formulae in defence of an
existing liberty into something altogether more dynamic and purposeful. A ‘will’
without purpose was no will at all. Especially after Polish translations of the Social
Contract (though only the first six chapters) and the Considérations appeared in
1778 and 1789 respectively, the ‘will of the nation’ was everywhere – in tracts,
pamphlets, instructions. It was to be the ideological driving force of the reform-
ing Four Years Sejm of 1788–92 (even if what that ‘will’ was by no means clear
to those who invoked it).74 Rousseau’s further ideological bequest to the Poles
was the rehabilitation of the sejmiki instructions. Konarski and Mably, with their
pragmatic assertions on the impracticability of grass-roots constituents treating
of the great affairs of state, could not compete with Jean-Jacques’s elevation of
the instructions into vehicles for the expression of the general will. Montesquieu
himself had accepted that ‘the people as a body should have legislative power’
and that only practical considerations prevented this.75 Few could argue so well
against mundane reality as Rousseau. His near-apotheosis of the driving role
of the sejmiki appealed to the sense of noble ownership of the Commonwealth
and recharged the long tradition of the indispensability of the communis con-
sensus. Western European idealism, even utopianism, infused fresh life into old
szlachta republicanism.
In 1775, Michael Wielhorski published, anonymously, his On the Restoration
of our Former Government According to the Earliest Laws of the Commonwealth,
which he had begun to work on in late 1772, in the immediate aftermath of
the Partition. Rousseau, not his friend Mably, was all-pervasive. Jean-Jacques’s
admonitions against the corruption of a state’s founding principles were certainly
convenient. ‘For as long as our early forebears, burning with old Polish virtue,
faithfully observed their country’s laws, neighbouring powers never dared to
assault their properties and liberties.’ In a more innocent age, Poland’s ancestors
had ruled as much through custom as through law – and the imprecision of
written law had allowed abuses to settle in.76 But in the sixteenth century, the
first major departures from Poland’s founding principles had taken place and
their consequences had grown more serious with the passage of time. Wielhorski
approached the thorny issue of coping with the sacrosanct merits of the szlachta’s
forbears by drawing (at considerably greater length than Konarski had done) a
distinction between ‘ancestors’, przodkowie,and less virtuous ‘fathers’, ojcowie,
FOREIGN AID 139
who had almost completely lost touch with ancestral intentions. He placed the
final, degenerative transition in the 1680s.77
What was needed was a return to Poland’s old laws, more clearly expressed.78
‘Each state has its own founding law or principle, which, if grounded on the
law of nature, assures it of its flourishing.’ A less virtuous posterity, driven by
lusts and passions, corrupted by foreign influences, (everything that Rousseau
warned against) had failed to abide by the elementary obligation to preserve
that founding principle: the wise mistrust of all things new had been neglected.
Poland’s founding principle lay in the direct control over its laws and govern-
ment by the nobility.79 Wielhorski refused to accept the Mably-Rousseau vision
of an emancipated commonalty. The sole rulers of the Commonwealth were the
nobility. ‘Certainly the exclusion of the common people from participation in
government is of manifest detriment to original freedom; consider, however, that
from the beginnings of our Commonwealth, all those who ran to arms in order
to protect it secured the rights of citizenship and that in former ages, the words
soldier and szlachcic had the same meaning.’80 The myth of exclusive blood sacri-
fice (disregarding the fact that many commoners had fought in the Confederacy
of Bar) outweighed the outpourings of well-intentioned philosophes.
The nobility had not only always elected (and deposed) their kings, they had
equally shared in the governing and legislative processes. Poland, almost from the
outset, was a federation of palatinates, transmitting the will of their nobility to the
Sejm, which by the year 1140, in Wielhorski’s version of history, had met at least
twenty-one times.81 This federal aspect of a state in effect owned by a free and
equal nobility was crucial to its character and it was in the failure to appreciate
that that the seeds of future disaster lay. The principle of szlachta ‘ownership’, or,
rather, sovereignty, had been weakened since the mid-sixteenth century, when
the king and the senate were, for the first time, misguidedly acknowledged to be
estates (stany) of the realm. The true estates were the nobility alone; more specif-
ically, as assembled in their palatinates and provinces. The king was answerable
to the szlachta assembled in the Sejm and could do nothing without consulting
them; the senators were more distinguished citizens, but in the final analysis
the peers of the nobility and, like the king, answerable to them in parliament.82
Each palatinate was a body sovereign in its own right, a sovereignty manifested
at its sejmik. The envoy was merely ‘the executor . . . of the will of his palatinate’.
Not the individual envoy, but the palatinate, acting through its envoys, legislated.
It followed that the instructions with which they were issued were binding. As
a result, voting at the Sejmy was not to be undertaken by individual envoys, but
by palatinates, with the envoys of each constituency acting unanimously as a
group, following their instruction. If new matters not covered by the instructions
arose during the Sejm, they had to be referred back to the electors. A two to
one majority of instructions would enact legislation. The Commonwealth’s full
sovereignty found expression at the Sejm, but, in turn, the envoys answered to
their electorates at the relationary sejmiki. Wielhorski was careful to restrict active
participation in local assemblies to landed nobles only, not in service with any
magnates. An active participant in the sejmik had to be ‘entirely free, master of
his own will, bound to no-one by any paid service’. He was to be free of any legal
judgement against him and to be a Roman Catholic. Restricting active participa-
tion in sejmiki to such independent country gentlemen would have reduced the
numbers debating and voting by at least one half. Moreover, for the first time,
eligible nobles would have to provide legal, documentary proof of their status
and residence.83 Poland’s founding principle, that sovereignty resides with the
nobility assembled at the sejmiki, would have been restored.84
The reassertion of mandatory instructions was a blow aimed at the reforms of
1764, when the Czartoryskis had stripped them of their supposedly binding force.
‘Supposedly’ because in reality their mandatory nature had meant little – at the
very least, there is no known instance of any sejmik taking action against any envoy
who failed to abide by his instructions. Wielhorski bewailed the ineffectiveness
of the relationary sejmiki. Under his proposals, those judged unsatisfactory faced
temporary or permanent bans from standing as envoys in the future. He went
further: he demanded the restoration of the old sejmiki-general both for those
palatinates which consisted of more than one constituency and for the three prov-
inces of Wielkopolska, Małopolska and Lithuania (these regional assemblies had
fallen into desuetude during the sixteenth century), for it was the union of these
three provinces which made up the Rzeczpospolita. They would also offer a vital
occasion for the constituencies to bring their instructions into a more uniform,
co-ordinated programme, rendering more expeditious the next Sejm – the reason
why the nobility’s ancestors had instituted them in the first place. Their neglect
and the fragmentation of sejmik activity had been a major contribution to Poland’s
loss of ancestral glory. He did not envisage the possibility that such co-ordination
might involve some etiolation or disregard of the will of local electorates.85
By restoring the (landed) nobility as a whole to the position of directly man-
dating their delegates, the deforming role of king and senate would be excised.
Wielhorski would rebuild the Commonwealth’s ‘true sovereignty and revive the
decayed equality of its citizens’. King and Senate retained an important function,
but in Wielhorski’s scheme, they were to be more closely integrated with the
sejmiki into the legislative process. On the one hand, if constituencies ‘did not
have the power to make laws, they would not be free.’ On the other hand, ‘if all
had the power to submit their proposals directly to the Sejm, without first deal-
ing with pre-selected business, the Sejm itself would . . . soon inevitably fall into
confusion and disorder.’ It was the duty of king and ministers to present materials
to the sejmiki to consider and then to instruct their envoys on how to proceed. In
this way, the senators in particular would be able to influence legislation without
FOREIGN AID 141
offence to noble equality, while at the same time make use of their wisdom and
experience: they would be ‘the soul of legislation’.86
Wielhorski assigned the sejmiki much more than a purely passive or blocking
role: he also enabled them to initiate legislation. His conversations with Rousseau
served him well. Hitherto, sejmiki had been effective only in promoting localised
interests. Wielhorski accepted the arguments of ‘the famous philosopher of our
age’ that the Poles had undervalued their sejmiki: he now set to correct that fail-
ing with a vengeance. ‘Participation in sejmiki, that is, the right to speak freely at
them, is the source of all the rights and honours of the szlachta.’ Each year, the
sejmiki of ‘good order’ (boni ordinis) would assemble. Hitherto, their role had
been to deal with purely local affairs. Now, over a complex process, lasting a good
week, of discussion, debate and majority voting on individual submissions, the
‘will of the palatinate’ on both local and national issues would emerge. Elected
emissaries would acquaint the Senate and ministers of it. Senate and ministers
would then be obliged to incorporate these resolutions into their own propos-
als, to be submitted back to the local assemblies for confirmation or rejection.
Wielhorski conceded that the instructions might delay or constrain what Sejmy
could achieve, especially in emergencies ‘but is there in any nation, distanced
from the laws of nature by human passions, any law, any procedure, which is not
subject to some failing?’87
The fear of royal machinations remained. ‘There is no citizen concerned for
his freedom who would not constantly oppose the power acquired over the years
by our kings.’88 Wielhorski echoed the traditional republican arguments against
the corrupting influence of the ius distributivum. That most dangerous royal
prerogative would be devolved to the local assemblies, so that all appointments,
senatorial, honorific, judicial at every level, would become elective (Wielhorski
did not give any thought to the appointment of bishops, whose diocesan bound-
aries did not at all fit constituency boundaries). A vestige of those powers might
be retained, by allowing the king the final choice for each post from four candi-
dates presented to him. In this way Poland would supposedly regain its old form
of government, as practised up to the reign of John Albert (reigned 1492–1501),
who, in Wielhorski’s demonology, was the first king to secure the royal rights of
appointment, which his successors had gone on to widen through ‘clandestine
practices’. Freed of the distracting incubus of the conduct of patronage, the king
would be free to give all his attentions to the well being of the Commonwealth.
‘From being an enemy of the nation, as he is universally regarded, he would
become its head and mainstay’, in the manner of Poland’s earliest rulers.89
Despite his reservations on the monarchy, Wielhorski explicitly rejected the
arguments of Jan Poniński’s ‘Moralisation on the condition of the Commonwealth’
of 1764 for its abolition. A country as large as Poland, and which had suffered
such a massive loss of political virtue, required a king, if only to keep the magnates
in their place. To abolish the monarchy would be to plunge the Commonwealth

into renewed and greater anarchy. Once the king had been deprived of his
distributive powers, he would be without power and almost without authority,
so that he would be reduced to his proper status of an official ‘assigned to the
discharging of the executive power’. Yet Wielhorski continued to view the king
as a potential menace whom it might still be necessary to dethrone. He was not
therefore prepared to go along with Mably and get rid of elective monarchy, even
though he acknowledged it had been disastrous for the country and had played
a key role in opening it up to foreign influence.90
Wielhorski turned all his ingenuity to resolving the problem. The boni ordinis
sejmiki would not only begin the process of expressing the national will through
proposals for legislation. They would also express that will by beginning the
process of royal election. Each year, the nobles attending these assemblies would
cast their votes for candidates drawn from ‘ministers not currently holding office
but who formerly discharged it virtuously and assured themselves of a univer-
sally celebrated reputation’. All votes would be kept in an elaborate battery of
strongboxes by the Senate. The process would be repeated each year; and each
previous year’s votes would be burned. Only at the death or dethronement of the
king would the Senate (or, if it happened to be in session, the full Sejm) publicly
open the ballot boxes and count their contents. The candidate with most votes
would be proclaimed king. In this way, ‘every citizen will become a participant
in the election of the king. Every right-thinking person should agree to this
proposal and only he could oppose it, who might wish to sell his vote.’ Annual
election would virtually eliminate interregna. ‘We would preserve in full and in
spirit the honour of Free Election and we would secure all the advantages which
a hereditary throne brings with it, without experiencing the evils it brings and
without the least fear of any detriment to our liberties.’91
It was not just the king who posed a threat – so too did senators and ministers,
who had to be made answerable to the nation. Wielhorski wanted a separation
of legislative and executive: the senate would no longer be an active participant
of the Sejm. Instead, it would have a new executive role. The nobility’s forbears
may not have clearly defined this separation in the manner of Montesquieu, but
it was what they had in mind.92 The separation of powers was not total: the senate
was allowed an influence-making role in the legislature, but the decision-making
would always remain with the envoys, in an arrangement that would allow per-
fect concord between the two. All executive matters would be the remit of four
councils attached to the great offices of state: the grand marshals (internal police),
the chancellors (judicial and foreign policy), the hetmani (military affairs) and
the treasurers. A total of six senators (two from each of the three Provinces of
Wielkopolska, Małopolska and Lithuania) would sit on each council. At each
biennial Sejm, the envoys alone would elect three senators to each council, to
FOREIGN AID 143
sit for four years – thus the councils would be served by a rotating system of six
senators, half of whom would change with every freshly assembled Sejm; such
service would allow them to acquire plenty of expertise in their council’s particu-
lar field. Three envoys would be elected to each council, not as full members, but
as their principal chancery officials, in order to keep records of proceedings and
to offer advice and elucidations. If envoys served as full members, there was a
danger they would try to mobilise their parliamentary colleagues to secure their
particular goals, which could only cause frictions between Senate and Sejm. It
was the duty of these councils to prepare executive measures (presumably, inter
alia, deriving from the latest legislation) within their competence, which would
be submitted on a weekly basis to the full assembly of the Senate, which would, in
turn, accept or reject them. The views of all would be recorded, including those
of objectors who had failed to sustain their arguments. In this way, the opinion
of each senator would be available for scrutiny by the Sejm, to which the senate
as a whole remained answerable for its decisions. Despite Wielhorski’s insistence
on the separation of the legislative and the executive, these senatorial assemblies
would be able to enact legislation, although such decisions would require con-
firmation by the next Sejm. Wielhorski admitted that the powers of the Senate
would indeed be increased, since the Senate would ‘in the interval between two
Sejmy become a near-legislature’. The responsibility of the Senate to the Sejm was
presumably, in his mind, sufficient to eradicate any clashes between them. Since
every third Sejm would continue, as it currently did, to meet in Lithuania, the
four ministerial councils would match the parliamentary rotation of venues (the
alternata), sitting for four years in Warsaw and for two in Wilno or Grodno.93
Ministerial tenure of office would cease to be lifelong but be restricted to a
maximum of four to six years; ministers would be elected at Sejmy from long-
standing senators of proven virtue and experience, and those among them who
had worthily discharged their duties would, on retirement be awarded an order
of Custos Legum or Emeritus Civis (‘Distinguished Citizen’) – the same sort of
awards that Rousseau had suggested (not that Wielhorski acknowledged him).
‘In this way, the spirit of citizenship would be aroused, together with a concern
to discharge the duties of the executive power.’94
The man who in 1766 had restored the liberum veto now condemned it. He
shrugged off his conduct then (and, by implication, his own collaboration with
the Russians, whom he singled out as Poland’s chief enemy and the principal
foreign patron of the veto). ‘The condition in which the Commonwealth found
itself after 1764 is only too familiar for people not to know the reasons which led
me not only to resort to the liberum veto in 1766, but even to invest it with new
vigour and dignity.’ A man of virtue (presumably, such as Wielhorski himself)
could indeed use the veto ‘prudently’ to save the freedoms of the Commonwealth
from destruction, but its form of government had now become so debased, moral
degeneration so ingrained, that salvation lay only in a return to root-and-branch

first principles, which did not include the veto. He showed off his own intellectual
credentials by invoking Locke on the need for men to respect their laws and to
come to them by majority agreement, for otherwise nothing could be decided.
In fact, in his condemnation of the veto, Wielhorski echoed Konarski – but he
never acknowledged him.95 He could not quite bring himself to discard the veto
entirely. It could be applied if all a constituency’s envoys agreed on it, in accord-
ance with their instruction; it could only block individual items of legislation.
‘In this way, the liberum veto will be less harmful to the general good and might
even prove useful, if used wisely.’ The veto would be abolished only insofar as it
wrecked the entire Sejmy. He also managed to insist that constituencies should
accept laws that might be ‘contrary to the will of the palatinate’ but if they felt
any ‘significant untowardness’ had resulted, they should complain to the Senate
and, if necessary, secure a re-consideration of the offending legislation by the
next parliament.96
These labyrinthine procedures were a necessary means to fathom and transmit
the new discovery of the ‘will’, one can say, indeed, the ‘general will’ that was now
proving such a useful and fashionable label to preserve old ways of thinking.
Konarski’s plea for a dynamic, active parliament that shaped the nation and its
policies was the last thing that Wielhorski wanted. Konarski had held up the
English parliament as a model. Wielhorski’s admiration for Locke, such as it
was, did not extend to English institutions. His Sejm would be superior to the
Westminster parliament, for its envoys, bound by their instructions, serving
for two years at a time only (they could not be re-elected for successive terms)
would be less liable to corruption; and the answerability of the envoys to their
relationary sejmiki would mean the Sejm could not attain the powers of the
English parliament. The executors of the palatinates’ wills would not ‘become in
time the all-powerful masters of the Commonwealth’s fate.’97
Wielhorski looked back to a past created by ancestors, but deformed by more
recent generations of ‘fathers’. It was comparatively easy for him to devise solutions
by adaptation and refinement of that past – all the more so because, unlike Mably
and Rousseau, he made no attempt whatever to consider Poland’s international
position. Beyond acknowledging the fact of Partition, and that in a letter he quoted
from Mably,98 he gave it no consideration at all. His work was a fiction, suspended
in a vacuum in which real events had no place, symptomatic of the enduring
strength of Sarmatian phobias, now bolstered by the fashionable lexicon of the
day, in particular, the ‘general will’. But that a man of Wielhorski’s conservative
outlook should have been ready to grasp what western Europe had to offer testified
to a major intellectual breach in the nobility’s attitude: yes, the Enlightenment
was being cherry-picked, but purely Polish traditions were no longer enough.
Even conservative Poland recognised that it needed the outside world.
FOREIGN AID 145
A very different appeal to the outside world was made at about the same
time as Wielhorski’s by Józef Wybicki. Wybicki did not ignore the Partition: his
work was an emphatic response to it. He did not turn to a mythologised past,
but looked to an unknown future. Where Wielhorski wanted to freeze society
inside a citadel of old liberties for the landed noble proprietors, Wybicki saw the
need for change as imperative. Like Wielhorski, he had been a supporter of the
Confederacy of Bar, but his support derived not from animosity to the king and
the Czartoryskis, but from outrage and disgust at Russian policy towards his
country. Disillusioned by the confederates, he tore himself away to pursue the
study of law in Leyden from October 1770 to September 1771. The experience
of the Netherlands was a revelation. ‘I found it impossible to understand that
townsmen and burgomasters could rule such a country, without a king, without a
nobility.’ Inspired by the teaching of Friedrich Wilhelm Pestel on law and history,
Wybicki flung himself into devouring the classics of politics and jurisprudence:
Montesquieu (especially), Rousseau, the physiocrats, Bielfeld, Vattel, Hume – any
author of note was greedily ingested. He responded to the Partition by trying
to improve his own estate (now in Prussia) to the level of such properties in
Holland. He observed bitterly that the main concern of many nobles were the new
levels of taxation to which they were subject. He poured out his new erudition
in the Political Thoughts on Civil Liberty (1775–6), a juvenile work to which, in
later years, he looked back with some embarrassment, but which was sufficient
to bring him to the attention of the king and secure him a place on Andrzej
Zamoyski’s reform commission.99 Wybicki offered little in the way of solutions
to Poland’s plight: his was primarily an impassioned plea for the nobility to share
his own experience of a root-and-branch reassessment of the Rzeczpospolita.
The szlachta’s much-vaunted freedom, pace its defenders, was not just anarchy
but an offence against natural law. What had man been created for? To live in
freedom. Yet, so often, so many men were not free: they themselves rejected
the order that God intended for them. In the Polish case, this lack of freedom
manifested itself at various levels, but above all in the nobility’s own illusions.
They sought to preserve not freedom, but anarchy, an illusion so strong that
they were even (a clear reference to the Confederacy of Bar) ready to die it. They
regarded themselves as virtuous, but they were not: true virtue meant genuine
patriotism – service to one’s country and obedience to its laws. By opting for
unbridled liberty, the nobility had placed their personal interests above those of
the state – they had consciously, deliberately rejected the virtue without which
no state could survive.100
Even in shaping their own government, the szlachta had rejected virtue: it
was no good blaming individuals – a nation had a collective responsibility to
itself to look to its own well being and security and in this, the Poles had proved
wanting.101 The born legislators of the nobility supposedly transmitted the will
of their electorates, made manifest at the sejmiki, to the central parliament. But
this was to see things as they should have been, not as they truly were. At a time
when their neighbours were gaining in strength, they had shown little concern
with measures for their own security, be it their army or their diplomacy – so
much so, that powers that would have wished to help Poland were unable to do
so.102 A truly free Poland could have flourished, as had Switzerland, the United
Provinces or England. Instead, Wybicki saw only economic and demographic
decay.103 Although he was ready to put on a fig leaf of praise for ancestral good
intentions, he had little time for what those ancestors had built up. Posterity
was more important than the past. At least their forbears had tried to create a
free government, but ‘we have destroyed it and increased the unbridled freedom
of each citizen’. Elsewhere he accused the szlachta of preserving their ancestors’
mistaken view that society could only be composed of those men who were most
free, that is, without any restraint.104 Such ‘freedom’ was utterly incompatible
with civil society, worse even than the worst despotism – a primeval state of
nature among wild beasts was preferable.105 Anarchy proper set in after 1652 with
Siciński’s veto: ‘it makes of one szlachcic a tyrant and all others his slaves.’ It was
an illegal, unjustifiable and tyrannical instrument, which defied ‘the will of the
community’, destroyed parliaments, and like a true tyrant, sacrificed everything
to its own interests, spreading fear and mistrust among all whom it touched.
Poles had always wanted freedom – but they interpreted freedom as something
that would confer ever-greater benefits; unable to distinguish between private
and public good, they found obedience to the law intolerable and even the most
innocent undertakings of their kings a cause of suspicion. ‘A nation which wanted
to be free considered that every law would make it a slave.’ Every step closer to
what they believed was freedom, in reality, took them ever further away.106
Criticism of the szlachta’s right, their proudest prerogative, to elect their own
monarch, had hitherto been timid and hesitating. Wybicki fired off an icono-
clastic broadside. With the extinction of the Jagiellonians, the nobility made
a headlong dash to grab what liberties they could: the establishment of elect-
ive monarchy had more to do with private ambition than the public welfare.
Interregna, the supposed apogee of noble liberty, were nothing more than occa-
sions for gatherings of slaves; they gave rise to civil war which disrupted what
little functioning machinery of government and justice the country possessed;
they brought economic and commercial disruption and the hatreds which they
nurtured continued to poison politics long after the interregna themselves were
over. They furnished the opportunity for foreign powers to meddle. Fostering the
illusion that each nobleman could be king, they placed on the throne foreigners
who could not possibly be as attached to Poland as they were to their own states.
Far from bringing out the best in men, they brought out the worst.107
It was as comprehensive a critique of everything the szlachta had ever believed
FOREIGN AID 147
their republic stood for as had ever been made. But Wybicki tried to push his
countrymen further. A truly free state should not be afraid of facing up honestly
to its own shortcomings.108 The szlachta had to consider what society was for. As
an emanation of divine and natural law, it was a complex organism of mutual
dependence that men formed in order to attain happiness and preserve their
liberty. Such a society had to have laws, for without them, its liberty would
degenerate into licence – precisely what had happened in Poland.109 Society’s
benefits were for all its members – and yet in Poland, most of the population was
excluded. Although Wybicki had very little in this treatise to say about Poland’s
peasants, he was clear that no society could exclude its ‘lower estates’ (stany
niższe) from the benefits of justice and civil liberty. Not to do so was a violation of
nature. He may not have said outright that the peasantry should be emancipated,
but that was clearly what he meant (as he was to emphasise at much greater length
in his Patriotic Letters of 1777). Political participation, ‘political freedom’, was
rightly the property of higher estates – but all estates were equally necessary and
should complement one another: the nobility should certainly not despise the
peasantry and continue to deny them access to the justice of the state.110
Wybicki did not go beyond laying down necessary preliminary preconditions
for Poland’s survival: the introduction of hereditary kingship and the replace-
ment of the liberum veto with simple majority voting (which he, like Konarski,
saw as part of Poland’s original form of government). He believed the framing
of a new constitution should be entrusted to a small group of nine wise men
– novemviri – who would draft a future form of government, the ‘good laws’
necessary for his country’s rehabilitation. This was, of course, utterly wishful
thinking. No effective, wide-ranging, home-grown reform was feasible. There was
no possibility of the tutelary, partitioning powers agreeing to any reform they had
not approved and they certainly had no interest in fostering the sort of strong,
flourishing state that Wybicki held out; a state, moreover, which he hoped would
be able, in time, to find allies, exploit the conflicts of interest that would inevitably
develop between Russia, Austria and Prussia and which would even be able to
recover the territories it had lost (Wybicki was to be the only writer seriously to
hold out such a prospect).111 The Political Thoughts on Civil Liberty, for all the
telling points they made, and for all their differences from Wielhorski’s On the
Restoration of our Former Government were ultimately a similar exercise in rosy
optimism, for nothing at all of their proposals could begin to be implemented
while outside powers controlled Poland’s destiny. If anything, it was Wielhorski
who was the greater ‘realist’. He at least, unlike Wybicki, did not want a radical
change of course, any more so than most of his fellow-nobles.
8
Marking time
The ruling nation of the nobility was in no position to contemplate territorial

recovery or revanchism after 1772. Those conscious of the need for radical
change appreciated that old verities about the past would no longer do. The
szlachta would have to jettison its views of the excellence of the Rzeczpospolita’s
constitution. In 1771, even before the Partition, the king’s uncle and grand chan-
cellor of Lithuania, Michael Czartoryski, drew up guidelines for a putative history
of the Commonwealth. He aimed to inspire ‘the healthier and greater part’ of
the szlachta with ‘sensible considerations, prudent reflections, inclinations and
desires’ to find ‘means and methods whereby our country may possibly be saved
from the misfortunes and dangers with which it is now menaced.’ He saw the root
of the malaise in the creation, after the extinction of the supposedly hereditary
Jagiellonian line, of elective monarchy and in the general failure of the nobility to
respect their own laws. The resulting history composed by an anonymous author
languished in manuscript.1
The same didactic, critical approach was reflected in a pamphlet, which was
published at around the same time – Suum Cuique, Each to his Own, the author of
which was almost certainly the king himself.2 This, too, was a plea to look beyond
surface events and personalities. It was wrong to ascribe Poland’s ills simply to the
events of the last interregnum. Societies were complex, almost physical organ-
isms, and those complexities could make all the difference between healthy and
weak bodies. Sigismund II Augustus, the last Jagiellonian, had failed to devise
a sound means of succession for future kings. As a result, ‘he had undermined
the foundation of the power, authority and government of this country.’ The
‘supposed honour’ of electing its own kings proved a ‘Pandora’s box’, which gave
rise to internal strife, vitiated all the progress made in the spheres of politics,
economics, and industry and opened up the doors to the intervention of ever
better-organised neighbouring powers. ‘Seduced by a senseless love of independ-
ence’, the Poles came to equate licence with liberty. The decisions of the Silent
Sejm of 1717, imposed by Russia, confirming the veto and fixing the army at a
notional strength of 24,000 men, were ‘a monument to our insouciance, shame
and destruction’. In 1733, it was only thanks to Russian support that a minority
of electors secured the return of Augustus III. In contrast, claimed the author,
although Poniatowski owed his elevation in 1764 to Russian assistance, a majority
of the nation had genuinely wanted his election. That apart, it was illusory to
continue to believe that Poland’s neighbours would allow its nobility freely to
choose their own ruler.3
The problem with the message of Suum Cuique (one of which its author was
extremely conscious) or indeed, with Michael Czartoryski’s unpublished mus-
ings was that to many nobles, the rule of Augustus III did represent a golden age
of self-centred freedom. The undoubted difficulties of his reign did not even
begin to compare with the humiliations heaped on the Commonwealth under
his tampering successor. Suum Cuique failed to propound any solutions to its
problems – other than a plea to lay aside old hatreds, come together in unity and
learn from the past. At best, it showed how men at the peak of Poland’s noble
hierarchy were prepared to think and in what direction the process of converting
the szlachta mind had to go. The ancestral edifice had to be critically examined
and radical repair undertaken.
One thread in particular caught the attention of reformers. Physiocracy may
have begun to lose something of its attractions in France by the 1770s, but in
central and eastern Europe, its allure assumed a new intensity. In a Poland broken
by partition and crippled by the tariff policies of its partitioners, physiocratic
theory held out the promise of economic recovery and moral regeneration. No
other fashionable economic doctrine placed so much weight on the importance
of agriculture as the primary driving force of all economic activity. Physiocracy’s
gurus, Quesnay, Mirabeau the Elder, Mercier de la Rivière, Dupont de Nemours
promised nothing less than a rational, scientific reconstruction of society and
economy. Grounded in Nature and natural law, the physiocratic polity would
acknowledge that all wealth and all economic production stemmed ultimately
from agriculture. The prime generators of wealth were landowners and, to a
lesser degree, their tenant-farmers: it was only right then that they, above all,
should reap the rewards of an ever more productive agriculture in the shape of
ever greater riches.
Such a doctrine had, in principle, an appeal to a landed aristocracy, not least
in an overwhelmingly agrarian state such as Poland-Lithuania. Physiocracy
accorded almost untrammelled freedom to great agricultural producers: ‘the
two sacramental words: property, liberty’. Mirabeau the Elder expressed the
hope in 1767 that Catherine the Great would revive Poland by the introduction
of physiocratic doctrines. Physiocracy affected to believe in minimal govern-
ment – ‘Do not govern too much’: few Polish magnates would have demurred.4
As to aspects about which great landowners were bound to have misgivings, such
as the emancipation of serfs, the abolition of all fiscal privilege, the taxation of
landed income alone, these were so unrealistic as to be safely ignored. On the
other hand, the whole package of physiocratic ideas contained exactly what
those genuinely interested in reform were seeking. The doctrine’s stress on the
MARKING TIME 151
need for education of society at all levels caught their eye. Bowing to pressure
from the Bourbon powers, pope Clement XIV decreed the abolition of the Jesuit
Order in his breve, Dominus ac Redemptor, of 21 July 1773. The breve, published
in Poland on 27 September, provided a major distraction for the Sejm which
was struggling to cope with the immediate aftermath of the First Partition. The
suppression came as a shock: the relatively cheap Christian humanist education
that the majority of the Jesuit colleges provided was immensely popular; there
had never been any desire to liquidate the order in Poland. In 1772, the king and
his entourage had considered a proposal to suppress all monastic orders except
the Piarists, Missionaries and Jesuits and to use the confiscated assets to fund
a state-controlled educational system in which teaching ‘without prejudices’
would be provided by those three ‘enlightened congregations.’5 The suppression
of the Jesuits stood this on its head: their estate would now have to provide the
backbone of the financial resources that a new educational system would require,
although its capacity to do so was savagely depleted by an orgy of depredation
which stripped the Order’s estate of some two-thirds of its assets.6 On 14 October
1773, the Sejm authorised the establishment of an eight-member Commission
for National Education (Komisja Edukacji Narodowej), under the presidency of
Ignacy Massalski, bishop of Wilno. Although its prime task was the education
of the szlachta youth, all schools of whatever standing were placed under its
jurisdiction.7
Massalski had been an admirer of the physiocratic ideas of Quesnay and his
circle since the mid-1760s. He corresponded with Mirabeau, whose Paris salon
he had frequented in 1767. Michael Wielhorski had approached not only Mably
and Rousseau, but also Parisian physiocrats for advice on re-ordering Poland.8
Paul-Pierre Le Mercier de la Rivière produced an extended manuscript entitled
‘The Common Interest of the Poles’ in which he urged freeing the peasants,
giving free reign to market forces, building up the population into a nation of
property-holders and argued for the wider education of society. The political
institutions of Poland he deemed less important. He also applauded Catherine
II’s intervention in Poland on behalf of the dissenters. It may be that his embar-
rassment at a Russian policy, which culminated in partition, helped persuade
him not to publish his tract.9
A whole phalanx of younger educators and politicians looked to physiocracy
to lift Poland out of its degradation. Russia’s ambassador, Otto Magnus von
Stackelberg, was an enthusiastic admirer of the doctrine,10 which furnished
seemingly sound principles for reform, without presenting a threat to the new
territorial status quo and without insisting on any immediate changes unpalatable
to the partitioning powers. If nothing else, the journey from the annunciation of
principle, through its general acceptance to its practical enactment could only be
a lengthy one. Physiocracy’s stress on the primacy of agriculture in the generation
of national wealth and its expectation that the primary beneficiaries of that
wealth would be landowners was bound to resonate with enlightened aristocrats,
even if it commanded less conviction, let alone understanding, further down the
landowning scale. To reform-minded clergymen, physiocracy’s providential God,
ruling the world through natural laws, no matter how nebulous a force He may
have been, provided a platform for reasserting the claims of Catholicism against
the besieging forces of deistic or atheistic philosophies.
Advocates of the abolition of serfdom were few indeed, but sufficiently com-
mitted to take the intellectual initiative: physiocracy insisted that all men be free.
Morality could be married to material interest: physiocracy promised not only
freedom, but prosperity, while justifying and indeed, expecting, inequalities of
wealth. Physiocracy would work effectively only if whole societies were educated
to accept it: the establishment of the Commission for National Education was a
golden opportunity to initiate that process. Physiocracy promised what a trun-
cated and economically blighted Poland had to settle for: the hope of material
prosperity, but a material prosperity which would inevitably follow from the
construction of society according to the laws of nature. In a self-consciously
enlightened age, it extolled universal peace as its aim and the mutual obligations
of nations. The errors of the past could be condemned as arising out of ignor-
ance and a new, promising and secure future could be made to beckon. In the
Rzeczpospolita of the 1770s and 1780s, it was the only straw to clutch. By enunci-
ating principles, rather than setting forth specific criteria for action, as previous
reformers had done, it was possible to side-step the uncomfortable question of
what actually had to be done.
Almost all actively involved in the new educational prospects were, if not
convinced disciples, strong admirers of physiocracy.11 In a speech to the Senate
on 8 February 1773, Bishop Massalski ascribed Poland’s ills to the defects of its
education. Particularly under a republican form of government, admonished
Andrzej Zamoyski in his ill-fated Law Code, ‘the fate of a country depends on the
education and the youthful hearts reformed by it.’12 The theme was enthusiastic-
ally taken up by reformers. It was the duty of the new Commission to eradicate
the faults in which the Poles had ensnared themselves. The Piarist Wincenty
Skrzetuski argued that
where men wish to be free not under the laws, but in defiance of the laws; where economy
is taken for avarice; where ambition has taken over citizens’ hearts; where the spirit of
true equality is misconstrued and each wishes to be the equal of him, to whose rule he
has willingly chosen to submit himself; where private and public education alike are
neglected; where, instead of as in previous times, individual fortunes made up the public
treasury, that treasury becomes the property of individual personages; where the power
of the Commonwealth becomes the force majeure of some and the licentiousness of all;
MARKING TIME 153
finally, where pride, greed, the soft life and other failings purge citizens’ hearts of those
virtues which are the should and fortress of a free government – such free nations have
to perish.13
He was echoed by a small phalanx of fellow-Piarists, to whom it came all the

more easily, as Stanisław Konarski had already blazed the trail.14
The individual components of this education were clear: they involved the
moderns, the natural sciences, greater knowledge of contemporary vernaculars,
a greater awareness of Polish language and literature and less emphasis on Latin.
Skrzetuski hailed the efflorescence of Polish literature during the Renaissance, but
‘even a few years ago, infantilism and stupidity infected our philosophy, our Latin
[was] a kind of barbarism, and foreign and Latin words [infected] Polish . . .’15
The anticipated new curriculum was, in most respects, that of of Konarski’s
Collegium Nobilium and the more progressive Jesuit schools, a far cry from the
ossified latinity that still pervaded most Polish educational establishments.
Even the most extensive knowledge, on its own, no matter how valuable the
services it might pay in overcoming ignorance, prejudice and backwardness,
was insufficient. ‘The noble arts, knowledge’ were among the qualities that
contributed to a society’s manners and conduct, but they could also bring in
their train ‘luxury, degeneracy and effeminacy’. The pinnacle of education, all
serious commentators agreed, had to be ‘moral sciences’, nauka moralna, which
would inculcate citizen virtue: it was the moral sciences which were to be the
culmination of the Commission for National Education’s curriculum. Polish
schools, complained Adolf Kamieński O. S. P., had concentrated too much on the
imparting of knowledge, too little on ‘the formation of people useful to society.’ It
was rare indeed for a nation to fall when virtue and sound morality flourished.16
In Poland, complained Franciszek Bieliński, ‘we know everything except what
is expected of a good citizen.’ Wincenty Skrzetuski felt that states fell primarily
through defective government, rather than defective morality, but he was in no
doubt that the cultivation of morality was one of the prime tasks of education
and of the link between good government and sound morals.17
For the Piarist educators and their allies, the inculcation of a sound morality
– by which, in general, they meant love of country, obedience to the laws and a
readiness to place the common above the particular good – was an opportun-
ity to reassert the claims of religion, and Catholicism in particular, against the
forces of scepticism and unbelief. ‘Religion, law, good examples and books’ were
for Kamieński the soundest means of encouraging good morals, but the surest
of these, ‘the base and foundation’ of morality was ‘the holy Catholic religion’.
Without it, ‘philosophy’ was ‘vain and weak’, capable at best of the superficial.
With its strictures of eternal punishment and reward, the teaching of religion
was a far more effective anchor of morality than the teachings of contemporary
‘would-be philosophers’, whose attacks on religion he condemned as attacks on

society as a whole.18
For these reformers, religion, with its promises of eternal punishments
and rewards, was an almost mechanical aid to the cultivation of civic virtue.19
Kamieński would have banned the importation and publication of works
mocking religion.20 Franciszek Bieliński, advocating the supposedly primit-
ive, simple theology of the early Christian church, would have eschewed any
distracting scholastic metaphysical speculation, but he also urged against too
deep a probing into incomprehensible mysteries which would only lead men
into error. Revelation was not to be questioned, but was to serve as a support
for public virtue, a curb on human passion and an antidote to the deficiencies
of human reason.21
With the creation of the Commission for National Education, there was gen-
eral agreement that this new instruction had to be provided by the state. For
Wincenty Skrzetuski, education was ‘the chief and most important object of
the government’s attention’: without it, the legislative reformation of the nation
would be an empty endeavour. Moreover, it had to be prescribed according to
uniform rules, albeit geared to the different needs of the different estates, with
especial care paid to the ruling nobility. A government which drew up such a
programme would provide ‘an inexhaustible fount of general happiness, its
lands will blossom with great men of every kind; and each estate of citizens will
discharge in the fullest manner its due obligations.’22
One of the most striking characteristics of this largely Piarist literature is
concern for the populace as a whole. Physiocracy insisted that all men were free:
nature and hence ultimately Providence required it – for so man’s Creator had
made him. Piarist tracts, which were intended equally to serve as textbooks in
the higher classes of the new public schools as well as exercises in the persuasion
of wider opinion, sought a drastic revision in the way in which the nobility
approached their own society. Virtuous and valorous forbears, that universal
constant of Polish political writing, were almost totally absent, save as passing
rhetorical topoi. Society was not meant to be an ancestral edifice, but the product
of the proper action of the laws of nature. At bottom, said Franciszek Bieliński,
‘absolute’ natural law entitled man to all that was necessary to his existence and
well being – provided that he did not infringe the similar entitlements of his
fellow men. ‘He is master of his own freedom, but this freedom of one man may
not suppress that of others, for it would become a dissolute anarchy. For in the
state of nature, all men are equal, none is superior or subject.’ In that state of
nature, all was equally at man’s disposition, provided no harm was done to others.
Society came about because men united freely ‘to secure their common good as
well as their differing needs’ – those were the bonds that held society together.23
For Hieronim Stroynowski, the social condition was ‘the natural state of
MARKING TIME 155
man’ precisely because it enabled him to look to his needs and well being. Man’s
natural freedom was the freedom to use his property of his own person and its
resources, for the safeguard of which he had entered society in the first place.
No one had the right to hinder him in the use of that property. A man subjected
to another no longer enjoyed the property of his own person, for there could be
no property without freedom. Men were under mutually equal obligations by
virtue of membership of society – without those obligations, society could not
exist. Men therefore had to help each other, not least in the protection of their
individual rights to freedom and property. Outside society, it is true, man might
have no obligations to others, but neither did he have any entitlements to their
assistance or protection. But men, at least in the state of nature, were always
inclined to assist each other, driven by mutual compassion for their difficulties.
In post-partition Poland, physiocracy had met Rousseau.24
It was not martial ardour that made societies, but work, industry, labour – and
these required the co-operation of all. To Michael Karpowicz, a single hard-
working serf was of more use to his country than all the ‘heroes’ who identified
freedom with anarchy and licentiousness.25 ‘There is nothing worse for states
than inactive citizens, a burden to the nation, contributing nothing to its happi-
ness’, warned Wincenty Skrzetuski. Poland would become enriched through new
agricultural techniques, but these required the willing collaboration of its ‘most
useful’ citizens, the serfs, who in their oppression sought refuge in idleness.26
It was not just the peasantry who had to work harder, it was the nobility who
had to learn the virtues of diligence and application – not through agricultural
labour, but by taking up commercial activity. Skrzetuski passed off ‘Speech XX’
of his Speeches on the Principal Matters of Politics, ‘Against the prejudice of the
estate of the nobility against trade’, as a précis of the abbé Coyer’s La noblesse
commerçante, in itself a challenge to long-accepted values in its championing of
a noble involvement in business. However, what he produced was in reality an
original essay geared to Polish conditions, in which, after the fashion of Coyer,
he lauded trade, condemned the ‘chimera’ of ‘gothick’ prejudice against it and
decried wallowing in empty titles and ancestral glories. ‘The foundation of power
are riches; the source of riches is trade.’ The English and Venetian nobilities,
Skrzetuski maintained, were proud to trade – yet they were no less noble for that.
As for the szlachta, ‘Your forbears did not conduct trade; and, as a result, you are
impoverished and useless to your country.’27 All the citizens of the nation formed
one family – it was their duty to work collectively for the common good. The
Piarists consciously held up the peasantry as a new model of citizenry, hardwork-
ing and frugal – or, at least potentially so. Antoni Popławski was explicit: the
peasantry were Poland’s ‘most industrious’, ‘most useful’ citizens. If one citizen
did not work or idled, he said, adopting a supposed Chinese maxim, then another
would die.28 It was all very well to praise industriousness and industry, but they
could not be fostered unless security of person and property were provided
within a context of justice accessible to all.
In its denial of liberty to the serfs, the szlachta’s Commonwealth, far from
being blessed by Providence, was opposed to the divine construct of natural law.
Any legislative system was at best, ineffective, at worst, harmful ‘if it does not
accord with the natural order, from which men may not deviate with impunity.’
To enlarge the freedom of some at the expense of that of others was to throw open
the gate to ‘violence and oppression . . . base slavery and misery.’ Any original
compact which incorporated a denial of freedom and property could only flow
from ‘force and violence or insanity’ – and any such ‘compact’ could be regarded
as being neither free nor, indeed, a compact.29 Michael Karpowicz in his sermons
was more brutally clear than most in what the consequences had been: ‘the viol-
ent dismemberment of our ancestral lands and possessions . . . near-despair of
betterment for our country, weighed down by anarchy . . . devastated provinces,
citizens crushed almost to the uttermost . . . confusion, quarrels, disharmony,
rivalries, families torn apart, a nation divided . . . laws, decrees and government
fallen out of place and anarchy rampant among all estates.’30 What remained of
Poland could neither hope, nor even deserve, to survive if it continued to flout
natural law.
The physiocratic writers launched a new concept of the Rzeczpospolita’s inhab-
itants. All were citizens, obywatele. For Michael Wielhorski, it was inconceivable
that serfs or peasants could be so regarded. For him, and, indeed for almost all
who wrote before him, ‘the szlachta alone are honoured with the name of cit-
izens’.31 This was a view quite unacceptable to the physiocrats. In 1772, Ignacy
Potocki, scion of one of Poland’s greatest families (even if he belonged to the
branch of ‘poor Potockis’) had written in general terms of the applicability of
natural law and its assurance to each of liberty and property. That all the inhabit-
ants of a country ought to be citizens was something he implied – he was careful
to avoid any explicit reference to the serfs.32 Less prominent writers were less
coy. Franciszek Bieliński divided Poland’s inhabitants into four groups – clergy,
nobles, townsmen and peasant-farmers: ‘All these are citizens, all should be
good citizens, these four wheels of the machine that is our country should be so
perfectly arranged, that, fixed on a common aim, each serves the others with help,
not as an impediment.’33 All who lived in society were citizens: or were they?,
asked Father Karpowicz, who had been specifically charged by Bishop Massalski
to preach against the evils of serfdom. ‘Of what use is a slave to a country which
needs citizens, of what use to his country is a man who has no certainty of owning
his property, whose life and happiness depend on the caprice of his seigneur . . .?
But this is a man whose labour lends itself to the well-being of his country, whose
agriculture is the sole foundation of his country, whose hands maintain thrones
and estates.’ These ‘rural citizens’ were either members of society or not – if not,
MARKING TIME 157
they were under no obligation to endure their oppression. They might as well
be the citizens of another country or even Poland’s enemies, or scarcely men
at all.34 For Konstanty Bogusławski, not only did birth confer citizenship, but
the lives of all and the interest of their country were so closely connected as to
form one estate, even one family.35 A healthy society, one based on natural law
(and hence, approved by Providence) was one that was fully internally united:
‘The true expression of the union of society is the junction of wills to attain the
common good, the union of strengths . . .’36 The quest for harmony among all
the nobility so avidly pursued in the literature of the early eighteenth century had
turned into something else: a quest for a new society which embraced all estates
in a wider, social, rather than purely political, concord.
What the Piarist reformers and their allies sought was simple: serf emancipa-
tion. If nothing else, their belief in the thaumaturgical powers of physiocratic
principles demanded this. Make men free to follow their own economic inclina-
tions and all would be well: through such freedom would come general prosperity.
Since ultimately all economic activity derived from agriculture, prosperity could
follow only if agriculture flourished – and without personal freedom and security
of personal property for the peasantry, that could not come about. Assured of
those, the agricultural population would increase in number and well-being. ‘A
population of poor farmers, deriving no net income from the land, brings no
benefit to the nation.’37 If French physiocrats were above all concerned with the
enrichment of landowners, their Polish disciples saw in their doctrines a means
of benefiting the peasantry as a whole.
Even the most optimistic advocates of emancipation recognised that it
alone was not enough. They universally insisted that emancipation had to be
accompanied by (though they rarely said clearly whether it should precede)
a systematic programme of education of the peasantry. The Commission for
National Education’s remit extended to primary education – but it had no powers
as such to set up elementary schools. Bishop Massalski tried to set up a network
of parish schools in his own diocese of Wilno, and had some success, at least on
paper. By giving peasant children a grounding in the three Rs as well as in religion
and social obligation (i.e., obedience to seigneurial authority), he hoped to make
a start in eradicating the contempt in which the nobility held the peasantry and
perhaps, in time, even transforming it into respect.38 Efforts to persuade mon-
astic orders to set up such schools met with little enthusiasm. Ultimately, such
an endeavour could only succeed if noble landowners were prepared to set up
such schools voluntarily. Those who did were very much the exceptions, and even
Ignacy Potocki, though a member of the Commission, instructed his stewards
that the schools on his own properties (in the end, only one such seems to have
been established) should be established with minimal cost to his own revenues.39
In general, the szlachta were overwhelmingly hostile to such initiatives, which
might, at best, diminish their incomes, and at worst, threatened to create an even
more truculent and unreliable agricultural populace. In such circumstances,
advocates of education for the lower orders sought to persuade their readership
that education and emancipation would benefit not only peasants, not only the
state as a whole, but above all, individual landowners. The whole purpose of
their education should be to fit them for their role as peasants, ‘to improve to
a degree their conduct, to enlighten them as to their obligations towards God,
their country, their masters, towards themselves and to others.’ They were to be
instructed in virtues, in agricultural and craft skills, in a government programme,
which would educate ‘every estate of citizens into the most complete discharge of
its obligations.’40 Franciszek Bieliński even knew where to look for an appropriate
model of peasant education – Ignaz Felbiger’s Sagan schools, aimed at moulding
God-fearing, obedient, literate and industrious Catholic subjects for the king of
Prussia.41 A good education, administered through the parish clergy, claimed
Michael Karpowicz, would purge the peasantry of their superstitions; they should
be instructed in reading, writing, simple accounting and in agricultural and basic
medical skills; reading religious texts such as a basic catechism would keep them
from idleness, drink and all the other vices to which they were all too prone.42
The thrust of arguments in favour of education and emancipation was simple:
they would make peasants more disciplined and more efficient, more industrious,
more ready to accept their place in the social hierarchy. Hence, their seigneurs
would be made more secure and their revenues more profitable. In purely social
terms, society would remain as it was, but be more productive, more lucrative
and more secure for its landowning class, purged of the injustices of serfdom or,
as many writers regarded it, slavery. It would be a society in which ‘the well-being
of any one estate of citizens should not come about at the expense of another
estate.’43 Learning and education, said Adolf Kamieński, should be extended
across all conditions of men in order to create useful citizens, but it certainly did
not follow that the same education should be provided for all, ‘but according to
the estate and capacities of those who learn.’ Kamieński was prepared to allow
individuals endowed with the right talents to rise above their condition of birth,
but he clearly regarded such cases as exceptional. Ultimately, a state owed its
wealth to the labour of the peasantry and, so, most would remain peasants. ‘I do
not want to bring equality to the condition of citizens, I merely seek respect for
citizens of every estate.’ He was aware that the simple grant of freedom would
make the commonalty ‘insolent’ and even ‘rebellious’ but, with an appropriate
education, they would become ‘infallibly better behaved.’44
Michael Karpowicz saw further benefits. If the peasants could be improved,
that could only encourage those at the bottom of the szlachta heap to improve
themselves and that, in turn, would have a beneficial impact on all of Poland’s
politics and institutions. With twenty years of effort, the country’s prospects
MARKING TIME 159
could be transformed. The peasantry were thus made into an instrument of

transformation of the state, just as they were acknowledged to be its most valu-
able asset. Socially, however, their position would remain unchanged.45
The educational regime which the Commission would have liked to impose
on the peasantry was spelled out in its widest form by an ex-Jesuit, Grzegorz
Piramowicz, in his Powinności Nauczyciela, Duties of a Teacher, in 1787.
Piramowicz was one of the leading lights of the Commission for National
Education and secretary to its publishing arm, the Society for Elementary Books
(Towarzytswo do Ksiąg Elementarnych), set up in 1775 to commission textbooks
and primers. He was, in effect, the official spokesman for the Commission.
He was also an intimate of both the king and of Ignacy Potocki, despite their
mutual personal animosity.46 The instruction he proposed for the children of
the peasantry and inhabitants of small townships (which were, to all intents
and purposes, villages) was largely predictable: basic literacy and writing skills;
basic arithmetic; religion and moral conduct, aiming to produce an obedient,
God-fearing, well-mannered and diligent labour force. Piramowicz threw in
elementary surveying, medical, commercial and craft skills – all to be taught
with sympathy, moderation (any corporal punishment was very much seen as a
last resort), with much practical experience and outdoor activity to ensure a full
and proper understanding by the children of what was being taught – Rousseau
was constantly looking over Piramowicz’s shoulder. But the Duties were not
just meant as a handbook for parish schoolteachers. Significantly, the subtitle
proclaimed the book to be ‘useful to parish priests, seigneurs and their managers
[who are] concerned for the good of the people’. There was no mention of nat-
ural freedoms or emancipation: rather, Piramowicz took it as understood that
the szlachta’s farms were models of beneficent paternalism, a sure sign of which
would be the provision of village schools.47
The year after the Duties of a Teacher appeared, a Piarist from Lublin, Remigiusz
Ładowski, in his Duties of Persons of Noble Birth, was to paint a brutally unflatter-
ing picture. ‘The mind of a peasant is in some sort diseased . . . The peasant is of
the nature of cattle, who seeks only to thieve, give him an inch and he will take a
mile . . . They know no restraint in the observance of the boundaries of decency,
show him any intimate kindness and he will repay you with insolence.’48 The
subtext of reformers’ remarks on the peasantry, for all their theoretical exalta-
tion of their supposed virtues, shows his views on peasants to have been widely
shared, even if not spelled out so uncompromisingly. Michael Karpowicz’s happy,
prosperous peasantry was one that might come to be in the future: at present, all
too many wallowed in superstition, shiftlessness, brutishness, simmering rebel-
liousness and drink. It might not have been the peasants’ fault, it stemmed from
their oppression and ignorance, but it was real enough.49
Piramowicz’s Duties sought to persuade the nobility that through education,
this picture would be radically transformed. There is no way of telling whether

he was familiar with Stefan Garczyński’s Anatomia Rzeczypospolitey of 1753, but
the Duties reads like the answer to many of the strictures on rural life found there.
Physical education and the improvement of personal and agricultural hygiene
would build up a healthy peasant population well equipped to cope with the
physical demands of farm labour.50 Children were to be instructed in reading
and writing not as an end in itself, ‘but to serve them as a means of acquiring
and using knowledge appropriate to their estate.’ It would indeed be positively
‘harmful’ if such knowledge led them to quit their agricultural existence ‘and
let themselves be led on by the reading of books not useful to [them].’ It was
the teacher’s duty ‘to suppress in them in good time any excessive curiosity of
unnecessary things, any excessive desire to read, which would interfere with their
labours, services and other obligations.’ The school year was to be restricted to the
six-month period between All Saints and St Adalbert’s (1 November to 23 April)
to enable children to assist their parents. As a general rule, teachers had to bear
in mind that ‘the children in villages and small towns are not so dedicated to
learning as to be free from helping and assisting in the home.’ It would be the
worse for them if their schooling were to receive preference over their domestic
obligations.51 A thorough grounding in morality and religion would lead to
the better discharge of their duties, and greater respect and obedience to their
seigneurs, their God-given protectors.52
The village teachers that Piramowicz wanted to see were to be very much
active agents in the enlightenment of the rural population. They were not just
to train the obedient, respectful, willing and diligent workforce of the next
generation; they were to improve the manners, hygiene and knowledge of their
parents, they were to act as peacemakers in village disputes; the products of their
schools would, in time, raise the well-being and mental life of the countryside
from its primitive torpor.53 Piramowicz, for all his obeisance towards seigneurial
authority, was engaged in something more subtle than the honing of a docile
and industrious commonalty. He envisaged that the products of his schools
could rise in the manorial administration (although this was in part because he
also expected the children of poorer nobles to attend these schools). He even
considered that more adept pupils could make progress in mechanics ‘that is, in
the science of giving force and motion to various equipment’, on whose further
education teachers should consult with seigneurs and their managers – ‘but such
cases will be rare.’54 Yet, for all their seeming reassurances, the Duties were a sub-
versive work. The improvements envisaged were supposed to benefit the national
economy and landlord incomes – but they consciously sought to impart a sense
of self-worth and dignity to the peasantry, raising them out of their degradation
and the contempt in which they were held.55 Such a peasantry would be very
different from the one that existed – it would be one that was ready for freedom,
MARKING TIME 161
as Rousseau had hoped and men like Tomasz Dłuski wanted to hold at bay for
as long as possible.
Once the reforms were in place, it was the duty of government – ‘Supreme
Authority’, ‘Najwyższa Zwierzchność’56 – to do as little as possible, beyond facil-
itating the smooth operations of the freely functioning mechanisms of exchange
and monetary circulation through improvements in communications, roads and
canals and in maintaining the educational system. In the Polish context, however,
government would have to be endowed with unprecedented powers, even if it
were to achieve the physiocratic minimum. None of the reformers had any pro-
posals on how such a government might come about, beyond placing their hopes
in the spread of general enlightenment under the auspices of the Commission of
National Education and the example of enlightened landowners.57
These writings did, however, seek to carve out a new relationship between
nobles and monarch. Wincenty Skrzetuski went furthest in rejecting elective rule
altogether. He held that the ‘awful horrors of interregna’ should be enough to per-
suade doubters. He put it to his readers that hereditary monarchy and freedom
were not incompatible. Calling on ‘the unrivalled Montesquieu’, he argued that
the monarch, unlike the tyrant, was constrained by fundamental laws. An enlight-
ened monarch wanted enlightened subjects, appreciative of freedom, which could
be preserved only under the orderly rule of law. Poland’s own history, under the
hereditary Jagiellonians, the hereditary monarchies of England and Sweden and
even the hereditary Stadholderate in the Dutch Republic all demonstrated that
freedom and hereditary royal succession were anything but mutually exclusive.58
Other physiocratic-minded writers were not prepared to endorse Skrzetuski’s
arguments in favour of royal heredity, but they were prepared to argue for
a softening of the traditional monarch-subject antagonism. For Franciszek
Bieliński, the szlachta’s republicanism was simply an ineradicable prejudice, of
the sort to which every nation was prone – it could so easily have been attach-
ment to monarchy or even despotism. The best form of government was not a
particular type, but that which assured the majority of the people of happiness
and left them free to its pursuit.59 Ignacy Potocki pointed out that monarchs
could be restrained to the point of powerlessness by law and, enthusiast that he
was for education, he claimed that, as knowledge of natural laws spread among
the populace, arbitrary royal rule would become impossible.60 Royal rule was
perfectly compatible with liberty, said Antoni Popławski, provided the bonds
between king and Commonwealth were close and unbreakable. If so, the king
would be ‘the supreme custodian and protector of the common good.’ More, if
the Commonwealth were to function effectively, the king had to be there in order
to give it strength and unity. It was a ‘machina’ of different and complex parts,
parties, interests and offices. ‘Under aristocratic or democratic rule, all counsels,
resolutions and their implementation must proceed very slowly and haphazardly,
unless there be a single person to accelerate the workings of the state and its
intentions, who would reconcile differences, smooth out and resolve difficulties,
and look out for circumstances.’61 This was a far cry from the Sarmatian portrayal
of the king as potential enemy to liberty – on the contrary, this was the king as
protector and facilitator of liberty and the state. Under a well-ordered political
system, the king was ‘the supreme custodian and executor’ of the laws, but in
turn, he was supervised by the nation, through a parliament, which should be in
continuous session. In reality, kings proved oppressive through the imposition
of taxation. That power should be removed from him and vested in the nation’s
representatives. Separate the judiciary, make ministers responsible to parliament,
deprive the king of his powers of patronage and the monarch could be made
safely answerable to no one.62
Monarchic irresponsibility was of course a canon of English constitutional-
ism. It is no accident that the Piarists should have built on Konarski’s praise of
England to promote it as a model for Poland. Hitherto, if Poles had expressed
admiration for anywhere, it had been Venice; but increasingly, England was
the new cynosure. Not only did it combine a population of the free with inter-
national success and standing, it fused hereditary constitutional monarchy with
liberty. The freeing of the lower orders, had been the refrain, would allow the
monarch to use them as allies to impose despotism. On the contrary, proclaimed
Karpowicz, ‘those countries are the most pathetic and most unfortunate in which
the leftovers of gothic laws preserve the slavery of their serfs – that is, Hungary,
Bohemia and Poland.’ The freeing and betterment of all inhabitants should
be the culmination of noble liberties, the overthrow of serfdom bringing ‘not
absolutism or tyranny, but true national happiness . . . Where do subjects have
more freedoms than in England or Holland? There is no supposed absolutism
there, but the hearts of their citizens are most strongly directed by a republican
spirit.’ Give the peasants their freedom, improve agriculture, and Poland would
come to equal those states in their prosperity.63 Konstanty Bogusławski invoked
Algernon Sidney to argue that the more free a country, the greater its happiness
and enlightenment – hence the English excelled all others in freedoms and intel-
lectual achievements.64 Antoni Popławski used the example of England (‘glorying
in its prerogative of national liberty and the excellence of its government’) to try
to reassure his readers that their freedom would be safe even if royal powers of
patronage were left intact.65 England was what Poland could yet be.
Calls for peasant emancipation met with little positive response. Michael
Karpowicz ruefully admitted that his searing homilies brought him much hostil-
ity.66 The fate of the Zamoyski Law Code in 1780 showed how ill-founded hopes
of peasant reform were. None of these physiocratic writers specified how such
far-ranging changes were to be implemented in the face of such hostility: the
hope was that persuasion and education would in time do their work. Karpowicz
MARKING TIME 163
talked of the miraculous results that ‘enlightened seigneurs’ who undertook

such reforms on their own estates, notably the imposition of cash rentals, had
experienced. Yet there was little real tangible evidence of this. The results for those
landowners who experimented in this direction were, at best, mixed.
The widest exposition of physiocratic doctrine came in Hieronim Stroynowski’s
Science of Natural Law. In his eyes, government, that is, ‘Supreme Authority’, was
initially instituted by men in a state of nature by a compact for the common
protection and advancement of all.67 In its eighteenth-century manifestation, this
Supreme Authority ought to consist of elected landowners, presumably under
a monarch. Stroynowski’s preference for looking at government in the abstract
kept him from commenting on something as concrete as a king. Even if such
landowners could agree to a physiocratic programme in theory, it is difficult
to see how they could possibly ever implement an economic reform in which
only they and their tenant-farmers paid taxation (in the form of a ten per cent
single tax, ‘impôt unique’) out of their net landed revenues. Quesnay’s Tableau
Economique may have convinced Stroynowski and his associates; Stroynowski
permitted himself a detailed exposition of Quesnay’s theories in his work, which
was written not only as a textbook for the schools, but for ‘the public utility’.68
Works directed primarily at the senior classes of the secondary colleges could
expect little empathy from the nobility. Traditionalist landlords like Tomasz
Dłuski were far more in tune with szlachta opinion than the disciples of physi-
ocracy. It was not just the rejection of the Zamoyski Law Code that demonstrated
the depth of feeling against any relaxation of serfdom. In their instructions, the
sejmiki showed themselves to be consistent defenders of the institution. Between
1776 and 1788, not a single sejmik was prepared to accept, let alone endorse,
peasant reform: on the contrary, they demanded more effective measures against
serf flight, easier recovery of runaways, using what passed for the army to guard
the borders against serf escapes abroad or hunting down runaways.69
In March 1787, Stanisław Staszic, a clergyman and tutor to the Zamoyski
family, published his Observations on the Life of Jan Zamoyski. Far less coherent
than anything published by the physiocratic educationalists, but eschewing their
theorising, the Observations were more readily accessible to the szlachta reader-
ship. The prime intellectual influence on them was an otherwise unmentioned
Rousseau, both the author of the Considérations sur le gouvernement de la Pologne
and of the Du contrat social, grafted on to a summation, often deliberately
provocative, of much of the reformist writing of the 1770s and 1780s. The
central messages of the Observations, scattered in disjointed fragments through-
out the work, pressed the need to extend freedom; to expand the educational
programme; to strengthen the monarchy and reform the Sejm; to develop the
economy so as to allow Poland to maintain a significant standing army, backed
by a citizen levée-en-masse. It was all very well for the nobility to continue to look
to the preservation of its freedom – but it was the survival of Poland that was at
stake.70 ‘It is better to extend the freedom of other, fellow-inhabitants in order
to enlarge the strength of the whole country than fear day and night that awful
day when a stronger power announces to all that they are its slaves.’ ‘One man,
in relation to another should be neither an autocrat nor a slave. Every citizen,
living in whatever human society, has the right to demand of every other citizen
liberty.’71 At the very least, the peasantry should be given at least the same sorts
of security and protection that they enjoyed in Prussia and the Habsburg lands.
Ideally, more should be done for them. Peasants should be given the right to opt
for fair cash rental instead of labour services and their children be allowed to leave
the villages for other occupations As for townsmen, they should have all restric-
tions on their rights to trade removed. In practice, this amounted to a programme
of general political and economic emancipation.72 An end to szlachta tyrannising
over their peasantry and to the unjust weight of taxes on them would attract
new immigrants: Staszic even suggested that temporarily reducing the present
army from 16,000 to 5,000–6,000 men would reduce the tax burden while the
economy recovered – and would make no difference to Poland’s defences, since
the current 16,000 strong force would be incapable of defending the country
anyway. He calculated that if only Poland in its existing condition adopted an
equitable system of taxation, in which the szlachta, as well as the peasants, paid
their fair share, it ought to be in a position to maintain an army of 62,000.73 In
the longer term, Staszic accepted that Poland did need a stronger army – some
300,000 men he reckoned, but that would only be supportable if the economy
strengthened. That, in turn, required ‘[security of] property and equal personal
freedom for all’. Emancipated serf families would be obliged to send one son into
military service. Exceptionally among Polish authors, Staszic was even willing to
look to boost the economy by encouraging Jewish immigration – provided the
new arrivals occupied themselves with agriculture or industry. Religious tolera-
tion in general was a sine qua non.74
Such measures presupposed an enlightened szlachta. Staszic praised the
Commission of National Education, in particular for its imposition on the
universities of a secular curriculum, no longer dominated by theology and
Aristotelianism.75 Education as a whole had to be geared to the production of
a society of dutiful, industrious and obedient citizens: ‘A man ceases to be free
when he ceases to be obedient’ – the very opposite of the Sarmatian ideal of
the irresponsible, autonomous, autarchic noble. An education appropriate to
republics had to make men useful and happy – at the very least, they should
learn not to do to others what they would not have done to themselves. Staszic’s
ideas on education were rather sketchy, but much of what he wanted taught the
Commission was already trying to do – with an emphasis on history, geography,
rhetoric, the natural sciences. Aristotelian logic, metaphysics and speculative
MARKING TIME 165
theology were to be banned – not that they were taught anyway, while ‘Religion’
(not otherwise defined) was to be the foundation of morality. Craft and medical
schools were to be set up.76
The aim of Staszic’s educational hopes went beyond creating an enlightened
nobility that would welcome the wider social reforms he wanted. He placed
much emphasis on military education, drill and physical education and would
have liked the Commission’s colleges to be patterned on the royal Cadet Corps.
Patriotism would also be nurtured by a ban on education abroad – unnecessary
not only for its potentially corrosive influence, but because the new schooling
was far superior to what could be obtained elsewhere, not least in France. He also
wanted the Commission to license all domestic tutors, with the strong implica-
tion that French tutors especially (‘The French are mainly responsible for the
lack of love the Poles have for their own country’) should be excluded in favour
of native Polish ones. Behind his tirades, he wished to secure a class of patriotic
citizen-defenders of the Commonwealth. ‘A free citizen . . . should also be able to
vanquish, defeat and destroy the enemies of his country.’ ‘The art of war should
be the sole purpose of the physical exercises in the education of a republican.’ In
no other way could such a state defend itself against neighbouring powers which
maintained ‘several hundred thousand thugs to oppress the liberty of some and
destroy that of others’.77
The most controversial, but also some of the most confusing, of Staszic’s
Observations related to constitutional reform. He distinguished three types of
state: republics (or commonwealths), oligarchies and despotisms. Only the first
conformed to the laws of nature and only republics could assure their citizens
equally of freedom and security. Tragically, the prevailing principle of European
policy was to ‘oppress and destroy neighbouring states, by force or guile. It is
the study of our kings to harm humankind, not to render it happy’. The state,
which had the greatest capacity to inflict damage on others, was the strongest
and most secure. This led Staszic to a conclusion unprecedented in his country’s
political thinking: ‘it is a sad fact that to-day the best form of government is
enlightened despotism’ (‘oświecony despotyzm’ – Staszic was one of the first to
use the term). No Commonwealth beset by despotisms could survive. Unless the
Poles appreciated the truth of what he was saying, their state and all its liberties
were doomed. As it stood, Poland was not even a true republic, but an oligarchy
in which a minority (by which he meant the magnates) unnaturally oppressed
the great majority.78
The call for the establishment of ‘oświecony despotyzm’ was hardly serious:
it was not an idea that Staszic developed in any meaningful way. What he clearly
did want was a more effective constitutional monarchy. A start should come
with the abolition of the elective principle. If the Poles insisted on keeping royal
elections, they should at least alter their modus operandi: foreigners should be
barred, the Sejm should, by a process of majority voting, elect a pool of one
palatine in every three, from which the final choice would be made by lot. But
Staszic’s clear preference was the establishment of a hereditary monarchy, to be
drawn (despite his exclusion of foreigners from an elective system) from ‘one of
the leading houses of Europe’ – only thus could Poland be assured of long-term
survival.79
‘Where a king does not form a separate estate of the legislature, where he
cannot impose taxes or command the army, where he has no power to harm
and can very rarely corrupt men with rewards, and is but the custodian of the
implementation of the laws, a hereditary throne is no danger to liberty.’80 This
was enlightened, and was no despotism. Above all, Staszic wanted a genuinely
ruling Sejm, which would combine the roles of legislature and executive. The
separation of these powers, he maintained, in a departure both from Polish ideas
and those so fashionably expounded a generation earlier by Montesquieu, could
only lead to conflict between them. The executive would subdue the legislature
– as had happened in most of Europe. Staszic regarded all monarchies as despot-
isms – it was only in their degree of enlightenment, that is, in their recognition
of the importance of reason, that the kings of Europe differed from the sultans
of Turkey. Conversely, the legislature would be so mistrustful of the executive
that it would reduce it to impotence – which was what had already happened
in Poland.81
Staszic’ Sejm would continue to come together every two years, but would
reconvene at need. No longer would the Commonwealth exist as a political
entity for a six-week period every two years, but it would be a constantly active
force.82 When its main business was complete, the envoys and senators would
elect an (unspecified) number from amongst themselves, half of whom would
then be named by lot to act as a standing executive committee, chaired by the
king. The committee would oversee implementation of the laws enacted.83
Staszic wanted to extend this combination of election and lot, his preferred
mode of appointment, to the choice of all official positions. By the same token,
the royal distributive powers would be largely eradicated. In his Warnings to
Poland, published in 1790, Staszic was even to demand the election by nobles
and townsmen of bishops.84
These proposals fell within a by now well-established tradition for the
provision of ingenious safeguards for the preservation of rights and liberties.
Where Staszic went much further than anyone else was in his explicit demand
that townsmen be admitted to the legislature (and presumably, by extension, to
the executive, although that was not something he spelled out). If Poland was to
convert itself from an oligarchy into a republic, it had to be done. The primary
principle of the parliament of any republic had to be ‘that the enactment of laws
concerning property belongs to all those whose lives and properties the laws
MARKING TIME 167
regulate’. Staszic did not of course understand by this admission to the Sejm of
peasants, but of townsmen. Only with a share in the legislature, and thus, fully
partaking of liberty, could the economic flourishing of the towns be assured.
‘In this way, oligarchy will perish and a Commonwealth be instituted. At last,
the aim of our Sejmy will be the happiness of all Poles.’ He even wanted to ban
all private bills on the grounds that ‘particular, personal good is the chief and
strongest enemy of . . . legislation.’85
Such a parliament could not function under the existing, cumbrous proce-
dures. Staszic did not specify whether urban representatives would constitute a
separate chamber, though that is presumably what he intended: he spelled out
as much in his 1790 Warnings, in which he also demanded an equal number of
envoys for both townsmen and nobles.86 Of course, the liberum veto had finally
to go. He took for granted the incompatibility of unanimity and the good of the
whole. ‘The loss to the lesser part as a result of a promulgated law, which is to the
benefit of the greater part of society, cannot deter the legislator.’ ‘Unanimity, this
incomprehensible means of determining the general will’ not only wreaked con-
fusion but was contrary to the laws of nature – for amidst imperfect humanity, it
was unattainable. It was unnatural because man had entered society precisely so
as to ‘subordinate all his personal properties to the general will’ for the purpose
of assuring himself of his security and civil liberty. He did not emulate Konarski
(whom he had clearly read, even if he made no explicit reference to him) in his
detailed analysis of the impossibility of unanimity. ‘The happiness of the greater
number of citizens is the public good. The will of the greater half [sic] of the
nation is the general will.’ Man could only be free in a society where each citizen
was the equal of every other, but where each citizen was also only a tiny fraction
of society which was everything and he nothing. The demand for unanimity
destroyed this. But he could not bring himself to demand Konarski’s simple
majorities – he casually, without further elaboration, demanded the introduction
of two-thirds majorities.87 The lure of communis consensus remained strong.
The Observations on the Life of Jan Zamoyski were a cri de coeur born of the
stagnation of an atrophied political scene, rather than a systematic blueprint for
reform.88 Staszic’s patron, Andrzej Zamoyski, was a spent political force. Staszic’s
demands were a mixture of old noble-style republicanism, plus a recognition of
the need for change in the shape of peasant emancipation, and a new political
role for townsmen, but there was little thought of how all these could be meshed
together. His dilations on enlightened despotism, republicanism, hereditary
and elective monarchy were more of a desperate thrashing about for solutions
than a realistic course of action. He had nothing to say about sejmiki, despite
their vital role in the Commonwealth’s political processes. He demanded that a
confederated Sejm should begin by creating hereditary monarchy, a continuous,
reconvenable parliament and the introduction of majority voting. He counted
on a combination of the Sejm’s example and the new educational programmes

to ‘repair prejudice and bad customs’.89
In one area, Staszic expressed views which very much chimed in with the
wishes not only of other reformers, but which had a wider resonance among the
nobility. He advocated a revival of the old military musters of local noble levies,
the popisy, which, though still prominent in the seventeenth century, had fallen
into desuetude by the eighteenth. It was generally accepted that Poland’s military
preparedness left much to be desired. The current troop levels, painstakingly
brought by the king up to 18,000, were risibly inadequate, and although figures
of between 40,000 and 100,000 were bandied around as a more desirable target,
the question of their affordability was ever present. Even a 100,000 army, it was
appreciated, might not be enough to defend the Commonwealth. To those advoc-
ating reform, a combination of physical and military education in the schools,
plus a revival of the the popisy, would furnish a citizen militia which would help
protect the Commonwealth from its predatory neighbours. Adolf Kamieński,
Antoni Popławski and Franciszek Bieliński wanted the government to lay down
a regime of physical education (which would include military education) for
all estates, including the peasantry. As far as the latter were concerned, a good
physical education would not only help them work more productively, but would
also make them into defenders of the Commonwealth – although that was almost
inconceivable without emancipation.90
The clearest statement on these miraculous musters came in a manuscript, ‘On
the Reform of the Cadet School and the Establishment of a Palatinate Militia’,
written by Hugo Kołłątaj in 1784.91 He had long been associated with the cause
of reform. He had travelled and studied extensively in Austria and Italy. Family
connections had pushed him up the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment, a role he
complemented by skills as an estate manager and businessman. A memorandum
he penned on the condition of the University of Kraków in 1775 brought him
to the notice of the king’s brother, Michael Poniatowski, bishop of Płock and
coadjutor of the bishopric of Kraków. Poniatowski succeeded Bishop Massalski
as president of the Commission for National Education in 1776. With his sup-
port, Kołłątaj achieved national prominence in pushing through a modernising
reform of the university. He was also a close collaborator of Ignacy Potocki in
designing the Commission’s regulatory framework.92 In his 1784 manuscript,
he advocated removing the Cadet Corps from the king’s immediate jurisdiction
to the Commission of National Education (a proposal which cannot have failed
to irritate Stanisław August), and, indeed, to break up the Corps among the new
schools, so that its example would inspire them. NCOs would instruct pupils in
drill, a measure which would serve in its own turn to raise the esprit de corps
and standards of the schools. The resurrected annual popisy would create and
keep in readiness an effective local militia, which, within three or four years, he
MARKING TIME 169
reckoned, could match the standards of a regular army.93 Kołłątaj took heart from
the capacity of republics – Switzerland, the Dutch Republic and, most recently,
the United States – to defend themselves. Poland was, as yet, too impoverished
to support a large standing army, so ‘let us serve our country ourselves, let us
be soldiers ourselves, let us look to the great deeds of our forbears.’ The moral
benefits would go further: Poles would put aside their habitual quarrelsomeness,
slough off their idleness and stand up to the magnates. Kołłątaj was invoking old
noble mythologies in order to create a new nation in arms, in which free men,
unconstrained by force or conscription, would readily defend their laws and pos-
sessions ‘and, having saved [their] country, will readily return home to cultivate
the good earth’. By contrast, ‘the foreign soldier is a base slave, selling himself for
an uncomfortable sustenance for the remainder of his life, burdensome to his
country in his idleness, fit only to invade foreign nations.’94 He shared the hopes
of others in a new generation of educated and enlightened landlords (such as
himself). These would, he trusted, freely instruct their own serfs in arms and
bring them to militia service. Though he did not, in his memorandum, call for
peasant emancipation explicitly, it was implicit in what he was saying – he had
no doubt at all that his peasants were, after all, citizens.95
This rosy Cincinnatic vision had a long-established tradition among repub-
lican writers, not just Poles. It was a way of appealing to noble tradition and
mythology and, even, of using them not only to energise the nobility, but also as
a further means to persuade them of the need for a degree of serf emancipation.
At the very least, serfs who had completed prolonged military service ought to
be freed. It was a measure of how limited the prospects were of such proposals
being accepted that the young Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, son of Adam Kazimierz,
suggested in August 1788, that the families of serf soldiers should be fully
emancipated only after six generations of unblemished military service (though
individual soldiers would be emancipated after twenty years).96
At the time of writing, all this belonged to a realm of unattainable fantasy. But
international events were conspiring to drive the partitioning powers apart and
to loosen Russia’s grip on Poland. In October 1787, an exasperated Turkey once
more declared war on Russia. Austria was shortly to come to Russia’s assistance. A
sidelined Prussia looked to cut its own deals with the Poles. A sense of climacteric
was in the air: even Polish politicians who had no vision beyond self-advancement
sensed that a new international conjuncture was taking shape. The Ottoman War
meant that opportunities for change might present themselves, be they purely in
the pursuit of private ambition or perhaps at some deeper level. The new turns
in the relationships between the partitioning powers held out the possibility of a
breaking out of the stifling Russian protectorate – a move encouraged by Prussia
and its new ruler, Frederick William II, who felt that if he could cast himself as a
new protector, a grateful Poland would hand over fresh territorial morsels in the
north and west. By the time a new Sejm met, in October 1788, Russia’s tutelage
was on the verge of collapse, even if its speed was to take all by surprise. It was,
indeed, only in the early stages of that Sejm that Staszic’s Uwagi aroused wider
interest and debate – the issues he had raised were to become, only in the new
conditions, subjects which could be meaningfully discussed.97
There was nothing to indicate that in 1788 the nobility as a whole were ready
for an extensive programme of reform. Jerzy Michalski’s study of the sejmiki
instructions of that year paints a picture of bubbling tension and general uncer-
tainty, resulting from the awareness of Russian distraction and the machinations
of magnate factions, rather than any expectations of major change. At best, the
electorate wanted an expanded army. The Czartoryski-controlled Lublin sejmik
proposed an increase to 45,000 men, a modest level conditioned at least as much
by a general reluctance to pay taxes as by any appreciation of limited economic
potential to support any enlarged force. Characteristically for the factional align-
ments of the year, the assembly wanted that force to be well removed from royal
control, put more firmly under the command of the anti-royalist hetmani and
the Permanent Council to be wound up. Ultimately, this was a set of proposals
designed more to damage the king than to assist the Commonwealth. There were
inklings of a need for wider parliamentary reform. The Czersk sejmik in Masovia
urged that the Sejm should be extended beyond the normal six-week session to
allow all business to be adequately despatched, a call echoed by Brześć Litewski,
where it was the sole concrete proposal emanating from electors anxious for
‘more effective’ legislative procedures. The Sandomierz sejmik went further and
demanded a ‘continuous Sejm’, as indeed did that of Ciechanów. The latter how-
ever, also demanded that ‘the liberum veto should be perpetually never tampered
with . . .’, though it appears to have been the only assembly to have given the veto
any support.98
As the date set for the new Sejm, 6 October, approached, any wider coherent
vision of reform had yet to be set out. Even Hugo Kołłątaj, who, in the course of
the Sejm, was to set out the most ambitious such programme, confined himself
in the earliest of his Several Letters from an Anonymous Correspondent to Stanisław
Małachowski (widely, and correctly, tipped to be the Sejm’s marshal) to urging a
60,000 strong army, backed by the revived and morally-improving popisy.99 He
stressed the need for higher, if affordable, taxation, anxiously pleading for the
nobility to pay their fair share directly – and not thrust the burden onto the clergy.
He was also determined to avoid using the funds of the Commission for National
Education for the army, another populist cry.100 He even warned that unfair
taxation had led to misery and discontent in France, arousing the population
‘against the government and weakening all its mainsprings’.101 Borrowing from
the Neapolitan reformer, Gaetano Filangieri, he demanded a ‘gentle revolution’
(‘łagodna rewolucja’) in government102 – like so many publicists, he believed
MARKING TIME 171
that Russia’s distraction provided Poland with a unique opportunity to mend its
ways and was anxious it should not be squandered. He made some gestures to
accommodate noble prejudices. His call for popisy, even if dressed up in the new
trappings of a nation in arms, was itself an echo of a traditional noble panacea for
the Commonwealth’s military failings. He looked to significant savings in non-
military expenditure by demanding a reduction in the number of civil officials, a
reduction in the civil list and in ministers foregoing their salaries altogether. ‘Our
forefathers knew no such pensions . . .’103 But such invocations of old nostrums
were put in their place by clear allusions to a more radical programme.
‘What are the common people’, Kołłątaj asked, ‘who by their courage and
obedience must give strength to our army?’ He began to sketch out a wider role
for townsmen, by suggesting that the composition of the Permanent Council’s
Police Department be divided equally between six urban councillors and six
szlachta – modest enough, but the first time that municipal representatives would
have been given any say in a central government department. He harked back to
the physiocratic solution of free trade and free peasantry as the means to generate
the resources for a sustainable standing army. ‘Let the peasant be equally free and
happy in each of our provinces, let trade be eased, let industry be encouraged
throughout Poland and Lithuania . . .’ He wanted peasant participation in the
popisy, whose morally improving force would be felt in a nation which extended
beyond the nobility.104 Whether the new Sejm would make the szlachta nation
more inclined to change its ways than the earlier pleas of reformers remained
to be seen.
9
Ferment
The Parliament that assembled in Warsaw on 6 October 1788 was the most
remarkable in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s history. Sitting in near-
continuous session until June 1792, the ‘Four Years Sejm’s’ principal monument
was the reformed Constitution of 3 May 1791, destined to be an icon of revivi-
fying national expectations. For a few short years, Russia, weighed down by
war with Turkey (and between July 1788 and August 1790, by further conflict
with Sweden), relaxed its grip on Poland. Austria, fighting alongside its Russian
ally, had always disposed of limited influence in the Commonwealth and was,
in any case, ready to be sympathetic to a degree of reform, if only because a
more energetic Rzeczpospolita might provide a useful check on the Habsburgs’
old foe, Prussia. On 7 October 1788, the Sejm confederated itself in defence of
‘our holy Catholic faith, the integrity of the territories of the Commonwealth,
a free republican government [and] the person, dignity and all the rights and
prerogatives’ of the king.1 The liberum veto was suspended. The parliament was
free to act as it chose.
Decision-making was to prove tortuous and tortured, as envoys and senators
found themselves wielding what seemed unrestrained power on the one hand
but constantly coming up against the traditions of ancestral liberty on the other.
Given the hopes of both King Stanisław August and of his opponents to profit
from Russia’s and Austria’s travails with Turkey, an air of expectation had seeped
over the Commonwealth well before the Sejm convened. What made the atmo-
sphere explode into an almost uncontrollable excitement was a communication
from the Prussian minister, on 13 October, offering Prussia’s friendship and even
assuring the Poles that they were free to expand their army as they wished. On
20 November a second Prussian note announced that King Frederick William
II no longer considered the Prussian guarantee of 1775 to be any impediment
to reform. His motives were hardly disinterested. Russia had found in Austria a
more useful ally against the Porte. Sidelined, Prussia wanted to fish in Poland’s
troubled waters in the hope of acquiring Danzig, Thorn and other titbits to secure
a neat, rational arrondissement of its sinuous borders (‘it is not necessary for
states to be round, but to be happy’, one wag was to comment of such schemes).2
St Petersburg’s influence disintegrated amid an orgy of russophobia in a cathartic
reaction to decades of humiliation.
Politically, this was reflected in the Sejm’s destruction of the Permanent

Council between November 1788 and January 1789. That feeble body, sniped at
throughout its existence by opposition politicians who did their level best to paint
it as a trailblazer of absolutism, was discredited by association with Russia, which
had approved its establishment after the First Partition. With the Commonwealth
bereft of a central administration, the Sejm itself had perforce to fill that role.
Operating for the first time in living memory in untrammelled freedom, it
demonstrated a striking capacity to take decisions first and attend to their con-
sequences later. On 20 October 1788, it decreed the expansion of the army from
18,000 to 100,000 men; on 26 March 1789 it resolved a ten per cent tax on rev-
enues to pay for it; from July 1789, it embarked on a programme of secularisation
of episcopal estates; in November 1789, it created a new system of local adminis-
tration in the shape of civil-military commissions of the peace (komisje porządkowe
cywilno-wojskowe). In December 1789, the Sejm endorsed a set of Principles for
the Reform of the Form of Government, guidelines which mapped out directions
for future change. When, in October 1790, it had become depressingly clear how
much remained to be done, the Sejm resolved that fresh sejmiki would go ahead
in November, with the new complement of envoys to sit alongside the old one.3
No one had expected anything like this. The electorate was both fascinated and
horrified. Not a single major enactment, with the exception of the destruction of
the Permanent Council, not even the genuinely popular expansion of the army to
100,000, had received any endorsement from the 1788 sejmiki. This parliament,
passing law on an unprecedented scale, prolonging its own lifespan, seemed to
be hurtling out of control. In an explosion of polemic and theorising, envoys and
senators sought to explain and justify their conduct and propagate their ideas.
There was no question of censorship. Jan Potocki’s ostentatiously named ‘Free
Printing-Press’ (Drukarnia Wolna) served only to provide an additional and very
necessary facility: ‘. . . the freedom of the press, to the glory and honour of our
nation, has assumed such proportions, that the printers can barely satisfy the
urgent zeal of our citizens.’4 The turbulence was compounded by news of events
in France and the growing and unprecedented engagement of Warsaw’s towns-
folk in the discussions. The most authoritative study of this literature puts the
number of formal tracts and treatises produced during the lifetime of the Sejm
at between 600 and 700, ranging from a few to over a hundred pages in length.
That is apart from repeat editions and from the separate and abundant printed
and handwritten copies of speeches, epistles and flysheets of all kinds. The most
popular writings could boast print-runs exceeding 5,000. ‘Almost everyone reach-
ing for the pen had ambitions of reforming the Commonwealth.’ In Warsaw at
least, something like a genuine public sphere was forming.5
The issue which attracted the greatest and often the most splenetic output
was that of whether elective monarchy should be replaced by hereditary.6 Behind
FERMENT 175
this, and threading its way through virtually any discussion on government was a
basic, often unspoken question: what was the liberum veto to be replaced with?
There was remarkably little in the way of direct debate on the subject. There
were those, with field-hetman Seweryn Rzewuski in the van, who insisted on its
preservation. To him, as to his father and grandfather before him, the veto was
‘the guardian of the laws and Polish freedom’.7 But his was an extreme position.
Wojciech Skarszewski, writing in 1790, by then bishop of Lublin, devoted some
space to the matter in a pamphlet primarily concerned with the defence of
ecclesiastical interests. But he did little more than offer a very cursory summary
of Konarski’s arguments on the veto as one of the chief sources of Poland’s
ills – above all, a case of preaching to the convinced.8 A perceptive observer of
the political scene, Jan Ferdynand Nax, ennobled engineer, architect, prospector
and commentator on economic affairs, noted that whereas thirty years earlier,
he would not have advised any advocate of its abolition ‘to show himself in the
Polish world’, the veto could now be discussed without embarrassment – and
would die a natural death.9 The veto had not been used at the Sejm for a whole
generation. Desuetude had its own effect.
Few, however, were prepared to go as far as Stanisław Konarski a generation
earlier, urging outright English-style parliamentary practice. The right of the
individual to block and disrupt may have been discredited, but its corollary,
the principle of collective assent, lived on. Leading reformers and politicians
remained firmly wedded to unanimity, or even immutability, when it came to
fundamental constitutional principles – once, of course, those ‘cardinal laws’ had
been reformed and redefined.10 The December 1789 Principles for the Reform of
the Form of Government, prepared for the Sejm in their original form by Ignacy
Potocki, proclaimed that ‘the will of the Rzeczpospolita’ would be expressed in its
parliaments ‘by unanimity or by varying majorities’, depending on the character
of the legislation.11 Between September 1790 and January 1791, the Sejm began
to enact (without ever completing) a set of supposedly unchangeable Cardinal
Laws. The Catholic faith was declared dominant – though personal security
was granted to non-Catholics and any form of religious persecution was form-
ally forbidden. Poland-Lithuania’s territories were declared inalienable and all
foreign guarantees declared invalid. Neminem Captivabimus – the ban on the
imprisonment of the nobility save after due process – was confirmed. Nothing
was to be construed as law save that which emanated ‘from the clear will of the
Commonwealth at its Sejmy’. Most notably the cardinal laws proclaimed the
partial final demise of the veto: the ‘free voice’, the ‘głos wolny’ was affirmed for
sejmiki and Sejmy – not as the liberum veto, but as the right of free speech – a
posthumous victory for Konarski.12
A reformed government would need to ensure that both its new laws and
liberty, however it might be redefined, would be safe and secure. Montesquieu
and Rousseau had provided seemingly different answers. ‘So that one cannot
abuse power, power must check power by the arrangement of things,’ said the
former. For the latter, the free state had to be governed by the general will that
could not err – which, translated into the Polish context, meant the expression
of that will through the mandatory instructions of the sejmiki.13 In practice,
the two principles often combined. Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois had been
translated into Polish in 1777, dedicated to his great admirer, the king; Rousseau’s
Considérations appeared during the Sejm itself, early in 1789. There was much in
them that chimed in with Polish traditions – they lent their authority, rather than
initiated solutions.14 It was no accident that Rousseau awarded the title custos
legum, ‘guardian of the laws’, to particularly deserving senators. Montesquieu
had urged the creation of a separate ‘depository of the laws’ to keep them in the
people’s mind.15 The idea of ministers and senators as possessing a custodial
power to watch over and guard the laws reached back at least to the sixteenth
century – ministers were regularly referred to as ‘custodes regum et legum’
or ‘guardians of kings and laws.’ The need for a body to perform this task, a
Straż, literally, a guard, watch, custodian, was deeply rooted in Polish tradition.
Proposals for some form of executive ‘custodial council’ were mooted in the very
early stages of the Sejm.16
As soon as a parliament ended, wrote Stanisław Potocki at the turn of 1788–89,
‘the government begins its guard, keeping watch and supervision over them’ –
‘them’ being new executive commissions which he proposed for Police, Fiscality
and the Army.17 Although different authors put forward different conceptions
of a Straż, Potocki’s formulation neatly revealed the szlachta’s chronic mistrust
of the putative arrangements towards which the Sejm was groping its way.
Contemporaries could not and would not rid themselves of the feeling that
effective government, no matter how re-shaped, remained a potential threat to
liberty. So much so, indeed, that in addition to Montesquieu’s three powers of
government – the legislative, executive and judicial – the Poles elevated their
mistrust into a fourth, the custodial: ‘władza dozierająca’, a concept which
seems to have surfaced early in 1789, articulated by a rare (though anonym-
ous and unidentifiable) defender of the discredited Permanent Council, who
argued (before the Council’s final abolition) that it should be entrusted with
such a power.18 Although Adam Wawrzyniec Rzewuski, nephew of field-hetman
Seweryn Rzewuski, urged that it was the role of an otherwise powerless king to
exercise custodial power, in order to check efforts by over-mighty subjects to sub-
vert liberty, most commentators took the view that it was to be exercised by some
form of council.19 Thus, Ignacy Łobarzewski proposed a Straż of five persons to
be attached to the king’s person. It would be composed of senators and envoys
elected by the Sejm, but who held no other office. Although Łobarzewski, an
advocate of hereditary monarchy, pleaded that it was high time that ‘we should
FERMENT 177
cast off the guise of the citizen ever fearful of his king becoming all-powerful . . .
an empty fear which has never permitted any reform of our government’,20 he
was as emphatic as anyone in presenting the monarchy as an axiomatic threat
to freedom.21 His Custodial Council would keep an eye on the running of the
executive bodies and the enforcement of law, but it existed as much to advise
and supervise the king.22
Hugo Kołłątaj, in the Anonymous Letters which he continued to publish
throughout the early stages of the Sejm, seemed, at first sight, to take a different
view. A custodial role should be exercised not by any council, but by the Sejm
itself. Any separate conciliar body, he warned, would inevitably arrogate to itself
an excess of power and cut itself off from the interests of the nation. He postu-
lated a ‘continuous’ Sejm (‘Sejm trwały’), which would itself exercise a permanent
oversight over the executive. The nobility had to appreciate that government
involved hard work and continuous, tedious application, which it had rarely
exhibited hitherto. Periodic corrections of exorbitantia, after which the envoys
could return to the bucolic pleasures of their country estates, would no longer
suffice. Free men should willingly undertake the demanding tasks of governing,
unlike those who toiled at the orders of a tyrant.23 Hence his was a parliament in
continuous session, which he opposed to the much widely touted alternative of a
‘ready’ (‘gotowy’) Sejm, that is, reconvenable at need. In practice, however, as he
developed his ideas, Kołłątaj’s ‘continuous’ Sejm came closer to a reconvenable
one (even contemporaries frequently found this terminology confusing). He
proposed a parliamentary assembly that would meet in a prolonged initial session
(from October to April) for the enactment of legislation proper, then reconvene
each October in order to conduct an examination of the executive. Most propos-
als for a reconvenable assembly did not envisage its sitting for more than eight
to ten weeks, meeting again only in a national emergency. Quite exceptionally,
Kołłątaj envisaged a Sejm term of six years in between general elections. His
parliament had become ‘reconvenable’ (‘gotowy’) by the time he developed his
ideas in a blueprint for a new constitution, the Political Law of the Polish Nation,
in December 1789. Its six-year terms were implied, rather than made explicit.
It would still reassemble annually for the specific purpose of inspecting the
executive, although it would not normally be able to legislate except during the
initial session of a new parliament.24 The Principles for the Reform of the Form
of Government reflected Kołłątaj’s views to the extent that they gave the Sejm a
supervisory role over all executive organs, including a Custodial Council (Straż),
which the Principles did not, however, further describe.25
That Kołłątaj pulled back from his initial suggestions for a continuous parlia-
ment was not surprising. Stanisław Staszic had advocated such a legislature in
1787 in his Considerations on the Life of Jan Zamoyski, reiterating his position
in the Warnings to Poland, which he published in early 1790.26 Virtually any
proposal for reform of the central government encountered strong opposition,

and a more powerful and active Sejm was no exception. Anything new was,
almost by definition, capable of being presented as unleashing new dangers.
A Sejm in permanent session could start framing its own interests rather than
the nation’s. More likely, it would, over time, be corrupted.27 Ignacy Potocki’s
Principles opted for an ‘ever-reconvenable’ (‘zawsze gotowy’) Sejm, meeting every
two years, but to be recalled in national emergency or constitutional crisis.28 At
bottom, many, perhaps even most, nobles continued to see the Sejm as something
that should be a force for the protection of their freedoms. But its recent history
and the debates stirred up since October 1788 were throwing that traditional
role into question. What had once been a temple of liberties could become a
threat to them.
It was almost as if Konarski had never written his On the Means to Successful
Counsels three decades previously. If the szlachta had become accustomed to
Sejmy which functioned, in the sense of enacting legislation, they were parlia-
ments which either enacted little – the ‘ordinary’ Sejmy of the late 1770s and
early 1780s – or had passed measures which were, at best, disquieting and, at
worst, damaging – the Sejmy of 1767–8, 1773–5 and 1776. Commentators did
not ignore the role that Russia had played in forcing much unwelcome legislation
upon Poland, but it was the parliaments that were made to shoulder most of
the blame. In such conditions, Konarski’s distant call for an all-powerful elected
legislature found no echo. Virtually the only significant advocate of such a body
was Ignacy Łobarzewski, fulsome standard-bearer of English-style parliamentari-
anism, in his Honour of Polish Freedom, Equal to England’s, which appeared in
January 1789. Even he conceded in the Political Testament Bequeathed to a Son of
my Country, published the following April, that great care had to be taken against
the monarch corrupting a majority.29 The sole politician of note who consist-
ently sought English-style parliaments was King Stanisław August, but, tarred
by opportunist politicians for his association with Russia and his suspicions of
Prussian intentions, he had to tread carefully – it was well over a year into the
Sejm before he could command a degree of wider confidence.30
It was Rousseau who provided an impeccably republican solution, which
tallied well with Polish tradition. Instructions from the sejmiki had lost their
binding force in 1764, but the authority of Jean-Jacques was sufficient to accord
them a triumphal rehabilitation. How else was the ‘general will’, that is, the will
of the nation, the will of the palatinates, to be manifested? After the composition
of the Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, the general will and its
mode of transmission, sejmiki instructions, became a staple of political literature.
Wojciech Skarszewski’s voice was exceptional in maintaining that in practice,
powerful nobles would almost invariably dominate the assemblies and impose
their will on them. Government, especially in times of crisis, demanded speed and
FERMENT 179
efficiency. The true sovereignty of the nation did reside in the palatinates – but
only when their representatives were gathered together in the Sejm. Skarszewski’s
was an unfashionable stance. For most, the envoys’ faithful adherence to their
mandates would ensure that old laws were not violated and the stability and con-
tinuity of government assured. The Sejm’s Principles of the Reform of Government
made the ‘will of the Commonwealth’ manifest itself through the instructions.31
Rousseau had recommended that laws be enacted according to a variable
majority of instructions. The less integral a measure was to the basic constitu-
tion of the state, the smaller the majority required. Conversely, amendments to
fundamental laws would require the unanimous endorsement of local assemblies.
Otherwise, ‘Legislation’ would require at least a majority of three-quarters, ‘mat-
ters of state’ a majority of two-thirds, ad hoc administrative business a simple
majority.32 Such sliding scales exercised considerable appeal. Kołłątaj even identi-
fied two types of cardinal law: those derived directly from nature, which would
remain immutable (a logical position for a physiocrat to occupy); and those
agreed by men among themselves. The latter, according to the Anonymous Letters,
could be changed only on a three-quarters majority of instructions. Three-fifths
of instructions had to endorse their amendment and no single one oppose it.
In the Political Law of the Polish Nation, Kołłątaj finally opted for unanimity of
instructions to amend cardinal laws.33 Staszic, in his Observations on the Life of
Jan Zamoyski, felt unanimity was excessive: the general will (‘wola powszechna’)
could be adequately expressed by a two-thirds majority of instructions, although
in the later Warnings to Poland, he grudgingly conceded that a simple majority
might suffice for the amendment of non-fundamental laws. He dithered as to
whether cardinal laws required a three-quarters or two-thirds majority.34 The
Sejm’s December 1789 Principles laid down that ‘the will of the Commonwealth
. . . will be expressed, according to the nature of the material, by unanimity or
by differing majorities.’ Cardinal laws would require unanimity of instructions;
the ratification of treaties and alliances, three-quarters of all instructions; the
size of majorities for other business was left open. Amid all this, King Stanisław
August remained implacably determined to have nothing to do with binding
instructions.35
The greatest threat to liberty remained what it always had been: the king. Amid
the riot of authors battling over the monarchy, Crown field-hetman Seweryn
Rzewuski stood out in adamantine opposition to heredity. His stream of mainly
anonymous publications predictably warned that many of the measures of
the present Sejm were a prelude to the introduction of absolutism.36 His most
notable outpouring, A Short Treatise on the Succession in Poland, produced in
January 1790, rehearsed old jeremiads that ‘every king seeks limitless power.’ With
malicious gusto he set out to demolish the much-vaunted English paradigm,
citing ‘Blagstkon’ as his authority. What kind of freedom was it where the king
could block a law by withholding of the royal consent – his own liberum veto?
Where debtors could be imprisoned without trial? Where office was at the royal
disposal, where the king was commander of army and navy, and head of the
Church? Where the king could do no wrong and not be brought to trial? Where
the succession could be transmitted through the female line? As for the power
of the taxation vested in the Commons and in which observers saw the means
to keep the king in check, it was a minor concession that English kings were
perfectly content to leave their subjects. Through his control of foreign policy, the
king could readily secure funds from abroad and, as the Stuarts had apparently
done, employ foreign mercenaries to oppress his subjects. By comparison with
England, it was France, Spain, Austria, Prussia and Russia that were ‘completely
free’. Why did the Poles want a form of government ‘in which the king would be
everything and the nation nothing’ and which the Americans, headed by ‘those
virtuous souls’, Franklin and Washington, had shed blood to overthrow?37
Once hereditary monarchy was established, freedom would inevitably be
lost – not at once, but over two or three generations. The king would demoralise
the people by introducing ever-greater luxury (which already bore responsibility
for sapping old Polish virtue). Citizens, conscious that their king would be suc-
ceeded by an heir who would wish to avenge any insults done him, would not be
able to resist his designs. He would introduce ‘a changed education’ so that the
youth would adopt ‘a way of thinking opposed to liberty’; he would try to involve
Poland in war, which he would exploit to suppress liberty; he would try to turn
the peasantry against the nobility; he would introduce an ‘immortal parliament’
which he could subvert at leisure, not least by the abolition of the liberum veto:
‘for a majority of votes, or the right of the stronger, are the same thing’. He
would dominate the army and treasury through commissions staffed with men
in his confidence. He would use the royal veto to block legislation of which he
disapproved and the royal right of pardon to protect those abetting his designs.
He would ban confederacies as supposedly conducive to disorder, and discredit
liberty by tarring it with the taint of anarchy and fanaticism; he would so vex his
subjects with changing laws enacted by a docile Sejm that they would seek relief
in strong monarchic rule. He would of course proceed with care and subtlety,
avoiding the crass efforts of John Casimir in the 1660s to introduce hereditary
rule, in which he had been thwarted by Rzewuski’s ancestor, Jerzy Lubomirski. He
would proceed slowly, under the cover of laws, so that the appearances of freedom
would be preserved, just as Augustus had done in ancient Rome. The abolition
of life tenure of office would make men beholden to him and anxious to keep
his favour ‘and he will introduce slavery so cunningly, so imperceptibly, that the
nobleman will only then appreciate the transformation of government and of his
own position when his own serf begins to haul him before the courts.’ This vision
of chillingly Machiavellian subtlety was brilliantly unfolded. Everything new,
FERMENT 181
everything introduced since Konarski’s 1740 educational reform, every single

royal initiative, the Sejm itself, even its 100,000 strong army were discredited by
association, insinuation, innuendo and inference – one demonic horror piled on
another so that even the abolition of Neminem Captivabimus, the introduction
of arbitrary arrests, the suppression of free speech and the transmogrification of
the once-free Commonwealth into a land of Bastilles and informers could take
on a deranged plausibility.38
The warnings of diehard conservatives carried all the more weight in that
those most pressing for constitutional reform also wanted changes that would
call into question the szlachta’s dominant role. It was Stanisław Staszic, in his
Observations on the Life of Jan Zamoyski, who had brought the abstractions
of Piarist physiocracy to life, when he argued that towns and townsmen, as
property-holders, needed to be given ‘freedom’ (as opposed to particular rights
and privileges) by opening up the legislature to them. ‘In this way, oligarchy will
perish, a Commonwealth will be born. Only then will the aim of Sejmy become
the happiness of all Poles.’39 In the political doldrums of 1787, this presumptuous
demand, made almost in passing, carried little weight. But with the reprintings of
the Observations in the first year of the Sejm and with echoes of events in France,
nobles had willy-nilly to consider seriously the role of towns.
A politically active urban element was primarily confined to Warsaw. Only
some five per cent of the population lived in towns of 2,000 or more inhabit-
ants. Most ‘urban’ settlements were predominantly agrarian in character. Of the
1.5 million people who lived in conglomerations which could be described as
towns of one sort or another, two-thirds were inhabitants of privately owned
towns. To these, as the personal domains of their noble owners, parliamentary
legislation could not apply. Over half a million urban residents were Jews and the
great majority of them, again, were found in private townships. Outside Warsaw,
and its 100,000 inhabitants, Jews formed easily the most dynamic commercial
element in the Commonwealth. Although the Sejm acknowledged the need for
a new definition of their role, as an active, political factor, excluded from guilds
and municipal government, they were almost non-existent.
On 2 December 1789, 294 urban delegates assembled in the Royal Castle in
a ‘Black Procession’ (so-called after their civic robes) and submitted a petition
to the king for the ‘restoration’ of their old rights – in effect, equality with the
nobility. For all the fuss kicked up in some conservative circles about the threat
of a French-style revolution, the Black Procession was a timid affair which could
not have happened without Warsaw’s initiative and that of Hugo Kołłątaj, the
towns’ most energetic advocate. The petition was drawn up (and moderated)
in consultation with the king.40 Kołłątaj was asking his fellow nobles to take
an imaginative leap of faith about what the towns might become, rather than
consider what they presently were. In a memorandum to the Deputation for the
Reform of the Form of Government, which the Sejm had set up in September
1789, he warned that unless towns were accorded wider political rights imme-
diately, they would be doomed to stagnation.41 He saw them transformed into
physiocratic centres for the commerce in and transformation of the products of
the land. It was right that government should lie in the hands of landowners: but
such ownership consisted not only of rural, but also of urban land. Merchants
and craftsmen may, in a physiocratic sense, have been ‘sterile’, but they were
essential in transforming the products of the land into wealth. It followed that,
as a particular type of landowner, owners of urban property should have their
own separate chamber in parliament. Though this would be a lower chamber,
possessed only of half the number of representatives sitting in the upper chamber
of senators and envoys (justified by the greater importance of rural landowners as
the sources of real wealth), in practice its role would be on a par with that of the
upper chamber – only in matters of foreign policy would it have no say.42 Szlachta
owners of urban property would be entitled to serve as town envoys and could
hold urban office without loss of noble status. Conversely, the old prohibition on
the acquisition of landed property by townsmen would be abolished. Townsmen
would sit on new central executive commissions of state on par with nobles –
which meant that in key areas, nobles would find themselves for the first time
formally subordinate to decisions made, in part, by commoners.43 All this added
up to a massive extension in the constitutional rights of a social sector that had
had no significant political role since the sixteenth century. It could be argued
that this arrangement would actually have given townsmen a disproportionate
weight in domestic affairs, since without the assent of townsmen, sitting in their
new parliamentary chamber, no new laws could be passed.
There was widespread agreement on the decayed condition of the towns,
but the actual admission of municipal representatives to the Sejm was an auda-
cious step. Adam Rzewuski admired Rousseau too much to deny townspeople
access to the legislature – he bewailed the corruption of an age which denied
that all men were equal – but he was enough of a Polish nobleman to insist that
townsmen should be allowed only a consultative voice on commercial matters
(‘without the least participation in government’) and that at least two-thirds of
their representatives should consist of noblemen ‘so that the urban estate does
not secure the advantage over the szlachta . . .’44 Wojciech Skarszewski argued
that the towns’ most important need was for justice, security and the certain
foundation of a flourishing agriculture. To admit their representatives to the
Sejm would be to complicate still further ‘your machine of government already
made up of enough miserable cogwheels’.45 Ignacy Łobarzewski’s thoughts on
the subject could be taken to suggest that he wanted a mixed szlachta-townsman
Chamber in the Sejm, but for all his admiration for the House of Commons, he
had a very low estimation of Polish towns in their current condition. He avoided
FERMENT 183
any more detailed exposition of urban rights, describing townsmen as ‘an inter-
mediate free estate’ between nobles and peasants, which should be brought to a
condition of prosperity by the conferral of appropriate privileges ‘which . . . are
not detrimental to the prerogatives of the szlachta estate’, a meaningless exercise
in moderate enlightened sentiment.46 The thoughtful Jan Ferdynand Nax who,
naturally sympathetic to the role of the towns, nevertheless pointed out that
there were so few urban centres of any economic importance in Poland, that
their representatives would have no impact in the Sejm.47
Those advocating wider urban rights faced an uphill task – not just because
those like Adam Rzewuski continued to mistrust townsmen as a potential source
of support for a potentially absolutist king, but simply because Polish towns
in general were too feeble to be credible as a political force in their own right.
Maurycy Karp, another szlachcic-admirer of Rousseau, thought towns to be
cesspools of vice, peopled by economic parasites who would, if they could, exploit
and oppress nobles and peasants alike.48 Such scepticism was more than shared
by Jacek Jezierski, one of the most successful of the Commonwealth’s noble entre-
preneurs: prospector, industrialist, brothel-owner (and, to those who knew him
better, con man and merciless exploiter of serfs), who did much to propagandise
himself as the enlightened homo œcomonicus of the future. In a vitriolic tirade
following the Black Procession, he denounced townsmen in general as idlers
and parasites and, at best, petty market-traders. His gibes provoked one of the
few defences of the urban cause actually written by a townsman, Jan Baudouin
de Courtenay, and some of the sharpest polemical ripostes of the whole Sejm.
Baudouin de Courtenay did not deny the parlous condition of Polish towns in
general (though he argued strongly for recognition to be given to the economic
dynamism of Warsaw) but responded to Jezierski’s crowing by laying the blame
squarely at the feet of centuries of szlachta misgovernment. The Polish nobility,
he wrote in his Impartial Observations on the Speech of . . . Jezierski, Castellan
of Łuków, were a ‘savage horde’ which had enslaved a once prosperous settled
population and whose descendants sought to perpetuate the same tyranny and
degradation into an enlightened age. Towns could only flourish, he argued,
invoking the example of ‘the great Frederick’s’ Prussia, with government assist-
ance, which in Poland had simply not been forthcoming. How could this be in a
country ‘which wishes to assure itself for ever of its liberty and independence?’
Without flourishing towns, Poland could never attain the rank of great power.
Freedom had to encompass all inhabitants – it could brook no exception. As
for the nobility’s much-touted patriotism and willingness to shed blood in the
defence of their Commonwealth, the unopposed Partition of 1772 had shown
how much those qualities were really worth. Poland’s rulers had bestowed on
them properties and privileges to enable them to defend the country – ‘since you
have failed to discharge these obligations, they should be taken away from you.’
If government was to last, it had to be founded on law and justice: ‘law enacted
by a minority of general wills, to the detriment of the majority, is simply superior
force . . . the wills of five hundred thousand, even of one million of men are not
the will of five million.’ Baudouin was committing the appalling solecism of tak-
ing over a Rousseauesque rhetoric which the nobility had hitherto monopolised
for themselves. Worse still, in an ad hominem aside, he questioned Jezierski’s
right to criticise urban economy and industry in the first place, in view of the
failure of many of Jezierski’s own enterprises. He ridiculed Jezierski’s portrayal
of the Black Procession as some kind of sinister conspiracy. But all of Baudouin’s
passion and, in cooler moments, reasoned demolition of the nobility’s claims
to rule could not hide the fundamental weaknesses of the urban position. His
warnings that in the eighteenth century, the ‘despotism of the nobility’ could not
survive, that ‘you were stronger, so you subdued us . . . to-day we have become
stronger, so, if you oppress us any further, we will tear your usurped power from
you’ were more likely to irritate than impress.49
It was not just the place of townsmen that was the subject of debate. In the
carefully coded, enlightened vocabulary of the sermon which he preached in
St John’s collegiate church at the opening of the Sejm, Canon Franciszek Jezierski
had laid out the moral case for the reformation of serfdom. The nation was all
of those who lived in their particular country. Poland’s religion and liberty were
Providence’s greatest benefactions on it. Freedom, wrongly understood as the
free exercise of the passions, could corrupt an entire society, ripping apart the
very bonds of mutual assistance which held it together, perverting the designs of
Providence by depriving men of God’s greatest gift, liberty, making of them ‘the
tool and machine of another’s will.’50 His eloquent plea for social reformation
was one most of his listeners preferred not to hear. Strong voices were to be peri-
odically raised in favour of serf emancipation, in less guarded terms than Canon
Jezierski’s, and he himself was to be much less restrained in his anonymous
publications. Yet these amounted to no advance over the physiocratic demands
that had followed the First Partition. Serfdom degraded, disincentivised, under-
cut economic growth and ultimately, harmed landowners themselves by reduced
productivity and profitability. Stanisław Staszic produced elaborate calculations
to show that shifting to waged labour was bound to be more remunerative than
insisting on labour dues – although this kind of agronomic accountancy was
at least as likely to convince such landowners who took it seriously that labour
services were too precious to be dispensed with.51
Hugo Kołłątaj was the most woundingly frank advocate of emancipation.
Providence made men free and equal. It followed that men had no right to
enslave others. The Polish Commonwealth was a ‘feudal aristocracy’ in which
‘almost every peasant has his own despot’. The Commonwealth’s neighbours
would be justified in saying ‘The Poles are a barbaric race . . . they crave liberty
FERMENT 185
but do not know what it is . . . we must therefore make slaves of them.’ Nature
would be revenged for the denial of liberty to men whom it meant to be free.
A Poland built on serfdom did not deserve to survive.52 Peasant vices stemmed
from ‘feudal laws’, which reduced the common people on private estates to slavery
(he maintained, disingenuously, that peasants on crown and ecclesiastical lands
had always remained free), reducing them to the level of de-natured seigneurial
property.53
Canon Jezierski, under the entry ‘EMANCYPACYA’ of his anonymously mord-
ant Assemblage of Words Alphabetically Arranged and Appropriately Explained
was considerably more forthright than he had been in his sermon to the newly
convened Sejm. ‘For a man to be the owner of a man is the most egregious act of
insolence and pride.’ A physiocratic Creator had given men their liberty. It was
all very well to talk of enlightening first and emancipating later, but since when
had the law of nature permitted the deprivation of freedom to begin with? This
supposedly enlightened age would be a truly happy one ‘if those who rule held
men to be men and those who are enslaved saw in their wealthy seigneurs noth-
ing else than more substantial citizens’.54 The same arguments were developed
in Józef Pawlikowski’s On Polish Serfs, the single most substantial work dealing
with the subject. Basing himself on calculations by David Hume, Pawlikowski
reckoned that Poland ought to be able to support a population of almost 21 mil-
lion, instead of the 8.5 million he estimated it to be. ‘The biggest cause of our
lack of population is the slavery of the peasantry.’ If the Commonwealth could
function at its full, liberated potential, it could readily afford an army not of
100,000, but of over 208,000.55
The szlachta alone, warned Kołłątaj, could not assure Poland’s security. It had
to interest the peasantry in it – and that meant giving them their freedom. Give
men their natural due and then reform government, not the other way around.
Failure to do so would lead to further catastrophe. The territorial losses of 1772
occurred precisely because the common people had no interest in opposing
them: slaves could only be indifferent to such a country. Popular rebellions were
cruel and savage because serfdom and oppression pushed the people into cru-
elty.56 The need for a mobilisation of the population as a whole, as opposed to the
szlachta alone, was one of the most insistent themes of the emancipationists. For
even if the 100,000-strong army decreed in October 1788 was ever to be raised in
full, such a force would, on its own, be insufficient to protect the Rzeczpospolita
from its over-mighty neighbours. To be a credible deterrent, it would have to be
backed by some form of national militia.57
But what sort of nation (and by implication, what sort of citizens)? Szlachta,
or szlachta and all inhabitants? To some, the answer was simple: serfs should be
freed immediately, if they were be of true benefit to Poland. Others preferred to
put off the awkward hour for as long as possible. Adam Wawrzyniec Rzewuski,
devotee of Rousseau and Raynal, took the sentimental path. He wanted seigneurs
to be good to their peasantry. He even proposed an Émile-style education, which
would leave nobles with fond memories of a bucolic childhood mixing with the
commonalty (‘here, in this meadow, I used to frolic with the children of my own
dear peasants’). Older pupils would, as part of their curriculum, be exposed to
unexpected encounters with gnarled, broken old men (preferably with a small
grandson in tow) who would expatiate on the brutalities and injustices of serf-
dom and the evils of not owning property. He did not go so far as to advocate
emancipation explicitly (though he did say that all men should be free) and his
discussion of the subject veered off into a tirade against monarchical oppression,
which enabled him to side-step the whole issue of what seigneurs were to do to
reform relationships with their own ‘subjects’.58 Kindness to peasants would do.
Those who demanded serf emancipation were anxious, like the physiocrats in
the 1780s, to reassure the nobility that they had nothing to fear and could even
expect to profit from it. Society would remain unchanged – save that it would
now consist of willing free men, respectful of their masters, accepting of their
station and labouring with a new industriousness to enrich their landowners.
Give peasants justice, assured Kołłątaj, and all would be well. To encourage
his fellow landowners, he went on to claim, somewhat disingenuously, that he
had substantially increased the income from his own properties after giving
his serfs their freedom and security of tenure.59 Put an end to oppression, said
Józef Pawlikowski, give peasants a basic education, free them and Poland would
become a land of milk and honey.60
Jan Nax remained sceptical. Not because of any intrinsic hostility to emancipa-
tion: on the contrary, nothing could be more just. But in cool, measured terms,
he pointed to the practical problems. Serfdom may have been an injustice, but it
was one constructed over centuries, with the backing of ‘agreements and laws so
well established, that the whole gaggle of authors, philosophes and lawyers cannot
shake it . . .’ He agreed that rentals would be more remunerative to seigneurs
than labour dues, but warned that a peasantry degraded ‘by prolonged slavery’,
chronically suspicious of all novelty, would be unable to cope with any sudden
liberation. To enthusiasts of the benefits of emancipation, he pointed out that
many of the rental experiments by well-meaning landlords had ended in failure;
and where they had been successful, it had been a gradual process under very
specific conditions. At the very least, landlords would initially have to set low
rents so as to accustom their peasants to the new regime – the very opposite
of what advocates of emancipation promised would inevitably follow. The real
problem, he felt, was that peasants were simply too poor to be productive. Only
by genuinely ‘investing’ in them, in terms of massive agricultural assistance, could
they become more productive61 – but most Polish landowners would not, and
the feeble Polish state could not, do this.
FERMENT 187
The freedom that was to be given to the peasants would be a particular kind
of freedom, appropriate to their estate. ‘When I speak of freedom’, wrote Józef
Pawlikowski, ‘I do not mean to put it on a level with that of the szlachta, I do
not intend their voices to mix with those of noble republicans . . . but I want
such a freedom for them as would release them from the shackles of slavery, as
a result of which they could describe themselves as men and happier peasants
and which will remove from their seigneurs the name of tyrants, with which they
are blackened amid other nations.’62 The social order would remain preserved.
Maurycy Karp’s Question and Answer, Is it Necessary for the Perfection of the
Political Constitution of our State for the Commonalty to Have a Share in the
Legislature? which saw two editions in 1791, was exceptional in its treatment
of a delicate subject. Its author combined an admiration for Rousseau with a
stripped-down physiocracy and a bucolic nostalgia for pristine virtues. It was
sheer chance that he, Karp, had been born a noble, not a humble peasant – ‘the
chimera of birth does not afflict me’. The commonality, by which he meant the
peasantry, was the most populous part of the nation, the source of all riches
and material benefits. Surely then, ‘according to all the laws of justice and
humanity’ they should be admitted ‘to a common share with us in legislature
and government.’ But the peasantry existed in a state of ‘barbaric serfdom’. No
state, not even England or the United Provinces, admitted such people into the
ruling order. ‘Democratic government’ was practicable only in towns and petty
territories. All that could be done for the peasants was to end the landowners’
‘tyranny’ over them. Leave them tied to the land, but assured of ‘the security
of person and property, health and life.’ In particular, too, they had to be given
access to impartial, non-seigneurial justice. Once this was done, the magical
transformation (‘by some hidden, if I may so put it, magnetic strength’) of the
Commonwealth’s agriculture, demography and economy would ensue. A con-
stitution could be perfectly sound even if it did not embrace all classes of citizens
– the key was to assure legal protection and justice for all. In any case, the interests
of landowners and peasants were so closely connected, that szlachta envoys were,
to all intents and purposes, the virtual representatives of the peasantry. Since
peasants did not actually own their land, it was pointless, even risible, for them to
send representatives to the national parliament. Karp did not deny that peasants
could and should be given the right to own land –once they did so, they would
be free in the fullest sense. But here he could call on Rousseau: ‘that we should
first free their souls, that is, enlighten them, before we might think of freeing their
physical persons.’ In any case, Karp claimed Rousseau never intended ‘political’
freedom to be given to serfs – ‘civil’ freedom (that is, freedom without political
participation) was enough. He did not exclude the concession of political free-
dom at some indeterminate point in the future – but that could come only with
ownership of the land and the peasants’ share in that would, in the interests of
sound agriculture, have to be carefully regulated. Karp was certainly not thinking
in terms of accompanying any emancipation with the grant of freehold rights
to the land the peasants worked: the position of the nobility would hardly be
undermined in a free property market in which they enjoyed a near monopoly.63
Such was Karp’s disdainful view of towns that, if pressed, if given the choice
between opening the legislature to peasants or townsmen, he would choose peas-
ants every time. Agriculture was the source of real wealth: merchants, tradesmen,
craftsmen, industrialists were ‘sterile’, transforming without producing. To Karp,
this was simply parasitism. In his re-agrarianised Commonwealth (far from the
towns expanding, these cesspools of demoralisation were to be reduced in size),
a just nobility and a free and gratefully contented peasantry would produce
what they truly needed and provide their own goods and services with minimal
recourse to devious, demoralising intermediaries – ‘in the fashion of our glorious
ancestors’. The szlachta, more secure than ever, would continue to rule for the
foreseeable future.64 It was, indeed, a vision that Rousseau himself might have
settled for. The freedom of this well-behaved, industrious peasantry would, in
practice, consist of access to state justice, secure heredity of tenure (as opposed
to freehold possession), freedom to marry, security of moveable property, agreed
contractual obligations, freedom of movement on the discharge of all obligations.
In return, all landowners had to do was to cease their tyrannisation.65 Hardly any-
one was prepared to suggest that this was a matter for the state. The Reverend
Józef Puszet de Puget’s two-volume opus, On the Happiness of Nations, was the
only work of substance which argued that where seigneurs (and Puszet dared
to claim that most landowners were like this) persisted in imposing excessive
burdens, the state should step in and restrict their powers to do so.66 To argue
for such an interventionist (and hence powerful) government would have been
to kill all hopes of peasant reform from the outset.
This may have been the reason why the zealously well-intentioned campaign
of advocates of peasant reform failed to provoke much in the way of a response,
certainly nothing on a par with the polemics over the towns. Conservatives, at
least among those actively engaged in the politicking in Warsaw, seem to have
viewed any prospect of real emancipation as so unrealistic, as to have felt the
case to be scarcely worth answering.67 In the same way, the conscription law of
4 December 1789 held out the possibility of emancipation after twelve years’ ser-
vice by serf conscripts. It passed almost unremarked, presumably because it made
it clear that emancipation would require seigneurial consent.68 The szlachta were
comfortable with the most enlightened measures, provided they retained the last
word on their actual implementation. The conscription law changed nothing.
The role of the nobility did not escape argument – but it was argument
within the noble estate. Rank-and-file nobles had always professed suspicion
of the supposed machinations and arrogance of the ‘panowie’, the great lords
FERMENT 189
whose wealth, far-flung territorial possessions and political influence made a

mockery of equality. Much of this hostility was deliberately exploited and even
encouraged by magnates themselves as they sought to win wider gentry support
for the playing out of their own rivalries. The topos of a malign magnateria was
a constant of political rhetoric, second only to that of a monarchy seeking to
undermine noble freedom. During the Sejm it reached a new pitch of intensity,
a result not only of the sheer volume of circulating literature, but also because
magnates’ political influence was genuinely weakened in the course of the
unprecedentedly long and confused parliament. Ludwik Krzywkowski’s On Polish
Liberty was among the most probing of these attacks, demolishing the threats
of a tyrannising monarchy presented by Seweryn Rzewuski and his ilk as noth-
ing more than demagogic slogans designed to preserve the dominance of great
lords over the nobility who were their supposed equals. ‘The lords are szlachta,
yet if any called them szlachcic, they would take it as an insult.’69 Condemnation
of magnates was also a convenient device to explain the Commonwealth’s ills
without examining them in uncomfortable depth (not, it must be said, a charge
that could be levelled at Krzywkowski) – it was, ultimately, a variation on the
hand-wringing over a decayed morality and a generation of more virtuous
forbears. But, in the context of 1788–92, attacks on the magnates (albeit making
exceptions for the ‘virtuous’ among them) were genuine expressions of a new
confidence by a relatively well-to-do middling gentry, for whom the Sejm offered
new opportunities for sustained (and seemingly effective) political activism. Of
all the early reforms of the Sejm, that which the politically vocal nobility took
most to heart was the institution of the civil-military commissions of the peace in
November 1789 – precisely the sorts of local administrative and policing bodies
on which substantial gentlemen were likely to serve and exercise influence in
their own right.70
Yet again, the most radical approach to the nobility came from Kołłątaj.
Government had originated in unions of landowners – and only landowners
(even owners of urban land) should be entitled to participate in it, for it was
land which tied men irremovably to their state, in a direct bond which no other
connection could supply. Overweening magnate power had set the Rzeczpospolita
on the road to ruin (he even dared to criticise that much-idolised architect of
szlachta liberty, Jan Zamoyski).71 Kołłątaj proposed that active participation in
political life, including voting and eligibility for public office, should be confined
to owners of seven-and-a-half włóki of land (some 135 hectares), the equivalent,
he reckoned, of one village, or the minimal amount of land necessary to assure
its owner of personal political independence. Nobles would truly be independent
country gentlemen. A formal system of registration of nobles at central and local
level would be introduced for the first time.72 He also wanted to open participa-
tion in the sejmiki to ‘capitalists’ without land, but paying a minimum 500 zlotys
of taxes each year – money was, after all, ultimately a symbol of the produce of
the land, though until such individuals had acquired their seven-and-a-half
włóki, they would not be eligible for any form of office. He took his landowning
logic further. A range of persons hitherto denied access to the sejmiki could
participate if they owned the landed minimum: besides rural-property-owning
townsmen, representatives of institutions such as hospitals or universities,
clergy and even widows (though he said nothing about their right to stand for
office – presumably it was not even worth considering).73 Kołłątaj’s position on
(male) property-holders may have reflected the realities of the political process,
which was indeed dominated by substantial and middling landowners (it was
almost unheard-of for petty or landless nobles to be returned to parliament),
but it would have entailed the formal disenfranchisement of about five-sixths
of the total body of the nobility – an impossible step for the szlachta electorate
to contemplate.74 In the later Political Law of the Polish Nation, he retreated to
allow all nobles full electoral rights provided they owned at least some land and,
although he continued to envisage a minimal property qualification for public
office (on the grounds that the exercise of office was expensive), he did not spe-
cify what the level should be – but clearly, the seven-and-a-half włóki of the Listy
Anonima were excessive.75
Kołłątaj had dared to raise the issue of what should be done with the landless
nobility: in fact, they had long been regarded as a nuisance and many sejmiki
had secured constitutions barring their participation from their particular
proceedings – restrictions which were routinely ignored. Among those who
scrutinised their role was Franciszek Jezierski. Impoverished and service nobles
were despised, humiliated and even physically beaten by their wealthy confrères
(often also their landlords and employers), who re-discovered the virtues of
noble equality only briefly during the sejmiki, when they courted, treated and
carted these indigent, illiterate hordes to do their bidding.76 But he had a deeper
aim – to show up noble prejudices and elevate the dignity of the common man.
He translated the abbé Sieyès’ Qu’est-ce le Tiers État? into Polish. His historical
writings, notably the Rzepicha, Mother of Kings of 1790, reminded his readers
that the legendary founder of the Piast dynasty was a commoner, a wheel-
wright.77 The entry ‘POSPÓLSTWO’, ‘Common People’ in his posthumously
published Assemblage of Words Alphabetically Arranged opined that ‘in my view,
the common people should be called the first estate of the nation, or, to put it
more bluntly, the nation as a whole.’ It was they who constituted the ‘wealth
and strength of states’, who maintained their national character, as opposed to a
de-natured, cosmopolitan nobility.78 In a radical twist to such already extreme
views, the anonymous author of A Response from the Ukraine to a Letter from
Warsaw suggested, in August 1790, that social divisions and estate barriers could
be abolished entirely by the simple expedient of ennobling the entire population.
FERMENT 191
It was a view espoused, at least theoretically, by Ignacy Potocki.79 The rights that
the Polish nobility enjoyed were the rights of any man – all they had to do was
to recognise it.
The same point had been made some nine months previously, in Hugo
Kołłątaj’s Political Law of the Polish Nation, in December 1789. This was the sole
work from the Four Years’ Sejm to go as far as producing a detailed blueprint
of a new society. In its entirety, it was a proposal for a new constitution, which
its author submitted for consideration to the Deputation for the Reform of the
Form of Government as well as the wider noble public – neither of whom could
possibly accept it. He was writing, Kołłątaj proclaimed, not for the benefit of a
particular group, but for that of all of Poland-Lithuania’s inhabitants. It was all
very well for it to have shaken off its external yoke: an internal one remained,
which enslaved millions to one hundred thousand families, many of those, in
their turn, in thrall to great magnates. Unless this was lifted, Poland could never
be truly independent. Those with no stake in the country, be they peasants or
even petty gentry, had no interest in its preservation. The merest chance could tip
it back under foreign domination and ultimately, consign it to oblivion. Unlike
France’s revolution, which was, despite all its excesses, a true grasp for freedom,
Poland’s revolution was so far nothing more than a quarrel between one despot-
ism and another – the external and the internal. Law had to derive from nature
and the rights accorded to man by his Creator. Neither conventions nor the
rights of particular social groupings could be allowed to override this. Kołłątaj’s
proposals, of course, bestowed liberty on the nobleman, but in doing so, ‘I grant
him nothing more than the rights of every man’. To give such freedom only to
nobles was to elevate some men above others, making of them not men, but
cattle. ‘The person of man and its security is, to me, the foundation of the whole
edifice of the Commonwealth . . . every man born, resident, arriving in Poland is
free and secure in his person and property.’ This was a physiocratic freedom, in
which government, primarily the legislative power, would be in the hands of two
estates of property-owners, those of land and of municipal property. ‘Wanting
this nation to preserve itself for all ages in its liberties, I assign to it three great
principles; enlightenment, religion and common defence.’ These principles, in
turn, gave rise to what he called three ‘service, or rather, beneficent estates’ (‘stany
usłużne a raczej dobroczynne’), that is, the teaching, the ecclesiastical and the mil-
itary. ‘Beneficent’ in the sense that the benefits they conferred allowed the state to
survive and flourish; ‘service’ in the sense that they rendered the Commonwealth
the greatest services. ‘Man, a guest in Nature’ received a ‘benevolent guide in his
teacher, who informs him of his duties and obligations.’ The clergy inculcated the
principles of morality into men’s hearts and consciences. The soldier was ready
to lay down his life for the society he defended.80
Collectively, these estates would have their own rights and prerogatives,
their own superior authorities, although their individual members retained the
rights and prerogatives of the noble or urban estate from which they originated.
Kołłątaj allowed scope for these estates to have some representation in the two
chambers of his Sejm. Other associations could not claim the same status. While
their services added to the well being of society, clergy, teachers and soldiers
contributed over and above this to the preservation of constitution and govern-
ment. Those that did not fit into any of these estates had their personal freedom
and security assured under the law. Anyone, whatever his social condition, was
free to join the teaching estate. Kołłątaj said nothing about entry to the clerical
and military estates, but presumably the same would apply. He may of course
have felt that the implications of his proposals (for example, peasant recruits
would obviously be part of the military estate – what rights in practice would
they then enjoy?) were too far-reaching for szlachta society to contemplate. He
himself conceded that society was barely ready for the restrained (in his view)
ideas he was putting forward.81 It would have been a rare nobleman indeed who
would have emancipated the serfs, admitted townsmen into the legislature as his
equal, given them a veto on laws the szlachta proposed and reconciled himself to
the potential social mobility offered by the service estates. Surprisingly perhaps,
scarcely anyone polemicised directly with Kołłątaj – it has been suggested that his
writing and rhetoric intimidated would-be opponents.82 Only at the November
1790 sejmiki was the electorate to show what it thought of him.
In touching on the importance of religion, Kołłątaj was expressing a wide-
spread view, regularly articulated both among clergy and nobles, that its role in
the preservation of the state was vital. There was much indeed to give the clergy
(of whom Kołłątaj was one) pause for thought. In a desperate bid to fund the
army (and spare themselves taxation) the envoys had decreed the secularisation
of episcopal properties, a move that caused even more alarm in the Vatican than
Joseph II’s policies in the Habsburg lands. The imposition of a 20% ‘Voluntary
Offering’ tax on the clergy, that is, twice the rate imposed on lay landowners,
in March 1789, did nothing to ease ecclesiastical concern.83 Poland was hardly
a hotbed of materialist and deistical literature on a par with France, yet more
than enough of such anticlerical and ‘demoralising’ writings circulated within
the country to cause alarm not merely to clergy, but to many laity. Deism was
rife in literary circles.84 A phalanx of clerical authors pleaded religion’s cause.
The most comprehensive treatment was found in Józef Puszet de Puget’s On the
Happiness of Nations. ‘Religion’, he complained, ‘which in the deliberations of an
unenlightened mind, ought to appear as the strongest foundation of the ties of
society, seems to exercise least the zeal and praiseworthy observations of political
writers.’85 Much of what Puszet wrote matched the pleas of other enlightened
publicists for peasant emancipation and legal protection, wider rights for towns-
men and so on: but throughout, he attached a broad, parallel argument – without
FERMENT 193
a healthy religious life, all such efforts would be meaningless. Unsparing of the
faults of defective clergy, disdainfully dismissive of primitive clerical fanatics
whose enthusiasms did more harm than good, this admirer of Montesquieu and
believer in the redemptory powers of the arts and sciences insisted that the role
of a generally improving, more educated ecclesiastical order in an enlightened
age was more important than ever.
The crucial, much-repeated argument was the one proffered by Kołłątaj: an
internalised religion would act as guide to civic conduct and virtue. Law, said
Puszet, sought to restrain human action, that is, the superficial and the external
– hence the effect of law was bound to be defective. But religion, by penetrating
to men’s very thoughts ‘thus becomes a great and essential support for human
law.’86 Wojciech Skarszewski, urging security of tenure and access to impartial
state justice for peasants, not to mention fair taxation and a universal education
appropriate to social status, insisted this could only come about with the help of
religion – which meant a reformed, enlightened and materially secure clergy (that
is, not the one menaced by the Sejm’s depredations). Urbanisation, the spread of
arts and sciences, may have helped the progress of reason – but, in the process,
morality had been undermined. Religion, the true source of morality, at a time
when it was coming under more intense attack than ever before, was also more
necessary than ever before to the preservation of the state.87 Morality, growled
Stanisław Staszic, should be founded on religion: ‘It teaches man of his links with
God. It alone threatens each, even he who is stronger than human laws, that when
he wishes to harm others, he opposes the will and the eternal decrees of God, for
which he will be punished.’ It functioned as the most powerful executive force
within a state – it ‘always was and is the best statute for the implementation of
the laws.’88
This, was, ultimately a utilitarian view of religion. Puszet came close to saying
that if it did not exist, it would have to be invented, so necessary was it for the
good ordering and regulation of society.89 Those who wanted serf emancipation
insisted that it should be accompanied by intense religious indoctrination, so that
the peasantry be made more obedient and more industrious. Where apologists
such as Jerzy Ancuta or Józef Załuski had once taken the view that only one
faith was permissible or safe for a state, their enlightened successors insisted
that religion could not be forced and diversity was acceptable. Catholicism may
have been the true faith, but the beliefs of individuals were a private matter.
To attempt anything else was to provoke discord and even civil war. Religious
diversity was not a threat, but religious insecurity was. No one explicitly argued
for a full equality of rights for religious dissenters, but the clear expectation was
that Catholicism would always remain the dominant faith.
Since religion was so important to the well-being of state and society, it had to
be protected. Approbation of religious diversity fitted well with Polish-Lithuanian
tradition, for all the strains to which it had been subjected. Defenders of
Catholicism and clerical apologists were, however, prepared to speak out against
another tradition, freedom of speech and press. In fact, the huge volume of pub-
lications generated by the Sejm, the emergence of an invigorated public sphere,
placed Polish society in an unprecedented confrontation with its own values and
traditions: irreligion, and the threat of irreligion (seemingly made real by events
in France) led men to question their hitherto sacrosanct right to express them-
selves freely – not that the Commonwealth was alone in this. Certainly, leading
and indubitably enlightened clerical apologists drew the line at permitting attacks
against religion in print.
Puszet was the most forthright. Any godless, mocking text was a threat to
religion. In past ages, they had been fewer in number, if only because the force
of scholarly and devout opinion had inhibited their dissemination. But in this
enlightened age, ‘supposed philosophers’ avidly propagated them for base finan-
cial gain, appealing more to men’s passions than to their intellects, deliberately
writing to corrupt, rather than to instruct. Moreover, ‘in our age, in which
bookshops, just like other sources of merchant goods, have become the stages
of public commerce, the great number of those who read has so multiplied, that
almost all seek to pass themselves off as readers’ – even women and children. ‘At
any social gathering, books have become a relief from boredom and a form of
amusement.’ No class of person was immune to the ‘cunning infections’ of dubi-
ous literature. Unfettered freedom of publication would be acceptable in some
idealised state where each could form a true opinion of each work’s merits, but in
reality, few were capable of such ‘objective’ judgement. ‘Philosophers’ encouraged
the untrammelled play of the passions, the abandonment of self-restraint. The
interests of government and society meant that it was better to censor than to
deprave. Puszet optimistically suggested that once writers were convinced they
could no longer be suffered to write such books, they would begin to produce
good and useful literature.90
Wojciech Skarszewski declared himself in favour of press freedom in prin-
ciple, but, he asked, did supposedly ‘enlightened’ authors need to attack religion
and morality? The ecclesiastical authorities should exercise a censorship over all
works on religion, otherwise Poland would be doomed to experience the same
sort of violent revolution that France was undergoing. Already, such writings,
and writings proclaiming the supposed equality of men (Skarszewski slipped
in a plea for government censorship of political works) were, he claimed,
encouraging hatred among townsmen (from whom he would have withheld
parliamentary representation) for the szlachta.91 In 1790, the ex-Jesuit, Jan
Albertrandi, who had done much to invigorate Poland’s scholarly and literary
life in previous years, weighed in with Observations on the Freedom of Printing
and Selling of Public Books. Such freedom, he acknowledged, had done much to
FERMENT 195
proclaim necessary truths and combat entrenched prejudices. But freedom could
not be allowed to become ‘insane’. Since Polish laws had declared Catholicism
to be the dominant state religion, ‘it follows that the freedom of printing, sell-
ing and general reading cannot extend to books which would mock or subvert
Christian religion in general, its principles and teachings . . .’ While tolerated
minority faiths could publish freely for their own purposes, books which
purported to reduce Catholicism to the level of such denominations could not
be permitted. It was ‘a contradiction’ on the one hand to proclaim a religion
as ruling or dominant and on the other, to permit it to be attacked. Irreligious
scribblers were arrogating themselves a power to be above the law. Such books
weakened public morality and ultimately civil government. Although he did
not, like Skarszewski, call explicitly for a ban on politically subversive books, he
expressed his disquiet at their ready availability.92 The clergy had done much to
bring Poland out of its old torpor – but amid the messy ferment of the reforming
Sejm, the limits of their support for Enlightenment, ‘Oświecenie’, were beginning
to show.
Arguments over reform circulated above all in the vicinity of the Sejm, in
Warsaw itself.93 Some idea of provincial feelings can be gained from the instruc-
tions issued by the sejmiki of November 1790 to the second cohort of envoys
elected to the now-prolonged Sejm. Normally, instructions were drafted after
elections by a small caucus of activists, when most of the electors had dispersed
– though even under these circumstances, movers and shakers would be unwise
to put forward anything unacceptable to their fellow-nobles. But the newfound
rhetoric of the ‘will of the nation’, the pressure from reformers of almost every
political orientation for mandatory instructions, as well as accusations of elect-
oral manipulation, all had their effect. On 18 October 1790, the Sejm resolved
that at the forthcoming sejmiki, the instructions were to be drawn up before
the envoys were elected. In November, one assembly after another specifically
confirmed that this had taken place, involving procedures which proved so
time-consuming that some assemblies were extended over two or three days.94
There was much that the constituencies approved – especially when it came
to affirming the sovereignty of the nation (that is, the szlachta) and its supposed
control of the affairs of state. All instructions applauded, in principle, the work
of the Sejm. After all, this was the first opportunity in living memory for the
naród szlachecki to grasp control of its own affairs and the insistence of so many
ideologues on the mandatory constituency instruction as the expression of the
will of the nation imparted a new, enlightened sheen to szlachta dominance.
Envoys should never forget, said the Wieluń sejmik, that ‘the will of the nation
always resides in the noble estate assembled at its sejmiki, which has the particular
power to accord its representatives power and authority in its clearly expressed
injunctions.’ All would be bound by mandatory instructions. Future kings,
declared the nobles of the little Masovian county of Wizna, should ‘not influence
the will and liberty of the nation even by putting forward a request.’
The ‘will of the nation’ or the ‘will of the constituency’ figured, in one form
or another, in at least every other instruction.95 If the constituencies could com-
mand their representatives, they should also be able to choose those in authority:
at least since Karwicki, the champions of noble republicanism had been arguing
for the abolition of the royal patronage and the transfer of the right to choose
senators and even ministers from the monarch to the constituencies. The king’s
last great power to undermine noble liberty would be tamed. The old Permanent
Council had greatly reduced the king’s ius distributivum, by restricting his right
to appoint lay senators to candidates promoted by the Council: but the Sejm had
abolished the Council, and, consequently (it was eventually agreed) Stanisław
August’s old powers of patronage had reverted to him. But it was to be otherwise
under his successors and a new form of government. The constituencies were
strongly in favour of this assertion of their control, in particular if it involved
subjecting their senators to instructions on a par with envoys and making them
accountable to the relationary sejmiki.96
Almost all sejmiki declared themselves convinced by the arguments in favour
of electing a successor to Stanisław August during his own lifetime, accepting,
like the Różan electors, the need to avoid ‘the dangers of interregna’. Almost all
were ready to see the election of Frederick Augustus III of Saxony – but of no
one else, without further reference back to the electorate. The outpourings of
anglophile publicists persuaded the Smolensk sejmik 97that should Frederick
Augustus refuse, the (elective) throne should be offered to ‘one of the most illus-
trious house of Hanover, reigning in England’. The Wołyń sejmik stood out in its
refusal to accept any kind of vivente rege election and its insistence that advocates
of hereditary monarchy should be punished. It may have been of some consola-
tion to heredity’s supporters that only fourteen assemblies explicitly ruled it out
altogether. There were clearly fierce arguments on the issue. The Sandomierz
sejmik, unusually, recorded that ‘the will of the palatinate’ in favour of retaining
elective monarchy had been declared by 206 votes to 192. The elective principle
was to remain, even if a few assemblies were ready to see the royal electoral pro-
cess reformed. But of all the fifty-five sejmiki of the entire Commonwealth, only
nine declared themselves ready to accept hereditary succession.98
The measure enacted by the Sejm which found overwhelming approval was
the introduction, in November 1789, of civil-military commissions of the peace,
each consisting of sixteen elected laymen and three elected clergy. Their principal
purpose was to ensure that the newly expanded army was supplied, billeted, kept
up to strength and that all disputes between troops and civilians were resolved at
their own judicial hearings. The brief extended to building up the economic and
demographic support base for the army: not only taking oversight of the new
FERMENT 197
taxes, but also supervising the clergy’s keeping of parish registers, monitoring the
movements of commoners (not least vagabonds – ‘loose people’, ludzie luźni) by
a passport system (those without passports were liable to impressment into the
army) and encouraging agriculture and industry. In short, this was a new, unprec-
edentedly close system of local administration, reporting, in the first instance, to
the newly created central Army and Treasury Commissions. The commissioners,
elected for two-year terms, were to be substantial landowners – in any case a neces-
sity, since they were unsalaried. The legislation also marked a step in the direction
of a more professional administrative apparatus, since in the future, a minimum
of one term’s service on the new commissions was to be a prerequisite to holding
any further office. In practice this legislation allowed substantial landowners to
preserve, and indeed, reassert, their dominant role within the constituencies. It
also provided a more active and dynamic alternative to the sejmiki, which had
been deprived of all power to levy any form of local taxation by the 1767–8 Sejm,
rendering them virtually moribund as administrative bodies.99 Almost all sejmiki
wanted the competence of the commissions to be increased, by assuming wider
tax-collection supervision, involving themselves in education, a more active role in
policing and maintaining communications. The sejmik of Brześć Litewski, which
described them as ‘intermediaries between the nation and the state commissions’
even wanted to give them the right to demand a reconvened Sejm should they
discern any illegalities in the directives from those central bodies.
But once the rediscovered sovereignty of the szlachta nation was challenged,
the defences began to be raised. Those who had professed themselves shocked
by the Sejm’s unilateral prolongation of its proceedings were not lacking in
support. The Nowogródek sejmik expressed its concern at such ‘an innovation
threatening to bring down future dangers . . . whereby envoys might transform
themselves into ‘absolute dictators, harmful and terrible to national freedoms’.100
There was widespread mistrust of a Straż, that is, a Custodial Council. The
Wołyń nobility warned that its possibly subversive powers ‘might succeed in
undermining citizens’ freedom’. Suspicion was especially strong in Masovia,
where four counties – Ciechanów, Czersk, Liw and Nur – wanted no Straż at
all. Wizna and Wyszogród were prepared to accept it, provided that all envoys
would be entitled to sit on it. The majority of those constituencies that raised the
matter were anxious that its power should indeed be custodial, and not include
any right to ‘interpret’ the laws – an absurd demand of any executive body, but
nonetheless, one of the charges flung against the old Permanent Council. To the
nobility, the power to interpret the laws conferred arbitrary force, making such
executive organs legislatures and judiciaries in their own right.101
The status of the szlachta as the ruling order was not to be weakened by the
admission of the urban estate to the legislature. Not a single assembly supported
the idea. The Wizna sejmik, meeting in February 1790, to elect civil-military
commissioners, declared itself ‘horrified’ at rumours that ‘the urban estate

wishes to insinuate itself into the prerogatives of the szlachta estate’. Most other
assemblies may have been less explicit, but were no less firm over exclusion,
often contenting themselves with insisting on the preservation of the szlachta’s
long-standing prerogatives, coded language for no concessions. Dobrzyń, Liw,
Wołyń and Pinsk insisted on the reaffirmation of the old laws banning townsmen
from the purchase of landed property outside urban precincts. Any ground given
was of a marginal nature. Some were prepared to see the two chief towns of each
Province return one representative each to the Sejm (that is, six in all) but their
role would be, at best, consultative, and confined to municipal and commercial
issues. The Kraków nobility pointed out that other towns would be free (as they
already were) to submit their desiderata through the sejmiki. Ciechanów and
Czersk were prepared to allow towns to return representatives to sit on the central
state commissions to help deal with urban issues. Wołyń was ready only to let
the chief towns submit proposals for commercial legislation to the Sejm, but
rejected all thought of direct representation. Brześć Litewski would have allowed
the towns to elect one representative to each commission of the peace, in order
to help resolve disputes between townsmen and nobles. The palatinate of Podole
was prepared to extend the nobility’s privilege of Neminem Captivabimus to the
towns, which would have secured their inhabitants from imprisonment without
trial, but advanced their political rights not at all. None of this came anywhere
near the demands emanating from the reform-minded.
Proposals on behalf of the peasantry met an even less favourable reception.
Assemblies such as those of Czersk, Liw or Wyszogród, which made no specific
reference to the peasantry, but which had come out against the admission of
the towns into parliament, were hardly likely to be hotbeds of closet emanci-
pationists. That so many sejmiki did express concern shows how alarmed the
szlachta were by what reckless politicians were up to in that stew of vice and
depravity, Warsaw. Envoys had to remember, warned the Livonian sejmik, that
effective parliamentary government could not be based on ‘idealised illusions of
liberty’ or ‘the much admired equality of estates, in to-day’s age exercising only
those of a metaphysical understanding’. For the Słonim nobility, emancipation
was nothing less than a plot hatched by traitors and foreign powers to weaken
the Commonwealth, ‘a disease spread by a good half of the various writings
circulating among our brethren.’ The Wołyń sejmik similarly sniffed foreign
machinations behind suggestions to give serfs the right to appeal to state courts.
The integrity of szlachta revenues, warned the Sandomierz nobility, depended on
serfdom, the preservation of which should be guaranteed by a cardinal law. The
even more appalled assembly of Rzeczyca feared that peasants might be admitted
into the legislature. The Nur nobles opposed any secret ballot in the Sejm on the
subject of widening peasant (or urban) rights.102
FERMENT 199
Pious hopes over the peasantry were another matter. The Sandomierz nobles
were content to allow individual landowners to make their own arrangements
with their peasants – in practical terms, meaningless. There was some agreement
that peasants should be spared further taxation – though, as it happened, this
would also spare the nobility taxation. The Podole sejmik went further than
others in declaring that landowners who shifted the burden of their own taxes
onto their peasants should be subjected to ‘the strictest justice’ – but, since mis-
treatment of peasants was hardly a crime, this meant nothing. The Chełm sejmik
deplored the cruelty with which many seigneurs treated their serfs. It, like a
number of other assemblies, was prepared to accept the inviolability of serfs’ lives
and moveable property, but no assembly was prepared to accept any restriction of
seigneurial jurisdiction. Some sejmiki maintained that it was primarily the exac-
tions of crown land administrators, short-term leaseholders and Jews that were
to blame for the peasant condition.103 The Pinsk assembly neatly side-stepped the
issue: ‘the plebeian estate . . . in this enlightened age, experiences no indecencies’.
Those most anxiously aware of the need for reform – the king, Hugo Kołłątaj,
Ignacy Potocki, Adam Czartoryski, whatever their often acute political differ-
ences, were all passionately committed to the cause of educational reform. But
it was in this very field that the noble electorate dealt its most bitter blows. The
great majority showed little understanding for the Commission for National
Education and its goals. The palatinate of Kiev would have abolished it altogether
and assigned the supervision of education to the civil-military commissions.
Most would have undermined it by transferring its funding resources (consist-
ing mainly of the ex-Jesuit estate) either to the central state treasuries or to
the civil-military commissions, which would generally continue to dispense
educational funds, but would use the ‘surpluses’ (the szlachta were very prone to
see ‘surpluses’ everywhere) for the army, or even to reduce the levels of taxes the
nobility now found themselves paying. Jan Nax’s daring (if elliptically phrased)
suggestion that the nobility were under-taxed – he was possibly the only person
in Poland who dared to articulate such a thought – found no echo.104 As a body,
the nobility showed themselves to have no idea of the expenses inevitably to be
incurred by a modern and modernising state. It was generally felt that consider-
able savings could be made in educational expenses by entrusting more teaching
to the religious orders. The nobility wanted an education on the cheap, delivered
by traditional, clerical means. Improbable hopes circulated of persuading the
papacy to sanction a restoration of the Jesuit Order (though these were not
matched by any readiness to re-endow it with its former properties).105 There
was no understanding of the Commission’s experiment in training lay-teachers.
The nobility of Sieradz, Pinsk and Wołkowysk were concerned that instruction
in Latin was suffering.
Those sejmiki that specifically supported a continued role for the Commission
were few and far between. Two of the most supportive were those of Bracław
and Minsk, and only the first of these gave its unqualified endorsement to
the Commission’s work. Minsk was careful to match its praise by a particular
emphasis on the need to ensure that the lay teachers, at a time of growing
irreligion, should be of impeccable Catholic orthodoxy and morals. Insofar as
any comment was passed on the new curriculum, it came from the palatinate
of Łęczyca, which congratulated the king for his educational patronage and the
‘excellent writings which have appeared during his reign’ and which had brought
about the destruction of ‘old prejudices’. But by this, the nobility understood the
absence of Sejm disruption. It did not prevent them from demanding the full
preservation of seigneurs’ authority over their serfs.
Those fearing for the position of Catholicism could take comfort from the
assemblies. There was certainly no such concern manifested for the position
of the Catholic faith as had been by the sejmiki of the mid-1760s, in the face
of aggressive demands by dissenters, backed by Russia and Prussia, for wider
freedoms. Only eight assemblies referred explicitly to the place of Catholicism
within the Commonwealth106 (although many more touched on matters asso-
ciated). No assembly would have departed from the formulaic insistence of
Ciechanów on ‘the safeguard of the Holy Catholic Roman religion as the domin-
ant one’. Whether such terms as ‘safeguard’ or ‘strengthening’ could be interpreted
to mean that the nobility detected any real threat to Catholicism’s position is
debatable. These were sentiments as old as the Rzeczpospolita itself. The Wołyń
sejmik was exceptional in raising the issue of religious toleration – to assert that
religious dissenters should receive no widening of their existing entitlements,
‘since in other countries where different faiths from our own are dominant,
Roman Catholics do not enjoy all those prerogatives which citizens of the ruling
religion possess.’ The Chełm sejmik, recommending a uniformisation of the
Catholic and Orthodox calendars, insisted that this would involve no detriment
to the existing ‘tollerancya.’ The szlachta accepted the religious status quo. Nobles
and others (at least, others who were not serfs) were free to practise what religion
they chose (a total of three envoys to the Sejm were indeed Protestants),107 but
they would do well to be discreet. The local nobility had no need of a Skarszewski
or a Puszet to warn them to be heedful of their Catholicism.
Puszet, apart from advocating censorship to combat irreligion, had also
proposed restrictions on foreign travel. He was all in favour of travel for the sake
of learning and moral improvement (that was why the ancients had travelled),
but mere curiosity, he contended, led to adoption of fashionable, ruinous ideas,
hostile to religion (a position Rousseau would surely have endorsed). The young,
in particular, whiling their time away in ‘coffee-houses’ were all too prone to
fall into bad company. Foreign voyages should be for the mature and of good
character; subject to authorisation by the government. As for complaints that
FERMENT 201
this would be an assault on liberty, ‘I ask you, since when has the privilege of
freedom depended on the right of each citizen to use it in a manner harmful to
himself and to his country?’108 This mistrust of foreign travel had always surfaced
in the instructions, though never more than sporadically; the extent to which it
did so in November 1790 is quite remarkable.109 At least thirteen sejmiki urged
major restrictions on travel abroad, usually stipulating that it could only be
undertaken with the permission of the Sejm or, at least, of the local civil-military
commission. But the motivation behind these demands was complex – the views
of the assemblies may have chimed in with Puszet’s, but they were independent
of them. Brześć Litewski and Słonim sought such restrictions because they feared
that high-ranking Poles were plotting with foreign powers; it is perfectly possible
that less-targeted demands for travel restrictions were motivated by the same
concerns.110 But there was clearly more to it. The Sandomierz sejmik, alarmed at
the extent to which young people travelled, was also concerned that such travel
would lead to an outflow of specie. The concerns of the Zakroczym szlachta were
of a moralistic nature – they wanted to bar under-24s from even applying for
permission to leave Poland. Some echoes, then, of ecclesiastical concerns – or
simply repetition of old stereotypes? It is perfectly possible that the circulation
of suspect foreign writings, or, at least talk of such, may have had some role in
shaping such attitudes. But they could easily be explained by other, more tangible,
considerations. Not one sejmik endorsed calls for any kind of censorship.
Despite the Sejm’s insistence that instructions should be drawn up before
the election of the new envoys, it is clear that influential individuals could play
a decisive role in framing the tenor of the instructions. There was no particular
reason, beyond such influences, why the sejmik of Bracław should have been
supportive of the Commission for National Education and the neighbouring
assembly of Kiev resolutely hostile, or why the Podole instruction broadly
approved the work of the Sejm, while the adjacent palatinate of Wołyń was highly
suspicious. A diary of proceedings of the Minsk sejmik reveals the ill-tempered
playing out of tensions between politically opposed alignments.111 But whatever
the individual differences within instructions, the end result is clear. Even before
the November sejmiki met, Ignacy Potocki complained of the ‘almost unalterable
prejudices and lack of principle’ among his fellow-nobles.112
The szlachta wanted not a transformed Rzeczpospolita, but a more smoothly
functioning noble Commonwealth. Their envoys were to ensure, stated the
county of Wyszogród, that the final form of government would be perfected in
accordance with ‘the freedoms, liberties and security of the noble citizen.’ The
assembly of Smolensk felt that ‘as for the reform of government and its new
form . . . the old laws of our country are excellent, but lack only execution.’ One
sejmik after another insisted on the preservation of customary noble privileges
and prerogatives and even if they did not do so explicitly, they certainly did so
implicitly.113 The most often reiterated demands were for more efficient, speedier
judicial procedures, more courts, and clearer inheritance laws – those areas of
tension in daily life closest to szlachta hearts and purses. The one major con-
stitutional proposal which emerged from the sejmiki themselves was a desire to
see equal representation in the Sejm given to all three Provinces – Wielkopolska,
Małopolska and Lithuania. Equality and balance would be perfected.114 The
Grand Duchy’s sejmiki were resolute in maintaining its separate identity and
insisting on the preservation of its ancient regional privileges and statutory
instruments, though a minority were prepared to see some merging of the
central state commissions.115 Even when looking at the army, the object of so
many hopes, the prime concern of the nobility was to strengthen and resource
the National Cavalry, traditionally the preserve of the szlachta elite and in reality
the most undisciplined and least effective element within the Commonwealth’s
armed forces. Aware of the slow progress being made in the army’s expansion
and overhaul, the best that the nobility could suggest to stiffen it was to revive
the moribund popisy and maintain the feudal host, the pospolite ruszenie – but
unlike the reformers who advocated recourse to these ancient institutions, there
was no suggestion that anyone but nobles should participate in them.116 The
signal incapacity of the nobility to ward off the disasters of the previous century
left them unmoved.
This is not to deny some progress. Only the assemblies of Wołyń and
Zakroczym enjoined resort to the liberum veto on their envoys, in both cases in
the event of any attempt to impose hereditary royal succession. Up to the 1760s,
such exhortations were commonplace. But the mountains of reformist tracts,
which had appeared during the reign of Stanisław August and the excitements of
the Four Years Sejm itself had, in the end, produced only a mouse-like change in
szlachta attitudes. The clearest sign of the nobility’s commitment to the old order
came in the commendations for promotions and advancement that the sejmiki
habitually made. In November 1790, the Crown vice-chancellorship was vacant.
It was no secret that Hugo Kołłątaj wanted the office. More tactful assemblies
contented themselves with backing alternative candidates, but a few did not
hide their hostility to this radical cleric – the only publicist singled out by name.
Kołłątaj, said the Sieradz nobles, ‘is to be removed from all prerogatives for debas-
ing the szlachta estate’. The Wołyń sejmik, which during its proceedings, accused
him of encouraging a peasant insurrection, demanded that he be punished for
his ‘harmful proposals . . . to overthrow noble freedoms and prerogatives’. The
Lithuanian sejmik of Wołkowysk was unique in commending him for the office
of vice-chancellor, although this was not matched by any support of his pro-
gramme: it wanted no extension of townsmen’s rights, no relaxation of serfdom
and was suspicious of the Commission for National Education, preferring the
restoration of education to religious orders.117 The assemblies ended up rejecting
FERMENT 203
almost everything that enlightened reformers hoped for. ‘I confess,’ wrote Ignacy
Potocki, ‘this gives me the worst opinion of my nation, or, strictly speaking, of
the noble republic of which I am a member.’ The instructions lacked ‘common
sense and natural justice . . . The Sarmatians continue to care only for the present
moment.’118
10
Judaica
The unprecedentedly long Sejm was able to accord rare consideration to issues
which had attracted only cursory consideration from its predecessors. Among
these was the vexed question of Poland’s Jewry. ‘More than half of the Jews in the
world lived in Poland-Lithuania in the eighteenth century . . .’1 On the eve of the
First Partition in 1772, their numbers may have approached one million, getting
on for ten per cent of the Commonwealth’s total population, perhaps as numer-
ous as the nobility themselves, possibly even more so. A pamphlet of 1789 spoke
of their being ‘almost an eighth part of our population.’2 They were a permanent
presence in the szlachta’s world, but always set apart by their distinctive dress, by
their customs and by their religion. And by language. Among themselves they
spoke Yiddish, though, as the eighteenth century drew on, a growing number, if
still probably a minority, spoke Polish. They were prominent in trade, in money-
lending, in the service sector, a prominence thrown into even greater relief by
their seeming near-monopoly over commercial activity in so many of Poland’s
small towns. Three-quarters of Polish Jews lived in private, mainly magnate-
owned townships. Most had populations of only a few hundred, and, in many of
these, commercial and service activity lay predominantly in Jewish hands. Jews
accounted for as many as three-quarters of the roughly 4,000 inhabitants of the
town of Opatów, in the palatinate of Sandomierz. In smaller towns, particularly
in the Ukraine and much of Lithuania, the proportion was often greater. Many
royal towns, including Warsaw and Kraków, had, since the Middle Ages, acquired
De non tolerandis Judaeis privileges, to insulate themselves from Jewish economic
competition. Such privileges rarely succeeded in excluding the Jews altogether,
as they settled either in suburbs or in liberties (jurydyki) belonging to nobles
and magnates and, as such, beyond municipal jurisdiction. Jews were in any
case allowed to participate in town markets and, in the case of Warsaw, to trade
and reside there whenever the Sejm was in session. To the szlachta they were
commercial agents and purveyors of consumption. Parliamentary envoys and
senators did not wish to do without comforts, which Jews could procure them
more cheaply and more efficiently, it seemed, than Christian tradesmen.3
Jews were free men, subject, in principle, only to the monarch, but, in prac-
tice, subject also to the authority of the seigneur on whose estates they lived or
whose commercial interests they furthered. They had been settled in Poland
and the Grand Duchy since the late Middle Ages. Their demographic expan-
sion appears to have been primarily an endogamous one, fuelled by declining
mortality rates. Rich nobles encouraged their settlement not least because they
saw in them a means of bypassing Christian guild restrictions (it was rare for
guilds to accept Jews) and as a ready means of boosting their own prosperity. In
1776, Crown Grand Marshal Stanisław Lubomirski warned that if ever the De
non tolerandis Judaeis rights of royal municipalities were repealed, ‘the Jews will
rapidly abandon all the szlachta’s towns.’4
The Jews’ inextricable association with the szlachta could cost them dear.
During Chmielnicki’s rebellion of the mid-seventeenth century and again during
the great Ukrainian peasant rising of 1768, they were massacred in unquantifiable
numbers, fair game for all. In 1648, Prince Jarema Wiśniowiecki saved thousands
of them from the Cossacks – but many thousands were also massacred in the
course of the Deluge by Polish soldiers under Stefan Czarniecki, especially in
Wielkopolska. It is difficult to say how many were slaughtered during the Great
Northern War: if losses were not on the scale of the mid-seventeenth century,
they were still considerable. Jewish communities across Poland never recovered
financially from those conflicts, which encumbered them with a crippling level
of indebtedness to the very end of the Commonwealth.5
For all that, Hugo Kołłątaj was able to claim, in December 1789, that the Jews
‘constitute, as it were, a privileged estate.’6 It was easy to make the case. Across the
Commonwealth, they had, from the sixteenth century, developed an extensive
network of near-self-governing communities (kehillot), grouped into provin-
cial networks and returning representatives to their own quasi-parliamentary
assemblies in the Crown and in Lithuania (the two Vaadim), until these were
wound up in 1764. Jews not living on noble-owned properties were subject
to the authority of the palatines and of the royal courts. In 1780, the outraged
Wyszogród sejmik complained incredulously that Jews were even summonsing
nobles before royal justice. Jewish institutions had developed in response to the
situation in which the Jews found themselves, seeking to preserve their own
traditions and personal freedom and reconcile these with their obligations to
the Polish state. The Vaadim functioned as a combination of tax allocating and
dispute-resolving bodies, although their domination by conservative Jewish
elders led to a growing alienation from them in the community at large. Their
abolition in 1764 was part of a measure aimed at the more efficient collection
and administration of a reformed Jewish poll tax. The great majority of Jews
endured a miserable existence, not least because they were exploited by their own
elders. Collective financial responsibility for debts and taxes weighed heavily on
them. Jan Dębiński’s Domina Palatii in 1727 scorned the suggestion that Poland
was a ‘Paradisum Iudaeorum’. He thought they were so wretched and despised
that it was more like the land of Egypt: were he a Jew, he would have preferred to
J U DA I C A 207
leave. However, ‘they are so deeply rooted here, that it would take an Angel with a
flaming sword to expel them from Poland, as the first people were from Paradise’.7
The relationship between nobles and Jews was an ambivalent one. It was
perfectly possible for Jews to do well in magnate or royal service, but, among
the wider populace, the worst prejudices and stereotypes could always be
found.8 Piotr Pruszcz’s Fortress of Monarchs of 1662, republished in 1737 by
the University of Kraków, contained some grisly paragraphs on Jewish ritual
murders – ‘Concerning the cruel murder of innocent little children perpetrated
by the reptilian Jewish nation in various places.’ 9 At the beginning of the century,
Father Stefan Żuchowski of Sandomierz devoted much of his career to compiling
histories (including one posthumous publication in verse) of Jewish ritual mur-
ders, to be rewarded in 1711 by being made the Kraków diocese’s commissarius
seu inquisitor generalis contra perfidiam Iudaicam, an office he administered
with relish and conviction to his death in 1716.10 In his potted chronicle of
Polish kings, Augustyn Kołudzki, a local judge from northern Poland, permitted
himself a rare criticism of King Casimir the Great in the fourteenth century,
for the grave damage he did to Poland by welcoming so many Jews. ‘To this
very day this infernal nation does not cease to deceive Catholics . . .’11 Florian
Jaroszewicz’s interminable Poland, the Mother of Saints of 1767 honoured its
entry for 28 December (Holy Innocents’ Day) with ‘the martyrdom of innocent
little children, horribly put to death . . . by faithless, vengeful Jewry, desirous of
Christian blood like leeches.’ Jews slaughtered Christian children in their thou-
sands, but Jaroszewicz contented himself with giving details of those murders ‘of
which I know authentically’ – three. He could only deplore the representations
made in the Jews’ favour by some ‘worthy persons.’12 Zenon Guldon and Jacek
Wijaczka have identified 82 ritual murder trials of Jews in the Crown between
1547 and 1787, thirty-two of them in the eighteenth century. In the most spec-
tacular case, at Żytomierz in 1753, twelve Jews were executed. The 1740s and
1750s appear to have marked something of a peak of anti-Jewish persecutions,
as a number of bishops sought to establish their reputations by cracking down
heavily on supposed Jewish malefactors.13
Fantastic accusations could be levelled against the Jews because they lived
among a populace that was all too ready to believe that this was the sort of thing
Jews did. While members of the political establishment were ready to intervene
in the Jews’ favour, and even though in the early 1760s the papal nuncio warned
that there was no foundation in such charges, there were plenty of key figures who
disagreed. Poland’s kings had a tradition of protecting the Jews against the wilder
excesses of their populace, yet a royal directive reaffirming the De non tolerandis
Judaeis privilege of the town of Kamieniec Podolski in 1746 saw in them ‘natural
traitors and almost sworn enemies of the Catholic faith’. A key role was played
in the Żytomierz executions by the ambitious bishop coadjutor of Kiev, Kajetan
Sołtyk, soon to become one of the leading political figures of Augustus III’s
reign.14 Szymon Majchrowicz saw in the Jews a kind of anti-Commonwealth, a
warning to the Poles of what they might become if they did not mend their ways.
The Jews, too, had once lived in Golden Freedom. But they repeatedly refused
to abide by God’s laws, and, in the end, they had rejected God himself – for
which outrage they had been crushed by the Romans and thrust into ‘perpetual
captivity’. ‘And from that time, the Jewish people have borne the contempt and
endless loathing of all nations.’15
The Jews were not a passive mass of victimhood. Gershon Hundert sees
an economically vibrant community, rising to the challenges of shifting cir-
cumstances. If Poland was to flourish economically, that community was
indispensable. Marcin Matuszewicz’s parents, to improve the fortunes of their
estates, saw the settlement of Jews as an essential first step. This was also a group
capable of looking after its own interests aggressively. Matuszewicz spoke almost
admiringly of the Jew, Notko, who, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, directed something of an international mafia of banditti. When one
minor worthy tried to ‘assist’ the chronicler’s parents in reclaiming monies owed
them by the kehilla of Brześć Litewski by defecating in the community’s school,
he received a sound thrashing for his pains.16 It is also clear that there was suffi-
cient socialisation between Catholics and Jews at all levels of society to drive their
respective religious authorities to repeated, unavailing pronouncements against
such relations. The very violence of language against the Jews may even have been
a symptom of the insecurities this could cause in some quarters.17
For those who wanted a reformed and prosperous Rzeczpospolita, deeply-
embedded phobias of Jewish vengefulness towards Christians were intensified by
a different way of viewing Jewish commerce. Not as something positive, propping
up the manorial economy, but as something irredeemably deleterious. Stefan
Garczyński’s Anatomy of the Commonwealth, which so laceratingly ascribed its
decay to the moral failings of landlords and clergy, could hardly be expected to
spare the Jews. His townscapes swarmed with them. Particularly in Małopolska
‘all the towns and townships are full of nothing but Jews, who also run the brew-
eries in the villages, the hostelries and inns along the roads, so that, all told, our
Poland is more like Jerusalem than a Polish state.’18 Jews, he complained, operated
on wafer-thin margins. They were thus able to undercut Christian craftsmen and
traders, not least in the production and sale of alcohol, the chief industrial and
commercial activity of many Polish towns. Christian townsmen were left without
capital to invest. A vibrant urban life was impossible.19
The Jews, precisely because of their distinctive role and their dominance
of commerce, served as an easy scapegoat for economic stagnation. Wacław
Rzewuski paid them something of a backhanded compliment in 1756, arguing
that they owed their commercial superiority to ‘their methods, especially their
J U DA I C A 209
patience and their endurance of all the insults, injuries and oppressions to which
Christian merchants could not accustom themselves . . .’ Even so, they continued
to practice deceits and conduct their business lethargically, fatally undermining
the urban economy. Rzewuski did not say so outright, but the only people who
could have subjected the Jews (and non-Jews) to ‘insults, injuries and oppres-
sions’ were the szlachta. Rzewuski’s remedy, as for so many conservative nobles,
was to adhere to old laws protecting trade and to put a stop to illegal imposts on
it, which, again, could only have been levied by the szlachta.20 Had Rzewuski been
prepared to push his reasoning through to logical conclusion, he would have been
led to question the nobility’s economic privileges, if not their privileged position
in general. It was an inconceivable step.
This dismal view of the Jewish population was not at all confined to those of
a conservative disposition. Reeling off a list of the ills besetting Poland, Stanisław
Konarski included ‘the utter decay of trade in our country, taken over by the
Jews, by their extortions made repugnant to [Christian] merchants.’ Trying to
reassure his noble readership that the introduction of majority voting would not
inevitably mean a strengthening of the royal court, he referred approvingly to the
parliamentary rescindment in Britain of the Jewish Naturalisation bill in 1754,
by the ‘Pluralitas . . . of those better disposed towards their country, in anticipa-
tion of the certain and unavoidable harm which would come from so cunning a
nation.’21 Józef Wybicki, though attributing the decay of Poland’s towns to a lack
of justice and security, could still observe, in 1776, ‘Only wretched Jewry, ruining
the nation and itself readily ruined, animates our towns.’22 He had more to say
in his Patriotic Letters the following year, taking the Jews to task for adding to the
travails of the serfs through their widespread retailing of alcohol on seigneurial
estates. But at least Wybicki saw, and stated explicitly (it can have won him few
friends) that behind Jewish leaseholders and innkeepers were the szlachta them-
selves. He pointed out that the terms of contracts drawn up between landowners
and Jewish middlemen virtually obliged the latter to ‘pay’ peasants for their grain
deliveries (which they might have no choice but to sell to a specified, Jewish,
party) in alcohol.23 The stereotypes of Jewish degeneracy were hardly restricted
to Poland. They were certainly shared by Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (Rousseau
had nothing to say about the Jews in his Considérations). Where Wybicki and
Popławski saw the nobility as the drivers behind Jewish activity, for Mably, it was
the other way around. He was scathing of Jewish wiles. ‘It is not the nobility, it is
the Jews who are the masters of Poland. You have become the tributaries of their
avarice and usuries. They have forced you to be unable to do without them. They
have made use of the egregious stupidity you have imposed on your own people
to make themselves necessary.’ By degrading their serfs and excluding townsmen
from their due share in government, the szlachta had allowed the Jews to establish
themselves in Poland. Though the Jews profited, they were also the victims of
‘frequent injustices’ at the hands of the nobility – for which the Jews ‘punish you
cruelly’ under their economic empire.24
The views of ordinary szlachta come through in the instructions of the sejmiki.
Not every assembly made pronouncements on the subject, but at some stage,
most would do so. There was no shortage of derogatory epithets – ‘perfida gens’,
‘perfidious race’, ‘plugastwo’, ‘vermin’. What emerges clearly are the economic
tensions between Jews and ordinary nobles. Since the sixteenth century, Sejmy
had decreed a battery of laws barring Jews from a host of economic activities: had
such laws been enforceable, presumably the Commonwealth’s economy would
have ground to a near-halt. Sejmiki repeatedly insisted that Jews be excluded from
trading in commodities ‘befitting the szlachta estate’ – mainly grain, timber, wine
and livestock – in other words, Poland’s principal exports and those commodities
most closely tied to the szlachta’s own production. A law passed by the 1773–5
Sejm, specifically allowing nobles to practice ‘all manner of trade’ could only
intensify such economic rivalries.25 The nobility resented the appointment of
Jews to the customs administration or the award to them of leaseholds on crown
lands and other properties.26 But a once hostile sejmik might, at another time,
support the setting up of a kehilla, or voice concern over the level of Jewish
indebtedness.27 The sejmik of Wyszogród which, in 1764, advocated the expul-
sion of all Jews from Poland, in 1780 requested they be given their own quarter
in the town of Wyszogród, in order to reduce the fire risk from their distilleries.
Whatever insults the nobility might throw at the Jews, their main objections lay
in areas of economic activity which they, the nobility, wanted to dominate – and,
in that respect, the Jews were only the most prominent group among a range of
possible rivals.
How could the perceived problems raised by a significant Jewish pres-
ence be resolved? There were those who proposed drastic remedies. Stanisław
Szczuka, if he was indeed the author of the Eclipsis Poloniae of 1709, looked to
a Commonwealth ruled by a native monarch and embracing just one religion
– Catholicism. Foreigners and non-Catholics alike were a threat to Poland’s
territories and freedoms. The greatest threat came from the Jews. After leaving
no stereotype untouched, ‘Szczuka’ proposed giving them three years’ grace to
settle all their affairs and debts and then ‘to expel the worthless crowd of Jewry
from the kingdom.’28 Michael Dylewski, envoy to the 1748 Sejm who ‘inter alia
vehementissime expatiated against dissenters and Jews’ felt that expelling the latter
would lead to the ‘wasting’ of the country. Instead, he proposed ‘to castrate them,
young and old, so that this nation should insensibiliter be eradicated.’ Marcin
Matuszewicz noted that this, and Dylewski’s ‘thousand other absurdities’ brought
immense hilarity to all from the king downwards.29
Most, like Jan Dębiński, seem to have accepted that the Jewish presence was
a fact of life, no matter how regrettable.30 Even a Dylewski had some inkling
J U DA I C A 211
that without the Jews, Poland’s economy would suffer. Most nobles appreciated
that they were indispensable to commercial activity in all its forms, not least to
the extraction of seigneurial revenues from serf subjects. Stefan Garczyński, for
all his antipathy, hoped that in his morally renewed and physically cleaned-up
Commonwealth, the Jews and especially their children might be converted to
Catholicism.31 This was a much reiterated, if formulaic, hope of church synods.
It was a peculiarity of the Grand Duchy, under the Third Lithuanian Statute of
1588, that Jews who converted were automatically ennobled. The numbers who
did so seem to have been few, although the Lublin sejmik in February 1764 was
moved to complain of the usurping of szlachta status by Jews; as was irritatingly
normal with such instructions, it did not expand on the matter of complaint.
Though ennoblement on conversion was ended by the Convocation Sejm of
1764, the Coronation Sejm in October of that year confirmed the elevation to
noble status of fifty converted Jewish families. Such neophytes, however, might
still find it difficult to shake off the suspicions surrounding their origins.32
The notion of ensuring Jews made a ‘useful’ contribution to the life of the
Commonwealth was reflected in the legislation of 1773–5. Jews settling on and
cultivating unworked agricultural land would be permanently exempted from
the poll tax and be given a sliding scale of exemptions from other direct taxes.
Rabbis were forbidden to give marriage to any Jew not engaged in ‘commerce,
craft, agriculture or service’. The 1776 Sejm banned them – ineffectually – from
leasing alcohol production facilities in the Crown’s royal towns, claiming the
measure to be essential to avert ‘the further ruination of our royal townships’.33
Andrzej Zamoyski’s ill-fated law code of 1778–80 approached the Jewish ‘prob-
lem’ by striking a balance between the status quo and going along with demands
to take some kind of action. Jews were to be assured, in principle, of the right
to reside in the Commonwealth. Toleration of their religion was formally
confirmed, all attempts at forcible conversion were banned, the security of their
persons, property, synagogues and burial places was assured. But their rights of
residence in royal towns (the Code would not have applied to private towns) were
restricted to those they already possessed. They would remain barred from those
that enjoyed De non tolerandis Judaeis rights – mainly larger urban centres such
as Warsaw, Kraków, or Poznań. There they could only be admitted on market
days. Where they had the residence rights, they were to have ‘their own separate
street’ and would be liable to financial penalty if they leased a shop or house
elsewhere. Jews in Poland did not live in ghettos as such, but ghettoisation would
have been imposed by the Code.34 In such towns, they would now be subjected
to the jurisdiction of the municipal magistrates (as opposed to the particular
authority of the palatine, representing the king), with the right of appeal to the
superior royal urban courts. Their kehillot would remain, but the scope for closed
oligarchic control would be much reduced: in each town, the Jewish commonalty
was to elect three elders each year. Their chief task would be to collect taxes from
the community (and, presumably to assist rabbis to resolve religious-related
issues); their election was to be confirmed by the town’s magistrates. Jews would
not receive municipal citizenship, even though they would be under the juris-
diction of urban magistracies – only converts to Christianity could benefit from
citizenship.
In keeping with the physiocratic ethos that infused the code and its authors,
the Jewish population was expected to make itself useful. Within a year of the
putative introduction of the code, Jews would be expected to show that they were
conducting commerce with an unencumbered capital of at least 1000 zlotys; or
that they were practising a useful craft; or that they had some form of viable
leasehold arrangement with a landowner. Those unable to demonstrate these
requirements satisfactorily to the local authorities (who would issue appropri-
ate certification), were to leave Poland within another twelve months. These
arrangements were to be renewed every six years. No Jew would be able to marry
without a licence from the local magistracy – obtainable only by those who had
unencumbered property to the value of 600 zlotys, or practiced a craft or were ‘a
farmer or a leaseholder’. Those who ignored this would be liable to life imprison-
ment and confiscation of property.
A range of restrictions would apply – largely a reiteration of existing, if mori-
bund, laws. Jews would be banned from all treasury posts or from leases carrying
any form of jurisdiction over the Christian population. They would not be able
to employ Christian servants (though they would be able to hire day-labourers).
During religious processions and on holy days, they would have to remain in their
homes. The question of what commodities Jews might export, which so exercised
the sejmiki, was resolved: the decisions would be made by the local nobility, sitting
in the Boni Ordinis commissions, bodies created for individual royal towns since
1765 in order to supervise their financial affairs. The collective right of kehillot
to incur debt would be ended – in future, Jews would be able to run up debts
only as individuals, on the security of their own property. This was meant as the
first stage in what would be the long process of liquidating the existing massive
indebtedness of the kehillot.35
The underlying thrust of these proposals would have been to reify existing
prejudices. There was very limited recognition of the existing value of Jewish eco-
nomic activity. Jews remained an alien group, which was to be brought under the
closer control of Christian municipal magistrates and country gentlemen – the
very groups that most mistrusted them and were engaged in economic rivalry
with them. The hold of Jewish oligarchs over their kehillot might conceivably have
been weakened, but, on balance, there was little to benefit the Jews in this and
much that would have worked to the Commonwealth’s own economic disadvant-
age. The abortive Code’s provisions showed how little noble reformers were able
J U DA I C A 213
to recognise of their own prejudices. But equally, it has to be recognised that the
great majority of Jews themselves, while wanting a more secure place in Polish
life, found assimilation into wider society (almost literally) inconceivable. A very
small handful of families were, to all intents and purposes, fully secularised – but
they were barely a drop in the Judaic ocean, living mainly (illegally, or by specific
royal privilege) in and around Warsaw. Almost all Jews were literate and better
educated than their Polish town-dwelling counterparts – a point occasionally
conceded by szlachta commentators. Assimilation held few attractions. By and
large, it would mean degradation to groups the Jews looked down on, even as
they were themselves looked down on by them: to a stagnating gentile urban
populace which saw in them rivals or to an enserfed peasantry who hated them
as agents of an exploitative landlord class. For this reason, the 1775 legislation
to encourage Jewish agricultural settlement was bound to be ineffective, and,
because ineffective, it could only reinforce existing prejudices.36 It was not a
promising platform for any smooth evolution of a relationship between Jewish
and Christian communities.
Those Polish nobles who followed enlightened debates would have had their
attention drawn in 1785 to the Jewish question by Piotr Świtkowski’s journal,
The Historico-Political Recorder. It carried a detailed review of a remarkable
treatise by a Prussian government official, Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Über die
bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civic Improvement of the Jews) of
1781. Dohm argued for full equality in rights for Jews and other subjects of the
Prussian state, with a view to their eventual integration into mainstream society.
All restrictions on such groups in trade, industry and employment were to end.
Any limitations, such as exclusion from military service or the ban on purchase
of extensive landed properties (in Prussia, as in Poland, officially forbidden to
all commoners), would be preserved for a transitional period only. Świtkowski’s
review was approving. He ascribed, with Dohm, the generally unfavourable situ-
ation of Jews to ‘inhuman and gross prejudices’ inherited from less enlightened
ages and their supposed failings he attributed not to any Judaic biology, but to
the circumstances and conditions into which they had been forced over time.
He was not free, however, of prevailing attitudes: he would have liked the Jews
to be steered towards agriculture and artisanship and was later even to advocate
their exclusion from retail trades in towns.37 In 1787, Stanisław Staszic, rather
more wary of the Jews than Świtkowski, nevertheless urged, almost uniquely
for a Polish writer, that, as part of a wider programme of immigration designed
to revive the economy, even Jewish (and Protestant and Muslim) immigrants
should be welcomed. Moreover, a reforming Sejm would ‘give them all equal
citizen freedom, destroy the particular privileges of those that harm others’. But
he also added that it would ‘force the Jews into agriculture and artisanship’, for
this would be a parliament that would ‘loath idlers’ and ‘crush useless estates.’38
It was the Four Years Sejm that saw sustained and genuine debate over the place
of the Jews, for the first time involving the Jews themselves. Foremost in setting
out a reform agenda was Mateusz Butrymowicz, envoy from Pinsk in the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania, who, in his corner of the world, would inevitably have had
much commercial contact with them. His Means of Transforming the Polish Jews
into Citizens Useful to the Country of February 1789 represented the most that
anything resembling liberal opinion on the matter was prepared to countenance.
The work had an older provenance, in that it was largely, as Butrymowicz readily
acknowledged, a re-working, with no significant alterations, of an anonymously
authored The Jews, or a Necessary Reform, in circulation since 1785, itself doubt-
less influenced by Dohm’s work. Butrymowicz laid out a standard view on the
subject: ‘For centuries, the Jews have been a burden for many countries. Idleness,
hypocrisy and sloth appear natural to them.’ Yet he went on to proclaim a com-
mon humanity of all men, adding that groups and individuals were shaped by
circumstances. ‘Religion, legislation and education are the most pertinent factors,
the three things which make a man.’ If deficiencies in these could be eradicated,
‘we will see that the Jews, being men, can become useful citizens’.
Unlike many commentators, Butrymowicz rejected religion as a source of
evils – the principles enunciated by Judaism were largely identical to those of
Christianity. The roots of the problem lay in Poland’s own legislation and in
education – which gave him an opportunity to slip in pleas for a wider reform
agenda. ‘Poland divides into three classes of citizens: the nobles, the townsmen
and the agricultural or rural. The Jews have been located in none of these.’ Instead,
the Commonwealth’s laws ‘always understood the Jews to be an alien and separate
nation.’ Removed from citizenship, subjected to discriminatory taxes and levies,
and in a country ‘for centuries strictly upholding religious toleration’ they had
become the objects of ‘contempt, degradation and various oppressions’. Yet they
were expected to ‘bear their fetters and kiss the hand that put them round their
necks’. ‘Men are what the laws make them.’ Inevitably, the Jew in Poland (it was
different elsewhere, most notably in England and the Netherlands) had become
‘slothful, idle, faithless, cunning and, in the end, what he is to-day.’ Butrymowicz
explained the failure to direct Jews into agriculture by the repellent nature of a
degraded and impoverished peasantry.
Deterred from rural settlement, the Jews took to the towns. But here too, they
were constantly obstructed from ‘being useful to themselves and to society’. Many
towns forbade them to settle; others hedged them with restrictions; guilds and
magistracies were closed to them. Powerful patrons began to intervene on their
behalf, causing friction with the towns. Trade declined. Many Jews could find only
one opening for their energies: in retailing seigneurial alcohol to the peasantry,
exploiting ‘the most numerous, the most useful and, at the same time, the most
unhappy part of our nation.’ ‘The Jew tears the last crumb of bread from the
J U DA I C A 215
famished peasant, but he cannot be blamed for this, for this is the only means
of existence we have left him – and moreover, we command him to pay us very
well for this activity.’ While Butrymowicz chose not to allow himself a deeper
analysis of the szlachta’s exploitation of Jewish alcohol traders (and, hence, at one
remove, of the peasantry), he was in no doubt that Polish laws lay at the root of
the problem. A bad situation was made worse by the Jews’ distinctive customs
and culture. Mutual ‘rivalry, confusion, mistrust and hatred’ inevitably followed.
‘It was a Christian maxim to oppress and loathe the Jew and to cheat and hate
the Christian became the maxim of the Jew.’ The Jews may not have been in any
formal sense taught to hate Christians, but the general degradation, contempt
and exploitation to which they were subject formed their wider education, block-
ing them off from any hope of a redeeming ‘enlightenment’.
Butrymowicz’s solution was to integrate the Jews into the urban estate. The
Poland he envisaged was one as it once had (ought to have) been, where the
nobles served as defenders, townsmen conducted trade and peasants agriculture.
Each estate knew its role and place, each estate was on a par with every other
(the implications of this he passed over in silence). He wished ‘to abolish every
difference which has hitherto existed between the Jew and the Christian.’ Jews
would be subjected to the same laws as townsmen. Apart from purely religious
courts, all separate jurisdictional arrangements for Jews would be terminated.
Rabbinical powers and kehilla jurisdiction would be confined to the realm of
the purely spiritual. The Jewish poll tax, ‘a tax on religion’, which had no place
in a republic which had always been ‘a shelter of toleration’, would be abolished.
The Jews’ religious laws and regulations would be modified to permit a greater
degree of co-existence and social utility. Thus, the number of Jewish holy days
(which Butrymowicz claimed amounted to a total of three months, obliging the
rest of Poland to support one million idlers for quarter of the year) would be
drastically reduced. Integration would be furthered by obliging them to make
greater use of the Polish language. While ‘you cannot make the Jews by law talk
otherwise than they do now’, Yiddish would, with time, simply wither away if all
their legal and commercial transactions had to be written in Polish. Butrymowicz
even envisaged a ban on all Jewish book imports and on the publication of books
not in Polish – though any Jewish book could be translated. This would hasten
the process and open the Jews to enlightenment. He also wanted to make them
leave off their distinctive costume, which only encouraged the ‘ridicule of the
commonalty’. If Jews in other countries could wear the same dress as everyone
else, so could those of Poland-Lithuania. As to the awkward question of whether
supposedly equal citizens should be allowed to continue trading in alcohol, he
proposed that they should be allowed to ply the trade in towns, since there was
already established Christian competition there (which meant that the quality
of drink could only improve, with the added benefit of prices being kept low).
They should, however, be banned from alcohol leases in the countryside, where
their supposedly monopolistic position made them ‘leeches on our serfs and
. . . destroyers not only of the fortunes, but of the health of our peasants.’ He
reassured his fellow-nobles that any drop in their alcohol revenues would be
temporary, over a period of one or two years at most. He helpfully added that
entrusting alcohol sales to Christian innkeepers would, in the long term, be more
profitable: they might not put up so much money for their leases, but, since peas-
ants would drink less, they would work more effectively and landlords would save
by not having to bale them out of their straitened circumstances so frequently.
Butrymowicz proposed setting up a Sejm commission to negotiate with
Jewish elders ‘to draw up a lasting and permanent concordat between two hith-
erto conflicting nations in the same country.’ One question he did not explicitly
raise – though it would have inescapably featured on the agenda of his putative
commission – was the matter of the election of Jews to municipal office. Without
that, all integrationist measures would be useless. In many smaller towns, it was
quite likely that, had such elections been permitted, Jews would have dominated
their magistracies. The logic of Butrymowicz’s proposals was that they would
be so admitted – the tone of his tract, however, suggested that they would not
be and would remain distinctively separate. Butrymowicz may have wanted to
make townsmen of the Jews – but he was too much a man of his own time to
wish to make Poles of them.39
For all the ambiguities and opacities of Butrymowicz’s proposals, these
marked the limits of the szlachta’s readiness for accommodation. Most of the
major contributors to the literature of the Four Years Sejm had something to say
on the subject, and much of what they said was close to Butrymowicz’s elucu-
brations. There was almost universal agreement on the need to ban Jews from
alcohol retailing – Butrymowicz at least would have permitted them to conduct
the trade in towns. Kołłątaj seemingly insisted on leaving all other occupations
and professions open to them – but this was to be ‘without, however, infringing
the rights belonging to towns’, which meant that where municipalities (mainly in
the larger towns where the Jews hoped legally to be free to establish themselves)
enjoyed discriminatory laws, these would continue.40 Staszic, while banning the
Jews from alcohol trade, at least pointed out:
The nobleman complains that the Polish peasant is a terrible drunkard. Yet every noble-
man in his village or in his town establishes five or six taverns, a veritable trap to snare that
peasant. In these taverns he puts and chooses the most adept Jews, who might pay him the
most, that is, those who will most skilfully lead astray the peasants and get them drunk.41
Similar thoughts, all laced with condemnations of the Jews as cunning, base,
manipulative, exploitative continued to be found in even the most ‘progressive’
J U DA I C A 217
authors.42 That Jews deliberately undercut Christian craftsmen and traders,

whether out of malice, innate character, a readiness to put up with miserable
profits and a wretched standard of living, was a widely held view. Kołłątaj believed
far too many to be idle parasites, who should be forced into public works by the
commissions of the peace. Józef Pawlikowski, like Staszic, was at least prepared to
lay the ultimate blame on magnate exploitation.43 On the other hand, all felt that
given the right policies, a degree of closer, redeeming integration was possible.
There was broad agreement that the Commission for National Education should
devise some form of programme to coax the Jews into becoming more Polish.
Kołłątaj wanted the local school authorities to certify that Jewish rabbis and
teachers had a good command of Polish and Latin.44 Kołłątaj and Pawlikowski
wanted a Butrymowicz-style programme of assimilation by dress and language.45
Franciszek Jezierski subscribed to the stereotyped view of Jews ‘of cunning, base
spirit’, yet he at least saw that if Polish society was to reform itself, it had to involve
all its members. ‘If we want to reform the Jews . . . we must first change the way
of thinking of the nobles and the peasants . . .’46 For all that, like Butrymowicz,
no author was prepared to break the ultimate taboo by calling explicitly for the
election of Jews to hitherto Christian municipal magistracies.
One of the obstacles to a more radical approach to Jewish reform lay in the
attitude of Christian townsmen. Those who harboured reformist aspirations
wanted meaningful political representation. They also wished to clear the way
to greater urban economic prosperity. In practical terms, however, this meant
eliminating competition – and the prime source of competition came from
the Jews (it has to be said, that towns in Lithuania, where the importance of
Jewish economic activity was far more striking, were overall less hostile than
those of the Crown).47 The initial town programme was represented by Michael
Swinarski’s A Notification of the First Principle of the Towns of Poland, published
in January 1789 and endorsed by the city council of Old Warsaw (Swinarski,
the council’s recorder, had close family ties to noble society). A plea for urban
parliamentary representation, it was primarily a historical exposé of the towns’
decline. Swinarski attributed this to the loss of civic autonomy, erosion of the
towns’ Magdeburg-style rights, the encroachments of royal officials, the ‘loss’
of representation in the Sejm (not that towns had ever formally enjoyed such
a representation), the creation of privileged liberties exempt from municipal
authority, and the establishment of excessively numerous private fairs and
markets by noble landowners. Potentially useful immigrants had either been
deterred from settling in Poland, or even driven from it, by ‘a lasting misfortune’.
‘This greatest misfortune and punishment of townsfolk and of the whole country
are the Jews.’ By a combination of misguided royal privileges and native guile,
which allowed them to evade all restrictions, the Jews were able to secure a lodge-
ment in Poland’s towns ‘and took up all sorts of trades to the detriment of the
townspeople.’ ‘Wherever the Jews insinuated themselves, they ruined Christians.’

They borrowed monies from Christians and used the proceeds to undercut them,
destroy them economically and now were often unable to repay those debts that
they had incurred to maintain this deleterious process. Once they acquired a
monopoly of trade in a town, they refused to allow Christians to share. They
continued to use the same tactics in towns where the magistrates still held them
at bay – this was what they were planning for Warsaw itself. ‘It follows naturally
from this that the most illustrious Commonwealth, for the improvement of
the towns, if not all, at least for several leading ones in each province, should
deign to release the Jews from residence and devise a different means for such a
numerous people to live . . .’ Swinarski suggested forcing them into agriculture:
the vacuum filled by these internally expelled and resettled Jews would be filled
by foreign immigrants, who would flock to revive the towns. A special magistracy
with nationwide powers should be created to ensure these new laws would be
enforced.48 The Notification had nothing whatever to say about the evils of Jews
and drink, which featured so prominently in the szlachta’s own tracts.
One major publicist, though hardly sympathetic to the Jews, regarded
Swinarski’s presentation as self-interested pleading. Jacek Jezierski in his All
are Mistaken: a Conversation Between and Landowner and a Peasant of 1790,
thought that ‘true merchants’, that is, those conducting the export trade, were
confined to nobles (such as himself) and Jews. Other so-called merchants, that
is, the townsmen whose pretensions he so despised and opposed, were no more
than petty retailers and hawkers, who, at best, imported luxury trinkets which
demoralised society.49 Jews had the upper hand over Catholic Poles because they
were generally better educated. He dismissed Swinarski’s arguments in favour of
barring Jews from Warsaw as absurd, not least because at a time when under-
population was acknowledged as a serious problem, Swinarski and like-minded
thinkers proposed to ‘cure’ it by further depopulating the capital. If townsmen
were really to contribute to Poland’s prosperity, the sole way to do so for them
was to set up factories and manufacturers – and the only people Jezierski saw
doing this were foreign immigrants.50 Townsmen in general were, for Jezierski,
parasites and idlers. It was for these views that he incurred the wrath of Baudouin
de Courtenay – though it is noticeable that Baudouin avoided raising the Jewish
issue in his attacks on Jezierski.
The debates over the Jews stirred up considerable interest among the provin-
cial nobility. The 1788 sejmiki had almost nothing to say on their subject – those
of November 1790 had considerably more so. A number of assemblies, mainly
in Mazowsze, fell in with reformers’ demands for banning Jews from the alcohol
trade. Presumably, the impoverished petty nobility of the area viewed them
as competitors. On the other hand, the Wołyń assembly, in a palatinate with a
marked concentration of magnate properties, insisted that, at least on private
J U DA I C A 219
estates, Jews be allowed to conduct the alcohol trade unimpeded. The instruction
was also the only one to insist that there be no reduction in the scope of kehilla
authority – which meant, in effect, that the status quo was to be maintained.51
Most other assemblies which demanded Jewish reform contented themselves,
like Upita in Lithuania, with a generalised plea for ‘a reform of the Jews’.52 The
more detailed instructions reflected the tone of the wider debates. The county
of Czersk wanted to make ‘the Jewish nation . . . useful’. A start would be made
by requiring all Jewish parents to ensure their children were taught to read and
write in Polish; all legal and religious transactions were to be recorded in Polish
‘and even . . . the Talmud ought to be printed in the Polish language.’ Kehillot
and rabbis were to lose all non-religious jurisdiction – Jews were to seek resolu-
tion of grievances and disputes in the normal courts. The districts of Orsza and
Wołkowysk justified their demands for barring Jews from the alcohol trade by
claiming that they would no longer be ‘destructive and burdensome to the serfs.’
Those Jews not contributing to manufacture and trade were to be ‘directed to
agriculture’ if necessarily, encored the Ciechanów sejmik, by force. Jews spending
their time in ‘deceit and idleness’ were no longer to be tolerated.
Jews had long shown themselves to be skilled, discreet lobbyists of Sejm and
sejmiki. It was a feature of the Four Years Sejm that they became, for the first time
ever, openly, publicly involved in the debates generated on their own subject.
Almost at the very start of the Sejm, they had applied to it for permission to
secure 300 Jewish families permanent residence and trading rights in the capital,
which benefited from an erratically observed De non tolerandis Judaeis privilege.
This request was one of the chief targets of Swinarski’s Notification. During
the Sejm, their agitation was much encouraged by news of the measures taken
in France to dismantle Jewish discrimination, culminating in the full grant of
citizenship and legal equality to French Jews in September 1791.53 But all Jewish
pressure was determinedly resisted by Warsaw’s townsfolk. Their guilds had
been calling for the removal of Jews from the city’s precincts since at least 1786.
The profits Christian townsmen might have made from an unprecedentedly
prolonged and numerous noble presence were undermined, even threatened, by
the suspension of the city’s ban on Jewish activity while a Sejm was in session. The
guilds of furriers, tailors and tinsmiths felt particularly under pressure. In March,
April and May 1790, sporadic anti-Jewish riots erupted, and although there were
no deaths, troops had to be used to restore order. If anything, the disturbances
served only to alienate the already suspicious envoys from any sympathy for
widening urban rights.54
On the other hand, Poland’s Jews themselves were much divided on how far
any assimilation should go – if, indeed, it should take place at all. Those seeking
change primarily wanted the removal of all obstacles to settlement and the pur-
suit of any trade or occupation – and were ready to offer to pay higher rates of
tax in return for such concessions. Municipal citizenship was to be thrown open.
No one overtly suggested that access to municipal magistracies be permitted,
even though this should have followed in time if, as Jews also demanded, entry
into the guilds were to be made possible. Proposals mooted by individuals even
went as far as suggesting the eligibility of Jews for military conscription. But, by
and large, the Jews of Poland-Lithuania continued to see themselves as a separate
group whose separation ought to be preserved. For most, their world remained
in the culturally introspective universe depicted in the novels of Isaac Bashevis
Singer. The barriers dividing them from the gentile communities around them
were to be made less stark, but they were not to be removed. Individual Jews and
individual Jewish families, especially in and around Warsaw, might be so fully
culturally assimilated that they were indistinguishable from cultured gentiles.
But they were few and far between, too few to be able to muster the sort of
brilliant salon society their fellow-Jews were creating in contemporary Berlin,
Prussia’s restrictions on Jews notwithstanding. For the great majority of Poland-
Lithuania’s Jews, as much as for their gentile neighbours/rivals, French-style
emancipation and equalisation were unthinkable.55
The Four Years Sejm never found time to enact any legislation reforming
Poland’s Jewry. But it did lay out some pointers to a possible future. On 19 April
1790, jolted by the anti-Jewish disturbances in Warsaw, the Sejm set up a deputa-
tion to examine Jewish reform. Its two most active members were Jacek Jezierski
and Mateusz Butrymowicz. The Deputation formulated two sets of substantially
similar proposals in August 1790 and May 1791, although it was never fully able
to agree on either, a factor that contributed to the Sejm’s failure to take any action
in respect of the Jews. Even if it had done so, its decisions in this quarter, as in all
others, would have been overtaken by the catastrophic events of 1792.
The recommendations of the Deputation which carried majority support,
were, in essence, a summation of existing proposals – with much that had been
unsaid remaining so. No one, advised the Deputation ‘should be insulted or
persecuted by anyone because of their religion.’ All official transactions were to
drop the demeaning official designation of Jews as ‘infidels’, niewierni: from now
on, they were to be known as ‘people of the Old Law’, starozakonni. On the other
hand, laws against apostasy from Catholicism to Judaism (an almost unheard-of
occurrence) would be maintained. Rabbis, scribes, teachers and other communal
officials were to be made genuinely elective (rabbis for two-year terms, with scope
for re-election) by householders. The old kehilla courts would restrict themselves
to purely religious matters: they would not however be allowed to impose fines
nor to order the terem, the excommunication from the community which could
be so disastrous for individuals and their families. In all other matters, Jews were
to seek justice in the appropriate courts: municipal, royal, ecclesiastical or sei-
gneurial, depending on residence and the nature of the case involved. Ultimately,
J U DA I C A 221
all Jews were to be able to have final recourse to the state’s courts for the security
of their persons and properties. In all these bodies, the Deputation emphasised,
Jews were to be treated in exactly the same way as Christians. The Deputation
expressed its hope that the next Sejm would repeal the Jewish poll tax ‘regarding
it as indecent that they should be subject to a double taxation, for their religion
and as citizens’. In other words, Jews were to be subject only to the normal state
taxes. Presumably, they would still be liable to some form of special levy pending
the final liquidation of kehillot debts – an intractable problem the Deputation
assigned to the commissions of the peace and the state treasury to sort out.
Jews were to be formally admitted to ‘national citizenship’ (though this itself
was a concept which was not made clear). They were to be free to settle wherever
they wished and free to lease agricultural properties. They were to be free to take
up all trades, crafts, manufactures, or liberal professions. The much-reiterated
demands to exclude Jews from the alcohol trade were not repeated, as such.
However, ‘only he may truly be regarded as a citizen who assists his country from
a true residence by his labour or by useful industry’: living on premises leased
for the purposes of alcohol retail did not constitute ‘true residence’. On the same
note, the proposals explicitly approved the decisions made by four sejmiki in
recent years, those of Sandomierz, Sieradz, Rawa and Łęczyca, to exclude Jews
from leasing premises for the retail of alcohol. In other words, although there
was no explicit banning of Jews from this area of economic activity, strong
signals of discouragement to Jews and landowners alike were to be sent. This was
emphasised by the requirement that certification of citizenship was to be granted
by the civil-military commissions of the peace, against formal statements from
municipal or seigneurial authorities confirming the householder’s occupation,
sources of livelihood, residence and details of his family circumstances. Towns
and seigneurs issuing false attestations would be fined. Children leaving home
to set up on their own account were to produce similar documentation. Anyone
unable to justify himself to his local commission ‘may not only not be recognised
as a citizen, but may be regarded as a vagrant.’ Such persons were to be assigned
to factory labour and public works. As for the elderly and infirm with no other
means of support, the civil-military commissions would assign their mainten-
ance and residence to appropriate Jewish communities. Only those Jews would
be able to marry who could support themselves. From each kehilla, the teacher
would submit an annual register of births, circumcisions, funerals and marriages
to his commission of the peace, which would pass on these details to the state’s
Treasury Commission.
More positive steps were also to be taken to direct the Jews towards a degree
of assimilation. Jews were to adopt the dress of the Commonwealth’s Christian
inhabitants ‘as their [present] costume is a cause of uncleanliness and provokes
contempt and hatred from the commonalty’. The Polish language was to be used
in all Jewish ‘documents in general’, which, presumably meant in the first instance,
all legal transactions – the injunction was less explicit than Butrymowicz’s earlier
writings on the subject. The Commission for National Education was to ‘devise
means and lay down methods and regulations through which the youth of this
Jewish people, and the teachers who are to instruct these young people, might be
able to perfect them in all that which is fitting and useful to civil life.’56
Much of this was driven by a self-consciously enlightened agenda of making
the Jews ‘useful’. Inevitably, the proposals raised at least as many questions as
they answered. There was to be no obstruction of Jewish economic activity. The
alcohol trade was something of an exception, but because there was no abso-
lute prohibition on Jewish participation in it, more a nod in the direction of
enlightened prejudices, landowners could continue to make use of Jewish services
in this area. Yet the proposed legislation did nothing to oblige guilds to accept
Jews as members, even though one implication of the bestowal of municipal
citizenship was that Jews should be allowed to enter the guilds. Whether they
would have wished to do so, given the range of guilds’ restrictive practices, was
another matter. The same considerations applied to the place of Jews on muni-
cipal magistracies. The ending of a distinctive, estate-based Judaic jurisdiction
would presumably have left Jews vulnerable to the resentments of Christian
authorities in those towns where those authorities were strongest – that is, those
larger towns of the Crown in which the Jews were most anxious to establish
themselves. Logically, reformers should have urged the szlachta primarily to look
to the Jews, rather than Christian townsmen. After all, the overwhelming mass of
commercial activity in Poland was conducted by Jews. They were the ones who
had collectively the widest international connections, they were the ones who
showed the greatest entrepreneurship and flexibility. In late eighteenth-century
Poland, indeed, in late eighteenth-century Europe, such a partnership was liter-
ally unthinkable, as much among Christians as among Jews themselves. Religion
still defined identity and even, where, as in revolutionary and Napoleonic France,
it supposedly ceased to do so, age-old prejudices continued to exert their hold.
It could not be otherwise on territories inhabited by the most numerous Jewish
community in the world.
11
Towards new Utopias
On the morning of Tuesday, 3 May 1791, an unusually agitated atmosphere

surrounded the Sejm’s venue in the royal castle. The entrances and surrounding
streets were thronged with expectant townspeople. The public galleries were
packed. The royal lifeguard was much in evidence; officers close to the king
were conspicuously present in the debating chamber. Stanisław August made
his entrance at eleven o’clock. The Sejm had recently been in recess: of around
500 senators and envoys, 182 were present. About 100 had subscribed in advance
to a new constitutional project, the ‘Statute of Government’ (Ustawa Rządowa).
Seven hours of argument followed. Finally the king clambered onto his throne,
took an oath to the new Constitution, enthusiastically echoed by the majority
of the Sejm and the public. The cheering crowd bore Stanisław August off to
give thanks to Providence in the nearby collegiate church of St John, leaving a
stunned, bewildered rump of some dozen opponents in the Chamber.1 It was
a very Polish coup d’état. There had been one major illegality: the project had
not been circulated the statutory three days in advance. That and, of course, the
Statute of Government itself, was quite enough in the eyes of malcontents to
damn the Constitution of 3 May as ‘the grave of Liberty’.
What had been pushed through was a statement of principles rather than
a detailed constitutional reform. To understand what lay behind it, and why it
was, despite its contents, to be acceptable to the nobility, it is necessary to go
back to a law enacted on 21 April 1791, the Law on Towns. It had made conces-
sions to townsmen; it also conferred significant benefits on nobles. It drew the
sting of what feeble urban radicalism there was. Royal towns and their citizens
were declared to be free: freedom, a quality attributed to the nobility, was now
constitutionally and formally ascribed to another sector of Polish society. Urban
citizens could elect their magistrates and officials unimpeded, ‘a characteristic of
freedom’. Private and ecclesiastical jurisdictional enclaves within the towns and
their suburbs lost their distinctive status and were fully subjected to municipal
authority. The szlachta privilege of Neminem Captivabimus nisi iure victum, a
libertarian totem guaranteeing the nobility freedom from arrest without trial,
was extended to ‘persons settled in the towns.’ In a number of important respects,
townsmen were directly associated with government. Twenty-one towns (seven
from each Province) were designated as seats of new urban appeal courts: these
towns were each to elect, in advance of each Sejm, ‘one plenipotentiary by

majority vote’ from property-owning citizens (towns without such courts could
also put up candidates). During the Sejm, they would join gatherings of envoys
in provincial sessions, to be assigned places on the central Police and Treasury
Commissions and on the Assessories (the central courts dealing with urban
matters). On all these bodies, ‘in matters affecting towns and trade’, the pleni-
potentiaries would have vocem activam, that is, an active vote in deliberations.
In their capacity as members of these bodies, the urban plenipotentiaries could
submit, and speak freely to, the desiderata of the towns in the Sejm – although
that marked the limit of their parliamentary role. In the constituencies, three
townsmen could be elected to each civil-military commission of the peace.
Townsmen were free to practice as barristers in noble law courts and to serve in
judicial and administrative chancelleries.2
It was all a far cry from the ambitious demands for equal representation in
the Sejm. But, given their social and economic fragility, it was as much as the
towns could realistically aspire to. The unhindered right of election of civic
officers was meant as a safeguard from the overbearing interference of state
functionaries. Although the legislation did not specifically mention the Jews, who
often operated from privileged jurydyki, the extension of municipal jurisdiction
over private liberties would go some way to meet demands for the extension
of Christian magistrates’ authority over them. The Law flattered townsmen by
allowing for the ennoblement, after two years’ service, of their plenipotentiaries
sitting on the state commissions. Each Sejm was to ennoble an additional thirty
townsmen, giving priority to those who had distinguished themselves in the
army, the civil-military commissions, who had established manufactures or
specialised in trading in Polish commodities. Some of this was made possible
because the law overturned legislation enacted in 1786, barring townsmen from
officerships. Only officerships in the National Cavalry, the particular reserve of
the szlachta, remained closed to commoners (though not once they had been
ennobled). Those who reached the rank of captain would become ennobled, as
would those attaining the senior office of regent in the chancelleries. Townsmen
were allowed to buy landed property; those who purchased an entire village or
town and paid at least 200 zlotys in the new land tax, were entitled to ennoble-
ment at the next Sejm. All canonries and prelacies, unless specifically earmarked
for nobles, were opened to townsmen.
This was less of a bonfire of szlachta vanities than might at first sight have
appeared. The more radically inclined were uncomfortably conscious that
urban elites would be drawn into the nobility. There would be no Parisian-style
events in Warsaw. Nor were the ennoblement mechanisms so different to what
had gone before. Over a period of three weeks in November 1790, the Sejm had
sanctioned some 400 ennoblements, many of them the almost random friends
T O WA R D S N E W U T O P I A S 225
and acquaintances of envoys and senators. The 1764, 1767–8 and 1773–5 Sejmy
had, between them, sanctioned at least 420 ennoblements. While some sejmiki
were irritated by such social largesse, most were more concerned that the
necessary chancellery fees be paid and that those newly ennobled did genuinely
set themselves up as landed gentlemen. The Lublin sejmik, in November 1790,
which demanded that future ennoblements required the sanction of the sejmiki,
proposed a cap of ten such recommendations for each assembly – ironically,
this would have produced ennoblement on a far more lavish scale than the April
1791 law allowed.3
The most important beneficiaries of the Law on Towns were not townsmen
at all: they were the szlachta. An early draft of the law spoke explicitly of confer-
ring freedom on towns as a means of supporting the nobility.4 ‘All the citizens
of a town, be it of noble or of urban birth’ were free to share in the full range
of economic activities. In 1775, a law had been passed opening up all forms of
economic activity to the nobility without derogation from their status. The new
law extended this to service on town magistracies and reception into municipal
citizenship. Nobles had always unashamedly practiced occupations they should
not have done. April 1791 not only set the seal on this process, it opened up
a whole new area of reward and office-holding. The extensive range of urban
courts set up by the Law on Towns enhanced the new opportunities. It specifically
allowed for the election of nobles, besides commoners, to the twenty-one new
urban appellate courts (each of which would have five elective judges). Even poor
nobles stood to benefit: towns were not to withhold citizenship (nor charge fees
for it) from ‘all honest foreigners, as well as craftsmen and all free men’.5
In one sweeping measure, the nobility had opened up an imposing array
of new activities for themselves. It was not just a question of putting a stop to
the erection of Parisian lanterns; in traditional noble demonology, townsmen
were always cast as the partners of absolutist-minded monarchs. Now, they had
been transformed into partners of the nobility. Of course, this was a different
nobility from that of Sarmatian myth. These nobles (and urban citizens) were
physiocratic instruments, rather than self-sacrificing defenders of privilege and
country. It was above all solid property-owners in whom the Law on Towns
showed interest. The fact that concessions were made to townsmen could only
enhance the Law’s progressive and moderate credentials. Ignacy Potocki was one
of those who felt that the rights of man could spread throughout Polish society
only when a sufficiently large number of Poles was ennobled. The April law was
a step in that direction. If nothing else, it built a bridge between commoners and
nobles. But its ambiguities and protean possibilities of interpretation also made
of it a signal exercise in smoke-and-mirrors constitutionalism.
The same was true of the Third of May Constitution. It was made possible by
a rapprochement between Stanisław August and Ignacy Potocki, who, for all his
interest in enlightened reform, had been an intemperate opponent of the king in

the 1770s and 1780s. But once the Four Years Sejm got under way and Russian
tutelage crumbled, the road had opened to a constructive politics. Potocki and
others like him, such as Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski and his young son, Adam
Jerzy, found that the pursuit of reformist aspirations had become a practical poss-
ibility. Former tactical alignments with diehard conservatives were unsustainable
in the new atmosphere. Emanuel Rostworowski has painstakingly demonstrated
how, from December 1790, the ‘Statute of Government’ took shape in a set of
Byzantine exchanges that mystified contemporaries (let alone later generations),
primarily between Potocki and the king, but with significant contributions from,
among others, Hugo Kołłątaj. Potocki had become convinced that the plodding
Sejm, left to itself, would achieve little. After Austria had agreed to withdraw
from the Turkish war under the convention of Reichenbach in July 1790 and
Russia and Sweden had made peace at Värälä the following month, it was clear
that the favourable international conjuncture which had made the Sejm possible
was coming to a close.
The Sejm had to be made to agree to a constitutional fait accompli. Its principal
architect was the king: his tactful patience, his obvious desire to work with men
of good will among the tortured coteries of envoys, his lack of vindictiveness
towards old opponents, all served to build up his authority. His astute projection
and cultivation of the maxim ‘Król z narodem, naród z królem’, ‘The king with the
Nation, the Nation with the king’ at a time when the ‘nation’ was snarling with
itself over elective and hereditary kingship, brought at least a promise of a resolu-
tion of the age-old tension inter maiestatem ac libertatem. It was Stanisław August
above all who wanted something like British-style parliamentary monarchy; it
was he who was painfully conscious, after years of humiliating experience at the
hands of his own subjects, just how little prepared most were for radical change.
He understood how far Ignacy Potocki’s failure to appreciate this had weakened
his standing with the szlachta. Yet he sympathised with would-be reformers and
was determined to project the best possible image of the fractious Rzeczpospolita
to enlightened opinion abroad. The ‘Statute of Government’ was an attempt to
ride these crosscurrents. It held firmly with the past – and yet offered promises
for the future.6
The preamble to the new constitution acknowledged the ‘long-established
failings of our government’ – something which could never have been publicly
proclaimed a generation earlier. It was up to Poles themselves, during this ‘fleeting
moment’, to escape their humiliating subjection to foreign powers. Article I, ‘The
dominant religion’ was characteristically ambivalent. Catholicism was Poland’s
ruling faith – yet ‘we owe all men of whatever belief the peaceful practice of their
faith and the protection of government’. Such toleration was qualified: the laws
committing to exile apostates from Catholicism remained in force. Enlightened
toleration was embraced; religious hardliners were at least meant to be appeased.

It set the tone for the rest of the document.
Article II, ‘The landowning nobility’ (Szlachta ziemianie), written in general
terms, did not necessarily or clearly apply only to landowning nobles. All nobles
were equal, enjoying security and freedom of persons and property, moveable
and immoveable. Government existed specifically to protect these freedoms, not
to infringe them, for (as physiocracy would have it), personal security and prop-
erty were ‘the true bond of society’. The szlachta were ‘the foremost defenders of
liberty and of this constitution’. All their old privileges accorded under the Piast
and Jagiellonian dynasties were solemnly confirmed.
Article III dealt with the towns: it simply affirmed the Law of 21 April to be
an integral part of the new Constitution. Article IV, ‘The rural peasantry’, (Chłopi
włościanie) deployed standard enlightened rhetoric. It was from the peasants
that ‘flows the richest source of the nation’s wealth’; they were ‘the foremost
strength of the country’. Christianity, humanity and ‘our own well-understood
interest’ required they be taken ‘under the protection of the law and the national
government.’ The government would underwrite and guarantee contracts and
agreements made between village communities, individuals and their seigneurs.
They would be perpetually enforceable and could not be unilaterally altered.
It represented a declaration of principle opposed to seigneurial arbitrariness –
though the Statute was careful to spell out that it secured for seigneurs ‘all the
benefits belonging to them from the peasants’. What existed would remain as
it was: but the future was open to change. ‘We declare the entire freedom of all
persons, both those who newly arrive, and also of those who may have left, but
now wish to return to our country.’ Presumably, this would also apply to future
departures and returns As soon as any such person ‘sets foot on Polish soil, he
is entirely free to use his labour how and where he wishes; he is free to conclude
contracts of residence, labour dues or rents’; he was free to remain, or to leave,
once his obligations had been discharged. In a state whose ruling order was as
attached to serfdom as the szlachta, a new trajectory was being set. Stanisław
August was an advocate of the incremental emancipation of a backward, ignor-
ant peasantry – a belief in which he was strengthened by events in France. In
their more diffuse way, these provisions echoed those put forward by Andrzej
Zamoyski in his ill-fated law code of 1780 for the gradual erosion of peasant
servitude. However, proposals floated in earlier drafts of the article for explicit
recognition of peasant freedom of movement and emancipation after military
service were dropped.7
Articles II, III and IV, in an immediate, practical sense, altered little. The role
of the szlachta as ruling order was reaffirmed and its scope for domination of
the Rzeczpospolita was broadened. Yet it could not remain what it had been. The
opening up of municipal and economic activity, the creation of formal, even
automatic mechanisms for entry into the ranks of the nobility would inevitably
see to that. Townsmen were given a new respectability, at the very least through
association with the nobility in office-holding and privilege-sharing. The
Constitution’s last article, Article XI, on the ‘National Armed Forces’, was to
emphasise this by asserting that ‘All citizens are . . . the defenders of the entirety
of the state and of their national freedoms’ – not just the szlachta alone. The
foundation was being laid for a new ruling class, or, more accurately, a new citizen
class, which was based on ownership of landed – urban as well as rural – prop-
erty. What had been conceded to the peasantry was little enough: but the law
had invested them with a new dignity. Polish society would change, gradually,
via Kołłątaj’s ‘gentle revolution’. Reformers could expect the peasantry to change
with it.
Article V, ‘The Government: the definition of the public powers’ was a succinct
amalgam of republicans’ Rousseau and the king’s Montesquieu.
Every form of authority in human society derives from the will of the nation. So that
the integrity of the dominions, the freedom of the citizens and the social order should
forever remain in equal balance, three powers are to constitute the government of the
Polish nation, from now in perpetuity. The legislative power is vested in the assembled
Estates, the supreme executive power in the King and Custodial Council and the judicial
power in the jurisdictional bodies set up, or to be set up, for this purpose.
Article VI enlarged on ‘The Sejm, that is, the legislative power’. The Polish
parliament remained bicameral, presided over by the king. It would meet for
two-year terms, reconvening at need after the initial sessions. But old rhetoric
about the status of the elected envoys was now transformed into legal precept:
‘The Chamber of Envoys, as the representation and repository of the national
sovereignty will be the temple of legislation. All legislative projects will be decided
first in the Chamber of Envoys.’ Priority would be given to constitutional, civil
and criminal law and regular taxation. The royal chancellery would continue to
send out its proposals in advance of the Sejm for consideration by the sejmiki,
which would communicate their responses through the instructions they would
issue to their envoys. The envoys would decide all other business, including ques-
tions of war and peace, alliances, and extraordinary state expenditure. ‘Yet since
legislation cannot be conducted by all and the nation foregoes its powers in this
respect to its representatives, that is, to its freely elected envoys, We hereby affirm
that the envoys elected at the sejmiki are, in matters of law and of the general
needs of the nation, to be regarded as the representatives of the entire nation
and the repository of the nation’s general confidence.’ In other words, while
instructions remained, they would not bind. Rousseau’s chimeric ideal and that
of his republican admirers had been laid to rest. The king had stood firm and got
his way. Moreover, ‘All matters, in all places, are to be resolved by the vote of the
majority. We therefore abolish in perpetuity the liberum veto.’ Bills required the
majority assent of both Chambers to become law. But the Chambers were not
equal. Bills would pass from the envoys to the senators, but the latter could, at
most, exercise a suspensory veto to the next Sejm. If the Chamber of Envoys then
resolved to confirm the original bill without modification, it would go through.
Confederacies, as old as the Rzeczpospolita itself, were condemned as ‘contrary
to the spirit of this Constitution, subversive of government and destructive of
society.’ Government would henceforth be conducted through normal channels,
not twisted and undermined through political paroxysms. Previous generations
had seen in the Sejm a fortress defending hallowed privileges and freedoms.
The new model parliament created by the Statute of Government would be an
active, dynamic, achieving organism. Lest there be any doubt, every twenty-five
years an extraordinary Sejm would meet to review and if necessary revise the
Constitution itself.
‘No government, no matter how well-constructed, can subsist without
effective executive power’, began Article VII, ‘The King, the executive power’. An
executive would make good what Poland had lacked: a means to enforce the laws.
It would be vested in ‘the King in his Council, which will be called the Custodial
Council of the Laws’ (Straż Praw). All magistracies were bound to obedience. The
Council could do no more than ‘watch over the integrity and implementation of
the laws’. It could not enact new legislation, it could not even interpret existing
laws. It could not raise taxes on its own account. It could conduct diplomacy and
conclude international agreements only on a provisional basis. All its foreign pol-
icy decisions were subject to confirmation by the Sejm. Under Article IX, it would
also act as a council of regency. It would consist of the primate and five specified
ministers: of the police, war, and treasury, two chancellors, one of whom would
hold the portfolio of foreign affairs. It would be up to the king to name ministers
and to appoint them to the Council. The Sejm’s marshal was also to attend as
the eyes and ears of parliament. He would not involve himself in the discussions,
but he was entitled, under certain set conditions, to recall the Sejm from recess.
The monarch was head of the executive. Article VII accordingly went on to
settle the nature of the Commonwealth’s kingship. It reminded its audience of
‘the disasters of the interregna [which] periodically afflicted our form of govern-
ment’ and praised Poland’s flowering under the dynasty of the Jagiellonians. In
language designed to assuage szlachta sensibilities, it made Polish monarchy
hereditary, while declaring it ‘forever elective from among [princely] families’.
The nobility would elect a dynasty, which would succeed by primogeniture in
the male line. Should the dynasty die out, ‘we reserve to the Nation the inalien-
able right of electing to the throne another family’. Rhetorical sleight of hand
contrived both to introduce heredity and to preserve the elective principle.
The November 1790 sejmiki had overwhelmingly rejected hereditary kingship;

they had also overwhelmingly supported Frederick Augustus of Saxony as
Poniatowski’s successor. The Constitution now named him next-in-line and
declared his daughter (for there was yet no son) Maria Augusta Nepomucena, as
‘Infanta of Poland’. Frederick Augustus could choose a suitable husband for her,
with the Sejm’s approval.8
The relationship with the new monarch would be clarified in a new set of pacta
conventa. The royal person, however, would always be ‘sacred and inviolable; he
does nothing of himself, he can be called to account to the Nation for nothing;
he is not an absolute ruler, but should be the father and head of the Nation’. This
was English constitutionalism transplanted to Poland. This was to affirm how
Poles had felt their monarch should be and how eulogised history had made
dead monarchs be. But it was completely different from how they had looked
on reigning incumbents in practice. The Third of May transformed potential foe
into caring, constitutional friend.
The royal distributive power was reaffirmed. The king would command the
army in wartime – there was no mention of the hetmani. He would promote
officers and appoint officials, including bishops, even ministers. Astonishingly,
resolutions of the Straż, in order to be legally binding, needed only the decision
of the king and any one ministerial countersignature. It did not even have to be
the minister to whose jurisdiction that resolution would ordinarily belong. Of
course, the countersigning minister would be held responsible for the resolu-
tion. Any minister could be dismissed on a two-thirds majority vote of the two
Chambers of the Sejm in joint session. Furthermore, a simple majority vote of
the joint Chambers could send a minister for trial to the Sejm court – impeach-
ment: he stood to answer with his life and property for his actions. The Custodial
Council’s decisions would be implemented by the central state Commissions
created before and during the Four Years Sejm. That is, the Commission for
National Education, and the new Commissions of the Two Nations for Police,
the Military and the Treasury (all elective in the Sejm). They would act through
the civil-military commissions of the peace.
Article VIII proposed a thorough reform of the judiciary. The sejmiki would
elect a new range of local courts of first instance, which would sit throughout
the year. They would hear not just the suits of the szlachta, but of all landowners.
They would complement the municipal courts to be set up under the Law on
Towns. Each of the three Provinces would receive new Referendary courts. These
would no longer judge pleas solely from peasants settled on crown properties, but
would also hear ‘cases involving free peasants’. In other words, tentative provision
was promised, for the first time, for a separate national judiciary for non-enserfed
peasants – something that would be needed to make real the guarded concessions
of Article IV on peasant freedom. Each Sejm would hold elections to the Sejm
court, to try crimes against the state. A new civil and criminal code was promised.
It might yet prove possible to resurrect elements of the failed Zamoyski Code.
The Statute of Government took the highly unusual step of providing for the
education of the royal princes (Article X). The king himself and the Custodial
Council were named responsible. But the Commission for National Education
would draw up a plan of their education, aimed at continually instructing ‘the
minds of the heirs to the throne in religion, love of virtue, of their country, of
freedom and of the national Constitution’. Their governor would be appointed
by the Sejm, to which he would answer.
The Constitution was a stunning exercise in political rhetoric. It contained
ideas long mooted in political writings, and heady suggestions new to the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s constitutional traditions. But it had to be
fleshed out. The sum of necessary legislation was enacted between 24 March 1791
(with a law on the sejmiki) and the final conclusion of the Sejm in May 1792.
To understand this supplementary legislation and, ultimately, why the Third of
May Constitution was to gain a real measure of acceptance, it is necessary to go
back to September 1789. For it was then that the Sejm set up a Deputation ‘to
draft projects for the form of government.’ This eleven-man body, presided over
by the ex-Barist bishop Adam Krasiński, but in truth driven by the indefatigable
Ignacy Potocki, was charged with the official preparation of a new constitutional
programme. Not a sudden coup d’éclat, but part of parliament’s own regular pro-
ceedings.9 It was this Deputation for the Form of Government which produced,
in December 1789, the short, open-ended statement of Principles for the Reform
of the Form of Government in response to an announcement from the Prussian
government, that it could not conclude an alliance with Poland until it had at
least an outline notion of the shape of a future constitution. Those Principles, as
finally approved by the Sejm between 17 and 23 December, expressly safeguarded
‘the liberty of the szlachta estate.’ But this was only after fearsome debate. In their
original version, as drafted by Potocki, however, they referred not to the szlachta
at all, but to ‘nation’ and ‘citizens’. His was a deliberate intention to build in a
flexible terminology which might, in the future, lend itself to the widest inter-
pretation. Some already considered even peasants to be citizens. It was something
of which the envoys were well aware – which is why they insisted on restricting
the Principles to the nobility. All that remained of Potocki’s hoped-for constitu-
tional contraband was an acknowledgement that the state had an obligation ‘to
secure the rights of property of every inhabitant’ and that the protection of the
government should be extended ‘to all [inhabitants] in general’.10
The same wishful hope of change suffused the official Proiekt do Formy Rządu,
Project for the Form of Government, a monstrous concoction of 692 articles,
tabled on 2 August 1790.11 Its underlying object was to provide a legislature and
executive that would assure the Commonwealth of good governance, but where
the central authority could pose no threat to cherished liberties. The szlachta
nation would control the legislature: the executive would be kept firmly in its
subordinate place through elaborate checks and balances. The Proiekt sought to
cover every aspect of Poland’s governance: the Sejm, the monarchy, the putative
Custodial Council, the Central commissions of Police, the Army, Treasury and
Education, down to the sejmiki and the local commissions of the peace. A suite
of ‘Cardinal’ Laws’ laid down the basic rights and obligations of all estates – only
the Jews were left out. Quite unlike the future Statute of Government, this was a
comprehensive constitutional blueprint.
‘The government . . . of the Commonwealth . . . will be the honourable
obligation of the knightly estate’ – the szlachta nation was in charge, expressing
‘the General Will’ through its elected representatives.12 Stanisław August would
continue to appoint to the full range of existing senatorial and national offices,
but his successors would lose most of their old patronage powers. They would
be able to appoint only to bishoprics and honorific offices – Rousseau’s idea of
leaving at the king’s disposal a residue of innocuous posts. Beyond that, the king
would be allowed to appoint senators and ministers from shortlists presented by
the sejmiki and the Sejm. Parliament would elect directly to the Custodial Council
and the central executive commissions.13
The sejmiki would drive legislation through binding instructions. To ensure
their independence, active participation in these local assemblies would be
confined to those nobles (and their sons over the age of eighteen) who were
landowners or who held land as collateral for monies they had advanced. The
poor, and therefore dependent, would have no say. Moreover, election was only
for those who had some experience behind them. No one below the age of
twenty-three, and who had not performed prior, specified military or civilian
service, could be made envoy.14 The king and Custodial Council would submit
proposals for new legislation to the sejmiki. So, too, would the local commissions
of the peace. Finally, the constituencies could proffer their own suggestions.
Cardinal laws could be amended only by a unanimity of instructions. Non-
cardinal constitutional laws and taxes could be changed on a three-quarters
majority of instructions, civil and criminal laws on a simple majority. Bills would
be registered as law within twenty-four hours of final approval.15 Envoys were
answerable to the relationary sejmiki. Those found wanting would be tried by
the local land court (sąd ziemski, the court of first instance) and, if convicted,
would be barred from all public office for the next two years.16 Envoys could vote
on their own initiative only on amendments to bills relating to administrative
matters presented by the Custodial Council and the central commissions.17
Otherwise, they were the passive instruments of their constituencies.
In parliament, the Chamber of Envoys had the upper hand: the Senate
could exercise a purely suspensory veto on the Chamber’s bills. The Sejm
could be reconvened at any time before the expiry of its usual two-year term.
Confederacies were outlawed. Poland-Lithuania would continue to exist as a dual
state. The alternata, whereby every third Sejm met not in Warsaw, but in Grodno
in Lithuania, remained in force. The king, ‘at the head of the legislative as of the
executive power’, was a figurehead.18 Though nominally president of the Senate
and of the Custodial Council, his attendance was not essential to either. The Sejm,
not the king, would choose twelve persons to the Straż from among ministers,
senators or szlachta.19 The king could preside and vote in plenary sessions of the
Custodial Council, but his vote was on a par with that of other members.20 The
king had to be weak, because the monarchy would be made hereditary. The same
‘concession’ to noble sentiment was offered that was to be made in the Statute
of Government: ‘The Polish throne . . . will be elective through the choice of a
family’.21 The king had the right to command the army in wartime, if he chose
to exercise it, but he would be advised by a council of war, whose membership
would be largely determined by the Sejm.22
The role of the Custodial Council would lie primarily in the supervision
(dozierać) of the procedures of the executive, the judiciary and, legislature.
When necessary, it would reconvene parliament and supervise foreign policy. It
would be responsible for the education of royal princes. But ‘[the exercise] by
the Custodial Council of the legislative power, the judicial power and the power
to interpret the laws are clearly and emphatically prohibited’. That would have
been almost a ‘power’ on a par with that of the legislative, the executive and the
judicial.23 The Straż was more of an inspectorate than an executive, answer-
able in all things to the Sejm. Its subordinate bodies, the Police, Military and
Treasury Commissions of the Two Nations and the Commission for National
Education, were subject to stringent safeguards. Thus, the Police Commission
would be charged, in the broadest sense, with upholding the full range of what
the eighteenth century understood by ‘police’: public order and security, public
morality and decency, public health provision, assistance in case of disasters and
so on. Most of its activity would be restricted to overseeing the administration
of royal towns, with the ultimate goal of removing all obstacles to full freedom
of trade and occupation, issuing periodic ‘admonitions’, which ‘are to enlighten
citizens in that which might be useful or harmful.’ Its mission was to conduct an
hortatory campaign of physiocratic education while ‘in no way interfering with
agriculture, nor restricting freedom or facility of trade, labour or manufacture
[and] not involving itself in citizens’ domestic arrangements.’24
The Commission for National Education would produce the glue holding this
constitutional edifice together through ‘the uniform education and exercise of
young citizens, fully in accordance with the constitution of a free government.’
It was to compile ‘a Catechism of Government, as concise and as precise as
possible, in which the entire content of the Constitution of the Commonwealth
will be expounded’, not only in schools, but through all churches: the new con-
stitution would be sacralised. The Commission was to have the power to order
monasteries to open parish schools (that is, aimed at the peasantry) out of their
own resources and would lay down their curriculum.25
The proposals aimed to set up a machina rządu, a ‘machine of government’,
which would finally render the szlachta polity effective. The liberum veto had
been a brutally simple means of protecting the nobility’s rights and privileges.
Any attempt to replace it while also permitting an effective state apparatus to
emerge was bound to be highly complex. A weak executive – the Straż Praw – was
not enough: it, and its subordinate bodies were subjected to a whole range of
additional checks and balances. The representation of all, except the Commission
for National Education, had to reflect the balance of the three Provinces of
Wielkopolska. Małopolska and Lithuania.26 The Police Commission was spe-
cifically forbidden to infringe the rights, property or liberties of any citizen. No
kind of spying or secret denunciations were permissible. If its officials caused
any injury, they would be liable before the courts.27 Neither the Treasury nor the
Military Commissions, nor the local commissions of the peace could unilaterally
undertake any form of action that did not have prior Sejm approval.28
Should the Straż issue any order the central Commissions felt was illegal,
they could, if it persisted, demand a summons of the Sejm, which the Custodial
Council could not refuse.29 All citizens were free to submit signed statements of
complaint against any Commission to the Sejm (and, indeed, against any aspect
of government).30 Every care was taken to ensure that the different ‘powers’ did
not impinge on one another. Senators with seats on the Custodial Council and
royal ministers would have no voting rights in the Sejm.31 Full, voting members
of the Straż and Central commissions could hold any other office, save on the
Commission for National Education; nor could he attend any sejmik.32 No com-
missioner of the peace could combine his post with that of envoy, deputy, judge
or any office on a central commission or Straż.33 The independence of the sejmiki
was to be further safeguarded by barring them to all nobles in paid service, be
it public or private. Republican purity demanded such a massive exclusion of
experienced, albeit supposedly predisposed in some interest, manpower from
the electoral process.34
The complex checks and balances were there to provide reassurance, although
some could never be reassured enough. Thus, the provisions for the Treasury
Commissions contained a novelty that went beyond mere rhetoric. ‘Every
government’ needed to know the state of its population. And so, it was the duty
of the Commissions to prepare for each new parliament a population census
(to be conducted through the parish clergy) ‘without distinction of estate and
condition, classifying as Christians, Tatars, Jews and Karaites; and with a schedule
of sexes, marriages, births and burials . . .’35 The szlachta, like gentry elsewhere,
had always resisted such censuses. Now they were to become one statistic among
many for the benefit of a new (physiocratic) form of government. Efforts to pre-
serve the szlachta’s position could not disguise the new threats to it. Townsmen
were to be allowed to acquire landed property and leases on crown lands and to
hold ecclesiastical canonries and other benefices hitherto barred to them. They
would also be free to hold commissions in the army. Those who reached the rank
of colonel would automatically receive hereditary nobility.36 The Deputation did
not formally recommend the admission of ‘municipal envoys’ to parliament, but
it raised the possibility, leaving it to a final decision by the Sejm. On the other
hand, three urban representatives were to sit on the Police Commission, alongside
the twelve noble commissioners. That Commission was also to nominate three
townsmen to serve as advisory assessors. Townsmen would sit on an executive
body with authority over the nobility at large.37 The central Commissions may
have been barred from interfering with the affairs of private estates, yet landlords
who wilfully refused to maintain roads and bridges across their properties in
good condition were to be fined and were to recompense travellers for any losses.
Worse still, the Proiekt affirmed the right of appeal in civil matters from courts
in all the towns (not just the royal ones) of the Crown and Lithuania to the aulic
assessory courts, which had hitherto heard appeals only from royal towns.38 Even
if this was simple oversight, it was alarming.
The Proiekt had relatively little to say about the serfs, yet what it did say must
have struck many as disturbingly reminiscent of the Zamoyski Code. It did not
do anything as radical as suggest even a limited programme of emancipation
(unless it lay in the stipulation that urban owners of land could not enjoy any of
the noble prerogatives that went with it, which would presumably have included
ownership of serfs).39 But it did set out to discourage, and financially affect,
abusive serf-owners. Aggravated wounding, murder and rape could all result in
the victims and their families being freed in perpetuity and compensation, fines
and even capital punishment being imposed on the perpetrators. Though no
mechanism was laid down for affected peasants to make good their claims, these
entitlements did figure among the Proiekt’s ‘Cardinal laws’. Sooner or later, some
kind of claim under these provisions would inevitably be made. The regulations
for the Treasury Commissions did, however, state that the jurisdiction of their
fiscal courts extended to ‘the imposition of levies not permitted by law, under
any pretext or pretence in towns, townships and villages of any kind’.40 Scope
here for appeals to be heard against landlords who exceeded customary or agreed
norms with their serfs.
The Polish-Lithuanian state functioned on the basis of gentlemanly ama-
teurishness. The szlachta served, supposedly, out of love for the public weal. To
the framers of the Proiekt, this was no longer enough. The rhetoric of selfless,
sacrificial service had produced a shambles, which had to be replaced by a
disciplined, systematic professionalism. Assessors advising the new land courts

of first instance were, in future, to have university-awarded legal qualifications
in ‘natural and political law and the law of nations’, in Polish law and a year’s
practical legal experience in the local chancelleries. So too were all barristers and
recorders (pisarze) to the Tribunals. The highest non-senatorial office at local
level, that of podkomorzy, whose duties included the resolution of boundary
disputes, would in future have to show a certificate of proficiency in surveying
and boundary law from the Principal Schools (universities), as would their
assistant surveyors (komornicy). Such qualifications had never been required
before. Similar legal qualifications were to be required of all those working in the
chancelleries attached to all the central organs of state.41 Hitherto, the szlachta
had picked up such posts as a matter of right, learning on the job. All this was
set to change.
That was not the half of it. It was not stated outright that those elective pin-
nacles of most nobles’ aspirations, that is, local judgeships, deputyships to the
Tribunals and envoyships to the Sejm, would require university qualifications.
But in future, no one was to be allowed to hold these posts unless they had earlier
held assessorships or recorderships, or the posts of podkomorzy or komornik, all
positions which would need university study. Envoys would have to have held
some form of judicial office – again, requiring a university qualification. There
was to be a period of grace of between three and eight years before these provi-
sions were to come into effect, but at the end of that period, there would be a new
nobility, enlightened through the national educational curriculum and through
attendance at the hitherto largely spurned universities. A new nation adequate to
the enlightened constructs of Potocki and like-minded reformers would finally
be formed. Lest there be any doubts as to this, ordinary teachers in the secondary
schools and colleges were to be deemed to be on a level with district officials:
after ten years’ service, they would then be entitled to proceed to all the same
offices as serving district officials. Directors of colleges would be on a par with
palatinate officials; university teachers were to be equalised in status to provincial
officials; and rectors of universities were to be placed on equal footing with state
secretaries, referendaries and recorders. The equivalency would not apply to com-
moners. But what Potocki was doing was endowing the pedagogical profession
with an unprecedented new prestige and directing role within the Rzeczpospolita
that might be.42 The nobility had long lived in an ageing Utopia. Potocki and the
Deputation were building a new one, based on republican checks and balances,
rejuvenated by physiocratic economics and the enlightening of the nobility.
Any hopes that the szlachta at large would embrace these aspirations were
dashed by the November 1790 sejmiki. As we have already seen, most were hos-
tile to hereditary monarchy. ‘Elective families’ fooled no one. Around half of the
sejmiki specifically engaged with the Proiekt do Formy Rządu.43 Only the Minsk
sejmik had a good word to say for it, praising its authors as enlightened, industri-
ous patriots, before launching into a series of reservations, dealing mainly with
the excessively generous emancipation of peasants injured by their seigneurs. But
the instruction made perfectly clear the local nobles’ wider fears for their ‘hon-
ours and privileges’. All those assemblies that did not address the Deputation’s
proposals directly adopted demands which would have largely nullified them.
Virtually any aspect of the Proiekt was liable to fall foul of the sejmiki. Some
were particularly blunt. Kraków saw the proposals as ‘aiming in the future
towards despotism.’ Ciechanów complained that the Proiekt ‘seems to secure the
appearances of freedom and property’ but in fact, curtailed both, ‘particularly
in reducing the age-old superiority of the szlachta estate’s privileges over other
inhabitants.’ The Nur assembly instructed its envoys to oppose the ‘Projekta’ of
the Deputation for Government Reform ‘as contrary to the liberty of the knightly
estate.’ The Wołyń szlachta saw in the Proiekt ‘an attempt at the suppression
of citizens’ liberties’. The enhanced powers of the Commission for National
Education stirred sensitive hackles, particularly regarding the imposition of
an educational bar on office-holding. To all intents and purposes, the szlachta
rejected the Proiekt.
Even before the November 1790 sejmiki, Ignacy Potocki was having doubts
as to whether ‘the stupidity of the Poles’ justified his faith in a general will
emanating from the ranks of the nobility.44 The instructions completed that
disenchantment. Everything he had worked for, an enlightened republican
education, a new, outward-looking szlachta democracy which would welcome
change, reform and the emancipation of the enserfed, would lie in ruins if the
general will was actually exercised. He deemed most instructions ‘absurdities’,
‘contrary to common sense and the conscience of the envoys’. They gave Potocki
‘the worst opinion of my nation, or rather, of the noble republic of which I am
a member’. It was the need to compromise with these ‘Sarmatian’ views and to
secure a reforming majority in the Sejm which led to his final rapprochement
with the king and the devising of the 3 May Constitution.45
One part of the Proiekt, much amended, was actually passed. This was the law
on sejmiki of 24 March 1791, wearily debated over a three-month period. Aspects
of Potocki’s original proposals in the Proiekt were retained. The restriction of
participation in sejmiki to landowners and their sons was affirmed. The fiscal
threshold of the right to participate was set low for hereditary landowners:
anyone paying any form of direct taxation. But a much higher threshold was
set for nobles holding land in life tenure (as opposed to outright ownership): a
minimum of 100 zlotys payable under the land tax. Landless and poorer nobles
renting land from others were barred – they could scarcely be regarded as
politically independent. On the other hand, the exclusion of all persons in any
form of salaried state service was dropped, since it would have excluded virtually
anyone of any political or administrative experience: republican probity could

only be taken so far. All that remained of the Deputation’s proposals on the legal
qualifications of envoys (and other comparable elective posts) was the demand
that candidates to envoyships must have held some form of prior, active office.
In reality most candidates had always held some such posts. But the vision of
a highly educated, professionalised corps of public servants, certified by the
Principal Schools, was buried. On the other hand, once the Sejm accepted the
logic of restricting participation in sejmiki to landed and well-to-do nobles, it
also accepted the need for a register of those eligible. The Commissions of the
Peace were to compile these registers on a parish-by-parish basis by the end of
June – although, in practice, not all were to be completed (and very few have
survived).46 The provisions on the relationary sejmiki placed much less overt
emphasis on the obligation to abide by the instructions – a partial victory for the
king and his supporters. Nonetheless, as the law finally stood, in advance of the
Sejm, the sejmik would decide by division whether it would accept or reject the
particular points of the proposals sent to it by the Custodial Council. The elected
envoys were expected to abide by this directive.47 How this would square with
the Statute of Government’s assertion that all legislation would be decided in the
first instance in the Chamber of Envoys as ‘the representation and repository of
the national sovereignty’ was never to be put to the test.
If the checks and balances within the Project for the Form of Government failed
to reassure many, it can have been no surprise that those contained within the
Statute of Government failed to convince sceptics. Many were bound to be hostile
if for no other reason than that the new constitution was a major novelty in a
state whose citizens imbibed hostility to innovation almost with their mother’s
milk. Maybe most sejmiki had accepted the accession vivente rege of the Saxon
elector, Frederick Augustus III – but they had been overwhelmingly opposed to
hereditary succession. Between May 1791 and February 1792 supporters and
opponents of 3 May joined in a massive propaganda struggle. The overwhelming
endorsement of the sejmiki of February 1792 settled the issue – at least for a few
brief months, until the Russian invasion barely a year after the constitution’s
enactment.48
In the interval between the new constitution’s acclamation and its endorse-
ment, a predictably bitter polemical struggle was played out. Opponents
deliberately misrepresented the Statute of Government, usually by resolutely
ignoring its inbuilt safeguards. Seventy-nine-year old Tomasz Dłuski (he who
had distinguished himself by his response to the Zamoyski Code) lamented
that his declining years had been embittered by the loss of ‘national freedom’.
The szlachta’s ancestors had bequeathed ‘a perfect government, appropriate to a
well-regulated liberty.’ They would never have made a monarch non-accountable,
let alone hereditary. He accepted that interregna had had ‘ill consequences’ but
these derived ‘not from the shortcomings of our forbears’ legislation, but from
our own fault’. If only there was no discord. Frederick Augustus’ succession was
all very well, but what would happen as a result of the Infanta’s marriage? A
reconvenable Sejm was no defence against a monarch who ‘is the creator of the
Senate and all ministers, the creator of all offices at the level of state, palatinate,
county and district, creator of military appointments . . .’ Ministers would be
unable to resist royal pressure.49
Tadeusz Czacki, son of Felix, that doughtiest defender of the status quo, echoed
the theme. There was no adequate separation of the powers – too much was held
by the monarch, straddling both legislative and executive. The king, at the head
of education, the army, foreign policy, the treasury, the Police, had been invested
with the means ‘to display and extend his power’. He would use his right of
pardon to protect his ministerial minions. He pointed to the ‘Declaration of the
assembled Estates’, promulgated on 5 May, formally abolishing all legislation not
in accordance with the new Constitution and declaring any man who opposed
it to be ‘an enemy to his country, a traitor to it, a rebel’. ‘I wish to ascertain
whether that what I write will lead to my persecution.’ (If Czacki was expecting
martyrdom, he was to be disappointed.) He reluctantly accepted hereditary
kingship – the Poles had failed to use wisely royal elections, ‘the brightest honour
of a free people’ – but, by the same token ‘should our concern for liberty not be
intensified?’ In that respect, the Statute of Government was severely wanting.50
The anonymous Thoughts of a Citizen on the New Constitution saw in the
Custodial Council an instrument of royal despotism, a small executive, in which
just one ministerial countersignature was necessary to validate a royal decision.
‘By its subordination the Educational Commission can shape and form a new
generation to a base way of thinking, by its subordination the Police Commission
rules over municipalities and trade, from which the country derives its wealth,
by its subordination the Military Commission commands the army . . . When
the king commands all this . . . what else does he need to seize power, when he
commands all the strength of the nation? By their judicious control, what can
prevent him . . . from becoming a despot?’ The author warned that in 1773–5,
the Partition Sejm’s eighty-man plenipotentiary Delegation had ‘for private gain
sacrificed our country and our liberty to the injustice of our neighbours’. That
the Delegation, under force majeure, had no option was not even considered.
The author was so desperate that he could only think of appealing to none other
than King Stanisław August himself to ‘save the nation, that it might not fall into
monarchy.’51
In general, doubters voiced old fears and characteristically put the worst poss-
ible construction on reform. The supposedly underhand way in which the 3 May
had been introduced was a widely mooted common factor, discrediting it at its
inception.52 Dyzma Tomaszewski, client of Felix Potocki, committed adherent of
Russia and one of the most powerful magnate opponents of the reforms of the
Four Years Sejm, produced the most scathing counterblast of all. The Observations
of Dyzma Bończa Tomaszewski, . . . on the Constitution and Revolution of 3 May
1791 were a systematically mendacious exercise in vituperation. The events of
3 May were driven by ‘a small handful’ of envoys in ‘a revolution never practised
hitherto in the annals of the Commonwealth’. ‘In one day, the will of the entire . . .
nation . . . has been overturned by the king and his own hand-picked Senate . . .’
The conspirators, he claimed, had planned proscriptions in the manner of Sulla
and Marius ‘and perhaps on that day they would indeed have fallen as sacrifices
to liberty, for why else had several thousand armed townsmen been gathered
from all parts of the provinces and placed among the envoys.’ The courtyard of
the royal castle was packed ‘with an armed mob impatiently awaiting a signal
from the [unspecified] Polish Catiline.’ A rabble of townsmen and servants had
been primed to turn against their benefactors and masters. Tacitus was pressed
into service to crank up the awful scene.
The theme was maintained throughout the article-by-article analysis of
the constitution which followed. Good citizens had already been blackened by
association with Moscow. The ‘Declaration of the assembled Estates’ of 5 May
had condemned all opponents of the constitution in advance – that venerable
safeguard, Neminem Captivabimus nisi iure victum was in tatters. ‘It would
certainly be necessary to eradicate a good half of all decent nobles, seize their
persons, properties and lives, for that is the safest way of securing around the
necks of free men the foul fetters placed there and such was surely the purpose
of those who made the revolution.’ New ennoblements, hand in glove with the
nefarious aims of the Constitution’s architects, would swamp the old szlachta.
Article III – the confirmation of the Law on Towns – had turned their deluded
inhabitants into the ghastliest of threats. ‘Blood flows freely throughout France
even now. Agriculture is neglected, workshops abandoned, religion violated,
the estates confused, the most horrible murders perpetrated, all the bonds of
society and obedience are rent asunder . . .’ It got worse with article IV on the
peasantry. What fair-minded man could deny that a Pole ‘from birth enjoying
the fruits of liberty’ treated his peasants justly? ‘Fairness, good-naturedness, a
caring concern for [their] health, aid in accidental disaster, assistance with a bene-
ficent hand in unfortunate circumstances, a religious observance of agreements,
protection from exploitation, not imposing excessive labours’ – these were the
obligations which characterised the Arcadian relationship between seigneur and
serfs. The constitution totally ignored this. The intentions of ‘the party, subtle
in its politics, making its revolution’ was gradually to subvert the agrarian order.
To gain court favour, individual landlords would emancipate their peasants or
reduce their obligations. Deluded peasants elsewhere would see this, become
discontented until finally, ‘just as in France, they will murder some [landowners]
and shamefully maltreat others.’ Monarchs, ‘crowned Machiavels’, had always

behaved this way.
Article II’s guarantee of the ‘legally and justly’ conferred rights and privileges
of the nobility was no such thing. The end of royal elections made old freedoms
redundant. Hereditary monarchies, Tomaszewski added in his analysis of Article
VII, had sought only self-aggrandisement and had plunged Poland into pro-
longed foreign warfare, whereas ‘the conflagration of interregna . . . rapidly died
down.’ The exclusion of poorer nobles from the sejmiki eliminated their defend-
ers and those of Poland itself. The monarchy was set to conduct investigations
(‘an inquisition’) into proofs of nobility. Even were this not to happen, the threat
would remain – ‘will that not be the harshest despotism?’ Article VI’s abolition of
Confederacies deprived the nation of the means to defend its liberty. However,
Tomaszewski preferred to say nothing on the abolition of the liberum veto. That
would have been to push reaction too far.
Tomaszewski’s critique of Article VI of 3 May Constitution, on the executive
power, echoed the alarums of other opponents. The Custodial Council expected
blind obedience from all subordinate magistracies. But in a free nation, such
a power of command resided only in the legislature and judiciary. Whatever
the limitations and checks on the Straż, they were too weak to restrain it from
pursuing aggressive foreign policies, through which kings would enlarge their
powers. The right of the Sejm marshal to recall parliament was too circum-
scribed. Already, a hereditary throne had been offered to Frederick Augustus III
without reference to the nation. Succession was merely a step down the road to
absolutism, especially given the preponderant role of the king in the Straż ‘which
he selects for himself ’. As for his non-accountability to the nation: ‘For whom,
my God, has this law been written? For enlightened Poles who understand what
they read or for children, only just beginning their education?’ The new powers
granted the king were on a level with those of the Turkish Sultan.
The best that Tomaszewski could do with Article VIII, promising a new,
reformed judiciary, was to claim it was a ploy to deceive the nobility into accept-
ing the Constitution as a whole. He was beginning to flag. Article IX, which
entrusted government during royal minorities to the Straż, and article X, which
made the governor of royal children answerable to the Sejm, he dismissed as
requiring ‘no further comment’ in respect of their ‘monarchic’ predispositions.
The final, eleventh article, on the army, aroused his concern at greater length. It
bound the army to defend the new constitution. Against whom? Tomaszewski
saw no foreign threat, so it could only be to ‘defend’ the Statute of Government
against Poland’s own citizens. That the article also required the army’s future
oath to defend the nation was something that he chose to ignore. He ended on
a suitably pathetic note. ‘Oh you! Our virtuous and free forbears, you, who were
unafraid in the council chamber and on the field of battle, your immortal souls
no longer rise above Polish soil, which is no longer free; that which for you was
virtuous fortitude is nowadays judged a crime against the nation.’53
The tone of the defenders of the Third of May in responding to the onslaught
against it was generally cooler, more rational and analytic and unsparing of the
lies and distortions to which critics often resorted. The opportunities for sarcasm
were irresistible. Oh, yes, snarled one wit, things were so much better in Poland
under the rule of Russian ambassadors.54 Some elements in this literature were,
in the context of Polish polemic, comparatively new. Ignacy Potocki, in his reply
to Tadeusz Czacki, pointed out that in asking his readers whether they wished to
have ‘a republic or a monarchy’, Czacki was being hopelessly simplistic. ‘It is as if
he did not know that in forms of government there is a mean between monarchy
and republic, that a republic moderated by monarchy agrees with liberty.’55 Such
a questioning of old verities and platitudes could scarcely have been articulated
even a few years previously. Striving to allay Dłuski’s fears, Potocki stood the
established view that ministers and senators formed a kind of barrier against
monarchy on its head. In fostering such ideas, magnates had given ‘the nation to
believe, that the king of Poland is a foreign power’, a belief they had exploited to
create anarchy and profit from it.56 Karol Lubicz-Chojecki, an old Barist cam-
paigner, permitted himself a staggering solecism: ‘They say that the Constitution
has been imposed, that it is supported by only one tenth of the nation. Well, let
it be so, for it is a good constitution.’57 In a state which had prized unanimity of
agreement almost from before its inception, this was an unprecedented declara-
tion. A number of the Third of May’s supporters broke out of the circle of chronic
noble legalism altogether. Nothing in politics could be perfect. It was high time
to trust the nation to protect its own liberties instead of endlessly rehearsing
possible monarchic perfidy.58
This confidence marked a new willingness to break free of the most emotion-
ally binding trammels of the Rzeczpospolita. The physiocrats had sought to shake
off the incubus of ancestral legacy and been ready to look to a state founded
on new, abstract principles. Stanisław Konarski had dared to suggest, even if
cautiously, that the ancestral edifice was less than perfect. That conviction had
gradually grown among advocates of change. In 1790, Felix Oraczewski gave
vivid expression to it:
Let us not wonder in admiration at the greatness of our ancestors, at their shedding their
blood, at their laws. Most, we will find, were good for them, but there are few that have
been good for us. Perhaps the Polish sword did do gallant work among the Teutonic
Knights, the Turks, the Swedes, the Muscovites, but such gallantry has left little trace in
our history of political foresight and acumen.59
‘Oyczyzna my jesteśmy’, ‘We are our country’, Stanisław Konarski had declared.
It was a call echoed by Antoni Trębicki, as he tore into Dyzma Tomaszewski’s

jeremiads. Each generation had to make its own decisions and each generation
had to practise the virtues that would safeguard liberty. Posterity would only be
grateful to the architects of 3 May, who had made this truly possible.60 For the
new Constitution’s defenders, the Statute of Government marked a coming of age
for the Commonwealth’s ruling order, an escape from a timid, fearful consensual
past. The very unorthodox nature of its enactment marked a culmination of the
educational process of the Four Years’ Sejm. Poland-Lithuania’s parliament had
finally done what governments must always be ready to do: it had acted decisively.
The real impact of such polemics on public opinion is impossible to judge.
Those who wanted change, favoured the new Constitution; those opposed, did
not. Waverers were, by definition, ready to be convinced either way, or, simply
continued to dither. What is certain is that after the 3 May, the king and reformers
mounted an enormous propaganda effort to win round opinion. No resource
of persuasion and patronage was neglected. The Commission for National
Education’s schools formed a particular focus for celebrations and manifesta-
tions of support.61 A speech by Hieronim Stroynowski in July, at the university
of Wilno, provided both an impeccably enlightened justification of 3 May and
expressed the hope of the most zealous reformers for the future. A true civil
society, Stroynowski proclaimed, was one in which all its inhabitants united
so that every individual was assured of social justice. This was clearly a far cry
from the Polish Commonwealth, but Stroynowski’s point was that it had now
received a constitution which would enable the future creation of a state in which
‘each has and should have that which Nature has bestowed on him or what he
acquires through agreement, labour and industry; in which each has the rights
and obligations which derive either from Nature or from voluntary agreement
. . .’ Any other form of society, he said in a clear criticism of the old order, would
be ‘arbitrary and unjust; it would be the fruit of blindness, guile and violence, but
not the effect of Nature, reason and justice’. More explicitly, Poland had lacked
a good constitution since the extinction of the Jagiellonian dynasty. The result,
especially manifesting itself during interregna, had been anarchy. It had led to
territorial losses, culminating in the Partition of 1772. For as long as interregna
persisted, Poland could be neither ‘happy nor truly free and independent, nor
even certain of its existence’. Posterity could only be astonished that Poles had
considered themselves free while their Sejmy were ‘inactive’.
The new Constitution changed everything. There was a culture clash – just as
Poland had secured for itself orderly government, its citizens seemed more afraid
than ever for their liberty. Stroynowski set out to reassure them. The nation could
not be governed by all; equally, the nation as a whole could not set up a good
form of government – it had to delegate that task to a greater or lesser number
of trusted persons. To endure, a constitution had to have ‘one certain, strong
and lasting . . . central point, in which all components of government should

be closely united and from which they should receive their continual, orderly
motion.’ It had to have a permanent head, ‘father, defender and protector of
the entire people; whose well-founded and perpetual interest . . . should tie him
to the permanence and happiness of the nation.’ Such a person was Stanisław
August; and such a constitution had been enacted on 3 May 1791. It provided
for hereditary monarchy – but that, in turn, provided a vehicle not for royal
absolutism but for tying the interests of the ruler to the state’s, for eliminating
foreign influence and for providing genuine independence. The new constitution
safeguarded the surest foundation of the state: pure, holy religion. It neverthe-
less welcomed those who differed in their faith, leaving it to the ‘holy power’ of
religion alone to enlighten them. The way was open to the influx of foreigners
who would enrich agriculture, trade and industry. The Statute of Government
offered towns ‘a civil constitution, in accord with Nature and justice and a notable
share in the freedoms of political liberty in place of old privileges’, many of which
were ‘monopolistic and contrary to the general interests of the whole country.’
It assured new arrivals of personal freedom and extended the protection of the
law to ‘the entire agricultural people’. Yet, at the same time, it assured the szlachta
estate of ‘natural freedom in its full entirety, of civil and political liberty’, making
of it the cornerstone of the new order. In the Straż Praw Stroynowski saw a single
entity willing ‘the general good’, the most effective organ for carrying out ‘the
general will of the nation’. In its relationship to the state commissions, he saw
not any fragmentation, but ‘a perfect unity’ in which the legislative, executive and
judicial powers were separate, but not opposed.
Stroynowski elliptically conceded that the Rzeczpospolita had not yet quite
realised this nirvana of being all things to all men. But it would become so. A
good constitution had to assure ‘the permanent enlightenment of the nation,
the growth of necessary and useful arts and sciences, both physical and moral,
through ever certain public education and instruction’. ‘A constantly and thor-
oughly self-enlightening nation can correct the faults and deficiencies arising
from the constitution of government.’ By contrast, a nation ‘remaining in the
darkness of ignorance, opinion and error’ was doomed to despotism. ‘The grow-
ing enlightenment of landowners’ assured the peasantry of a better future. Indeed,
the growing enlightenment of the nation as a whole would be the best security of
its future. In twenty-five years time, the first constitutional Sejm would permit
revisions in the Statute of Government – but they would surely (and reassuringly)
be limited, aimed at increasing its effectiveness and perfection.62
How convincing this exposition of 3 May’s miraculous powers was is difficult
to say. It so impressed Stanisław August he had copies disseminated across the
country. Stroynowski spoke as an enlightened clergyman: and, indeed, it was
likeminded clergy at all levels who played a major role in supporting the new
Constitution at pulpit level among their congregations. Michael Karpowicz, who

had so ardently espoused the cause of physiocratic peasant reform in 1770s, was
among the most eloquent, in his parish church of Preny in Lithuania, comparing
the bloodless 3 May with the bloody and godless events in France.63 Opponents
found themselves too much on the back foot to be able to sustain any kind of
effective rearguard action. A royal proclamation of 2 August 1791 condemning
peasant unrest – there was indeed some premature excitement among many
peasants who, as usual, misunderstood what the state was intending to confer
on them – did support for the Constitution no harm.64
That the sejmiki of February 1792 gave the Statute of Government their
overwhelming endorsement was not due solely to presentation or propaganda.
Opponents put up rearguard actions where they could, but even assemblies
sympathetic to them dared not come out against the new constitution.65 A key
factor was surely the legislation supplementary to 3 May, fleshing out the true
character of the new Constitution. The final twelve months of the parliament saw
the passing of an unheard of array of laws, often of unprecedented complexity
and detail. There was little of the pettifogging, obdurate obstructionism, which
had so weighed on the proceedings of the first two-and-a-half years. Opponents
were too shocked to put up much of a fight amid the evident mood of euphoria
sweeping the country. Between 13 May 1791 and 18 May 1792, new laws set out
the role of the Sejm, the Custodial Council and the new state commissions for the
Police, the Treasury and the Military. This was law-making to shape government,
but also law-making to protect liberty. The two could be combined. Much of the
material was already to hand. It had been prepared by Ignacy Potocki and the
Deputation for the Form of Government. Their Proiekt of 1790 had not been a
wasted labour. It required adapting to the new order. Much of its wording was
retained, much paraphrased, with a general trend to less convoluted detail. Above
all, the safeguards it had proposed re-emerged. Its more radical suggestions
were abandoned.
Among the charges made by supporters of the Constitution against their
opponents was that they had failed even to consider the supplementary laws. A
particular terror invoked by the critics was the royal right of pardon – it would
enable monarchs to ensure malevolent ministers went unpunished. Ignacy
Potocki and Antoni Trębicki pointed out that the 3 May Constitution itself, and
the law on royal power of pardon passed on 30 May 1791, specifically exempted
crimes against the state from the king’s prerogative of mercy, a provision not
found in the 1790 Proiekt.66 The exemption was part of a process designed to
box in royal powers. That process could be seen at work in the Law on the Sejm,
approved on 13 May. The main difference between it and the 1790 proposals
lay in 3 May’s discarding of mandatory instructions. The new law explicitly
repeated the Statute of Government’s ban on the liberum veto, confederacies
and confederated Sejmy.67 However, it did not go as far as Konarski had urged
in counselling the adoption of the English system of simple majorities. The veto
was indeed abolished, but replaced by a system of qualified majorities. Civil
laws would be decided by a simple majority (in both Chamber of Envoys and in
the Senate). Constitutional and criminal laws had to be passed by a majority of
two to one; and taxation, significantly, in a nation chronically averse to it in all
its forms, by a majority of three to one. The Senate’s power of suspensory veto,
valid for the lifetime of one parliament only, remained: it had no right, however,
to hold up money bills.68 A new provision was slipped in for reconvening the
Sejm – that was to be done if no minister agreed to countersign a royal order
emanating from the Custodial Council or if one of the state commissions
demanded parliament’s recall because it had been issued by what it took to be
an illegal order.69 The old fear that royal influence might somehow subvert a
long-standing Sejm had not been dispelled. The Deputation for the Form of
Government had specified the normal term of a Sejm to be ninety-four days,
with provision for indefinite prolongation, according to circumstances. The
Law on Sejmy reduced the normal term to seventy days, with specific provision
for two further extensions of fifteen days each, though it was presumably to
be understood that the Sejm might agree to additional prolongation. In every
case, Senate and Chamber of Envoys each had to agree to the extensions by
a simple majority. Should circumstances require, the Sejm could, of course,
be recalled as necessary. As an added precaution, provision was made for the
election of a Sejm deputy-marshal, to replace the marshal on the Custodial
Council should the latter fall ill or be absent for any reason. Moreover, as in the
Proiekt, Stanisław August was granted the right of nomination to the Senate for
his lifetime only: his successors would have to content themselves with choosing
from two candidates presented to them by the local sejmik after a secret ballot.
Senators who failed to attend throughout two successive parliaments would lose
office. To ensure further that the executive could not influence the legislative,
senators and ministers were not allowed to vote in the Sejm in matters relating
to any positions of responsibility they might hold; and ministers who also sat
on the Straż had no parliamentary vote at all.70 The unprecedentedly powerful
position, which the Statute of Government had seemingly conferred on the
monarch, turned out to be nothing of the sort. Constitutional fences would
keep him within due bounds. For future kings, the long-standing republican
dream of a monarchy stripped of its desperately dangerous ius distributi-
vum was finally to be realised. Rousseau might have been watered down, the
English principles of royal non-accountability and ministerial responsibility
adopted, but Montesquieu’s principle, that ‘power must check power’ was
firmly ensconced.71
Subsequent laws further strengthened these checks and balances. The law
on the Straż of 1 June 1791 aimed to make it more efficient, or, at least, less
weak, than the body envisaged in the Proiekt. The latter had proposed a council
of twelve, elected by the Sejm: it was now a council of five, nominated by the
king at the Sejm, with the primate sitting ex officio. The king also appointed
the Custodial Council’s chief chancellery staff (in the Proiekt, these had been
elected by the councillors collectively). The Deputation’s proposed ban on
Straż members attending sejmiki was dropped. The king, in line with the 3
May Constitution, had the final say over the Council’s decisions, whereas in the
Proiekt he had to follow a majority vote.72 However, the Council could only issue
resolutions via the state commissions – it could not send orders directly to any
other body. If a commission felt any resolution it received was illegal, it had the
right to remonstrate with the Council and demand of the king, or, if necessary,
the Sejm marshal (who sat on the Straż as an observer) a recall of parliament.
Ministers in the Custodial Council could not sit on any of the state commis-
sions.73 This was not just a separation of powers: it was a separation of powers
within powers.
The enactment of the law finalising the new ‘Police Commission of the Two
Nations’ occurred on 17 June 1791. It marked something of an advance on the
Proiekt from the viewpoint of townsmen in that it doubled their representation
on the Commission from three to six. The remaining nine commissioners were
drawn from senators and szlachta, but it was made clear that any decisions
had to have a majority of noble commissioners behind them to be valid.74
On 27 October, the Law on the Treasury Commission of the Two Nations was
approved. Where the Proiekt had envisaged the retention of separate treasury
commissions for the Crown and Lithuania, these were now merged, with the
significant proviso, however, that its two senatorial and eight szlachta members
should be drawn equally from the two parts of the Rzeczpospolita. The only
exception were the six urban commissioners, two each from Wielkopolska,
Małopolska and the Grand Duchy.75 Probably the least satisfactory item of the
supplementary legislation was the new regulation of the Military Commission of
the Two Nations, hurriedly finalised on 18 May 1792 (all the other key legislation
had been enacted by the previous October, in plenty of time for the February
1792 sejmiki), the very day the Russian minister delivered a note declaring his
country’s troops were crossing into Poland. Compared with the Proiekt, its most
significant difference was the ditching of the clause requiring the army to swear
an oath to obey the Military Commission alone. The Statute of Government had
allowed for command of the army to be entrusted directly to the king in wartime:
which is what, on 22 May, the Sejm did.76 In the face of invasion, there was clearly
more to worry about than the perils of royal absolutism. As for the prorogation
which the Sejm voted on 31 May, it is difficult to see anything in that other than
an abandonment of its own responsibilities. Rather than continuing to rule the
country, envoys and senators preferred to slip away to their own homes. The king
and ministers would now take over.
The supplementary legislation was more than just an exercise in checks
and balances. It also sought to preserve much that was traditional and deemed
of value, while balancing it against the new. Thus, the new Police ordinance
stipulated (which the Proiekt had not) that ‘the freedom to write and to print
must be assured and undiminished’. It also remained committed to fostering a
physiocratic economy. The Police Commission was always to secure freedom
of labour and industry over and against any guild privileges. All obstacles to
free entry to guilds were to be abolished – scope, here, perhaps, for a greater
economic integration of Polish Jewry?77 The law on the Treasury Commission
reaffirmed the principle of freedom for immigrants specified by the Statute of
Government.78 The king had made little secret of his hopes to create a more
centralised, or, at least, more unified Rzeczpospolita by bringing together a further
tightening of the Union between Poland and Lithuania. The new unified state
commissions ‘of the Two Nations’ might have been a step in that direction. But
the Lithuanians, encouraged by Ignacy Potocki (who had made his way up the
ladder of the Rzeczpospolita’s dignities through the Grand Duchy’s offices, most
notably securing the position of Grand Marshal of Lithuania in April 1791),
insisted that their separate status be affirmed. Almost all the November sejmiki
in the Grand Duchy had insisted on the preservation of its particular rights.
Most were in favour of winding up Lithuania’s separate Treasury Commission,
mainly, it would seem, on the grounds of the savings to be made. That the new,
unified treasury commission was to contain an equal number of senators and
envoys drawn from the Crown and the Grand Duchy (whereas, traditionally,
Lithuanians made up a third of such bodies, reflecting the supposedly equal
weighting of the Provinces of Wielkopolska, Małopolska and Lithuania) testi-
fied not only to the strength of a sense of Lithuanian distinctiveness, but to the
widespread view that such distinctiveness was integral to the Commonwealth as
a whole. The law on Sejmy had reaffirmed the principle of the alternata for the
Sejm’s venue.79 On 20 October 1791, the Sejm passed a ‘Mutual guarantee of the
two Nations.’ While it acknowledged that the 3 May Constitution represented a
‘single, universal and indivisible statute of government’ serving both the Crown
and Lithuania, it went on to make this conditional. Membership, not only of the
Treasury Commission but of the Police and Military Commissions, was to consist
in perpetuity of ‘an equal half ’ of Poles and Lithuanians. Lithuania would have
exactly the same number of ministers and officials as the Crown. The presidency
of the Military and Treasury Commissions would rotate between a Pole and a
Lithuanian. Lithuania’s revenues would be administered through a treasury office
on Lithuanian soil. Only Lithuanians would judge fiscal business from the Grand
Duchy.80 If anything, the new arrangements gave Lithuania a greater weight in
the Commonwealth’s politics than it had had hitherto, disproportionately so to

its resources and contributions. For the foreseeable future, any closer tightening
of bonds between Poland and Lithuania would go thus far and no further.
The 3 May Constitution and its supplementary legislation aimed not so much
to create a modernised, effective state – although that was undoubtedly one of the
aims of those who framed these laws – as to provide an alternative, modernised
vision of the noble Utopia. The reaffirmation of the alternata brought a new,
reassuring balance to the old Rzeczpospolita: it was equally important in all its
parts. Monarchy, especially now that it had been declared hereditary, remained
a threat to freedom; so, too, did an overhauled executive; so to, for that matter,
did a functional parliament. The most effective defence against these threats
had been the liberum veto of the individual. Its catastrophic simplicity was now
replaced by something altogether more elaborate and sophisticated: a series of
self-regulating institutional checks and balances. The same old freedoms could be
preserved and protected by other means, sanctioned by the authority of enlight-
ened, up-to-date exemplars: the British constitution, physiocratic aspirations,
Montesquieu. Rousseau was far from discarded: his views on the importance of
a patriotic education, extending right to the heart of the political establishment,
that is, the royal family itself, remained a source of inspiration. But this was above
all a Polish solution, the ‘gentle revolution’ that Kołłątaj had advocated. Alteration
without disruption. To claim, however, as one distinguished Polish historian has
done, that the Sejm’s reforms created ‘a modern, democratic society’ is to allow
enthusiasm to outrun the evidence by a very generous margin.81 Much was
certainly changed, just so that much could remain as it was.
It was this above all, more than any amount of propaganda or arm-twisting
which secured the ringing endorsement of the February 1792 sejmiki for the new
order. How Poland would have evolved and how they were to be further altered by
the first constitutional Sejm, which was scheduled to assemble on 1 October 1816,
was never to be given to the Polish nation to discover. In truth, ever since the Four
Years Sejm first met in October 1788, it had functioned in an illusory political
bubble, thrown up by the realignments of European foreign policies and Russia’s
distractions, none of which, of course, owed anything to the Poles themselves.
The weakest aspect of the blizzard of political literature, which the last free Sejm
generated, was the relative lack of serious consideration of the Commonwealth’s
foreign policy predicaments.82 Perhaps in the emotional fervour of the times,
they were simply too ghastly to contemplate. The one major treatise on the
subject, Kołłątaj’s ‘Considerations on the Influence of Two Great Powers on the
Interests of the Commonwealth’ of late 1788 was an exercise in hopelessly wishful
thinking. Abounding with ‘surelys’, ‘ifs’, ‘certainlys’ it purported to extend argu-
ments in favour of an alliance with Prussia while being utterly oblivious to the
real motivation behind its supposed tilt towards the Rzeczpospolita.83 Ironically,
the most realistic appraisal of Poland’s international prospects came from

Seweryn Rzewuski, in the course of his diatribes against hereditary succession.
None of Poland’s neighbours would tolerate a more powerful Rzeczpospolita: all
republican forms of government were essentially non-aggressive, monarchies
were fundamentally expansionist. Reform would inevitably doom Poland to
extinction. Rzewuski read the international situation with far greater perspicacity
than his reforming opponents. But then, he wanted no reform at all. A Poland
as had existed under Augustus III was his ideal – a playground for defenders of
liberties such as himself. Such quietism was no defence against foreign incursions,
but for Rzewuski, foreign incursions were a price worth paying for the stagnating
state he so wanted.84
The dissemination of a sober assessment of Poland’s fragile place in Europe
was a political impossibility. The king and his fellow architects of the new
Constitution could only appeal to a sense of national unity, solidarity and
hope in the future – a kind of collective whistling in the dark. Without Russia’s
approval, Frederick Augustus of Saxony would not accept the offer of the Polish
crown. The thunderous condemnations of opposition to the new Constitution
were not followed up by any concrete actions against its detractors, even when
they were engaged in patently treasonable correspondence with Russia. Those
condemnations had served only to give ammunition to those who accused the
Constitution of being an instrument of despotism.85 Augustyn Deboli, the Polish
minister in St Petersburg, despaired of the Sejm’s focussing on domestic minutiae
instead of putting all its energies into building up the army.86 Barely half of that
much-vaunted 100,000 force was to materialise. The raw, outnumbered recruits
were in no condition to repel the Russian veterans who crossed the Polish borders
on 18 May 1792.
The three principal architects of the Confederacy of Targowica, which on
14 May supposedly invited Catherine the Great to rescue Poland from a com-
bination of royal absolutism and Parisian democracy, (in fact, the document was
signed in St Petersburg on 14 April), Grand Crown hetman Ksawery Branicki,
Crown field hetman Seweryn Rzewuski and Felix Potocki inhabited a world
of even greater illusions than the supporters of the new constitution. Branicki
wanted whatever would maximise the wealth and power of Branicki. Rzewuski
wanted to turn the clock back to the Saxon era, in which the balance of power
within the state would be held by all-powerful, untouchable hetmani. Potocki
(a fourth cousin to Ignacy) alone entertained radical constitutional ideas. He
dreamed of a Poland without a monarchy, fully federated into the three Provinces
of Wielkopolska, Małopolska and Lithuania, each with its separate army and
administration. The new Commonwealth would be ruled by a common council,
headed by a titular president drawn by rotation from the three Provinces. Thus,
reckoned Potocki, would end the debilitating struggle between monarchy and
liberty. ‘In this way our liberty will be preserved and our neighbours need not
fear that any one power’s influence should dominate Poland . . .’87 The men
behind Targowica appear to have been utterly oblivious to the possibility that
Poland might not survive the future. If the nobility at large did harbour reserva-
tions about the 3 May Constitution, they were not enough to secure anything
like a major rally to Targowica, whose abortive attempts at rule collapsed amid
an orgy of score-settling and drives to self-enrichment by the leadership and its
cronies. The king acceded to the new Confederacy, encouraged by his ministers,
who hoped vainly that he might be able to salvage something from the wreckage.
When he did not, his old associates in framing the Constitution turned on him.88
The anarchy unleashed provided Russia and Prussia with the excuse to impose a
second Partition in 1793. The surviving rump state around Warsaw was nothing
more than a Russian satrapy, tied at every level to St Petersburg.
The now harmless statelet was allowed to retain a constitution that was a
pale imitation of that of 3 May. Targowica had formally annulled the Statute
of Government, condemning it (in the wake of the Second Partition) ‘as the
occasion of bringing down on our Commonwealth varied disasters and the
loss of numerous provinces.’89 Catherine and Russia could tolerate a more
efficient but wholly innocuous protectorate. New Cardinal Laws defining the
constitutional framework were declared immutable. However, major legislation,
including taxation, army estimates and foreign policy was to be decided by a
majority of three-quarters in a recast Sejm, where senators and envoys debated
in a single chamber. It was to meet for eight weeks every four years. The liberum
veto remained – ironically, now vested in the monarch, who was to exercise
it against any attempt to breach the new settlement. The king was declared
hereditary and was obligated to take the advice of a resurrected Permanent
Council, deciding by majority vote. Konarski’s redefinition of głos wolny, the
‘free voice’ was implicitly accepted as the right of free speech, preserved in full
for every nobleman – but it could not be used ‘for the subversion of religion or
of the Cardinal Laws.’ Nobles’ rights over their serfs were fully restored – not
that they had been much dented by the Statute of Government. Despite the
Confederacy’s reaffirmation of the plenitude of noble equality, nobles without
land were excluded from the sejmiki. Though there was no question of admitting
townsmen to the Sejm, they were to have the right to send delegates to the sejmiki
with their ‘demands’, which had to be incorporated into the instructions. In this
respect, townsmen were to be more privileged than petty nobles. Moreover,
the municipal citizens of the ten principal towns of the rump Commonwealth
were not only allowed to own land, but were expected to be recorded in the
registers of landowners which the local commissions of the peace (another
survival from the Four Years’ Sejm) were to maintain. All townsmen would
continue to benefit from the Neminem Captivabimus nisi iure victum Privilege,
extended to them under the April 1791 Law on Towns.90 Even Targowica had
to accept that the ‘revolutionary’ Sejm of 1788–92 had brought about some
irreversible changes.
The constitutional changes of 1793 meant little. The Cardinal Laws asserting
the untrammelled sovereignty and territorial inviolability of the Rzeczpospolita
were a risible exercise in deception, which fooled hardly anyone. On his Austrian
Galician estates, Seweryn Rzewuski observed: ‘I wanted nothing for myself,
everything for the freedom of the Commonwealth and the integrity of my
country. Our freedom has been restored, even if we do not have the entirety of
our country.’ Having decided that after 3 May, ‘Poland no longer exists, such was
God’s will’, he settled down to become a loyal Habsburg subject.91
It was not quite the end of the story. In March 1794, a desperate insurrection
against Russian rule was launched under the leadership of Tadeusz Kościuszko,
a former protégé of Stanisław August. He had distinguished himself on the
American side in the War of Independence and once more during the brief
conflict of 1792 with Russia. Kościuszko in practice, and his ideological soul
mates in theory, accepted that without wide popular support, the rising would
be doomed. Blockaded by Russian forces in his fortified camp at Połaniec, he
issued a Proclamation on 7 May 1794, which proved to be the copestone of those
who held out hopes of genuine social reform in an independent Poland. One
of the chief authors was Hugo Kołłątaj, who, five years previously, had asked
whether a Poland reliant on serfdom deserved to survive. The Proclamation
was an effort to provide a positive answer. ‘The person of every peasant’ was
declared free, ‘and he may move where he wishes’, provided he had discharged
his obligations. Labour services were reduced by about a half for the duration of
the emergency. The Sejm, which was to be convened after the successful conclu-
sion of the Insurrection, would conduct a final regulation of peasant dues. No
labour dues at all were to be exacted from the holdings and families of peasant
conscripts throughout the Rising, nor were they to be dispossessed of their
holdings. A network of supervisors was to be put into place across the country
to hear peasant grievances. Much of the Proclamation was itself a commentary
on the abuses of seigneurs perpetrated even at a time of national emergency.
Its provisions were unenforceable, even in those few areas that were, however
briefly, under Kościuszko’s effective control. Neither landowners nor the neces-
sarily noble officials through whom he worked showed any understanding of
what was expected – and, if they did, it must have opened up a world without
serfdom too horrendous to contemplate. ‘Let us throw the veil from our eyes’,
Kościuszko wrote to the Kraków commission of the peace. ‘Liberty cannot be
defended save by the hand of men who are free or sense the justice and sweet-
ness of their government.’ To little avail.92 But even real emancipation could
scarcely have saved the shattered Commonwealth from the forces ranged against
it. Kościuszko was defeated and captured in October. Warsaw fell to Suvorov’s
Russians on 5 November, following the grisly massacre of the inhabitants of the
Praga suburb. Less than a year later, on 24 October 1795 Russia, Prussia and
Austria concluded a third Partition agreement. The Commonwealth of the Two
Nations had been despatched.
Epilogue
A nation wanting independence must necessarily trust in its own strength. If it does not
have that sense, if it is not prepared to preserve its existence through its own exertions,
but through foreign support or favour, it can be confidently said that it will attain neither
fortune, nor virtue, nor fame . . . When the Poles trusted to their own strength, they took
their victorious arms from Vienna to Moscow.
The ‘nation’ envisaged in this ringing assertion of 1800 was not that of the szlachta,
but of all ‘Poles’ – by which the author meant all the inhabitants of the former ter-
ritories of the no longer existing Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów. The brave words
rang hollow. Their author, Józef Pawlikowski, had been one of the most eloquent
advocates of peasant emancipation during the Four Years Sejm. He had fled to
France in 1795 and, by 1800, was adviser and secretary to Tadeusz Kościuszko,
released from Russian imprisonment in November 1796 and living in Paris from
1798. Pawlikowski’s anonymously published pamphlet, Can the Poles Secure their
Independence, fell flat. Napoleon wanted better relations with Russia, so his police
confiscated what copies they could. In the former Polish lands, its social radical-
ism offended many. Even revolutionary republicans, such as there were, were
much put out that it revealed their fantastic plans to raise the populace not only
of the former Commonwealth but of all the territories of the three partitioning
powers.1 Among the self-exculpatory arguments that Pawlikowski rejected was
one that began to do the rounds soon after the final partitions: that ‘our country’s
geometrical situation between three great powers was most unfortunate.’2 For
him, the nobility’s own ‘inconstancy of mind and lack of energy’ were at fault.3
‘Geometrical situation’ was an excuse, not an argument.
An enormous amount of intellectual energy had been expended in Poland
during the latter half of the eighteenth century in an effort to shake the nobil-
ity out of its mental cul-de-sac. And it had failed. The Poles were not solely to
blame. For over a hundred years, their neighbours had watched to ensure that all
attempts at reform were stillborn. The most powerful of them all, Russia, consist-
ently worked against all measures which it deemed unacceptable since Peter the
Great’s reign. Yet it is a fundamental obligation of a ruling order to make the best
it can of a country’s situation and resources. The szlachta failed spectacularly.
Poland’s tutelary powers could not have exercised the influence they did with-
out the ready co-operation of so many within the Polish-Lithuanian nobility.
That, too, was on offer because the gentry and their leaders – or not enough of
them – could not bring themselves to break free from the mire of a vision of a
mythologised Sarmatian golden age. They frightened themselves with the horrors
of the tyrannous rule under which their confrères elsewhere supposedly groaned.
As neighbouring monarchies grew stronger and more threatening, the szlachta
clung all the more resolutely to their own institutions and beliefs, validating them
by appeal to an ancestral past. Such pressure as there was within their own ranks
for change made the lure of that past stronger still.
What the szlachta had built up was good enough at parish pump level. The
fear of a strong monarchy was an ideological fig leaf for something much more
fundamental – fear of a strong state of any kind, monarchic or republican. A
stronger state could be so only by reducing noble privileges. It was not that the
Polish-Lithuanian nobility could not function within such organisms – on the
contrary, the history of the partitioned lands or of the Duchy of Warsaw demon-
strated how far the szlachta could adapt to circumstances. But these were contexts
imposed from outside, not from within Poland-Lithuania itself. Psychologically,
left to themselves, too few Polish nobles were able to make the necessary trans-
ition. The decentralised institutions of the Rzeczpospolita were pitched against
such a framework. Reformers had no adequate foundations on which to build.
Contemporaries were ready to ascribe almost superhuman qualities to those
rulers – notably Frederick the Great in Prussia and, even more so, Peter the Great
in Russia – who seemingly single-handedly transformed their realms and their
prospects. But such rulers had a solid basis of traditions and institutions to hand
on which they could build. Poland had nothing that might have supported com-
parable reforms. Its political traditions were highly consensual. The architects of
3 May Constitution could only work with consensus (no matter how loudly their
opponents protested otherwise). The szlachta were prepared only to refurbish
their old Commonwealth, not construct a dynamic new one.
Kołłątaj – he was not alone – warned that the Rzeczpospolita did not deserve
to survive unless it freed its peasantry. Serfdom existed elsewhere, not least in
the lands of the partitioning powers. But these disposed of powerful apparatuses
of coercion. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had nothing like that. Its
nobility could not both keep order on their estates and fend off invasion, even if
they had been better organised and their popisy something more than a nostalgic
mirage. Revolutionary France developed and deployed the rhetoric of the ‘nation
in arms’. So, too, did contemporary Poland, but its nation, even if it took to
arms, was an isolated fragment of its population. Those who rejected hereditary
monarchy and insisted on the value of interregna as necessary instruments of
restoring injured liberty were quite right – but the liberty so restored was sterile
EPILO GUE 257
and irresponsible, capable only of turning back the clock in a Europe where
change was ever more pressing. In the end, a critical mass of the nobility was
brought reluctantly round to opt for hereditary monarchy – too little, too late.
Poland’s reformers were crushed under the weight of a history that went back
to the Jagiellonian era.
Independence remained an impracticable dream. It took the catastrophe of
the First World War to make it otherwise. Calls for it were above all a luxury
which those in exile could permit themselves – though even these had to be
muted, at least temporarily, after France’s peace with Austria at Lunéville in
February 1801.4 Most Poles had to make the best of their status as subjects of
new rulers. Even so iconic figure as Tadeusz Kościuszko could only secure his
release in 1796 by taking an oath of fidelity to the tsar.5 The general oaths of
loyalty imposed by the partitioning powers during that year encountered little
resistance. The young Adam Jerzy Czartoryski confronted the choice facing so
many propertied noblemen: ‘whatever Czartoryski’s personal feelings were, the
family’s economic interests, and consequently its social and political status, had
to be protected.’ ‘If we are to lose our lives and fortunes’, he mused in October
1812, ‘we can and should ask: to what end? What will we gain by it?’ If slavish
loyalty and zealous collaboration were bad form (though there was no short-
age among the very wealthy, those with most to lose, of enthusiastic fidelity to
new masters),6 those who held out ostentatiously were deemed eccentrics; and
‘indomitability’, niezłomność, in the face of the new powers’ demands was widely
seen as an embarrassment. Particularly in the aftermath of the Partitions, ‘every
Pole has, so to speak, two consciences; above all, a Pole wants to be a Pole and if
he cannot secure that one way, he will do so another.’ Poles would give a purely
provisional loyalty to anyone who held out the greatest prospects of restoring
Poland – or something like it.7
Amid the uncertainties that wracked the former lands of the Rzeczpospolita
in the two decades after the final Partition, there was a basic recognition, above
all among the landed nobility – those who stood most to lose from not acknow-
ledging such elementary facts – that life had to carry on. First, revolutionary
France offered some hopes of a resurrection; then Napoleon – but his ‘Duchy
of Warsaw’, created as a French satellite in 1807, did not even bear the name of
‘Poland’. Finally, after 1814–15, Polish hopes, such as they were, were vested in
Tsar Alexander I. He at least secured the creation of something bearing the name
‘the Kingdom of Poland’, substantially smaller though it was than its Napoleonic
predecessor. In November 1815, Alexander bestowed on his new kingdom a
liberal constitution – with a Sejm and a propertied franchise, and its own army
(commanded by the tsar’s brother and de facto viceroy, Constantine), a simu-
lacrum of a state supposedly free to conduct everything bar foreign policy.8 Many
had hoped, on the basis of hints thrown out by Alexander, that he would agree to
the creation of a wider Polish kingdom, composed both of the so-called ‘Congress
Kingdom’ and those territories of the Commonwealth annexed by Russia since
1772 or 1793. During Napoleon’s ascendancy, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski had even
hoped that Alexander would reconstitute such a Poland from lands held by
Prussia and Austria.9 All such fancies proved vain – tantamount to expecting a
rejection of the Partitions by the principal power behind them. Even the creation
of the Congress Kingdom aroused the opposition of Prussia and Austria.
In his 1820 versified Ród Ludzki, The Human Race, Stanisław Staszic voiced the
heroically optimistic view that all peoples of Europe would be united under the
benevolent constitutional rule of Tsar Alexander. Quite how heroic this vision
was is underlined by the fact that Staszic had the book printed surreptitiously:
as deputy minister of education, he had countersigned the decree introducing
official censorship (even though the 1815 Constitution had guaranteed freedom
of the press) in May 1819. He knew full well the censors would never pass his
work – Archduke Constantine was so incensed by its sentiments that he burned
his copy.10 In the year in which Staszic completed his barely readable epic,
Alexander had given his brother ‘carte blanche’ to do with the constitution as
he pleased. Even before then, one wag had quipped: ‘The Constitution is on the
table and under the table is a whip.’ ‘From the plague, famine, war and restorers
of Poland, dear God deliver us.’11
The 1820s saw increasing friction between defenders of the constitutional
status quo and an ever more authoritarian regime. Russian crackdowns on
patriotic (not necessarily insurrectionary) secret societies in the Kingdom and
in Russia’s western, Lithuanian, gubernii, exacerbated the atmosphere. The
eruption of a conspiratorial revolt by young officer cadets in November 1830
was probably inevitable. In 1814, Baron Stein had warned Alexander that a Polish
constitutional monarchy was incompatible with a Russian autocracy and would
serve only to encourage Polish hopes of full independence. Events proved him
right, but it is difficult to see how such hopes could have been avoided (short of
the physical eradication of the Polish population, something beyond the reach
of nineteenth-century governmental technologies). The revolt failed: the odds
were always on Russia’s side. Austria and Prussia were hostile and no govern-
ment anywhere would lend the Insurrection any support. Even the papacy was
to condemn the Rising. The business testified to the strength of national feeling
among the younger generation of the nobility and intelligentsia, but to little
else. It was unplanned, accidental, confined to the szlachta and the larger urban
centres. Scarcely any thought was given to mobilising, let alone emancipating, the
peasantry, who, if theoretically personally free under the Constitution, remained
subject to most of their old labour dues.
Besides the sheer fact of Partition, the biggest challenge facing the noble estab-
lishment of the Congress Kingdom was always the place of the peasantry. Leaving
EPILO GUE 259
aside the disparity in resources available to would-be insurrectionaries and the

partitioning regimes, as Pawlikowski (and, for that matter, eighteenth-century
advocates of peasant reform) had argued, without true freedom, the peasantry,
the overwhelming mass of the ‘people’, lud, could never be expected to rally to the
cause of independence.12 The landowning szlachta in the nineteenth century were
no more disposed than their predecessors of the eighteenth to concede meaning-
ful freedom to their serfs. They could reconcile themselves to their emancipation
under the constitutions of 1807 and 1815 because labour obligations remained.
Had Poland not been partitioned, the szlachta might conceivably have been per-
suaded of the merits of emancipation – such were the hopes of Kołłątaj and the
similarly minded from the 1780s, but history did not leave Poland the luxury of
either territorial integrity or national independence. The same fractures contin-
ued for a generation after the failure of the 1830–1 Rising, dividing not only the
peasantry from their social superiors, but splitting the latter among themselves.
Rather more planning and preparation went into the ‘January Rising’ of 1863–4
than that of 1830–1, yet those behind it were still caught off guard by the actions
of the Kingdom’s authorities and were forced to embark on the enterprise almost
against their will. They managed to set up a remarkable, parallel, underground
state, but they were never able to secure prolonged control of any substantial
territory. Once the tsarist authorities conceded outright ownership of the land
they worked to the peasantry, what support the latter had shown for the venture
largely melted away. Perhaps the ultimate irony was that for a good hundred years
after the insurrection of 1794, many peasants regarded the szlachcic Kościuszko
as ‘a criminal, who rebelled against the authority established by God.’13
The dream of independence was one harboured primarily by less well-off
nobles and members of the urban intelligentsia, largely drawn from déclassé
petty gentry. Youth, too, had much to do with it: in the economically backward
Polish lands, in a szlachta-dominated culture which continued to disdain manual
and mechanical work, opportunities for employment were limited. Nurtured on
a romantic, nationalist and nostalgic literature – it was not the least of Polish
paradoxes that its literary achievements scaled new heights in an era when Poland
itself had no independent existence – Polish youth yearned for independence as
part of the cure for their economic woes.14 Those literary achievements were
themselves based on the cultural revival of the eighteenth century. If the desire
for freedom was another bequest from the past, so too were nostalgia for that
past and providentialism. Particularly with the failure of the November Rising, a
feeling was nurtured by many Poles that national excision was compensated for
by the moral and spiritual superiority of Poland – in the 1830s, a ‘Christ among
nations’, expiring for the benefit of a heedless western civilisation which it had
protected against the despotic horrors of the east – Russia and Turkey. Poland
could somehow claim that last resort of the vanquished, a moral victory. Many,
particularly after the late 1820s, under the influence of Joachim Lelewel, histo-
rian, prophet and politician manqué, came to see the 3 May Constitution as a
wrong turning, a deformation of true Polish values These were represented by
a supposedly Rousseauesque communitarian democracy, far in advance of the
political systems of the rest of Europe, but which had, tragically, been warped and
taken over by a nobility itself deceived by a selfish aristocracy. No one developed
a coherent or convincing programme of how a reborn Poland might look in
practice – perhaps no one could.15
As time passed and a sense of national identity grew among the non-Polish
populations of the quondam Rzeczpospolita, it became increasingly hard to sup-
port the ideas and values – in eighteenth-century terms, the ‘prejudices’ – of the
old nobility. An attachment to liberty had been passed on, but the formation, or
re-formation of a new nation required more than that. ‘We are hardly a society;
just a huge national flag’ observed one of Poland’s greatest poets in 1862.16 But
it was a flag to which the former constituent parts of the Commonwealth felt
increasingly less attachment: Ukraine and Lithuania above all were home to a
growing nationalism, which gripped ever larger numbers of their populations.
The great majority of their people had, of course, been peasants – a noble-ruled
republic had nothing to offer them, other than a memory of toil and oppression.
And the source of the new nations would not be the nobility, it would be the
despised, ignored peasantry, led by an intelligentsia which itself often had noble,
and hence, Polish, roots; and which, unlike the peasants it sought to lead and
inspire, often had to make a conscious and frequently very painful choice as to
what its own nationality would be. New nations required new pasts every much
as artificial and mythological as that which had sustained the Rzeczpospolita
Obojga Narodów. The strength of these new histories was such that the old
Commonwealth could never be re-made.17
Appendix
THE CONSTITUTION OF 3 MAY 1791:

THE STATUTE OF GOVERNMENT
In the name of God, One in the Holy Trinity. Stanisław August, by the grace of
God and the will of the nation, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Ruś,
Prussia, Mazowsze, Żmudź, Kiev, Wołyń, Podole, Podlasie, Livonia, Smolensk,
Siewierz and Czernichów, together with the Confederated Estates, assembled in
their doubled number1 to represent the Polish Nation.
We recognise that the fate of us all depends wholly on strengthening and per-
fecting a national constitution. Long experience has revealed the age-old defects
of our form of government. We desire, therefore, to make use of the present
circumstances of Europe and of this fleeting moment, which has restored our fate
into our own hands. Free from the shameful commands of foreign oppression;
esteeming above life and happiness the political existence, external independence
and internal liberty of the nation whose destiny is entrusted to us; wishing to
secure the blessings and gratitude of present and future generations: despite the
obstacles which our own passions may raise, We proclaim, in the greatest firmness
of spirit, this Constitution, for the common good, for the assurance of our liberty,
for the salvation of our country and its dominions. We declare this Constitution
wholly sacred and inviolate until the time, duly defined by law, when the nation
by its clearly expressed will should choose to alter any part of it. All further
enactments of the present Sejm must in all respects abide by this Constitution.
I
The Ruling Religion
The ruling national religion is and will be the Holy Roman Catholic faith, with
all its rights; abandonment of the ruling faith for any other is forbidden on pain
of the penalties for apostasy. Yet since this same Holy Faith enjoins us to love our
neighbours, we are bound to accord peace and the protection of our government
to all men, whatever their religious beliefs. We therefore guarantee the freedom
of practice of all rites and religions in the Polish dominions, according to the
laws of the land.
II
The Landed Nobility
In reverence of the memory of our ancestors, the founders of a free government,

we most solemnly assure the szlachta estate of its freedoms, liberties and preroga-
tives of pre-eminence in private and public life; in particular, we confirm, assure
and acknowledge inviolate the rights, statutes and privileges justly and legally
bestowed on this estate by Casimir the Great, Louis of Hungary, Wladyslaw
Jagiełło and Witold, his brother, Grand Duke of Lithuania; likewise, by Władysław
and Kazimierz, sons of Jagiełło; by the brothers John Albert, Alexander and
Sigismund the First, and by Sigismund Augustus, last of the Jagiellonian line. We
affirm the szlachta estate in Poland to be equal in dignity to all degrees of nobility,
wherever found. We acknowledge all the szlachta to be equal among themselves,
in their right to attain office and perform public services, which confer honour,
renown and advantage; we hold them equal in their right to enjoy the privileges
and prerogatives proper to the szlachta estate. Above all, we wish to preserve their
rights of personal security, personal liberty and of landed and movable property;
we maintain them solemnly inviolate as they have served each throughout the
ages; we most solemnly swear to permit no alteration or encroachment in law
against any form of private property; indeed, the supreme public authority and
the government established by it will never put forward any claims under the
pretext of the royal prerogative to citizens’ property, in whole, or in part. We
respect, assure and affirm the personal security and rights of property of all under
the law as the very essence of citizen liberty and wish to have them respected,
assured and inviolable for all future time.
We acknowledge the szlachta as the foremost defenders of liberty and of this
Constitution. We trust to the virtue, citizenship and honour of each szlachcic to
respect the sacred character of this Constitution and to watch over its preserva-
tion as the sole bastion of our country and of our freedoms.
APPENDIX 263
III
Towns and Townsmen
We wish to maintain in its entirety the law which this Sejm has enacted, under
the title Our Royal Free Towns in the lands of the Commonwealth. We declare it
to be part of this Constitution, as a law bringing new, true and effective support
to the free Polish nobility for the security of their freedoms and the integrity of
a common Fatherland.
IV
The Peasantry
Moved by justice, humanity, Christian duty and our own well-considered

interest, we place the agricultural populace under the protection of the law and
the government. From the hands of the peasantry springs the most bountiful
source of our national wealth; the peasantry is the most numerous part of the
nation, and thus our country’s most formidable strength. We resolve that what-
ever freedoms, grants or contracts landowners will have concluded with the
peasantry of their estates, be they with village assemblies, or individuals, such
agreements will, from now on, be mutually binding on both parties, according
to their true meaning, conditions and terms. These agreements will be assured
of the protection of the government. Once a landowner has freely entered into
such an agreement and accepted the obligations arising from it, the terms will be
binding not only on him, but on his successors or on those who acquire rights
in law to the estate, in such a way that they will never be able to alter them of
their own accord. Equally, the ordinary rural populace on any landed estate may
not evade any obligations deriving from voluntary agreements and dispositions
which they have taken on themselves, save in such way and under such terms as
are specified in those contracts, be they in perpetuity or for a fixed term. Having
thus assured hereditary landowners of all the benefits to which they are entitled
from their peasantry and wishing most effectively to promote the increase of our
dominions’ population, We proclaim that all who newly arrive in our lands are
completely free; likewise, those who have left our dominions and wish to return
are also free. In this way, every person entering or returning to the territories of
the Commonwealth, no matter where from, is, from the moment he sets foot on
Polish soil, entirely free to make use of his industry as and where he wishes; he
is free to conclude contracts of residence, employment and leasehold. Once he
acquits himself of such agreements and of the obligations which he has freely
assumed, he is free to settle in town or village, to remain in Poland or return to

whatever country he wishes.
V
The Government:
the definition of the public powers
Every form of authority in human society derives from the will of the nation.
So that the integrity of the dominions, the freedom of the citizens and the social
order should forever remain in equal balance, three powers are to constitute the
government of the Polish nation, from now in perpetuity. The legislative power
is vested in the assembled Estates, the supreme executive power in the King and
Custodial Council and the judicial power in the jurisdictional bodies set up, or
to be set up, for this purpose.
VI
The Sejm,
that is, the legislative power
The Sejm, that is, the assembled Estates, will be divided into two Chambers: the
Chamber of Envoys and the Senatorial Chamber, under the presidency of the
King.
The Chamber of Envoys, as the representation and repository of the national
sovereignty will be the temple of legislation. All legislative projects will be decided
first in the Chamber of Envoys.
• General laws, that is, constitutional, civil and criminal laws and permanent
taxes are to be decided first. Proposals concerning them will have been
submitted from the throne for consideration to the palatinates, counties and
districts; from them, through their instructions, they will have been referred
to the Chamber of Envoys.
• Particular decrees of the Sejm will receive priority of consideration after
General Laws. These will be decrees dealing with taxation, the public
debt, ennoblement and other state honours and awards, the disposition of
ordinary and extraordinary expenditures, declarations of war and peace,
the final ratification of treaties of alliance and commerce, all diplomatic
acts and agreements involving the law of nations, the examination of the
executive magistracies and all similar activities, appropriate to the chief
APPENDIX 265
needs of the nation. Proposals from the Throne on such business will be
submitted directly to the Chamber of Envoys.
The Senatorial Chamber consists of bishops, palatines, castellans and ministers

under the presidency of the king, who has the right to give his own vote and to
cast a second vote to resolve any tied vote, either in person or in writing. It is the
duty of the Senatorial Chamber to:
• accept or hold over, by majority vote, for the further consideration of the
Nation, every bill which, after formal enactment in the Chamber of Envoys,
immediately comes before the Senate; the Senate’s acceptance will confer
the force and authority of law; the withholding of its approval will suspend
the bill only to the next Ordinary Sejm; if the Chamber of Envoys then
reiterates its decision, the Senate must give way.
• every particular Sejm decree (as specified above), which the Chamber of
Envoys must immediately present to the Senate, is to be decided with the
Chamber of Envoys by majority vote, so that the majority vote of the two
joint Chambers will be the decree and will of the Estates.
Senators and ministers, in matters arising out of their office either in the
Custodial Council or in any Commission, are not to have a vote in the Sejm and
are to sit in the Senate only in order to explain their decisions, at the Sejm’s behest.
The Sejm is to be ready to be reconvened at any time. The legislative, ordin-
ary Sejm is to meet every two years and to remain in session for as long as the
Law on Sejmy will lay down. The reconvenable Sejm, called in matters of urgent
necessity, will deal only with business for which it has been summoned or for
any urgent, subsequent contingency. No law enacted by an ordinary Sejm may
be repealed by the selfsame assembly. The composition of the Sejm, both of the
Chamber of Envoys and of the Chamber of the Senate, is to be established by
the Law on Sejmy.
We most solemnly affirm the law on sejmiki enacted by the present Sejm as
the central principle of the freedom of our citizens.
Yet since legislation cannot be conducted by all and the nation foregoes its
powers in this respect to its representatives, that is, to its freely-elected envoys,
We hereby affirm that the envoys elected at the sejmiki are, in matters of law and
of the general needs of the nation, to be regarded as the representatives of the
entire nation and the repository of the nation’s general confidence.
All matters, in all places, are to be resolved by the vote of the majority. We
therefore abolish in perpetuity the liberum veto, Confederacies of all kinds and
Confederated Sejmy as contrary to the spirit of this Constitution, subversive of
government and destructive of society.
We wish to prevent frequent, sharp changes to the national Constitution, yet
we appreciate the need to perfect it after experiencing its effects on the public
weal. We therefore assign a time and term to revise and amend the Constitution
every twenty-five years, when we wish to hold such a Constitutional, extraordin-
ary, Sejm, as regulated by the separate law on the Constitutional Sejm.2
VII
The King, the executive power
No government, no matter how well-constructed, can subsist without effective

executive power. The happiness of nations depends on just laws, and the effect
of the laws depends on their implementation. Experience has taught us that the
neglect of this branch of government has filled Poland with misfortunes. Having
assured, therefore, the free Polish nation of the power to make its own laws, of the
means to watch over each and every organ of the executive and to elect officials
to magistracies, we entrust the power of the final implementation of the laws to
the King in his Council, which will be called the Custodial Council of the Laws
[Straż Praw].
The executive power is strictly bound to watch over and enforce the laws.
The executive will function as the laws prescribe, and will provide all effective
assistance for their implementation. All magistracies always owe the executive
obedience. We entrust the executive with the right to bring to order recalcitrant
magistracies and those neglectful of their obligations.
The executive power may neither make nor interpret laws, nor impose taxes
or levies under any title whatsoever; it may not incur public debts, nor alter the
disposition of public revenues decided by the Sejm; it may make neither war
nor peace, nor may it definitively conclude any treaty or any other diplomatic
agreement. The executive may conduct only provisional negotiations with for-
eign powers and undertake measures of a provisional and day-to-day nature for
the security and tranquillity of the country. The executive must inform the next
session of the Sejm of all such activity.
We desire and decree that the Polish throne will be forever elective from
among [princely] families. The disasters of the interregna which have periodic-
ally afflicted our form of government; the obligation to secure the welfare of
every inhabitant of Polish territory and exclude forever the influence of foreign
powers; the memory of the magnificence and prosperity of our Country under
hereditary, dynastic rule; the need to deter powerful Polish citizens from reaching
for the throne, and to restore a single-minded concern for our national liberty,
have persuaded us, in all prudence, to make the Polish throne hereditary. We
therefore decree that, when the life which God in his goodness allows us is at an
APPENDIX 267
end, the present Elector of Saxony will reign in Poland. The dynasty of future
Polish kings will begin with the person of Frederick Augustus, now Elector of
Saxony, to whose direct successors in the male line we assign the Polish throne.
The eldest son of the ruling king will succeed to the throne after his father. But
if the present Elector of Saxony should not have any children of the male sex,
then a husband chosen by the Elector for his daughter, with the approval of
the assembled Estates, will inaugurate the line of male succession to the Polish
throne. And thus we declare the Elector’s daughter, Maria Augusta Nepomucena,
to be Infanta of Poland. Yet we reserve to the Nation the inalienable right of
electing to the throne another family after the extinction of the first.
Every King ascending the throne will take an oath to God and the nation to
preserve this Constitution, to observe the pacta conventa, which will be drawn
up with the present Elector of Saxony as monarch-designate and which will be
binding on him, just as the former ones have been binding in the past.
The person of the King is sacred and inviolable; he does nothing of himself,
he can be called to account to the Nation for nothing; he is not an absolute ruler,
but should be the father and head of the Nation: the law and this Constitution
acknowledge and declare him to be so. His revenues, such as they will be defined
in the pacta conventa and the prerogatives due to the throne, as defined by this
Constitution for the future king-elect, will be preserved without detriment to
them.
All public acta, the proceedings of Tribunals, courts, magistracies, as also coin-
age and seals and registrations should be in the king’s name. The king, to whom
every power to do good should be granted, will enjoy the prerogative of mercy
for all condemned to death, save for those guilty of crimes against the state. The
supreme disposition of the nation’s armed forces in wartime will belong to the
king, together with the right of appointing their commanding officers, saving
the nation’s right to change them if it so wills. It will be the royal duty to appoint
officers and officials and to nominate bishops and senators in accordance with
the law, and name ministers as the principal officials of the executive power.
The Custodial Council, that is, the royal council, assigned to the king in order
to watch over the integrity and implementation of the laws, will consist of:
• the primate as head of the Polish clergy and president of the Commission
of Education; the first bishop after him in rank may stand in for him in the
Council; neither may sign the Council’s resolutions;
• five ministers, that is, the minister of police, a chancellor, the minister of
war, the minister for the treasury, a chancellor with the portfolio for foreign
affairs;
• two secretaries, one of whom will be in charge of the Custodial Council’s
protocols, and the other will be in charge of the foreign affairs protocols;
both will sit without the right to vote.
The Sejm marshal, elected for a period of two years, will be included among those
sitting in the Custodial Council. He will not involve himself in its decisions, but
will participate only to call the reconvenable Sejm in the following eventualities:
• should he feel that the circumstances urgently require the summoning of
the reconvenable Sejm and the king refuses to do so. The Sejm marshal
should then issue circular letters to the envoys and senators, calling them to
the reconvenable Sejm and expounding his reasons for the summons. The
Sejm must necessarily be recalled only in the following circumstances:
• when the rights of the nation are violently threatened, especially in the case
of foreign war;
• in the event of domestic disturbances threatening the country with
revolution or a clash between magistracies;
• in the event of a clear, general threat of famine;
• should our country find itself bereft through the death of the king or should
he be dangerously ill.
All the decisions of the Custodial Council will be reached by the above-mentioned
complement. After hearing all the arguments, the king’s decision will prevail, so
that there should be one will in the enforcement of the law. Therefore, every
decision of the Custodial Council should appear in the king’s name and with
his signature. However, it should also be countersigned by one of the ministers
sitting in the Council and, so signed, it will command obedience, to be put into
effect by the commissions or any other executive magistracy, albeit only in those
matters not clearly excluded by this Constitution. Should no minister sitting
in the Council be prepared to countersign the decision, the King will desist.
Yet if he persists in his decision, the Sejm marshal will ask him to summon the
reconvenable Sejm; and should the king obstruct the summons, the marshal will
convoke the Sejm.
It is the right of the king to nominate all ministers as it is to call one minister
from each department of the administration into the Custodial Council. Each
minister will be called to sit in the Council for two years: the king will be free to
confirm his office for a new term. Ministers called to the Custodial Council are
not to sit on the commissions [see below].
Should two-thirds of votes cast in a secret ballot of the two Chambers of
the Sejm, meeting in joint session, demand the removal of a minister from the
Custodial Council or from office, the king must immediately name another in
his place.
Desiring that the Custodial Council of the Nation’s Laws should be held
strictly to account to the Nation for all breaches of the law, we resolve that, if
ministers stand accused of breaking the law by the deputation of inquiry into
their conduct, they must be held answerable in their persons and property. In
APPENDIX 269
all such accusations, the assembled estates, on a simple majority vote in joint
session of the Chambers, will send the ministers accused for trial to the Sejm
Court, to receive either a just and fitting punishment for their crime or to be
proved innocent and absolved from all guilt and penalty.
In order fully to establish the executive power, we institute separate commis-
sions duty bound to obedience to the Custodial Council. Their commissioners
will be elected by the Sejm in order to exercise their office for the term laid down
by law. These Commissions are: (1) for Education, (2) for Police, (3) for the Army,
(4) for the Treasury.
The palatine commissions of the peace, instituted at this Sejm, which also
come under the supervision of the Custodial Council, will receive their orders
from the above-named intermediary commissions as to their particular duties
and obligations.
VIII
The Judicial Power
The judicial power may be exercised neither by the legislative power, nor by the
king, but by magistracies instituted and elected for that purpose. It should be
linked to localities in such a way as to permit each individual readily to obtain
justice for himself and in such a way that the malefactor should everywhere feel
the government’s admonishing hand.
• We therefore institute courts of first instance for every palatinate, county
and district, to which judges will be elected at the sejmiki. The courts of first
instance will be in a state of constant activity and readiness to render justice
to those that need it. From these courts appeals will go to the principal
Tribunals to be set up for each province and likewise consisting of persons
elected at the sejmiki. All these courts of first and last instance will function
as the landed assizes of the szlachta and of all landowners in all civil or
criminal contention with any persons whatsoever.
• We guarantee the judicial rights of all towns as laid down by the present
Sejm’s law on the Free Royal Towns.
• We purpose to institute separate referendary courts for each province, to
hear cases involving free peasants, according to the ancient laws governing
these courts.
• We maintain in being the aulic assessory and relationary courts and the
courts of appeal for the duchy of Courland.
• The executive commissions will hold judicial hearings in matters belonging
to their jurisdiction.
• As well as the civil and criminal courts for all the estates, there will be a
supreme court, called the Sejm Court, to which judges will be elected at the
opening of each Sejm. This court will judge crimes against the nation and
against the king, that is, crimes against the state.
We order the compilation of a new code of civil and criminal laws by persons
appointed by the Sejm.
IX
The Regency
The Custodial Council will also function as a council of regency, headed by the
queen or, in her absence, the primate. The regency may be instituted only in the
following three cases:
(1) during the royal minority; (2) during the king’s incapacity caused by a
lasting disorder of the mind; (3) in the event of the king’s being taken prisoner
in war. The king’s minority will last only to the full completion of his eighteenth
year: his incapacity stemming from any lasting mental disorder must be declared
only by a reconvenable Sejm by a majority of three parts to one in a vote of the
Chambers in joint session. In all of these cases the primate of the Polish Crown
should immediately call the Sejm, or, should the primate be remiss in this duty,
the Sejm marshal will issue circular letters to the envoys and senators. The
reconvenable Sejm will determine the order of precedence of ministers in the
regency and will empower the queen to replace the king in his duties. And when,
in the first instance, the king attains his majority, in the second, fully recovers
his faculties, in the third, returns from captivity, the council of regency will be
required to render him account of their actions and to answer in their persons
and estates to the nation for their term of office, according to the procedures laid
down for the Custodial Council at every ordinary Sejm.
X
The Education of the Royal Children
The royal sons, in whom the Constitution vests the succession to the throne,
are the first children of our Country. Therefore, care for their good upbring-
ing belongs to the nation, albeit without any detriment to the rights of their
parents. During the royal rule, the king himself, together with the Custodial
APPENDIX 271
Council and with a governor of the princes’ education, appointed by the Sejm,
will care for their upbringing and education. During the rule of the Council of
Regency, the Council and the governor will be entrusted with their education.
In both instances the governor appointed by the Estates will report to every
ordinary Sejm on the education and progress of the princes. It will be the duty
of the Educational Commission to submit the programme of the instruction
and education of the royal princes to the Sejm for approval, to ensure that their
upbringing should be based on uniform principles, which will, from an early
age, continually instruct the minds of the heirs to the throne in religion, love of
virtue, of their country, of freedom and of the national Constitution.
XI
The National Armed Forces
It is the nation’s duty to defend itself from external aggression and to watch over
its territorial integrity. All citizens are thus the defenders of the entirety of the
state and of their national freedoms.
The army is nothing other than the protective, disciplined strength derived
from the general strength of the nation. The nation owes the army reward and
respect for the sacrifices it makes, purely in the nation’s defence. The army owes
the nation watch over its frontiers and its general tranquillity. In a word, the army
should be the firmest shield of the nation. In order to fulfil this task without fail,
the army must remain in constant obedience to the executive power, according
to the provisions of the law; it must take an oath of loyalty to the nation and to
the king and to the defence of the national Constitution. The national army may
accordingly be used for the general defence of the country, for the protection
of fortresses and frontiers, or to render assistance against all who would refuse
obedience to the law.
Notes
Notes to Preface
1 Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron Montesquieu, ‘Mes Pensées’ in D. Oster (ed.) (1964)

Oeuvres Complètes. Paris: Seuil, p. 1034.
2 Quoted in A. F. Grabski (1983), Perspektywy przeszłości: studia i szkice historiograficzne.
Lublin: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, p. 124.
3 J. Tazbir (2004), Polska przedmurzem Europy. Warsaw: Twój Styl, pp. 135–59.
4 Grabski, op. cit., pp. 280–412. The comment about Matejko came from J. I. Kraszewski,
author of an epic cycle of 94 novels about Poland’s past and himself with a real claim to
be regarded as a historian. See also M. H. Serejski (1972), ‘L’école historique de Cracovie
et l’historiographie européenne’, Acta Poloniae Historica, 26, 127–51.
5 E. K. Valkenier (1985), ‘The rise and decline of official Marxist historiography in Poland,
1945–1983’, Slavic Review, 44, 663–80.
6 P. Biliński (1999), Władysław Konopczyński. Warsaw: Ad Astra, pp. 58–64, 97–128.
7 W. Konopczyński (2002 edn), Liberum Veto: studium porównawczo-historyczne. Kraków:
Universitas, (first published, 1918); idem, (1991 edn) Konfederacja Barska. Warsaw:
Volumen, 2 vols (first published, 1936–8).
8 W. Kalinka (1991 edn), Sejm Czteroletni, Z. Zielińska (ed.). Warsaw: Volumen, 2 vols. This,
the most complete edition, barely takes the story up as far as the constitution of 3 May 1791.
See also the key works by B. Leśnodorski (1951), Dzieło Sejmu Czteroletniego, 1788–92:
studium historyczno-prawne. Wrocław: Ossolineum; J. Michalski (1960), ‘Sejmiki poselskie
1788 roku’, Przegląd Historyczny, 51 (1–3), 52–73, 331–67, 465–82; E. Rostworowski (1963),
‘ “Marzenie dobrego obywatela”, czyli królewski projekt konstytucji’, idem, Legendy i fakty
XVIIIw. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 265–464; Z. Zielińska (1991), “O sukcesyi tronu w Polszcze”
1787–1790. Warsaw: PWN; A. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz (2000), O formę rządu czy o rząd
dusz: publicystyka polityczna Sejmu Czteroletniego. Warsaw: IBL.
9 J. Woliński, J. Michalski & E. Rostworowski (eds.) (1955–69), Materiały do dziejów Sejmu
Czteroletniego. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 6 vols. See J. Michalski’s (1990) obituary of Emanuel
Rostworowski in Kwartalnik Historyczny, 97, 268.
10 The most impressive fruit of working in the Moscow archives is Zofia Zielińska (2001),
Studia z dziejów stosunków polsko-rosyjskich w XVIII wieku. Warsaw: Semper.
11 Individual studies of particular Sejmy do exist, most notably U. Kosińska (2003), Sejm
1719–1720 a sprawa ratyfikacji traktatu wiedeńskiego. Warsaw: Semper. W. Filipczak (2000),
Sejm 1778 roku. Warsaw: Semper deals with a relatively unimportant parliament. M. Nycz
(1938), Geneza reform skarbowych Sejmu Niemego. Poznań: PTPN looks at only aspects
of the defining assembly of 1717. There are, however, a number of important synthetic
scholarly works on eighteenth-century parliaments, most notably H. Olszewski (1966),
Sejm Rzeczypospolitej epoki oligarchii 1652–1763. Poznań: UAM; R. Łaszewski (1973), Sejm
274 N O T E S T O PA G E S x – x i
polski w latach 1764–1793. Warsaw: PiW; J. Michalski (1984), ‘Sejm w czasach saskich’
and ‘Sejm w czasach panowania Stanisława Augusta’, in J. Michalski (ed.), Historia sejmu
Polskiego. Warsaw: PWN, 1, pp. 300–49, 350–419.
12 J. Truchim (1921), Konfederacja Dzikowska. Poznań: Drukarnia Poznańska is still the
only (albeit very much dated) study of its subject, the least known of the great noble
confederacies of the eighteenth century. Henryk Palkij (2000) has researched the first two
parliaments of Augustus III’s reign, Sejmy 1736 i 1738 roku: u początków nowej sytuacji
politycznej w Rzeczypospolitej. Kraków: PAU. The main account of the 1764 interregnum
remains W. T. Kisielewski (1880), Reforma ks. Czartoryskich na sejmie konwokacyjnym r.
1764, Sambor: Czaiński, though much subsequent light has been shed on its events. See
especially J. Michalski (1956), ‘Plan Czartoryskich naprawy Rzeczypospolitej’, Kwartalnik
Historyczny, 63, 29–43; and most recently, Z. Zielińska, ‘Rosja wobec planów reform
ustrojowych niezrealizowanej konfederacji Czartoryskich z lat 1762–1763’ in idem, Studia,
pp. 60–89.
13 At the risk of some unfair selection, see especially J. A. Gierowski (1953), Między saskim
absolutyzmem a złotą wolnością. Wrocław: Ossolineum and his (1971) W cieniu ligi
północnej. Wrocław: Ossolineum; A. S. Kamiński (1969), Konfederacja sandomierska wobec
Rosji w okresie poaltransztadzkim. Wrocław: Ossolineum. More accessible to English readers
will be R. I. Frost (2000), The Northern Wars: war, state and society in Northeastern Europe,
1558–1721. Harlow: Longman.
14 J. Staszewski’s biographies of the two Saxon kings deserve especial notice: (1989) August III
Sas. Wrocław: Ossolineum and (1998) August II Mocny. Wrocław: Ossolineum. J. Dygdała
(1984), Życie polityczne Prus Królewskich u schyłku ich związku z Rzecząpospolitą w XVIII
wieku. Warsaw: PWN. See also K. Friedrich (2000), The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland
and Liberty, 1569–1772. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
15 H. Kołłątaj (1954), B. Leśnodorski & H. Wereszycka (eds), Listy Anonima i Prawo Polityczne
Narodu Polskiego. 2 vols, [Warsaw]: PWN.
16 Stanisław Konarski (1760–3), O skutecznym rad sposobie. Warsaw, 4 vols. In 1923, a fac-
simile edition of the original was brought out by Hieronim Wilder, publishers. Otherwise,
W. Konopczyński (ed.) (n.d.), Stanisław Konarski, Wybór pism politycznych. Kraków:
Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza, pp. 58–290; J. Nowak-Dłużewski (ed.) (1955), Stanisław
Konarski, Pisma Wybrane, 2 vols., Warsaw: PiW, 1, pp. 105–356.
17 For a common-sense historical perspective, see the essays of Jacek Kochanowicz (2006),
Backwardness and Modernization: Poland and Eastern Europe in the 16th–20th centuries.
Aldershot: Ashgate. Especially ch. VII, ‘Poland and the West: in or out?’
18 Of particular relevance to the period of the eighteenth century in the series are A. S.
Kamiński (2000), Historia Rzeczypospolitej wielu narodów, 1505–1795. Lublin: Instytut
Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej; N. Jakowenko (2000), Historia Ukrainy od czasów
najdawniejszych do końca XVIII wieku. Lublin, Instytut Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej;
H. Sahanowicz (2002), Historia Białorusi do końca XVIII wieku. Lublin: Instytut Europy
Środkowo-Wschodniej. A history of Lithuania has yet to appear.
19 W. Konopczyński (E. Rostworowski, ed.) (1966), Polscy pisarze polityczni XVIII wieku (do
Sejmu Czteroletniego), Warsaw: PWN. Konopczyński was working on a final part to the
book when he died in 1952, covering the period of the Four Years Sejm. The typescript is in
the library of Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, ms. BJ 52/61, but, unrevised and unfinished,
is unpublishable.
20 J. Maciejewski (1971), ‘Geneza i charakter ideologii republikantów 1767–1775’, Archiwum
Historii Filozofii i Myśli Społecznej, 17, 45–84.
N O T E S T O PA G E S x i – 2 275
21 It is difficult to single out individual works among the plethora of outstanding contribu-
tions made by these scholars. But the series of painstaking investigative studies by Emanuel
Rostworowski (1963) in his Legendy i fakty XVIIIw. Warsaw: PWN, merit particular men-
tion. Likewise attention should be drawn to Jerzy Michalski’s two extensive case studies
of western European interactions with Polish ideologues (1977), Rousseau i sarmacki
republikanizm. Warsaw: PWN and (1995) Sarmacki republikanizm w oczach francuza:
Mably i konfederaci barscy. Wrocław: Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej. Zofia Zielińska
has produced two magisterial studies of the political ideas of the Four Years Sejm, (1988)
Republikanizm spod znaku buławy: publicystyka Seweryna Rzewuskiego z lat 1788–1790.
Warsaw: Wydział Historyczny Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego and (1991) “O sukcesyi tronu w
Polszcze” 1787–1790. Warsaw: PWN. Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz has produced what will
long remain the standard study of that Sejm’s political literature, (2000) O formę rządu czy
o rząd dusz: publicystyka polityczna Sejmu Czteroletniego. Warsaw: IBL; and has completed
a study of Polish conceptions of liberty in the eighteenth century, (2006) Regina Libertas:
wolność w polskiej myśli politycznej XVIII wieku. Gdańsk: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria.
22 W. Kriegseisen (1996), Ewangelicy polscy i litewscy w epoce saskiej (1696–1763): sytuacja
prawna, organizacja i stosunki międzywyznaniowe. Warsaw: Semper.
23 N. Davies, (2005), God’s Playground: a history of Poland, 2 vols, Oxford: Oxford University
Press (revised edn); most recent Polish edition (2007), Boże Igrzysko: historia Polski.
Kraków: Znak. For a shorter general survey, see J. T. Lukowski & H. Zawadzki (2006
edn), A Concise History of Poland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press or N. Davies
(1984), Heart of Europe: a Short History of Poland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A.
Zamoyski (1997), The Last King of Poland. New York: Hippocrene; R. Butterwick (1998),
Poland’s Last King and English Culture: Stanisław August Poniatowski, 1732–1798. Oxford:
Clarendon. G. D. Hundert (1992), The Jews in a Polish Private Town: the Case of Opatów
in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press and (2004) Jews in
Poland-lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: a Genealogy of Modernity. Berkeley, Calif.:
University of California Press. Frost, op. cit.; A. S. Kamiński (1993), Republic vs. Autocracy:
Poland-Lithuania and Russia, 1686–1697. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Friedrich, op. cit. An accessible positive view, at least in its overall conclusions, is served up
by J. Gierowski (1996), The Polish-lithuanian Commonwealth in the XVIIIth Century: from
Anarchy to Well-organised State. Kraków, Polska Akademia Umiejętności. For an insight into
the problems of Poles immediately after the final partition, see W. H. Zawadzki (1993), A
Man of Honour: Adam Czartoryski as a Statesman of Russia and Poland, 1795–1831. Oxford,
Clarendon.
24 E. Opaliński (1995), Kultura polityczna szlachty polskiej w latach 1587–1652, Warsaw, Wyd.
Sejmowe; and see the same author’s (2001) Sejm srebrnego wieku: między głosowaniem
większościowym a liberum veto. Warsaw: Wyd. Sejmowe.
Notes to Chapter 1: The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania: an introductory survey
1 There is a huge literature on republicanism, but, for a recent comprehensive survey of

European ideas, see M. van Gelderen and Q. Skinner (eds) (2000), Republicanism: a Shared
European Heritage, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See also A. Jouanna
(1989), Le devoir de révolte: la noblesse française et la gestation de l’État moderne, 1559–1661.
Paris: Fayard.
2 J. Michalski (1986), ‘Zagadnienie Unii Polsko-Litewskiej w czasach Stanisława Augusta’,
276 N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 – 9
Zapiski Historyczne, 51, 97–131. For a striking overview of the tensions between the
Commonwealth’s constituent parts, see I. Łobarzewski (1789), Testament polityczny
zostawiony synowi ojczyzny. Warsaw, pp. 167–70.
3 W. Konopczyński (2002 edn), Liberum Veto. Kraków: Universitas, pp. 141–5.
4 H. Olszewski (1966), Sejm Rzeczypospolitej epoki oligarchii 1652–1763. Poznań: UAM,
pp. 36–7, 178–9, 295–6.
5 VL 1, p. 245.
6 Laws of 1638, 1641, 1673, VL 3, pp. 441–2; VL 4, pp. 8–9; VL 5, p. 73.
7 Domina Palatii, Regina Libertas, in Różne mowy publiczne, seymikowe y seymowe miane
przez Jegomości P. Jana z Dębin Dębińskiego . . . (1727). Częstochowa, pp. 51–61.
8 [J. S. Jabłonowski] (1730), SKRUPUŁ bez skrupułu w Polszcze albo oświecenie grzechów
narodowi naszemu polskiemu zwyczaynieyszych a za grzechy nie mianych n.pl., p. 15.
9 VL 6, p. 41. In law and in practice, landless nobles were regarded as inferior to landowning
ones, but the boundary between the two was far from clear.
10 W. Uruszczak (1980), Sejm walny koronny w latach 1506–1540. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 145,
176, 226.
11 S. Zaborowski (H. Litwin and J. Staniszewski, trans and eds) (2005 edn), Traktat w czterech
częściach o naturze praw i dóbr królewskich oraz o naprawie królestwa i o kierowaniu
państwem (S. Zaborovius, Tractatus quadrifidus de natura iurium et bonorum regis et
reformatione regni ac eius reipublicae regimine). Kraków: Arcana, esp. pp. 80–1.
12 The estimates of Tadeusz Korzon (1897–8), in Wewnętrzne dzieje Polski za panowania
Stanisława Augusta. Kraków: Zwoliński, 1, pp. 152–320, have been largely superseded.
J. Kowecki (1971), ‘U początków nowoczesnego narodu’, in B. Leśnodorski (ed.), Polska w
epoce Oświecenia. Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, pp. 107–9; E. Rostworowski (1988), ‘Ilu
było w Rzeczypospolitej szlachty’, KH, 94, 3–40; J. Topolski (2000), Przełom gospodarczy w
Polsce XVI wieku i jego następstwa. Poznań: Wyd. Poznańskie, pp. 149–52, 161–4.
13 G. [=J.] T. Lukowski (1977), The szlachta and the Confederacy of Radom, 1764–1767/68:
a study of the Polish nobility. Rome: Institutum Historicum Polonicum (Antemurale 21),
pp. 143–50. J. Fabre (1952), Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et l’Europe des Lumières. Paris:
Belles-Lettres, 1952, p. 29.
14 A. W. Mikołajczak (1999), Łacina w kulturze polskiej. Wrocław: Wyd. Dolnośląskie,
pp. 85–230.
15 C. Pyrrhys de Varille (1771), Lettres sur la Constitution actuelle de la Pologne et la tenure de
ses diètes. Paris, pp. 21–22, 116–7, 121.
16 The term ‘ szlachecka demokracya’ seems to have been first used by Antoni Popławski OSP
(1774) in his Zbiór niektórych materyi politycznych . . . Warsaw, pp. 231, 237, 241.
17 VL 2, p. 124.
18 ibid., pp. 150–3.
19 ibid., pp. 133–4, 152, 163.
20 Domina Palatii, pp. 79–80.
21 J. Pawlikowski (1789), Myśli polityczne dla Polski. Warszawa, p. 213, note 93.
22 A. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz (2000), ‘Anti-monarchism in Polish republicanism in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries’, in M. van Gelderen & Q. Skinner (eds), Republicanism:
a shared European heritage, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 1,
pp. 43–59.
23 Opaliński, E. (2000), ‘Civic humanism and republican citizenship in the Polish Renaissance’,
ibid., pp. 147–66.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 9 – 1 4 277
24 T. Wyrwa (1978), La pensée politique polonaise à l’époque de l’humanisme et de la Renaissance,

Paris: Librairie Polonaise, p. 435; VL 6, p. 11.
25 VL2, p. 452. The procedure was never used.
26 M. Pryshlak (2000), Państwo w filozofii politycznej Łukasza Opalińskiego. Kraków: Historia
Iagiellonica, pp. 61–2, 87–97.
27 J. Topolski (1994), Polska w czasach nowożytnych: od środkowoeuropejskiej potęgi do utraty
niepodległości (1501–1795). Poznań: UAM, pp. 530–33, 567. R. Frost (2000), The Northern
Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721. Harlow: Longman,
pp. 324–6.
28 A. Leszczyński (1994), Sejm Żydów koronny 1623–1764. Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut
Historyczny, pp. 23–4, 140–5.
29 D. L. Pohilewicz (1958), ‘W sprawie kryzysu i upadku gospodarki obszarniczej
Rzeczypopspolitej w drugiej połowie XVII i pierwszej połowie XVIII wieku’, KH, 65,
742–65; W. Rusiński (1969), ‘Gospodarka w dobie regresu’ in J. Topolski (ed) Dzieje
Wielkopolski. Poznań, Wyd. Poznańskie, 1, pp. 706–23; H. Sahanowicz (2002), Historia
Białorusi od czasów najdawniejszych do końca XVIII wieku. Lublin: Instytut Europy
Środkowo-Wschodniej, p. 307.
30 Lengnich, B.[=G.] (1836), A. Z. Helcel (trans. and ed.), Prawo pospolite królestwa polskiego.
Kraków: Kwartalnik Naukowy. All references are to the 1836 edition. For the Enlightenment
in Royal Prussia, see the bilingual (Polish and German) work by A. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz
(1998), Gdańsk oświecony: szkice o kulturze literackiej Gdańska w dobie Oświecenia. Warsaw,
IBL, passim.
31 K. Friedrich (2000), The other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, 1569–1772.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 189–202; idem (1999), ‘The urban enlighten-
ment in eighteenth-century Royal Prussia’, in D. A. Bell, L. Pimenova and S. Pujol (eds),
La Recherche Dix-Huitiémiste: raison universelle et culture nationale au siècle des Lumières.
Paris: Champion, pp. 11–29.
Notes to Chapter 2: Ancestral legacies
1 B. Baczko and H. Hinz (eds), Kalendarz półstuletni 1750–1800. Wybór tekstów. Warsaw:
PIW, 1975, p. 6.
2 J. Jarzęcka (1983), Obraz życia umysłowego Rzeczypospolitej doby saskiej (1710–1762).
Gdańsk: PAN, p. 182.
3 B. Chmielowski (1745–6), Nowe Ateny albo Akademia wszelkiej scyencyi pełna na różne
tytuły, iak na classes podzielona, mądrym dla memoriału, idiotom dla nauki, politykom
dla praktyki, melancholikom dla rozrywki erygowana. 2 Pts, Lwów – Lublin, Here, Pt. 1,
pp. 162–3. It is difficult to resist the feeling that Chmielowski was enjoying himself at the
expense of many readers’ prejudices and superstitions.
4 J. Israel (2001), Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity 1650–1750.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 61, 67, 71; W. Konopczyński (1911), ‘Z dziejów naszej
partyjności’, in idem, Mrok i Świt. Warsaw: Wyszyński, pp. 1–36.
5 J. Wybicki (1840), Pamiętniki Józefa Wybickiego, E. Raczyński (ed.). 3 vols., Poznań:
Stefański 1, pp. 7–29.
6 F. S. Jezierski (1790), Jarosza Kutasińskiego herbu Dęboróg, szlachcica łukowskiego, uwagi
nad stanem nieszlacheckim w Polszcze. pp. 12–22.
7 A. Kołudzki (1727), Thron Oyczysty albo Pałac Wieczności, w krótkim zebraniu monarchów,
278 N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 4 – 1 7
xiążąt y królów polskich, z różnych approbowanych autorów, od pierwszego Lecha, aż do

teraźnieyszych czasów . . . Poznań, pp. 17–19, 26.
przez Jegomości P. Jana z Dębin Dębińskiego . . . (1727). Częstochowa, pp. 1–131 (here,
pp. 32–34; all subsequent references to this edition). This was a revised version (by
Dębiński) of a tract by the Jesuit, Walenty Pęski, composed around 1672. Pęski’s manu-
script, ‘Palatium Reginae Libertatis Rempublicam oratoriam continens’ was considerably
more critical of the Commonwealth’s shortcomings than Dębiński’s version, which was
reprinted, on Jesuit presses, under a different title (‘Rozmowa uczona pewnego statysty
o wolności Rzeczypospolitey . . . ’) in J. Ostrowski Daneykowicz (1745), Swada Polska
y Łacińska albo Miscellanea Oratorskie . . . Lublin, 1 and in Latin in idem (1747), Suada
Latina seu miscellanea oratoria. Lublin. See the entry on Pęski by B. Natoński, Polski Słownik
Biograficzny, 25, pp. 746–8.
9 Ł. Opaliński (1959 edn), Polonia Defensa contra Ioan. Barclaium, in Ł. Opaliński, Wybór
Pism, S. Grzeszczuk (ed.), Wrocław: Ossolineum, p. 210; S. D. Karwicki (1992 edn), De
ordinanda Republica, in O potrzebie urządzenia Rzeczypospolitej albo o naprawie defektów w
stanie Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej [usually known as De ordinanda Republica, first publ. 1746],
in S. D. Karwicki, Dzieła polityczne z początku XVIII wieku, A. Przyboś and K. Przyboś (eds).
Wrocław: Ossolineum, p. 132. All references to this edition.
10 Quoted in K. Bartkiewicz (1979), Obraz dziejów ojczystych w świadomości historycznej w
Polsce w dobie Oświecenia. Poznań: PWN, p. 122. See also Karwicki, De ordinanda Republica,
p. 93.
11 S. Sienicki (1764), Sposób nowo-obmyślony konkludowania obrad publicznych . . . 3 Pts.,
Łowicz.
12 Chmielowski, op. cit., 1, pp. 242–3, 335.
13 Domina Palatii, pp. 33, 36; Łukasz Opaliński, Rozmowa Plebana z Ziemianinem, first
publ. 1641, here in Ł. Opaliński (1959), Wybór Pism, pp. 5–124, p. 25–6; Karwicki,
De ordinanda Republica, pp. 93–4, 133; [F. Radzewski], Remonstracya Stanom
Rzeczypospolitey Polskiey o Trybunałach Koronnym, tudzież estymacyi wolności, y pre-
rogatyw STANU SZLACHECKIEGO . . . ,[Poznań?], 1748, unpaginated; Sienicki, op.cit.,
p. 25.
14 A. M. Fredro (1979 edn), Scriptorum seu togae et belli notationum fragmenta, [first publ.
Danzig, 1660], here in Polish translation in Z. Ogonowski (ed.), Filozofia i myśl społeczna
XVII wieku. 2 vols, Warsaw: PWN, 1, p. 335.
15 Sz. Majchrowicz (1764), Trwałość szczęśliwa Królestw albo ich smutny upadek wolnym
narodom przed oczyma stawiona na utrzymanie nieoszacowaney szczęśliwości swoiey . . .
4 parts,Lwów, 2, pp. 7–12, 63–4. Cf. P. Pruszcz (1737), Forteca Monarchów y całego królestwa
polskiego duchowna z żywotów świętych tak iuż kanonizowanych y beatyfikowanych, iako też
świątobliwie żyiących patronów polskich, Także z obrazów CHRYSTUSA Pana y MATKI Iego
Przenayświętszey . . . w Oyczyźnie naszey cudami wielkiemi słynących . . . , Kraków, passim;
W. Łubieński (1740), Świat we wszystkich swoich częściach, większych y mnieyszych, to iest:
w Europie, Azyi, Affryce y Ameryce . . ., Wrocław, pp. 285–92.
16 Domina Palatii, p. 62. [S. Leszczyński, attr.], Głos Wolny Wolność Ubespieczaiący, [Nancy],
1733 [= 1743], (hereinafter Głos Wolny) p. 157. cf. Sienicki, op.cit., 1, p. 92.
17 Instruction of the Halicz sejmik, 20 January 1710, 18 August 1760. Similar concerns were
voiced by the Ruś and Brześć Kujawski and Inowrocław sejmiki, 7, 22 January 1710. For
sources of instructions, see Bibliography of primary sources.
18 Instructions of the sejmiki of Halicz, 18 August 1760; Ruś, 1 January 1699, 18 April 1701,
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 7 – 2 1 279
3 April 1713, 25 August 1730, 19 August 1748, 25 August 1760; Brześć Kujawski and
Inowrocław, 30 September 1718.
19 Laws of 1669, 1674, VL. 5, pp. 15–16, 141; 1736, VL 6, p. 304. G. [=J.] T. Lukowski (1977),
The Szlachta and the Confederacy of Radom, 1764–1767/68: a Study of the Polish Nobility.
Rome: Institutum Historicum Polonicum; J. Jedlicki (1968), Klejnot i bariery społeczne:
przeobrażenia szlachectwa polskiego w schyłkowym okresie feudalizmu. Warsaw: PWN,
pp. 19–23, 31–33, 96–99; J. Staszewski (1998), August II Mocny. Wrocław: Ossolineum,
p. 161.
xiążąt y królów polskich, z różnych approbowanych autorów, od pierwszego Lecha, aż
do teraźnieyszych czasów . . . Poznań, p. 285; Domina Palatii, p. 79; Sienicki, op.cit., 1,
pp. 316–8; Majchrowicz, op.cit., 2, p. 37.
21 Opaliński, Polonia Defensa, pp. 196–7.
22 T. Ulewicz (1950), Sarmacja: studium z problematyki słowiańskiej XV i XVI w. Kraków:
Studium Słowiańskie UJ; S. Cynarski (1968), ‘The shape of Sarmatian ideology’, Acta
Poloniae Historica, 19, 5–17; S. Tarnowski (2000 edn), Pisarze polityczni XVI wieku. Kraków:
Ośrodek Myśli Politycznej, pp. 122, 349–52, 417.
23 Opaliński, Rozmowa plebana, pp. 14–15, 40–50; A. M. Fredro (1979 edn), Militarium seu
axiomatum belli ad harmoniam togae accomodatorum libri duo, [first publ. Amsterdam,
1668], here in Polish translation in Ogonowski (ed.), Filozofia i myśl społeczna XVII
wieku, 1, pp. 331–8; W. Węgierski (1702), Geniusz dowcipu z rozumem o teraźniejszym
Rzeczypospolitey stanie certuiący się . . . n.pl. [unpaginated]. Karwicki, De ordinanda
Republica, p. 113.; Domina Palatii, p. 76; F. Poklatecki, [= F. Radzewski], Kwestye polityczne
oboiętne, statum Rzeczypospolity Polskiey . . . examinuiące . . . n. pl.: 1743, unpaginated
introduction and pp. 16–18; J. Maciejewski (ed.) (1976 edn), Literatura barska (antologia).
Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1976, pp. 7–15, 18–24, 39–42, 48–50, 228–9, 279.
24 A. W. Rzewuski (1790), O formie rządu republikańskiego myśli. n.pl., Pt. 2, pp. 51–3.
25 Domina Palatii, pp. 82, 86–7, 89.
26 S. D. Karwicki, ‘Egzorbitancje we wszystkich trzech stanach Rzeczypospolitej krótko
zebrane . . .’, [ms. c. 1703], in Karwicki, Dzieła polityczne, p. 26; repeated almost exactly
in De ordinanda Republica, in ibid., p. 96. The work was published in 1746, although the
manuscript was widely known before then.
27 J. T. Lukowski (2001), ‘The szlachta and the monarchy: reflections on the struggle inter
maiestatem ac libertatem’, in R. Butterwick (ed.), The Polish-Lithuanian Monarchy in
European Context, c. 1500–1795. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 132–49.
29 Fredro, Scriptorum seu togae et belli notationum fragmenta, p. 314.
30 Domina Palatii, pp. 46–7. The whole passage involves a range of detailed anatomical
comparisons and metaphors.
31 The phrase, ‘monarchic republic’ is, of course, Patrick Collinson’s. If it is indeed an apt
description of Elizabethan England, it is even more appropriate to Poland-Lithuania.
32 ibid., pp. 44–9.
33 Głos wolny, pp. 101–2.; F. Czacki, ‘Listy z okoliczności Monitorów’, 1765, BC 1195, pp. 13,
15, 16.
34 Karwicki, ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 31–2, Sienicki, Sposób nowo-obmyślony, 1, pp. 190–200.
Czacki, ibid., p. 56.
35 W. Konopczyński (2002 edn), Liberum Veto: studium porównawczo-historyczne, Kraków:
Universitas, p. 229.
280 N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 1 – 2 8
36 J. Dygdała (1984), Życie polityczne Prus Królewskich u schyłku ich związku z Rzecząpospolitą
w XVIII wieku. Warsaw: PWN, p. 80; Domina Palatii, pp. 75–6, 112–3.
37 Q. Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998,
pp. 28–9.
38 VL 1, p. 137.
39 Konopczyński, Liberum Veto, pp. 148, 160–2.
40 ibid., pp. 141–2, 165, 220–1, 229, 255, 266–7; W. Uruszczak (1980), Sejm walny
koronny w latach 1506–1540. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 161–8; W. Czapliński (1984), ‘Sejm
w latach 1587–1696’, in J. Michalski (ed) Historia Sejmu Polskiego. Warsaw: PWN, 1,
pp. 277–8.
42 E. Opaliński (1995), Kultura polityczna szlachty polskiej w latach 1587–1652. Warsaw: Wyd.
Sejmowe, pp. 81–9; M. Wagner (2000), Stanisław Jabłonowski, kasztelan krakowski, hetman
wielki koronny. Warsaw: Mada, pp. 6–7.
43 Czapliński, op. cit., p. 274.; E. Opaliński (2001), Sejm srebrnego wieku 1587–1652. Warsaw:
Wydawnictwo Sejmowe, p. 162.
44 Quoted in J. Gierowski (1971), W cieniu ligi północnej. Wrocław: Ossolineum, p. 141.
45 Lengnich, B.[=G.] (A. Z. Helcel trans. and ed.) (1836), Prawo pospolite królestwa polskiego.
Kraków: Kwartalnik Naukowy., p. 363.
46 Sienicki, op. cit., pp. 74–5.
47 A Grześkowiak-Krwawicz (2004), ‘Veto – wolność – władza. Zagadnienie sprzeciwu
jednostki w polskiej myśli politycznej wieku XVIII’, KH, 111, 142.
48 Fredro, Scriptorum seu togae et belli notationum fragmenta, pp. 312–5.
pp. 400–3.
50 W. Kriegseisen (1991), Sejmiki Rzeczypospolitej szlacheckiej w XVII i XVIII wieku. Warsaw:
Wyd. Sejmowe, pp. 144, 162–7, 171–97.
51 VL 6, pp. 112, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 124, 132, 137, 145, 159.
52 S. Garczyński (1753), Anatomia Rzeczypospolitey Polskiey. n.pl., p. 213.
53 Leszczyński’s Proclamation of 20 August 1734, incorporated into (1734) Konfederacya
Generalna Stanów Koronnych na walnym zieździe w Dzikowie pod Sandomierzem
postanowiona dnia V. miesiąca listopada roku pańskiego MDCCXXXIV, n. pl.
54 Domina Palatii, pp. 48, 109–110.
55 Opaliński, Rozmowa plebana, pp. 30–2.
56 W. Węgierski (1703), Classicum Wolności Polskiey w ruinie Oyczyzny na odgłos lamentuiącego
ubóstwa otrąbione niedotrzymaniem poprzysiężonych paktów oliwskich, przez KAROLA XII.
Króla szwedzkiego, złamaney wiary stwierdzone. [unpaginated]; [S. Szczuka, attr.] (1902
edn) F. X. Kluczycki (ed. and trans.), Eclipsis Poloniae orbi publico demonstrata. Kraków:
Czas, 1902, p. 113; Maciejewski (ed.) Literatura barska, pp. 91, 118–9, 232, 270–1, 287,
294–5, 324–5; W. Konopczyński (ed.) (1928), Konfederacja barska. Wybór tekstów. Kraków:
Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza, pp. 185–6; M. Wielhorski (1775), O przywróceniu dawnego
rządu według pierwiastkowych Rzeczypospolitey ustaw, [Amsterdam], pp. v–x. Cf. Opaliński,
Rozmowa plebana, pp. 30–2.
57 K. Mrozowska (1961), Szkoła Rycerska Stanisława Augusta Poniatowskiego. Wrocław:
Ossolineum, pp. 17–19; M. Loret [1930], Życie polskie w Rzymie w XVIII wieku. Rome:
Scuola Tipografica Pio X, pp. 125–62, 224, 237–8; J. Staszewski (1986), Polacy w osiemnas-
towiecznym Dreźnie. Wrocław: Ossolineum, pp. 128–40.
58 Kriegseisen, op. cit., pp. 80–87.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 8 – 3 4 281
59 [F. Czacki, 1758], Skarga ubogiej szlachty na otworzone w Polsce konwikty, podczas sejmików
zaniesiona, p. 3.
60 J. Tazbir (1966), ‘Prehistoria polskiej Utopii’, Przegląd Humanistyczny, (3), 15–26; idem
(1971), Rzeczpospolita i Świat: studia z dziejów kultury XVII wieku. Wrocław: Ossolineum,
pp. 190–200, esp. 197–8, 200. See also the comments by A. Mączak (1971), ‘Konfrontując
wiek szesnasty’, KH, 78, 872–8.
61 Text of the ‘Resolution’ in P. Smolarek (ed.) (1962), Diariusz sejmu walnego warszawskiego
1701–1702. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 50–3; the issue raised at the Sejm: ibid., pp. 62–3, 66–7, 70,
74, 83–4, 88, 100–1, 107, 136, 152, 158–9. See also J. Staszewski (1986) ‘ “Postanowienie
Wileńskie” z 1701r. i jego wpływ na unię polsko-litewską w czasach saskich’, Zapiski
Historyczne, 51, 83–96, who suggests it was a forgery designed to win royal favour. The
most recent analysis suggests that opponents of Augustus II in the Crown were responsible.
G. Slesoriūnas, ‘Czy tak zwane Postanowienie Wileńskie mogło zostać uchwalone w 1701
roku?’, ibid., 74 (2), 7–30. The matter remains unsettled.
62 M. Matuszewicz (1986 edn), B. Królikowski (ed.), with commentary by Z. Zielińska,
Diariusz życia mego. 2 vols, Warsaw: PiW, 1, p. 302.
63 J. Boczyłowic (1699), Orator politicus albo wymowny polityk różne traktujący materie. Toruń,
pp. 4–5.
64 K. Wieruszewski, SJ (1720), Fama polska publiczne stany y młódź szlachetską informuiąca . . .,
Poznań, pp. 79–81. Later editions, Poznań, 1722, Kalisz, 1730, Wilno, 1733, Warsaw, 1739.
65 Quoted in E. Rostworowski (1958), O polską koronę: polityka Francji w latach 1725–1733.
Wrocław: Ossolineum p. 300.
66 J. T. Lukowski (1985), ‘Towards Partition: Polish magnates and Russian intervention in
Poland during the early reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski’, Historical Journal, 28,
557–574.
67 Wieruszewski, op. cit., pp. 1–9 in the 1720 edition. B. Rok (1975), ‘Panegiryczne dedykacje z
kalendarzy S. Duńczewskiego (szlachecki ideał Sarmaty czasów saskich)’, Śląski Kwartalnik
Historyczny Sobótka, 15, 343–51.
68 Quoted in A. L. Sowa (1995), Świat ministrów Augusta II: wartości i poglądy funkcjonujące
w kręgu ministrów Rzeczypospolitej w latach 1702–1728. Kraków: Biblioteka Jagiellońska,
p. 54.
69 J. Lukowski (2004), ‘The szlachta and their ancestors in the eighteenth century’, KH, 111,
161–82.
Notes to Chapter 3: The search for harmony
1 [J. S. Jabłonowski] (1730), SKRUPUŁ bez skrupułu w Polszcze albo oświecenie grzechów
narodowi naszemu polskiemu zwyczaynieyszych a za grzechy nie mianych; traktat po prostu
grzechy roztrząsaiący . . . Przez pewnego POLAKA temisz grzechami grzesznego, ale żałuiącego.
Na poprawę swoię y ludzką podany. p. 34.
2 See W. Potocki, L. Kukulski (ed.) (1987), Dzieła, 3 vols, Warsaw: PIW, especially in
Potocki’s ‘Moralia’ of 1688, 3, pp. 31, 63, 190–6, 208–9, and his ‘Poczet herbów’ (1696)
3, pp. 386–97, 469–70. P. Buchwald-Pelcowa (1969), Satyra czasów saskich, Wrocław:
Ossolineum.
3 W. Konopczyński (1966), Polscy pisarze polityczni XVIII wieku. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 15–20.
4 B. Dybaś (1995), ‘De Vanitate Consiliorum a postawy i poglądy polityczne S. H.
282 N O T E S T O PA G E S 3 4 – 3 7
Lubomirskiego w pierwszych latach panowania Augusta II’, in K. Maliszewski & K.

Obremski (eds), Barok – Sarmatyzm – Psalmodia. Toruń: UMK, pp. 73–86.
5 S. H. Lubomirski (J. K. Rubinkowski trans.) (1739), Próżność y Prawda Rady. Poznań,
pp. 109–113, 126–37, 144–7. All references to this translation. See J. Staszewski (1975),
‘Pomysły reformatorskie czasów Augusta II’, Kwartalnik Historyczny, 82, 736–65.
6 Lubomirski, op. cit., pp. 7, 13–18, 73–4, 154–7.
7 A. L. Sowa (1980), ‘Wpływ doświadczeń okresu panowania Jana Sobieskiego na postawy
ministrów Augusta II’, Śląski Kwartalnik Historyczny Sobótka, (2), 411–420; idem
(1995), Świat ministrów Augusta II: wartości i poglądy funkcjonujące w kręgu ministrów
Rzeczypospolitej w latach 1702–1728. Kraków: UJ, pp. 27–9, 33, 36, 160–3, 179–81.
8 W. Węgierski (1703), Classicum Wolności Polskiey w ruinie Oyczyzny na odgłos lamentuiącego
Króla szwedzkiego, złamaney wiary stwierdzone . . . , unpaginated; S. Szczuka [attr.] (Polish
translation by F. X. Kluczycki) (1902 edn), Eclipsis Poloniae orbi publico demonstrata /
Zaćmienie Polski światu powszechnemu wykazane. Kraków: Czas, p. 113; Jabłonowski, op.
cit., p. 16; F. Poklatecki, [=Franciszek Radzewski] (1743), Kwestye polityczne oboiętne statum
Rzeczypospolity [sic] Polskiey, prerogatywy urzędów w niey, zwyczaie elekcyi królów, Seymów,
Seymików y inne rzeczy potrzebne do porządku oney examinuiące. 1743, unpaginated
introduction.
9 A. Poniński (M. Górska, ed.; M. Skrzypek, Introduction and annotations; A. Mączyńska-
Dilis, trans.) (2005 edn), Sarmatides seu Satyrae: Sarmatydy albo Satyry. Kraków: Collegium
Columbinum, pp. 245–52.
10 ‘Poklatecki’, op. cit., pp. 22–41, 66–67, 121–33, 149–70. The work saw two editions in 1743
and a posthumous one in 1749.
11 W. Bystrzonowski, S. J. (1733), Polak sensat w liście, w komplemencie polityk, humanista w
dyskursie, w mowach statysta, na przykład dany szkolney młodzi . . . Wilno, [unpaginated;
all references to this edition].
12 K. Przyboś (1981), Sejmik województwa krakowskiego w czasach saskich (1697–1763).
Kraków: UJ, p. 115.
13 S. D. Karwicki, O potrzebie urządzenia Rzeczypospolitej albo o naprawie defektów w stanie
Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej [usually known as De ordinanda Republica, first publ. 1746], in
S. D. Karwicki (A. Przyboś and K. Przyboś, eds) (1992 edn), Dzieła polityczne z początku
XVIII wieku. Wrocław: Ossolineum, pp. 88, 101; S. Leszczyński [attr.] (1733 [= 1743]),
Głos Wolny Wolność Ubespieczaiący. [Nancy], pp. 2–3, 7, 10, 12; [S. Konarski] (1760–3),
O Skutecznym Rad Sposobie albo o Utrzymywaniu ordynaryinych Sejmów. 4 vols, Warsaw,
4, unpaginated foreword and pp. 140–1; S. Sienicki (1764), Sposób nowo-obmyślony
konkludowania obrad publicznych. 3 Pts., Łowicz, Pt. 1, p. 43.
14 J. Dzieduszycki (T. Wirzbowski, ed.) (1906 edn), Traktat o elekcyi królów polskich z roku
1707.Warsaw: Kowalewski, pp. 9–10, 15–16, 18, 21–2.
15 ‘Poklatecki’, op. cit., unpaginated Introduction; Lubomirski, op. cit. pp. 125, 130;
Dzieduszycki, op. cit., pp. 9–10, 15–18, 21–2; Jabłonowski, op. cit., p. 16; [Szczuka, attr.],
op. cit., pp. 129–31.
16 Dzieduszycki, op. cit., pp. 19–22. J. Poraziński (1992), ‘Reforma ustroju czy pacyfikacja
wewnętrzna? Uwagi nad “Traktatem o Elekcyi Królów Polskich” Jerzego Dzieduszyckiego
z 1707 roku’, in J. Dygdała & B. Woszczyński (eds), in Historia i Archiwistyka: księga
pamiątkowa ku czci Andrzeja Tomczaka. Toruń: UMK, pp. 117–125. [Szczuka, attr.], op.
cit., p. 159; ‘Poklatecki’, op. cit., pp. 9–13, 21–22.
17 ibid., pp. 22–66.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 3 8 – 4 4 283
18 Głos wolny szlachcica jednego dobrze i poczciwie ojczyźnie życzącego i zasłużonego in pas-
sivitate na sejmiku przedsejmowym w Proszowicach zerwanym mówić nie chcącego, [1732],
unpaginated.
19 Rozmowa pewnego ziemianina ze swoim sąsiadem o teraźniejszych okolicznościach r. 1733
in S. Konarski (J. Nowak-Dłużewski, ed.) (1955) Pisma Wybrane. 2 vols., Warsaw: PiW, 1,
pp. 62–72.
20 [Szczuka, attr.], op. cit., p. 123.
21 ibid., p. 119.
22 Jabłonowski, op. cit., p. 5.
23 ibid., pp. 8, 9, 10–13, 15–16.
24 ibid., pp. 97, 111, 113–5.
25 ibid., pp. 4–6, 8, 9–10; 73–4.
26 ibid., pp. 16–17. W. Konopczyński (1966), Polscy pisarze polityczni XVIII wieku. Warsaw:
PWN, pp. 66–7.
27 J. T. Lukowski, ‘Towards Partition: Polish magnates and Russian intervention in Poland dur-
ing the early reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski’ (1985), Historical Journal, 28, 560–4.
28 Dzieduszycki, op. cit., pp. 17–18.
29 [Szczuka, attr.], op. cit., pp. 109, 139–41; Jabłonowski, op. cit., p. 24; B. Chmielowski (1746),
Nowe Ateny albo Akademia wszelkiej scyencyi pełna na różne tytuły. Lublin, 2, pp. 374–5;
[W. Rzewuski] (1756), Myśli w teraźnieyszych okolicznościach Rzeczypospolitey. Poczajów,
pp. 13r.–v.
30 S. Konarski (M. Gorbaczowa trans.) (1995 edn), Epistolae familiares Stanisława Konarskiego.
Część druga: tekst, przekład. Kielce: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna im. J. Kochanowskiego,
1995, pp. 12–13, 71–2, 90–1, 94–6, 173.
31 ibid., pp. 173–4.
32 Jabłonowski, op. cit., pp. 36–48.
33 ‘Poklatecki’, op. cit., pp. 162–4, 167–9.
34 ibid., p. 170.
35 ibid., pp. 163, 169–70.
36 [Rzewuski], op. cit., pp. 23v., 14r.
37 ibid., pp. 6r.–v.
38 ibid., pp. 9v–11r., 12r.–v., 14r.
39 Dzieduszycki, op. cit., passim; [Szczuka, attr.], op. cit., pp. 153–5.
40 [Rzewuski], op. cit., pp. 2v, 5v.
41 The Grand Crown Referendary heard appeals from peasants on crown properties. On
Dembowski’s authorship, see A. Rosner (1983), ‘Wolność polska, rozmową Polaka z
Francuzem roztrząśniona’, in A. Mączak & others (eds), Francja – Polska XVIII–XIXw.
Warsaw: PWN, pp. 120–9.
42 [A. S. Dembowski] (2000 edn) Wolność polska, rozmową polaka z francuzem roztrząśniona,
in M. Skrzypek (ed.), Filozofia i myśl społeczna w latach 1700–1830. Warsaw: PAN, 1,
pp. 594–60.
43 ibid., p. 595.
44 S. Konarski, Rozmowa pewnego ziemianina ze swoim sąsiadem o teraźniejszych okolicznościach
r. 1733 in Nowak-Dłużewski (ed.), op. cit. 1, p. 53.
45 S. D. Karwicki, ‘Egzorbitancje we wszystkich trzech stanach Rzeczypospolitej krótko
zebrane . . . ’, [ms. c. 1703], in S. D. Karwicki, op. cit., pp. 23–79; idem, O potrzebie urządzenia
Rzeczypospolitej [De ordinanda Republica], ibid., pp. 85–193.
46 Leszczyński, [attr.] (1733 [= 1743]), op. cit. (hereinafter Głos Wolny). Also published in
284 N O T E S T O PA G E S 4 4 – 5 1
French, (1749) La voix libre du citoyen. Paris. Rostworowski has proposed the true author
to be Mateusz Białłozor, an otherwise little-known Lithuanian nobleman. E. Rostworowski,
‘Czy Stanisław Leszczyński jest autorem Głosu Wolnego?’, idem (1963), Legendy i fakty
XVIIIw. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 68–144. The case remains open, although Rostworowski has
placed Leszczyński’s authorship in serious doubt. The same essay also explores the very
real differences between the Polish original and the French version, for which Leszczyński’s
responsibility is much less in question.
47 Głos Wolny, pp. 2,10–11, 14–5, 26–7, 108–9, 153, 181; Karwicki, ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 24,
29–30, 37, 65; idem, De ordinanda, pp. 88–9, 100–1, 113.
48 Głos Wolny, pp. 7–8.
49 ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 34, 70; De ordinanda, pp. 180–8; Głos Wolny, pp.165–75.
50 ‘Egzorbitancje’ p. 27; De ordinanda, pp. 91–2; Głos Wolny, p. 4.
51 De ordinanda, pp. 124–30, 134.
52 Głos Wolny, pp. 32–37; similar arguments in ‘Egzorbitancje’, p. 26 and De Ordinanda, p. 96,
130–33.
53 ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 41–7; De ordinanda, pp. 134–5.
54 ‘Egzorbitancje’, p. 43; De Ordinanda, pp. 135–7.
55 ‘Egzorbitancje’ p. 45; De Ordinanda, pp. 136–7.
56 ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 64–5; De Ordinanda, p. 113.
58 ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 34, 57–61; De Ordinanda, pp. 116–23.
59 ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 49–51; De Ordinanda, pp. 106–7.
60 ibid., p. 105; ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 51, 64.
61 De Ordinanda, p. 115; ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 58, 66.
62 ibid., pp. 49, 64; De Ordinanda, p. 127.
63 ‘Egzorbitancje’, p. 65; De Ordinanda, pp. 123–4.
64 ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 56–7, 64–66; De Ordinanda, p. 113,115.
65 ‘Egzorbitancje’, p. 67; De Ordinanda, pp. 115, 122.
66 ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 55–6; De Ordinanda, pp. 108–11.
67 ‘Egzorbitancje’, pp. 68, 71–77; De Ordinanda, pp. 181–2, 184–7.
68 ibid., p. 189.
69 S. Garczyński (1753), Anatomia Rzeczypospolitey Polskiey. [Poznań], p. 213; Głos Wolny,
pp. 8, 55, 107–8.
71 ibid., pp. 37–8, 40–2, 83.
72 ibid., pp. 48–53, 77–84, 92.
73 ibid., p. 71.
74 ibid., pp. 51, 71–2.
75 ibid., pp. 74–6, 79–83.
76 ibid., pp. 62–5, 110–117.
77 ibid., pp. 122–3. 127, 130–1.
78 Rostworowski, op. cit., esp. pp. 79–144. If, as Emanuel Rostworowski has suggested, the
Głos Wolny was written by Mateusz Białłozor, where he got the concept from can only be
an object of speculation. Perhaps he had read Malebranche, who had made considerable
use of the idea of a ‘general’ and ‘particular’ will. The Białłozors had something of a family
tradition of supplying chapter members of the cathedral of Wilno and there is no reason
why they should not have come across French theological writings. See P. Riley (1986), The
N O T E S T O PA G E S 5 1 – 5 7 285
General Will Before Rousseau: the Transformation of the Divine into the Civic. Princeton N.
J.: Princeton University Press.
79 ibid., pp. 148–51.
80 It may simply be that the concept of a ‘general will’ was more widespread than is generally
thought. The Głos Wolny appeared in a French translation, produced by Leszczyński and
his secretary, Solignac, as (1749) La voix libre du citoyen, ou observations sur le gouvernement
de Pologne. 2 Pts., [Amsterdam]. However, ‘wola powszechna’ is never rendered as ‘volonté
générale’, but as ‘bonne volonté’. ‘Volonté particulière’ is used to render ‘wola partykularna’.
Ibid., 1, pp. 56, 110.
81 ibid., pp. 100–5, 121.
82 ‘Moralizacja nad stanem Rzeczypospolitej po śmierci Augusta III, albo projekt do
ustanowienia formy rządów Polski i do uszczęśliwienia całej ojczyzny Rzeczypospolitej’,
Kraków, Polska Akademia Umiejętności, ms. 320, ff. 114r.–118v., 119v.–121v. See also
E. Rostworowski, ‘Jan Nepomucen Poniński autorem republikańskiej “Moralizacji” i
galerii “Patriotów” z czasów ostatniego bezkrólewia’ (1982), Śląski Kwartalnik Historyczny
Sobótka, 37, 233–40.
83 ‘Moralizacja’, ff. 121r–123r.
84 Jabłonowski, op. cit., p. 43.
Notes to Chapter 4: Keeping the faith
1 (1715) Confederacya generalna Stanów Rzeczypospolitey uczyniona w Tarnogrodzie dnia

26 Novembra 1715 [unpaginated]; (1734) Konfederacya generalna stanów koronnych na
walnym zieździe w Dzikowie pod Sandomierzem postanowiona dnia V. miesiąca listopada
roku pańskiego MDCCXXXIV [unpaginated]; act of the Confederacy of Radom [1767]
in G.[=J.]T. Lukowski (1977), The szlachta and the Confederacy of Radom, 1764–1767/68:
a study of the Polish nobility. Rome: Institutum Historicum Polonicum, p. 257; ‘Akt
konfederacji barskiej [1768]’ in W. Konopczyński (ed.) (1928), Konfederacja barska, wybór
tekstów. Kraków: Krakowska Spółka Wydaw., p. 7; Confederacy of Targowica [1792] in
comte d’Angeberg [=L. Chodźko] (ed.) (1862), Receuil des traités, conventions et actes
diplomatiques concernant la Pologne, 1762–1862. Paris: Amyot 1, p. 270.
2 S. Majchrowicz (1764), Trwałość szczęśliwa Królestw albo ich smutny upadek wolnym naro-
dom przed oczyma stawiona na utrzymanie nieoszacowaney szczęśliwości swoiey. [4 parts],
Lwów.
3 ibid., unpaginated Preface.
4 ibid., 1, pp. 4–10; 3, pp. 19, 147–59, 191.
5 ibid., 2, pp. 29–30.
6 ibid., 2, pp. 1, 5–16, 54–65.
7 ibid., 2, pp. 295–6.
8 ibid., 1, 209–11.
9 ibid., 1, pp. 151–210; 3, pp. 92–5, 111, 191–2; 4, pp. 102–5.
10 ibid., 1, p. 199.
11 ibid., 2, pp. 108–113, 136.
12 ibid., 4, pp. 475–86.
13 A. Fredro, Scriptorum seu togae et belli notationum fragmenta, 1660, here in in
Z. Ogonowski (ed.) (1979), Filozofia i myśl społeczna XVII wieku., Warsaw: PWN, 1,
286 N O T E S T O PA G E S 5 7 – 6 2
pp. 312–3; W. Kochowski (P. Borek, ed.) (2003 edn), Psalmodia polska. Kraków: Universitas,
pp. 17–20.
przez Jegomości P. Jana z Dębin Dębińskiego (1727). Częstochowa, pp. 121–2.
15 F. Jaroszewicz (1767), Matka Świętych Polska albo żywoty świętych, błogosławionych,
pobożnych Polaków y Polek wszelkiego stanu y kondycyi każdego wieku od zakrzewioney w
Polszcze chrześciańskiey wiary osobliwą życia doskonałością słynących. Kraków.
16 ibid., p. 483. B. Chmielowski (1746), Nowe Ateny albo Akademia wszelkiej scyencyi pełna
na różne tytuły, iak na classes podzielona. Pt. 2, Lublin, pp. 409–16. But Chmielowski did
count seventy-eight miraculous portraits of the Virgin Mary in the Commonwealth, ibid.,
pp. 418–22.
17 S. Leszczyński [attr.] (1733 [=1743]), Głos Wolny Wolność Ubespieczaiący, [Nancy], pp. 21,
94, 95, 187–8.
18 ibid., pp. 12–14.
19 ibid., pp. 15–25.
20 S. Garczyński (1753), Anatomia Rzeczypospolitey Polskiey. [Poznań]. All references to this
edition. The fact that three editions appeared is no testimony to the popularity of the
work, but to the author’s dissatisfaction with the ecclesiastical Polish printers who excised
a number of passages relating to his views on the clergy. Garczyński had the final version
printed in Prussian Silesia. E. Rostworowski (1963), ‘Spór Stefana Garczyńskiego z braćmi
Załuskimi o rolę duchowieństwa w “Anatomii Rzeczypospolitej”’, in idem, O naprawę
Rzeczypospolitej XVII-XVIII. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 213–30.
21 Garczyński, op. cit., pp. 12–14.
22 ibid., p. 3.
23 ibid., pp. 90, 92, 111–113.
24 ibid., pp. 130, 205.
25 ibid., pp. 106, 253–4.
26 ibid., pp. 41, 65–6, 199.
27 ibid., p. 140.
28 ibid., pp. 3–7, 68–70, 97, 120–5, 136–9, 180–1.
29 ibid., pp. 101, 267–70.
30 ibid., pp. 109–110, 267.
31 ibid., pp. 22–34.
32 ibid., pp. 245, 252.
33 ibid., pp. 187–8, 270–1.
34 ibid., p. 77.
35 F. Venturi (1982 edn), Settecento riformatore. Turin: Einaudi, 1, pp. 120–5, 135–45;
Garczyński, op. cit., pp. 186, 270.
36 ibid., ‘Praefatio’ [unpaginated] and pp. 325–7.
37 ibid., ‘Praefatio’; pp. 312–3, 334.
38 ibid., pp. 196–8, 291.
39 J. Ancuta (1719), Jus Plenum Religionis Catholicae in regno Poloniae wt M.D.L. iuri praetenso
Dissidentium in Supplici Libello et Supplemento Privilegiorum. Vilnius; the work was
translated into Polish and reissued in 1768 by L. Pruszanowski as Prawo zupełne wiary
katolickiej w Koronie i W.X.L. przeciw prawu uprzątnionemu Dyssydentów. [Vilnius] (here,
pp. 27–8). All references to this translated edition.
40 VL 2, p. 124.
41 W. Kriegseisen (1996), Ewangelicy polscy i litewscy w epoce saskiej (1696–1763): sytuacja
N O T E S T O PA G E S 6 2 – 6 7 287
prawna, organizacja i stosunki międzywyznaniowe. Warsaw: Semper, pp. 10, 19–24, pp. 35–8,
50–56, 75.
42 A. Deruga (1933), ‘Piotr Wielki a Bazyljanie połoccy’, in Księga Pamiątkowa Koła Historyków
Słuchaczy Uniwersytetu Stefana Batorego w Wilnie, 1923–1933. Wilno: Uniw. S. Batorego,
pp. 95–120.
43 (1734) Konfederacya generalna stanów koronnych na walnym zieździe w Dzikowie . . .
44 Kriegseisen, op. cit., pp. 172, 239–40.
45 VL 6, pp. 119, 124–5; Kriegseisen, op. cit., pp. 44–5, 108–110.
46 [Ancuta], op. cit.; J. A. Załuski (1731), Dwa miecze odsieczy katolickiey . . . przeciwko
natarczywym pp. dyssydentów polskich zamachom. Warsaw.
47 Ancuta, op. cit., pp. 286–7; Załuski, op. cit., pp. 352–3.
48 [S. Szczuka], [attr.] (Polish translation by F. X. Kluczycki) (1902 edn), Eclipsis Poloniae
orbi publico demonstrata / Zaćmienie Polski światu powszechnemu wykazane. Kraków: Czas,
pp. 130–1.
49 ibid., pp. 119–21, 140–3. J. Tazbir (2004), Polska przedmurzem Europy. Warsaw: Twój Styl.
50 K. Maliszewski (1982), Jakub Kazimierz Rubinkowski: szlachcic, mieszczanin toruński,
erudyta barokowy. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 18, 20–1. E. Cieślak (1984), ‘Społeczno-polityczna
i narodowa integracja’, in G. Labuda (ed.), Historia Pomorza, 2, pt. 2, Poznań, Wyd.
Poznańskie, pp. 160–66.
51 VL 6, p. 286; Kriegseisen, op. cit., pp. 244–9.
52 ibid., pp. 63–4, 69, 280–4.
53 Chmielowski op. cit., 1, pp. 258, 259, 337, 769; 2, pp. 355–6; 4, pp. 383, 390–6.
54 J. Fabre (1952), Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et l’Europe des Lumières. Paris: Belles Lettres,
pp. 69–70.
55 The circumstances of the Thorn affair remain far from clear. See G. Król (1991), ‘Anglia
wobec wydarzeń toruńskich 1724r.’, Zapiski Historyczne, 56,. 25–46. For wider aspects, see
L. R. Lewitter (1981), ‘Intolerance and foreign intervention in early eighteenth-century
Poland-Lithuania’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 5 (3), 283–305.
56 Załuski, op. cit., pp. 303–4, 354, 389–423; Chmielowski, op. cit., 1, p. 337; Majchrowicz, op.
cit., 3, pp. 414–7, 460–1.
57 ‘Akt konfederacji barskiej’ in Konopczyński (ed.), Konfederacja barska, p. 6.
58 Unpaginated Preface of L. Pruszanowski’s translation, Prawo zupełne wiary katolickiej.
59 E. Rostworowski. (1970), ‘Ksiądz Marek i proroctwa polityczne doby radomsko-barskiej’,
in Przemiany tradycji barskiej. Kraków: Wyd. Literackie, pp. 107–65.
60 See J. Maciejewski (ed.) (1976 edn), Literatura barska (antologia). Wrocław: Ossolineum,
passim.
61 ‘Odważny Polak na marsowym polu’, ibid., p. 316.
62 Fredro, Scriptorum seu togae et belli notationum fragmenta. 1, p. 305; S. Sienicki, (1764),
Sposób nowo-obmyślony konkludowania obrad publicznych. 3 Pts., Łowicz, 1, pp. 48–50;
List, pod imieniem rzymskiego katolika pisany d. 28 maii 1764 A., quoted in W. Smoleński
(1949), Przewrót umysłowy w Polsce XVIII wieku. Poznań: PiW, pp. 213–4.
63 Majchrowicz, op. cit., 2, pp. 221, 226, 227, 230; 3, pp. 99.
64 Ancuta, op. cit., pp. 149–50, 196–7, 286–7; Załuski, op. cit., pp. 111–2, 352–3.
65 Sienicki, op. cit., 1, pp. 112–4.
66 ibid., p. 102.
67 B. Lengnich (A. Z. Helcel ed. and trans.) (1836), Prawo pospolite królestwa polskiego.
Kraków: Kwartalnik Naukowy, p. 300.
68 S. Grzybowski, ‘Majchrowicz, Szymon’, PSB, 19, p. 157.
288 N O T E S T O PA G E S 6 8 – 7 3
69 M. Loret [1930], Życie polskie w Rzymie w XVIII wieku. Rome: Scuola Tipografica Pio X,
pp. 125–73; W. Müller (1969), ‘Diecezje w okresie potrydenckim’ in J. Kłoczowski (ed.),
Kościół w Polsce. Kraków: Znak, 2, pp. 108–29.
70 E. Aleksandrowska, ‘Pisarze – generacje i rodowód społeczny’, in T. Kostkiewiczowa (ed.)
(2002 edn), Słownik literatury polskiego Oświecenia. Wrocław: Ossolineum, pp. 400–49.
On these estimates, the clergy account for 52.2% (12) of those born before 1709, 67.5%
(48) of those born between 1710 and 1719, 61.6% (87) of those born between 1720–49.
Thereafter, the laity dominate. Even so, of a total population of 531 identifiable writers
born before 1709 and up to 1806, over one third (36.9%) were clergymen, of whom 11.6%
were Piarists and 10.9% were Jesuits. See also idem, ‘Zakony’, ibid., pp. 690–8.
71 Smoleński, op. cit., p. 24; Fabre, op. cit., p. 93.
72 B. Kryda (1992), ‘Józef Andrzej Załuski (1702–1774)’ in T. Kostkiewiczowa & Z. Goliński
(eds), Pisarze polskiego Oświecenia. Warsaw: PWN, 1, p. 48.
73 Smoleński, op. cit., p. 271.
74 Fabre, op. cit., p. 118.
75 W. Konopczyński (1926), Stanisław Konarski. Warsaw: Mianowski, pp. 21–9, where the
author also draws attention to Locke’s educational ideas on Konarski.
76 ibid., pp. 32–7.
77 Fabre, op. cit., pp. 74, 160, cf. pp. 45–6. K. Puchowski (2004), ‘“Collegium Nobilium”
Stanisława Konarskiego a elitarne instytucje wychowawcze zakonów nauczających w
Europie’, Wiek Oświecenia, 20, 11–69.
78 Konopczyński, Konarski, pp. 159–80.
79 S. Konarski, De viro honesto et bono cive ab ineunte aetate formando, in idem (1955 edn),
(J. Nowak-Dłużewski, ed.), Pisma Wybrane. Warsaw: PiW, 2, pp. 107–8n.
80 De emendandis eloquentiae vitiis, in ibid., pp. 9–11.
81 See the comments by Adam Jordan (1760), Mowa o konwiktach, na skrypt pod tytułem:
Skarga ubogiej szlachty odpowiadająca z potrzebnemi gwoli edukacji w Polsce szlacheckiej
młodzi refleksjami. Warsaw, pp. 15, 55–6.
82 Ordinationes Visitationis Apostolicae pro Provincia Polona . . . Scholarum Piarum, in Nowak-
Dłużewski (ed.), Pisma Wybrane, 2, p. 242.
83 ibid., p. 164. Awareness of the scope for abuse was one of which teaching orders were well
aware, although an early scandal involving the Piarists soon after their foundation may
have made them particularly sensitive to the issue. See K. Liebreich (2004), Fallen Order:
a history. London: Atlantic Books. This is the only readily accessible modern account of
even a part of this important Order’s history.
84 De emendandis eloquentiae vitiis, pp. 7, 12–25, 42.
85 ibid., pp. 44–51.
86 ibid., pp. 29–34.
87 De viro honesto et bono cive ab ineunte aetate formando in Nowak-Dłużewski (ed.), Pisma
Wybrane, 2, pp. 107–58, here, pp. 130–4, 148–50.
88 De arte bene cogitandi ad artem dicendi bene necessaria, in ibid., 2, pp. 94–9.
89 ibid., pp. 59, 66–8.
90 E. Aleksandrowska (ed.) (1976), ‘Monitor’ 1765–1785. Wybór. Wrocław: Ossolineum,
pp. 150–62.
91 De arte bene cogitandi, pp. 69–70, 76–80.
92 A. Jobert (1941), La Commission d’ Éducation Nationale en Pologne (1773–1794). Paris:
Droz, p. 195.
93 M. Klimowicz (2002 edn), Oświecenie. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 42–5, 77–84.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 7 3 – 7 9 289
94 M. Matuszewicz (1986 edn), (B. Królikowski, ed., with commentary by Z. Zielińska),

Diariusz życia mego. Warsaw: PIW, 1986, 2, pp. 510–11.
95 Majchrowicz, op. cit., 2, pp. 296–7, 299–306.
96 ibid., pp. 247–54.
97 ibid., 3, pp. 526–8.
98 ibid., pp. 150–3, 216, 463–5.
99 ibid., pp. 153–4, 163–4, 172–3.
100 ibid., p. 257.
101 ibid., 4, p. 279.
102 ibid., 3, pp. 330–6, 369–82, 394–97.
103 VL 4, pp. 238–9, 272, 323. T. Wasilewski (1984), Ostatni Waza na polskim tronie. Katowice:
Uniwersytet Śląski, p. 216; J. Snopek (1986), Objawienie i Oświecenie: z dziejów libertynizmu
w Polsce. Wrocław: Ossolineum, pp. 46–50. Jonathan Israel has pointed to seventeenth-
century German thinkers who viewed Polish Socinians as a source of materialist ideas
and disbelief, (2001), Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity
1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 629, 632; and (2006), Enlightenment
Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, pp. 113–34, 867.
104 Snopek, op. cit., pp. 53–6.
105 A. Poniński, M. Górska (ed.); M. Skrzypek (introduction and annotations), A. Mączyńska-
Dilis (trans.) (2005), Sarmatides seu Satyrae: Sarmatydy albo Satyry. Kraków: Collegium
Columbinum, pp. 103–34. On the consensus gentium argument, see Israel, Enlightenment
Contested, pp. 70–77.
106 Israel, Radical Enlightenment, passim, and especially pp.406–35, 637–58, 686, 693, 700;
idem, Enlightenment Contested, passim and especially pp. 183–93.
107 [F. Czacki] [1758], Skarga ubogiej szlachty na otworzone w Polsce konwikty, podczas
sejmików
108 Konarski, De viro honesto, pp. 110–2; Jordan, op. cit., pp. 6–10, 43–50.
109 De viro honesto, pp. 109–110, 141–2.
Notes to Chapter 5: Towards successful counsels
1 M. Matuszewicz, (B. Królikowski, ed., commentary by Z. Zielińska) (1986), Diariusz życia

mego. Warsaw: PIW, 2, p. 142. It was the only reference to a political treatise made in his
voluminous memoirs.
2 S. Konarski (1761–3), O skutecznym rad sposobie. Warsaw, 4 vols. All references to this
edition. Hereinafter, OSRS.
3 ibid., 1, pp. 70–1, 118–27, 137–8, 191; 3, p. 109; 4, p. 298.
4 ibid.,1, p. 177.
5 ibid., 1, pp. 167–71.
6 ibid., 2, p. 166.
7 ibid., 1, pp. 14, 15, 183.
8 ibid., 1, p. 173.
9 ibid., 2, p. 124; 4, pp. 227–30, 278–9.
10 ibid., 2, p. 56; 3, pp. 290–3. S. D. Karwicki, ‘Egzorbitancje we wszystkich trzech stanach
Rzeczypospolitej krótko zebrane . . .’, in idem, (A. Przyboś & K. Przyboś, eds) (1992) Dzieła
290 N O T E S T O PA G E S 7 9 – 8 4
polityczne z początku XVIII wieku.Wrocław: Ossolineum, p. 65; S. Leszczyński, [attr.] (1733

[=1743]), Głos Wolny Wolność Ubespieczaiący. [Nancy], pp. 75–6.
11 OSRS, 1, p. 63; 3, pp. 136–7.
12 ibid., 1, pp. 48–53, 126–8; 2, pp. 91–6, 98–9.
13 ibid., 1, pp. 50–1.
14 ibid., 1, p. 20.
15 ibid., 1, pp. 20–68, 96–118.
16 ibid., 1, pp. 59–62, 69–72.
17 ibid., 1, pp. 72–4, 81–96, 155–7.
18 ibid., 2, pp. 101–2, 124.
19 ibid., 1, pp. 144–5; 2, pp. 4–7, 200, 202.
20 ibid., 3, pp. 60–4. It is worth noting that the Lubomirskis were also early and generous
patrons of Konarski’s Piarist order. Jan Stanisław Jabłonowski may not have pursued some
of his key arguments through to a logical conclusion, but he had seen through Lubomirski.
J. S. Jabłonowski (1730), SKRUPUŁ bez skrupułu w Polszcze, pp. 104–5.
21 OSRS, 2, pp. 35–49, 44–5, 111.
pp. 312–6.
23 Konarski was referring to Louis’ grant of the Privilege of Košice of 1374, which exempted
the nobility from all but token taxation without their consent.
24 OSRS, 2, pp. 109–111.
25 ibid., 4, p. 141.
26 ibid., 3, pp. 16–17; 4, p. 223.
27 ibid., 3, pp. 18–27, 37–106; 4, pp. 305–6.
28 ibid., 2, pp. 49, 50–1; 4, p. 11.
29 ibid., 2, pp. 49–51; 96–7, 152–78.
30 Olszewski, op. cit., p. 312.
31 OSRS, 2, pp. 106, 180–1; 4, pp. 294–5.
32 ibid., 2, p. 188.
33 ibid., 2, pp. 133–9.
34 ibid., 2, pp. 129–30.
35 ibid., 2, pp. 212, 217–8.
36 ibid., 4, pp. 8–9.
37 ibid., 2, pp. 116, 118, 124–5, 131–2, 188–92, 205–7, 221–3.
38 ibid., 3, p. 286.
39 ibid., 2, pp. 114–6.
40 ibid., 4, pp. 36–8. Gaspard de Curban de Réal, La science du gouvernement (8 vols, Aix-la-
Chapelle, 1751–65). On its importance, see R. R. Palmer (1959, The Age of the Democratic
Revolution. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1, pp. 61–2.
41 OSRS, 4, pp. 36–60 (England); 17–29 (the Roman Republic); 60–83 (Sweden); 83–103
(Venice); 103–9 (Genoa); 109–115 (Switzerland); 115–129 (the United Provinces).
Konarski also expended considerable praise on England in chapter 23 and 24 of Book 3,
pp. 256–78.
42 [S. Poniatowski] [1740], List ziemianina do pewnego przyjaciela z inszego województwa.
p. civ.
43 OSRS, 3, pp. 56–9, 257–66; 4, p. 240.
44 ibid., 3, pp. 226, 253–6, 270–8.
45 ibid., 4, pp. 37–8 and 38n.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 8 4 – 9 3 291
46 ibid., 3, pp. 238–9, 253, 267, 287; 4, pp. 210–3.

47 ibid., 3, pp. 131–224.
48 J. Kl. Branicki, [attr.; sc. S. Konarski] (L. Nabielak, ed.) (1865), ‘“O poprawie
Rzeczypospolitej”. Memoryał podany rządowi francuzkiemu 1762 roku, ze względem na
inne reformy owoczesne’, Biblioteka Ossolińskich, 6, 1–83. Here, p. 32.
49 OSRS, 3, pp. 159–62.
50 ibid., 3, pp. 145–55, 197–200, 217–8; 4, pp. 300–1.
51 ibid., 3, pp. 197–8, 256.
52 ibid., 4, pp. 209–13.
53 ibid., 4, pp. 193–206, 213–4, 237–44, 266–82, 290.
54 ibid., 4, p. 267.
55 ibid., 2, pp. 114–6; 4, p. 283.
56 Much of Book 4 is taken up with the details of the council of residents, especially
pp. 166–293. See also ibid., 4, pp. 299, 302.
57 ibid., 4, pp. 174–5.
58 ibid., 2, p. 252; 4, pp. 14, 282.
59 [F. Czacki], List ciekawy przeciw autorowi książki o utrzymywaniu Seymów, pp. 3, 5–6.
60 W. Rzewuski (1764), Myśli o niezawodnym utrzymaniu Seymów y Liberi Veto. Z proiektami
na Konwokacyą. Unpaginated. Cf. idem (1756), Myśli w teraźnieyszych okolicznościach
Rzeczypospolitey. Poczajów, fos. 12v.–20r.
61 [S. Konarski] (1764), Myśli na Myśli albo Uwagi nad projektem pod tytułem: Myśli o
niezawodnym utrzymywaniu Seymów i Liberi Veto. pp. 5–8, 23–7.
62 OSRS, 3, p. 287.
63 [Konarski], Myśli na Myśli, p. 30.
64 [W. Rzewuski] (1764), Myśli o mądrych Uwagach naganiaiących niezawodny sposób
utrzymania Seymów y Liberi Veto R.P. [unpaginated].
65 S. Sienicki (1764), Sposób nowo-obmyślony konkludowania obrad publicznych, dla utwi-
erdzenia praw kardynalnych wolności, libertatis sentiendi & juris vetandi z uwagami nad
publicznemi status materyami do rozsądku Rzeczpltey Polskiey podany przez szczerze
kochaiącego Oyczyzny syna Szczepana na Sienicy Piotrasach Sienickiego burgrabiego grodz-
kiego różańskiego, 3 Pts., Łowicz-Warsaw.
66 ibid., 1, pp. 3–8.
67 ibid., unpaginated Preface, 1, pp. 2–4, 38–9, 255–6; 2, pp. 14, 36.
68 ibid., 2, pp. 23–4, 32–3, 39–47.
69 ibid., 1, pp. 144, 329–30.
70 VL, 1, p. 137.
71 S. Konarski, Rozmowa pewnego ziemianina ze swoim sąsiadem o teraźniejszych okolicznościach
r. 1733 in S. Konarski (J. Nowak-Dłużewski, ed.) (1955), Pisma Wybrane. Warsaw: PIW, 1
pp. 54–5. The charge of inconsistency related not to this tract, but to Konarski’s Preface to
the 1732 edition of the Volumina Legum. OSRS, 3, pp. 303–7.
72 Sienicki, op. cit., 1, unpaginated Preface and pp. 141, 330–1; 2, p. 25. Cf. OSRS 1, pp. 30–3.
73 ibid., 1, pp. 6–7, 43, 225, 246.
74 ibid., 1, pp. 128–9, 133, 254; 2, pp. 3–4, 107–11; 3, pp. 45–6.
75 ibid., 1, pp. 135–6, 253; 2, pp. 89, 90–2.
76 ibid., 2, pp. 91–5; 3, p. 71.
77 ibid., 3, pp. 88, 100, 130.
78 Some of the most highly placed opponents of the reformers tried to stoke up such fears.
Z. Zielińska (2004), ‘Zabiegi Rosji o zachowanie liberum veto i o gwarancję w okresie
292 N O T E S T O PA G E S 9 3 – 1 0 2
bezkrólewia 1763–1764r’, KH, 111, 85–6. On Sienicki, see also J. T. Lukowski (2006),
‘An eighteenth-century view of Nihil Novi: Szczepan Sienicki’s Sposób Nowo-obmyślony
konkludowania obrad publicznych (‘A new way to secure the conclusion of public counsels’),
1764’, Parliaments, Estates & Representations, 26, 91–101.
79 Branicki [= Konarski], op. cit., pp. 22, 60–1.
80 Uwagi szlachcica polskiego nad usposobieniem sąsiednich mocarstw względem naszych
sejmów, in S. Konarski (W. Konopczyński, ed.) [1921], Wybór pism politycznych. Kraków:
Krakowska Spółka Wyd., pp. 293–304.
81 OSRS, 3, pp. 319–29; “O poprawie Rzeczypospolitej”, pp. 23–5; ‘Uwagi szlachcica polskiego’,
pp. 299–304.
82 The most recent and thorough treatment of this whole episode is Z. Zielińska, ‘Zabiegi
Rosji’, pp. 63–87.
83 The fullest account of this episode is Z. Zielińska, ‘Przegrana walka o głosowanie
większością. Stanisław August od października do grudnia 1766 roku’, idem, Studia,
pp. 90–135.
84 Zielińska, ‘Zabiegi Rosji’, pp. 69–70, 86. See also Fabre, op. cit., pp. 118–9.
85 [1766], DYARYUSZ Seymu Walnego Ordynaryinego odprawionego w Warszawie roku 1766.
Warsaw, ‘Sessya Trzydziesta Ósma, die 22 Novembris’ [unpaginated].
86 J. T. Lukowski (1988), ‘The papacy, Poland, Russia and religious reform, 1764–8’, Journal
of Ecclesiastical History, 39, 66–94.
87 Monitor, no. 46, p. 358.
88 ‘Moralizacja nad stanem Rzeczypospolitej po śmierci Augusta III, albo projekt do ustanow-
ienia formy rządów Polski i do uszczęśliwienia całej ojczyzny Rzeczypospolitej’, Kraków,
Polska Akademia Umiejętności, ms. 320, f. 120 v.
89 C. Pyrrhys de Varille (1771). Lettres sur la constitution actuelle de la Pologne et la tenure de
ses diètes. Varsovie-Paris [first edition, 1769], pp. 48–57 and passim.
90 ‘O uszczęśliwieniu Polski, rozdział IV’, Monitor, no. 59, 24 July 1773, pp. 491–3.
Notes to Chapter 6: Confrontations with the Enlightenment
1 J. Szczepaniec in T. Kostkiewiczowa (ed.) 2002 edn, ‘Drukarstwo – Księgarstwo’ Słownik

literatury polskiego Oświecenia. Wrocław: Ossolineum, p. 74.
2 M. Klimowicz in R. Kaleta and M. Klimowicz (1953), ‘Mitzler de Kolof, redaktor i
wydawca’, Prekursorzy Oświecenia. Wrocław: Ossolineum, pp. 222–79, 282.
3 R. Kaleta, ‘Monitor z roku 1763 na tle swoich czasów’, ibid., p. 32; Szczepaniec, op. cit., p. 75.
4 Klimowicz, ‘Mitzler de Kolof ’, pp. 71–2, 301–3.
5 ibid., p. 305; Szczepaniec, op. cit., pp. 74–77, 79–81.
6 Klimowicz, ‘Mitzler de Kolof ’, pp. 222–307.
7 ibid.; Kaleta, ‘Monitor z roku 1763’, pp. 76–93.
8 K. Mrozowska (1961), Szkoła Rycerska Stanisława Augusta Poniatowskiego. Wrocław:
Ossolineum.
9 M. Klimowicz (1965), Początki teatru stanisławowskiego (1765–1773). Warsaw: PIW,
pp. 12–13.
10 ibid., pp. 50, 79–219, 265–70.
11 Kaleta, ‘Monitor z roku 1763’, pp. 140–60.
12 Monitor, no. 47, pp. 365–66.
13 Z. Sinko (1956), ‘Monitor’ wobec angielskiego ‘Spectatora’. Wrocław: Ossolineum.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 0 3 – 1 0 8 293
14 [F. Czacki], Skarga ubogiej szlachty na otworzone w Polsce konwikty, podczas sejmików
zaniesiona, [1758]; idem, List ciekawy przeciw autorowi książki o utrzymywaniu Seymów,
n. pl. 1762.
15 E. Aleksandrowska (ed.) (1976), ‘Monitor’ 1765–1785. Wybór. Wrocław: Ossolineum,
pp. xvi–xvii. Czacki’s letters are contained with other Czacki materials and are in at least
two different hands, one of which at least may be secretarial. Ms. 1195 of the Czartoryski
Library, Kraków. Though there is no definitive statement of authorship, the internal
evidence, particularly references to other works by Czacki, and a not wholly unambiguous
statement suggesting authorship at the beginning of the companion ms. BC 1193, make
the attribution extremely likely. The writer claimed he was not sending his letters to the
Monitor, because it would not publish criticism not to its taste. Kraków, BC 1195, p. 87.
16 BC 1195, pp. 18–19, 46.
17 Monitor, no.1, 23 March 1765, pp. 4–5; ibid., no. 5, pp. 33–7; ibid., no. 7, 24 April 1765,
pp. 46–50.; Czacki, ‘List XXIII na karty Monitora XLV y XVI’, BC 1195, p. 87.
18 Monitor, no. 6, pp. 39–42; BC 1195, pp. 8, 88.
19 Monitor, no. 48, pp. 367–9; BC 1195, p. 88.
20 ibid., p. 11.
21 Monitor, no. 53, pp. 483–8. Similar sentiments in ibid., no. 20, pp. 156–7; no. 36, p. 281; no.
41, pp. 317–23; no. 42, pp. 324–30; no. 43, pp. 331–7; no. 53, pp. 406–12; no. 64, pp. 489–95.
22 ibid., no. 36, pp. 280–2; no. 53, pp. 411–12.
23 BC 1195, p. 16.
24 ibid., pp. 8, 84, 87–8, 106, 109, 124.
25 ibid., pp. 27–8.
26 ibid., pp. 29, 77.
27 ibid., pp. 13–4.
28 ibid., pp. 59, 81.
29 ibid., pp. 24–5, 37–8, 64, 92, 129–30.
30 ibid., p. 48. Monitor, no. 31, pp. 240–1; no. 32, pp. 244–51.
31 BC 1195, pp. 25–7.
32 ibid., pp. 63–4, 77, 103, 128.
33 ibid., pp. 58, 103, 120.
34 ibid., pp. 28, 30.
35 ibid., pp. 29, 31, 78, 107.
36 ibid., pp. 10, 13, 29, 56, 64, 107, 122–3.
37 Monitor, no. 38, 11 August 1765, pp. 293–99; ibid, no. 65, pp. 497–501; BC 1195, pp. 64–7,
pp. 122–3.
38 ibid., pp. 5–6, 10–11, 12, 13, 16, 89, 123.
39 BC 1195, pp. 80, 115, cf. pp. 12, 29, 72, 77, 98. J. Goldberg (1982), ‘Die getauften Juden
in Polen-Litauen im 16.–18. Jahrhundert. Tauft, soziale Umschichtung und Integration’,
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, N.F., 30, 54–99.
40 BC 1195, pp. 97, 98.
41 Monitor, no. 60, pp. 460–1, 464.
42 BC 1195, pp. 102–4.
43 ibid., pp. 87, 115.
44 Monitor, no. 60, pp. 462–4; BC 1195, pp. 15, 20.
45 ibid., p. 11.
46 Monitor, no. 5, p. 36. BC 1195, pp. 8, 9, 107; cf. [F. Czacki], Skarga ubogiej szlachty, p. 3r.
47 BC 1195, pp. 27, 49–50; cf. Monitor no. 30, pp. 234–5.
294 N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 0 9 – 1 1 5
48 BC 1195, pp. 5, 9–10, 74–5.

49 For an accessible account of these events, see J. T. Lukowski (1999), The Partitions of Poland
1772, 1793, 1795. Harlow: Longman, esp. pp. 30–104.
50 VL 8, p. 543.
51 W. Coxe (1970 reprint), Travels in Poland and Russia (5th ed., London, 1802). New York:
Arno Pr., [3 vols in 1] 1, pp. 114–8; R. Orłowski (1965), Działalność społeczno-gospodarcza
Andrzeja Zamoyskiego (1757–1792), Lublin: UMCS, pp. 182–203, 212–30; J. Kasperek
(1972), Gospodarka folwarczna Ordynacji Zamoyskiej w drugiej połowie XVIII wieku.
Warsaw: PWN, pp. 18–19, 37–8, 164, 170.
52 E. Borkowska-Bagieńska (1986), ‘Zbiór Praw Sądowych’ Andrzeja Zamoyskiego. Poznań:
UAM, pp. 20–31. J. Michalski, ‘O rzekomych i rzeczywistych pismach Andrzeja Zamoyskiego’
(1970), Przegląd Historyczny, 61, 452–75. See the editors’ ‘Présentation’ in B. Delmas, T.
Demals and P. Steiner (eds) (1995), La diffusion internationale de la physiocratie (XVIIIe
– XIXe). Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, pp. 19–21.
53 VL 8, p. 543; Borkowska-Bagieńska, op. cit., pp. 17–50.
54 J. Wybicki (E. Raczyński, ed.) (1840), Pamiętniki Józefa Wybickiego. 3 vols., Poznań:
Stefański, 1, pp. 64–85.
55 E. Rostworowski (1978), ‘Myśli Polityczne Józefa Wybickiego, czyli droga od konfederacji
barskiej do obiadów czwartkowych’, Wiek Oświecenia, 1, pp. 31–52; J. Wybicki, (Z. Nowak,
ed., with an introduction by E. Rostworowski) (1984), Myśli polityczne o wolności cywilnej.
Wrocław: Ossolineum. J. Wybicki (K. Opałek ed.) (1955), Listy Patriotyczne.Wrocław:
Ossolineum, pp. xxi–xxiv.
56 ibid., pp. 11, 59, 171, 213.
57 ibid., pp. 14–23, 25–6, 151, 173.
58 ibid., p. 62.
59 ibid., pp. 67–9, 83, 169–71, 191–3. The post 1772 population is more likely to have been
two times that estimated by Wybicki. E. Rostworowski, (1988), ‘Ilu było w Rzeczypospolitej
szlachty’, KH, 94, 3–40.
60 Wybicki, op. cit., pp. 143–7, 199.
61 ibid., pp. 58–60, 87–8.
62 ibid., pp. 41–3, cf. p. 82.
63 ibid., pp. 93–101, 193.
64 ibid., pp. 21–3, 38–9, 44–56, 99.
65 ibid., pp. 91–2, 174–83, 210–5.
66 ibid., pp. 235–44, 274–9.
67 A. Zamoyski (1778), Zbiór praw sądowych na mocy konstytucyi roku 1776 . . . ułożony i na
Seym roku 1778 podany. Warsaw, pp. viii–ix.
68 ibid., pp. 89, 90.
69 ibid., p. 91.
70 ibid., pp. 195–6.
71 ibid., p. 128.
72 ibid., pp. 91–2, 93, 195.
73 ibid., p. vii.
74 ibid., p. 94. See also J. Michalski (2007), ‘ “Wolność” i “własność” chłopska w polskiej myśli
reformatorskiej XVIII wieku’, idem, Studia historyczne z XVIII i XIX wieku.Warsaw: Stentor,
2, pp. 144–60.
75 Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. viii, 72–3.
76 ibid., pp. 44–5, 48.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 1 5 – 1 2 4 295
77 ibid., p. 122.
78 ibid., pp. 73, 81–2.
79 ibid., p. 123.
80 ibid., pp. 9, 15–6, 22–3, 92, 102, 180–1.
81 W. Skarszewski (1778), Uwagi polityczne imieniem stanu duchownego do Zbioru Praw
polskich poddanych. Kalisz.
82 Borkowska-Bagieńska, op. cit., pp. 317–9; Zamoyski, Zbiór praw sądowych, p. 182.
83 Sejmiki of Kraków, Łęczyca, Czersk, Łomża, Wizna, Kamieniec Podolski, Wielkopolska
(palatinates of Poznań and Kalisz), Wołyń.
84 Sejmiki of Wizna, Różan, Sochaczew.
85 K. Adolphowa (1933), ‘Szlachta litewska wobec Zbioru Praw Andrzeja Zamoyskiego’, in
Księga Koła Historyków Uniwersytetu Stefana Batorego. Wilno: Uniw. Wileński, pp. 156–88.
86 [T. Dłuski] (1780), Reflexye nad proiektem pod tytułem Zbiór Praw Sądowych wydrukowa-
nym przez delegowanych od woiewództwa lubelskiego pisane. n.pl., text unpaginated. Cf.
Zamoyski, Zbiór praw, pp. 33–8.
87 Wybicki, Pamiętniki, 2, pp. 36–43. VL 8, pp. 588–9.
Notes to Chapter 7: Foreign aid: Montesquieu, Rousseau and others
1 J. Fabre (1952), Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et l’Europe des Lumières. Paris: Belles Lettres,
pp. 29, 268–9; L. Wolff (1994), Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind
of the Enlightenment. Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, especially ch. 6.
2 Montesquieu (A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller and H. S. Stone trans. and eds) (1992), The Spirit
of the Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17, 156, See also pp. 97, 120, 287,
344, 352.
3 Fabre, op. cit., pp. 246–50; [J. Lind] (1774), Letters Concerning the Present State of Poland,
p. 172.
4 L. de Jaucourt (1765), ‘Pologne’, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts,
et des métiers, par une société des gens de lettres. Mis en ordre et publié par M. Diderot . . .
et M. d’Alembert, 17 vols, Paris, 1751–65, 12, pp. 925–34 .
5 G. Coyer (1761), Histoire de Jean Sobieski. Paris, 3 vols, 1, pp. v, vii, 21–4, 117–21.
6 ibid., 1, pp. 31, 54, 98–9, 122, 125–6.
7 ibid., 1, pp. 122–3, cf. pp. 61–2, 67–8.
8 ibid., 1, pp. 97, 101–2, 106–7.
9 ibid., 1, pp. 35–6, 43–5, 53, 60–1, 288–9.
10 J. Fabre (1980 edn), ‘Stanislas Leszczynski et l’idée républicaine en France au XVIIIe siècle’,
in idem, Lumières et romantisme. Énergie et nostalgie. De Rousseau à Mickiewicz. Paris:
Klincksieck, pp. 189–207.
11 A. Lortholary (1951), Le mirage russe en France au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Boivin, pp. 80–122;
J. T. Lukowski (1997), ‘Unhelpful and unnecessary: Voltaire’s Essai historique et critique
sur les dissensions des Églises de Pologne (1767)’, in U. Kölving and C. Mervaud (eds),
Voltaire et ses combats. Actes du Congrès International, Oxford – Paris 1994. Oxford, Voltaire
Foundation, 2, pp. 645–653.
12 C. C. de Rulhière (1807), Histoire de l’anarchie de Pologne. Paris: Desenne, 1807, 1,
pp. 10–15, 18–21. Wolff, op. cit., pp. 272–8, sheds fascinating light on the vicissitudes of
this work.
13 J. Michalski (1977), Rousseau i sarmacki republikanizm. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 3–7; idem
296 N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 2 4 – 1 3 1
(1995), Sarmacki republikanizm w oczach francuza: Mably i konfederaci barscy. Wrocław:

Fundacja na Rzecz Nauki Polskiej, pp. 18–22. On the relationship of the ‘Observations’
to the Du Gouvernment et des lois de Pologne, see ibid., pp. 222–4 and also Fabre, op. cit.,
pp. 343–4, 640–1n.
14 G. B. de Mably (1791), Du gouvernment et des lois de Pologne, in Oeuvres complètes de l’abbé
de Mably. Paris: Bussaye, 1791, 8, p. 63. All references to this edition.
15 J.-J. Rousseau (J. Fabre, ed.) (1964), Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, in
B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond (eds), Oeuvres Complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Paris:
Gallimard, 3, pp. 951–1041. Here, pp. 959–60, 1037. All references to this edition.
16 Mably, op. cit., pp. 2, 5, 6, 10–11. Rousseau, op. cit., pp. 972, 976, 995.
17 ibid., pp. 970, 971, 972, 986, 1010, 1757–8n.
18 Mably op. cit., p. 29.
19 ibid., pp. 53, 120, 140–1; Rousseau, op. cit., pp. 1037–8.
20 Mably, op. cit., pp. 1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 27–8, 39, 75, 115, 153.
21 ibid., pp. 113, 114, 154.
22 ibid., pp. 113, 117–8, 155–6.
23 ibid., pp. 106, 114–5, 136–7, 140, 154.
24 J. J. Rousseau, Du Contract Social, in Oeuvres Complètes, p. 405. All references to this edition.
[S. Leszczyński], La voix libre du citoyen, ou observations sur le gouvernement de Pologne,
[Amsterdam], 1749, p. 135.
25 Rousseau, Considérations, pp. 972, 1024.
26 ibid., pp. 1015, 1024, 1028–9.
27 ibid., pp. 1015, 1016, 1027–8.
28 ibid., ‘Éducation’, pp. 966–70. Cf. Mably, op. cit., pp. 127–8.
29 ibid., pp. 10–11.
30 ibid., pp. 7–8, 11, 18, 36.
31 ibid., pp. 18–9, 24, 25.
32 ibid., pp. 170–2.
33 ibid., pp. 10–3, 16–8.
34 ibid., p. 9.
35 ibid., pp. 33–5, 49–50, 74.
36 ibid., pp. 49–50, 77–8, 80–2.
37 ibid., p. 174.
38 ibid., pp. 76, 85–6.
39 ibid., pp. 33, 50, 88–9, 94, 174.
40 ibid., pp. 8, 20–1, 32, 173, 176–7.
41 ibid., pp. 39, 52, 182.
42 ibid., pp. 48, 49, 73, 179–86.
43 ibid., pp. 39–41, 65–8, 180–1.
44 Rousseau, Considérations, pp. 984, 995.
45 ibid., pp. 971–2, 975, 977–8.
46 ibid., pp. 986, 989–90.
47 ibid., pp. 979, 991, 992–3, 998–9, 1032–3.
48 ibid., pp. 975–6.
49 ibid., pp. 1030–4.
50 ibid., pp. 993, 1016–7.
51 ibid., p. 995.
52 ibid., pp. 972, 984, 995.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 3 1 – 1 4 3 297
53 ibid., p. 996. Cf. Du Contrat Social, pp. 359, 440.

54 Considérations, pp. 987–8, 996–7.
55 ibid., p. 978.
56 ibid., pp. 971, 979; VL 7, p. 18.
57 ibid., pp. 971, 979, 980–1.
58 ibid., pp. 975, 978–9, 981–2.
59 ibid., pp. 960–1. Cf. Du Contract Social, pp. 458–9.
60 Considérations, pp. 983, 986, 1000–2, 1020.
61 ibid., pp. 969, 986–7, 1019–24, 1030–2, 1039–40.
62 ibid., pp. 1024–9.
63 Mably, op. cit., pp. 133, 136–7.
64 Considérations, pp. 1012–19.
65 ibid., pp. 962–4, 967–8, 1021–3.
66 Mably, op. cit., pp. 4, 63, 190–2; Rousseau, Considérations, pp. 1037–8.
67 Mably, op. cit., pp. 130, 132, 140–1; Rousseau, Considérations, pp. 1013–4, 1038.
68 ibid., pp. 1039–40; Mably, op. cit., pp. 2, 9, 54, 114.
69 ibid., pp. 3, 27–8, 107, 168; Rousseau, Considérations, pp. 959, 969, 1041; J. Michalski (1970),
Schyłek konfederacji barskiej. Wrocław: Ossolineum.
70 J. Michalski (1985), ‘Idee reformatorskie sekretarza konfederacji barskiej. Dyskusja
Ignacego Bohusza z Gabrielem Mablym’, Miscellanea Historico-Archivistica, 1, pp. 199–214.
71 Michalski, Sarmacki republikanizm, pp. 206–21. Wolff, op. cit., pp. 275–6.
72 Mably, op. cit., p. 176.
73 Considérations, pp. 959–60.
74 ibid., p. 980. B. Leśnodorski (1982), ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau vu de Pologne’, in E. Rzadkowska
and E. Przybylska (eds), Voltaire et Rousseau en France et en Pologne. Warsaw: Université
de Varsovie, pp. 25–34. J. T. Lukowski (1994), ‘Recasting Utopia: Montesquieu, Rousseau
and the Polish Constitution of 3 May 1791’, Historical Journal, 37, 65–87.
75 Montesquieu, op. cit., p. 159.
76 M. Wielhorski (1775), O przywróceniu dawnego rządu według pierwiastkowych
Rzeczypospolitey ustaw. [Amsterdam], pp. ix, 34, 61, 64–5, 157.
77 ibid., pp. 52–3, 60, 65, 70–8, 124, 156.
78 ibid., pp. x–xii, 32–3, 64–6, 126–7, 289.
79 ibid., pp. ix, xi, 1–2.
80 ibid., p. 305.
81 ibid., pp. 2–17.
82 ibid., pp. 33–6, 38–9, 41–9, 52–3.
83 ibid., pp. 53–60, 96–7, 117, 163–4, 168–9, 170–5, 181, 183, 197–202, 303.
84 ibid., p. 60.
85 ibid., pp. 63, 210–9.
86 ibid., pp. 61, 67–9.
87 ibid., pp. 159, 169–70, 180–93, 256, 314–5.
88 ibid., p. 32.
89 ibid., pp. 124–6, 129–32, 151–2, 269, 317.
90 ibid., pp. 45, 108, 122, 240, 271–4.
91 ibid., pp. 275–81.
92 ibid., pp. 100–2.
93 ibid., pp. 134–9, 145–7.
94 ibid., pp. 127–8, 138–41.
298 N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 4 4 – 1 5 1
95 ibid., pp. 79–88. Cf. John Locke (ed. P. Laslett) (1965 edn), Two Treatises on Civil Government.
New York: Mentor, Chapter VIII of the Second Treatise, ‘Of the Beginning of Political
Societies’, in which Locke legitimised the principle of the majority vote, pp. 374–94.
96 Wielhorski, op. cit., pp. 98, 117, 202.
97 ibid., pp. 157–8, 164, 172–3, 199.
98 ibid., pp. 300–2.
99 J. Wybicki (E. Raczyński, ed.) (1840), Pamiętniki Józefa Wybickiego. Poznań: Stefański, 1840,
1, pp. 187–94; 2, pp. 2–7; idem (Z. Nowak, ed., with an introduction by E. Rostworowski)
(1984), Myśli polityczne o wolności cywilnej. Wrocław: Ossolineum; E. Rostworowski (1978),
‘Myśli Polityczne Józefa Wybickiego, czyli droga od konfederacji barskiej do obiadów
czwartkowych’, Wiek Oświecenia, 1, pp. 31–52.
100 Wybicki, Myśli polityczne, pp. 49–51, 64–6.
101 ibid., pp. 99–105.
102 ibid., pp. 88–99, 194, 202–3.
103 ibid., pp. 197–8.
104 ibid., pp. 62–3, 225, cf. p. 182.
105 ibid., pp. 53–5.
106 ibid., pp. 179–81, 189–90.
107 ibid., 179, 182–9.
108 ibid., pp. 125–7, 131, 209.
109 ibid., pp. 75–6.
110 ibid., p. 200.
111 ibid., pp. 210–4, 225–6.
Notes to Chapter 8: Marking time
1 J. Michalski (1991), ‘Kanclerz Michał Czartoryski i początki autokrytycznej refleksji nad

dziejami Polski’, in D. Gawinowa et al., (eds) Kultura średniowieczna i staropolska: studia
ofiarowane Aleksandrowi Gieysztorowi w pięćdziesięciolecie pracy naukowej. Warsaw: PWN,
pp. 511–20.
2 ibid., pp. 519–20; idem, ‘O rzekomych i rzeczywistych pismach Andrzeja Zamoyskiego’
(1970), Przegląd Historyczny, 61, 455–9. Michalski thinks it likely that a significant
contribution was also made by the Jesuit poet and historian, Adam Naruszewicz.
3 [c. 1771] Suum cuique, unpaginated.
4 G. Weulersse, (1910; reprint 1968), Le mouvement physiocratique en France. 2 vols., Paris:
Mouton, 2, pp. 24, 25, 31–2, 97. This remains the best introduction to this sprawling
doctrine. See also L. Wolff (1994), Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization in the
Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, pp. 266–72.
5 For this and the Commission of National Education in general, see A. Jobert (1941), La
Commission d’ Éducation Nationale en Pologne (1773–1794). Paris: Droz, pp. 152–4, 163–5
and passim. See Wolff, op. cit., pp. 269–71 for the brief and unhappy collaboration of the
physiocrat Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours with the Commission in 1774.
6 Jobert, op. cit., pp. 171–4, 227–8, 281.
7 VL VIII, pp. 152–3; Proclamation announcing the Commission’s establishment, 24 Oct.
1773, in S. Tync (ed) (1954), Komisja Edukacji Narodowej (Pisma Komisji i o Komisji).
Wybór źródeł.Wrocław: Ossolineum, pp. 24–30.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 5 1 – 1 5 7 299
8 J. Fabre (1952), Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et l’Europe des Lumières. Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, p. 343.
9 Wolff, op. cit., p. 268; M. Forycki (2004), Anarchia polska w myśli oświecenia. Francuski obraz
Rzeczypospolitej szlacheckiej u progu czasów stanisławowskich. Poznań: Wyd. Poznańskie,
pp. 34–5, 110, 151–2.
10 Wolff, op. cit., p. 269.
11 Jobert, op. cit., pp. 156–7, 184–5.
12 A. Zamoyski (1778), Zbiór praw sądowych na mocy konstytucyi roku. Warsaw, p. 117.
13 W. Skrzetuski O. S. P. (1773), Mowy w głównieyszych materyach politycznych, Warsaw, 1,
pp. 36–8.
14 A. Kamieński O. S. P. (1774), Edukacya obywatelska. Warsaw, unpaginated introduction;
A. Popławski O. S. P. (1775), O rozporządzeniu i wydoskonaleniu edukacyi obywatelskiey.
Warsaw, unpaginated introduction. K. Bogusławski O. S. P. (1786), O doskonałym prawo-
dawctwie. Warsaw, pp. 106–113; [F. Bieliński,] (1775), Sposób edukacji w XV. Listach opisany,
które do Kommissyi Edukacyi Narodowey od bezimiennego autora były przesyłane, [Warsaw],
p. 52; M. Karpowicz O. S. P. (1776–7), Kazania. 2 vols., Warsaw, 1, pp. 219–21; H. Stroynowski
O. S. P. (1791 edn), Nauka Prawa Przyrodzonego. Wilno, pp. 120–2. First edn, 1785.
15 Skrzetuski, op. cit., 1, p. 89.
16 Kamieński, op. cit., pp. 9, 20–3.
17 [Bieliński,], op. cit., p. 2; Skrzetuski, op. cit.1, pp. 34–7, 337–41.
18 Kamieński, op. cit., pp. 35–40; Karpowicz, op. cit., 1, pp. 50–66.
19 [Bieliński], op. cit., pp. 155–6; Karpowicz, 1, op. cit., pp. 218–21; Popławski, op. cit., pp. 46–8,
152–5; H. Stroynowski, op. cit., pp. 57–63, 126.
20 Kamieński, op. cit., pp. 47–8.
21 [Bieliński], op. cit., pp. 174–88.
22 Skrzetuski, op. cit., 1, p. 151–4, 160–1; Kamieński, op. cit., unpaginated introduction,
pp. 1–2, 138.
23 [Bieliński], op. cit., pp. 108–113; Skrzetuski, op. cit., 1, pp. 207–8; Popławski, op. cit.,
pp. 52–4, 251; Bogusławski, op. cit., p. 81.
24 Stroynowski, op. cit., pp. 21–31.
25 Karpowicz, op. cit., 2, p. 66.
26 Skrzetuski, op. cit., 1, pp. 65–8, 240–1, 263.
27 ibid., p. 269 and pp. 255–301.
28 A. Popławski (1774), Zbiór niektórych materyi politycznych. Warsaw, pp. 38–9, 72.
29 Stroynowski, op. cit., pp. 54–5, 89, 92–3, 100–1.
30 Karpowicz, op. cit., 2, p.36.
31 M. Wielhorski (1775), O przywróceniu dawnego rządu według pierwiastkowych
Rzeczypospolitey ustaw. [Amsterdam], pp. 165–6.
32 [I. Potocki] (1772), ‘O prawach politycznych y o prawach fundamentalnych’, Zabawy
Przyjemne i Pożyteczne. (6) 221–36.
33 [Bieliński,], op. cit., pp. 9–10.
34 Karpowicz, op. cit., 2, pp. 46–7, 53, 84–5.
35 Bogusławski, op. cit., pp. 51, 77–80.
37 Stroynowski, op. cit., pp. 203–4, 214–16.
38 I. Szybiak (1973), Szkolnictwo Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim.
Wrocław: Ossolineum, pp. 97–115.
300 N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 5 7 – 1 6 3
39 Ł. Kurdybacha and M. M. Dobrowolska (1973), Komisja Edukacji Narodowej. Warsaw:

PWN, pp. 139–72.
40 Skrzetuski, op. cit., 1, pp. 159–61.
41 [Bieliński,], op. cit., pp. 19–22. On the Sagan schools, see J. van Horn Melton (1988),
Absolutism and the Eighteenth-century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and
Austria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 91–105.
42 Karpowicz, op. cit., 2, pp. 93–6, 98–100.
43 Skrzetuski, op. cit., 1, pp. 342–3.
44 Kamieński, op. cit., unpaginated introduction, pp. 25–6, 82–4, 136–7, 153–4.
45 Karpowicz, op. cit., 2, pp. 93–100.
46 G. Piramowicz (1787), Powinności Nauczyciela, mianowicie zaś w szkołach parafialnych i
sposoby ich dopełnienia. Dzieło użyteczne pasterzom, panom i ich namiestnikom o dobro ludu
troskliwym, rodzicom i wszystkim Edukacyą bawiącym się, Warsaw. Here, in G. Piramowicz
(K. Mrozowska, ed.) (1958), Powinności nauczyciela oraz Wybór mów i listów. Wrocław:
Ossolineum. All references to this edition.
47 ibid., pp. 35–6.
48 R. Ładowski (1788), Powinności dla osób szlachetnie urodzonych. Lublin, pp. 35–6.
49 Karpowicz, op. cit. 2, pp. 65–8, 74–5, 79, 88–93, 103–4, 111–6, 137–9; Popławski, Zbiór,
pp. 54–7, 73–7, 126–30; Piramowicz, op. cit., pp. 29–30, 62–3, 66.
50 ibid., pp. 46–9.
51 ibid., pp. 77–80.
52 ibid., pp. 34–5.
53 ibid., pp. 31–2, 39, 46, 52–4, 60, 78–9.
54 ibid., pp. 84, 90–2.
55 ibid., pp. 91–3, 99.
56 Wincenty Skrzetuski speaks of ‘Supreme Authority’ ‘Najwyższa Zwierzchność’ op. cit. 1,
pp. 178, 269–70, 333 and of ‘Supreme Authorities’, ‘Najwyższe Zwierzchności’, ibid., pp. 154,
318; Antoni Popławski of ‘Supreme Authority’ ‘Najwyższa Zwierzchność’, Zbiór, p. 333;
Hieronim Stroynowski uses the terms ‘Supreme Authority’, ‘Najwyższa Zwierzchność’, and
‘Supreme Power’ ‘Najwyższa Władza’, though with a clear preference for the former, op. cit.,
pp. 63–4, 74–7, 79–81, 83–7, 96, 99–103, 106, 110, 120, 125–6, 128–9, 134, 138–9, 142, 143,
145–8, 189, 197–8, 205–7, 211–3, 216, 228, 305–6.
57 Karpowicz, op. cit., 2, pp. 128–30.
58 Skrzetuski, op. cit., 1, pp. 33, 39, 84–5, 227–36.
60 Potocki, op. cit., pp. 230, 234.
61 Popławski, Zbiór, pp. 170–5.
62 ibid., pp. 184–213.
63 Karpowicz, op. cit. 2, pp. 55, 79.
64 Bogusławski, op. cit., pp. 109–110 n.
65 Popławski, Zbiór, p. 194.
66 Karpowicz, op. cit., 2, unpaginated preface accompanying the sermon of 24 September
1775.
67 Stroynowski, op. cit., pp. 63–78.
68 ibid., unpaginated preface.
69 1776 sejmiki: Dobrzyń, Zakroczym, Mielnik, Podole, Żmudź; 1778 sejmiki: Brześć Kujawski
and Inowrocław; Czersk; Liw; Nur; Zakroczym; Wołyń; Wielkopolska; 1780 sejmiki:
Lublin, Ciechanów, Różan, Zakroczym, Podole, Sieradz; 1782 sejmiki: Brześć Kujawski
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 6 4 – 1 7 0 301
and Inowrocław, Czersk, Zakroczym, Sandomierz; 1784 sejmiki: Brześć Kujawski and
Inowrocław, Liw, Łęczyca; 1786 sejmiki: Brześć Kujawski and Inowrocław, Liw, Różan,
Zakroczym; 1788 sejmiki: Różan.
70 S. Staszic, (S. Czarnowski, ed.) (1951), Uwagi nad życiem Jana Zamoyskiego. Wrocław:
Ossolineum, 1951, p. 5. All references to this edition.
71 ibid., pp. 9, 49.
72 ibid., pp. 92–4.
73 ibid., pp. 168–81.
74 ibid., pp. 192–3.
75 ibid., pp. 9–14.
76 ibid., pp. 14–9, 20–8.
77 ibid., pp. 31–5.
78 ibid., pp. 50–3.
79 ibid., pp. 40–8.
80 ibid., p. 45.
81 ibid., pp. 63–8.
82 ibid., p. 193.
83 ibid., pp. 54–5, 60–70.
84 ibid., p. 47; S. Staszic (S. Czarnowski, ed.) (1926), Przestrogi dla Polski. p. 199, Kraków:
Ossolineum, p. 199.
85 Staszic, Uwagi, pp. 54, 56.
86 Staszic, Przestrogi, pp. 181–3.
87 Uwagi, pp. 44, 55, 57–8.
88 A. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz (2000), O formę rządu czy o rząd dusz: publicystyka polityczna
Sejmu Czteroletniego. Warsaw: IBL, pp. 71–7.
89 Staszic, Uwagi, p. 193.
90 ibid., pp. 114–5. Cf. Kamieński, op. cit., pp. 30–1; Bieliński, op. cit., p. 79; Popławski, Zbiór,
p. 135 and O rozporządzeniu, pp. 149–52.
91 H. Kołłątaj ‘O poprawie Szkoły Kadetów i o wskrzeszeniu milicji wojewódzkich napisany
roku 1784’ in H. Kołłątaj (B. Leśnodorski and H. Wereszycka eds) (1954), Listy Anonima i
Prawo Polityczne Narodu Polskiego. 2 vols, [Warsaw]: PWN, 2, pp. 341–366.
92 There is still no modern scholarly biography of Kołłątaj. See the entry by Bogusław
Leśnodorski in PSB, 13, pp. 335–46.
93 Kołłątaj, ‘O poprawie Szkoły Kadetów’, p. 349.
94 ibid., pp. 352–3, 362, 366.
95 ibid., pp. 341–66. On Kołłątaj’s own agricultural and business enterprises, see E.
Rostworowski (1953), ‘“Zabawy Ekonomiczne” Hugona Kołłątaja’, KH, 60 (4), 109–49.
96 E. Rostworowski (1957), Sprawa aukcji wojska na tle sytuacji politycznej przed Sejmem
Czteroletnim. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 36–8, 87–104, 147–51, 215–6.
97 Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, op. cit., pp. 80–1.
98 J. Michalski (1960), ‘Sejmiki poselskie 1788 roku’, Przegląd Historyczny, 51 (1–3), 52–73,
331–67, 465–82.
99 Kołłątaj was known to be the author of these letters, generally known as the Listy Anonima,
Anonymous Letters, part 1 of which was issued shortly after the August 1788 sejmiki. They
may have circulated in manuscript form. Kołłątaj, (Leśnodorski and Wereszycka eds), Listy
Anonima. Here, 1, pp. 177–254. See A. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, op. cit., pp. 79–80, 92 n. 61.
100 Kołłątaj, Listy Anonima, 1, p. 233.
101 ibid., 1, pp. 225–30.
302 N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 7 0 – 1 7 6
102 ibid., 1, pp. 167, 171, 254. On Filangieri, see M. Maestro (1976), ‘Gaetano Filangieri and
his Science of Legislation’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 66, (6),
7–71; J. Robertson (2005), The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 385–7.
103 Kołłątaj, Listy Anonima, 1, pp. 178–80.
104 ibid., 1, pp. 211, 220–2, 230, 246.
Notes to Chapter 9: Ferment
1 VL 9, p. 46.
2 J. Potocki, Essay d’aphorismes sur la liberté, Warsaw, 1790, p. 10.
3 The standard account of the Four Years Sejm remains Walerian Kalinka’s unfinished Sejm
Czteroletni, first published in 1880. The latest edition is W. Kalinka (foreword Z. Zielińska)
(1991), Sejm Czteroletni. 2 vols, Warsaw: Volumen. Much of the key legislation is analysed
in B. Leśnodorski, Dzieło Sejmu Czteroletniego 1788–92. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1951. The
international ramifications remain best served by R. H. Lord (1915), The Second Partition
of Poland. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. See also the collection of essays in S.
Fiszman (ed.) (1997), Constitution and Reform in Eighteenth-century Poland. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
4 I. Łobarzewski (1789), Testament polityczny zostawiony synowi ojczyzny. Warsaw, unpagi-
nated preface.
Sejmu Czteroletniego. Warsaw: IBL. Here, esp. pt 1, ch. 1, p. 59. For the relative backwardness
of an otherwise major provincial centre such as Kraków, see J. Snopek (1992), Prowincja
oświecona: kultura literacka ziemi krakowskiej w dobie Oświecenia 1750–1815. Warsaw: IBL,
pp. 29, 32–33, 73.
6 This particular aspect has been examined by Z. Zielińska (1991), O sukcesyi tronu w Polszcze
1787–1790. Warsaw: PWN. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, op. cit., esp. pp. 60, 217–74.
7 [W. Rzewuski] (1764), Myśli o niezawodnym utrzymaniu Seymów y Liberi Veto. Z proiektami
na Konwokacyą. unpaginated; Z. Zielińska (1988), Republikanizm spod znaku buławy: publi-
cystyka Seweryna Rzewuskiego z lat 1788–1790. Warsaw: Wydział Historyczny Uniwersytetu
Warszawskiego, p. 85; and see here pp. 89–90, 112, 253, 254, 305–6.
8 [W. Skarszewski] (1790), Odezwa Gallicjanina do Polaków roku 1790. pp. 10–14.
9 Uwagi nad Uwagami in J. F. Nax (W. Sierpiński, ed.) (1956), Wybór Pism. Warsaw: PWN,
pp. 222–3.
10 [S. K. Potocki] ‘Myśli o ogólnej poprawie rządu krajowego’ [late 1788 or early 1789] in
Ł. Kądziela (ed.) (1991), Kołłątaj i inni: z publicystyki doby Sejmu Czteroletniego. Warsaw:
Wyd. Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, pp. 50–1; H. Kołłątaj (B. Leśnodorski and H. Wereszycka,
eds) (1954), Listy Anonima i Prawo Polityczne Narodu Polskiego. 2 vols, [Warsaw], PWN,
2, pp. 12–3, 110 (hereinafter, Listy Anonima); A. W. Rzewuski (1790), O formę rządu
republikańskiego myśli. Warsaw, pp. 110–25.
11 VL 9, p. 158.
12 ibid., pp. 203–4. Kalinka, op. cit., 2, pp. 374–83, 431–4.
13 Montesquieu (A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller, H. S. Stone trans. and eds) (1992), The Spirit
of the Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 155. J.-J. Rousseau (J. Fabre,
ed.) (1964), Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, in B. Gagnebin and M.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 7 6 – 1 8 0 303
Raymond (eds), Oeuvres Complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Paris: Gallimard, 3,

pp. 979–80.
14 Montesquieu [M. Czarnek, trans.] (1777), Duch, czyli Treść Praw. 2 vols, Leipzig; J. J.
Rousseau (1789), Uwagi nad rządem Polskim . . . przez J. Jakuba RUSSO Obywatela
Geneweńskiego. Warsaw.
15 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, p. 19; Rousseau, op. cit., pp. 1022–4.
16 [S. Leszczyński, attr.] (1733 [sc. 1743]), Głos Wolny Wolność Głosujący. Nancy, pp. 38–9.
J. Michalski (1991), ‘Zmierzch prokonsulatu Stackelberga’, in J. Kowecki (ed.), Sejm
czteroletni i jego tradycje. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 39–40.
17 [S. K. Potocki] ‘Myśli o ogólnej poprawie rządu krajowego’ in Kądziela, ed., Kołłątaj i inni,
p. 51.
18 Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, op. cit., pp. 104–7, discussing the Myśl względem poprawy formy
rządu (A Thought on the Betterment of the Form of Government).
19 A. Rzewuski, op. cit., 1, pt. 1, pp. 163–5.
20 I. Łobarzewski, op. cit., p. 128; idem, (1789) Zaszczyt wolności polskiey angielskiey
wyrównaiącey z uwagami do tego stosownemi i opisaniem rządu angielskiego. Warsaw, p. 58.
21 idem, Testament, unpaginated preface and pp. 19, 21–2, 103, 105, 107–8, 113–4, 132, 165,
183, 189; idem, Zaszczyt wolności, pp. 96–8.
22 idem, Testament, pp. 80, 82, 92, 105–6, 133, 137–8, 140, 163, 165.
23 Letter of 11 November 1788, in Listy Anonima, 2, pp. 14, 24–5, 29–30, 31.
24 ibid., 1, p. 333; 2, pp. 116–8; Prawo Polityczne narodu polskiego [1789] in Listy Anonima, 2,
pp. 221, 233, 235–6, 241, 254, 259.
25 VL 9, p. 158. Leśnodorski, op. cit., pp. 147–50. See also Kalinka’s account of the parlia-
mentary sessions which finalised the Principles, Kalinka, op. cit., 1, pp. 491–8.
26 S. Staszic (S. Czarnowski, ed.) (1926), Przestrogi dla Polski. Kraków: Krakowska Spółka
Wydawnicza, pp. 204–5. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, op. cit., pp. 100–1, 105–6.
27 Łobarzewski, Testament, unpaginated introduction; S. Rzewuski, op. cit., pp. 20–2; A.
Rzewuski, op. cit., 1, pt 2, pp. 68–70. Zielińska, Republikanizm, pp. 80–1, 89–90, 100–1,
112–3, 141, 170, 173, 179–81, 236, 293, 312.
28 VL 9, p. 158.
29 Łobarzewski, Zaszczyt, pp. 21, 188, 195, 199–200; Testament, unpaginated Introduction,
pp. 66, 77, 115, 123. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, op. cit., pp. 117–23.
30 E. Rostworowski (1963), ‘Marzenie dobrego obywatela, czyli królewski projekt konstytucji’,
idem, Legendy i fakty XVIIIw. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 265–354.
31 Listy Anonima, 1, pp. 273, 332–3; Staszic, Przestrogi, p. 202; A. Rzewuski, op. cit., 1, Pt. II,
pp. 121–3; [Skarszewski], Odezwa, pp. 14–16; VL 9, p. 158. See J. T. Lukowski (1994),
‘Recasting Utopia: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the Polish Constitution of 3 May 1791’,
Historical Journal, 37, 65–87 and (1994) ‘Od Konarskiego do Kołłątaja – czyli od realizmu
do utopii’, in Ł. Kądziela, W. Kriegseisen and Z. Zielińska (eds), Trudne stulecia. Studia z
dziejów XVII i XVIII wieku ofiarowane Profesorowi Jerzemu Michalskiemu w siedemdziesiątą
rocznicę urodzin. Warsaw: Semper, pp. 184–94.
32 Rousseau, Considérations, pp. 996–7.
33 A. Rzewuski, op. cit., 1, pt. 1, pp. 117–8; Listy Anonima, 2, p. 110; Kołłątaj, Prawo Polityczne,
ibid., 2, p. 237.
34 Staszic, Uwagi, pp. 49–50, 58; Przestrogi, pp. 21–2, 201–5.
35 VL 9, p. 158; Rostworowski, op. cit., pp. 332–3, 343–4, 364–5, 425–6.
36 Zielińska, Republikanizm, passim; idem, ‘O sukcesyi tronu’, esp. pp. 24–41.
37 S. Rzewuski, op. cit., pp. 26, 31–5, 45.
304 N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 8 1 – 1 8 7
38 ibid., pp. 16–24.

39 Staszic, Uwagi, p. 54.
40 On Poland’s urban question, see E. Rostworowski (1991), ‘Miasta i mieszczanie w ustroju
Trzeciego Maja’, in Kowecki, ed., Sejm Czteroletni i jego tradycje, pp. 138–51; W. Smoleński
(1976 edn), Mieszczaństwo warszawskie w końcu wieku XVIII. Warsaw: PIW, pp. 117–38.
K. Zienkowska (1976), Sławetni i urodzeni: ruch polityczny mieszczaństwa w dobie Sejmu
Czteroletniego. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 54–75.
41 H. Kołłątaj [1789], ‘Do Prześwietnej Deputacji dla ułożenia projektu konstytucji rządu
polskiego od Sejmu wyznaczonej’ in Listy Anonima, 2, p. 176.
42 Kołłątaj, Listy Anonima, 1, pp. 285–9, 313–6; 2, pp. 97–101.
43 ibid., 1, pp. 317–8; Prawo Polityczne in ibid., 2, pp. 282–3. Exponents of similar arguments
included J. Pawlikowski (1789), Myśli polityczne dla Polski. Warsaw, pp. 71–99; Staszic,
Przestrogi, pp. 180–3.
44 A. Rzewuski, op. cit., pp. 88–90.
45 [Skarszewski], op. cit., pp. 24–8.
46 Łobarzewski, Zaszczyt, pp. 125–6, 182; idem, Testament, pp. 158–60.
47 J. F. Nax, op. cit., pp. 231–2.
48 M. F. Karp (1791), Pytanie i odpowiedź, czy do doskonałości konstytucyi polityczney państwa
naszego koniecznie potrzeba, aby gmin miał ucząstek w prawodawstwie? [Warsaw], pp. 15–31.
49 J. Baudouin de Courtenay, Bezstronne uwagi nad mową j.w. Jezierskiego kasztelana
łukowskiego in J. Woliński, J. Michalski and E. Rostworowski (eds) (1955–69), Materiały do
dziejów Sejmu Czteroletniego. 6 vols, Wrocław: Ossolineum, 2, pp. 428–49. W. Konopczyński,
‘Polscy Pisarze polityczni XVIII wieku’, 2: ‘Sejm Czteroletni’, Kraków, Jagiellonian Library,
ms 52/61, pp. 260–5; Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, op. cit., pp. 48, 168–72, where she also notes
the paucity of townsman enagagement in polemic. On Jezierski, see K. Zieńkowska (1963),
Jacek Jezierski, kasztelan łukowski (1722–1805). Warsaw: PWN. For a very different stance to
J. Jezierski’s, see his namesake F. S. Jezierski’s (1791), Niektóre wyrazy porządkiem abecadła
zebrane y stosownemi do rzeczy uwagami obiaśnione. Warsaw, especially the entry ‘Latarnia’,
p. 119.
50 F. S. Jezierski (1788), Kazanie przed stanami Rzeczypospolitej na Seymie w roku 1788.
Warsaw, [unpaginated].
51 Staszic, Przestrogi, pp. 153–5.
52 Kołłątaj, ‘Do Prześwietnej Deputacji’, pp. 169–70.
53 ibid., p. 171; Listy Anonima, 1, pp. 277–8.
54 F. S. Jezierski, op. cit., pp. 37–41.
55 J. Pawlikowski (1788), O poddanych polskich. Warsaw, p. 62–4.
56 Kołłątaj, ‘Do Prześwietnej Deputacji’, pp. 171–6.
57 Staszic, Uwagi, pp. 112–7; Listy Anonima, 1, pp. 213, 244–6, 274, 341–3; [S. K. Potocki]
‘Myśli o ogólnej poprawie rządu krajowego’, pp. 48–9; Łobarzewski, Testament, pp. 172–5;
Jezierski, Niektóre wyrazy, pp. 173–4.
58 A. W. Rzewuski, O formę rządu republikańskiego, 1, pp. 45–7, 82–99.
59 Listy Anonima, 1, pp. 280, 291–2. Kołłątaj did indeed expand his revenues through his
efficient management and business ventures, but his peasants were expected to work harder
than ever. E. Rostworowski, ‘“Zabawy Ekonomiczne” Hugona Kołłątaja’ (1953), KH, 60,
109–49.
60 Pawlikowski, O poddanych polskich, pp. 25–31, 38–60, 100–5.
61 Nax, op. cit., pp. 295–8, cf. pp. 275–6.
62 Pawlikowski, op. cit., especially pp. 89–90. Listy Anonima, 2, pp. 99–100.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 8 8 – 1 9 4 305
63 Karp, op. cit., pp. 5–15.

64 ibid., pp. 15–31.
65 For a summary of reformed eighteenth century views on peasant emancipation and
property rights, see J. Michalski (2003–4), ‘ “Wolność” i “własność” chłopska w polskiej
myśli reformatorskiej XVIII wieku’, KH, 110, (4) 5–45; 111 (1), 69–103.
66 J. Puszet de Puget (1788–89), O uszczęśliwienie narodów. 2 vols, Warsaw, 1, pp. 201–24,
298–9.
67 Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, op. cit., p. 60.
68 VL9, pp. 143–5.
69 L. Krzywkowski (1790), O wolności polskiey. [Warsaw], unpaginated.
70 Ł. Kądziela, ‘Local government reform during the Four-Year Diet’ in Fiszman (ed.), op. cit.,
pp. 379–96.
71 Listy Anonima, 1, pp. 352–5.
72 ibid., 1, p. 327; Prawo Polityczne in Listy Anonima, 2, pp. 266, 267.
73 Listy Anonima, 1, pp. 289–303.
74 See E. Rostworowski (1988), ‘Ilu było w Rzeczypospolitej szlachty’, KH, 94, 35–6.
75 Kołłątaj, Prawo Polityczne, in Listy Anonima, 2, pp. 265–72.
76 F. S. Jezierski (1790), Katechizm o taiemnicach rządu polskiego. Sambor, pp. 14–17. Idem
(1790), Jarosza Kutasińskiego herbu Dęboróg, szlachcica łukowskiego, uwagi nad stanem
nieszklacheckim w Polszcze. See also ch. 2 above, pp. 22–3. For an accessible and penetrat-
ing critique of views on the petty Polish nobility, see D. Beauvois (2003), Pouvoir russe et
noblesse polonaise en Ukraine 1793–1830. Paris: CNRS, pp. 27–37.
77 F. S. Jezierski (B. Treger ed.) (2005 edn), Trzy utwory z czasów Sejmu Wielkiego: Tron dla
próżnej powagi, szlachta do poddaństwa; Gowórek herbu Rawicz; Rzepicha matka królów.
Kraków, Columbinum, pp. 147–264.
78 F. S. Jezierski, Niektóre wyrazy, pp. 176–7. See also J. Bartkiewicz (1979), Obraz dziejów
ojczystych w świadomości historycznej w Polsce w dobie oświecenia. Poznań, UAM, pp. 45–6,
84.
79 Odpis z Ukrainy na list z Warszawy, quoted in Rostworowski, ‘Ilu było w Rzeczypospolitej
szlachty’, p. 38. The same hope was also expressed by Ignacy Potocki during his work on a
new draft constitution. Rostworowski, ‘“Marzenie dobrego obywatela”’, pp. 293–4.
80 Kołłątaj, Prawo Polityczne in Listy Anonima, 2, pp. 199–202, 203, 204, 205, 206 and 292–3n.
81 ibid., pp. 199, 207, 221, 222, 286–7n., 289.
82 Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, op. cit., pp. 132–3.
83 R. Butterwick, ‘“Intrighi e simonie”. Wokół biskupstwa krakowskiego w 1789 roku’ (2004),
KH, 111 (3), 103–26; idem, ‘O ratunek Ojczyzny. Sprawa opodatkowania duchowieństwa
katolickiego w początkach Sejmu Czteroletniego’ (2007) in Z. Anusik (ed.) Spory o państwo
w dobie nowożytnej: między racją stanu a partykularyzmem. Łódź: Wyd. Uniwersytetu
Łódzkiego, pp. 229–41.
84 J. Snopek (1986), Objawienie i Oświecenie: z dziejów libertynizmu w Polsce. Wrocław:
Ossolineum, pp. 84–194.
85 Puszet, op. cit., 1, unpaginated introduction.
86 ibid., 2, pp. 198–9. Cf. Kołłątaj, Prawo Polityczne in Listy Anonima, 2, pp. 292–3n.
87 [Skarszewski], op. cit., pp. 26–45.
88 Staszic, Uwagi, pp. 22, 60–1. F. S. Jezierski, Kazanie, unpaginated.
89 Puszet, op. cit., 2, pp. 98–106.
90 ibid., 2, pp. 252–77.
91 [Skarszewski], op. cit., pp. 24–5, 31–5.
306 N O T E S T O PA G E S 1 9 5 – 2 0 1
92 J. Albertrandi [1790], Uwagi nad wolnością drukowania i przedaży ksiąg publicznych,

[Warsaw], unpaginated. A. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz (2006), Regina Libertas: wolność w
polskiej myśli politycznej XVIII wieku. Gdańsk: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, pp. 263–4.
93 Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, O formę rządu, pp. 24–5.
94 Kalinka, op. cit., 2, pp. 294–8, 383–97, 405–8; VL 9, pp. 184–5. Of 41 available instructions,
23 stated explicitly they had drawn up their instruction before the elections. There is no
reason to suggest that those not making this explicit statement not done likewise.
95 41out of a possible 55 (74.5%) sejmik instructions have been examined. The expression
‘will of the nation’ appears in 17 instructions, the ‘will of the palatinate’ (or an equivalent
expression) appears in 14. The county of Chełm, the districts of Ciechanów and Zakroczym
used both.
96 See the instructions of Kiev, Łęczyca, Ciechanów, Czersk, Liw, Nur, Różan, Wyszogród,
Zakroczym, Podole, Sandomierz, Sieradz, Wołyń, Brześć Litewski, Wilno.
97 That there was a Smolensk sejmik may appear bizarre, since Poland had ceded Smolensk
and its palatinate to Russia in 1667. The assemblies of Smolensk and Czernichów
functioned as sejmiki egzulanckie, ‘sejmiki-in-exile’, re-located to venues within the
Commonwealth. Both these sejmiki continued in being, attended by the descendants, real
or imaginary, of the original participants. Little is known about them. H. Olszewski (1966),
Sejm Rzeczypospolitej epoki oligarchii 1652–1763. Poznań: UAM, pp. 60–1, 64–66.
98 Zielińska, “O sukcesyi tronu w Polszcze”, pp. 207–19 offers the fullest analysis.
99 In Lithuania, the commissions were to consist of a minimum of 15 elected commissioners,
although the sejmiki were free to elect more if they wished; and there was no specific
injunction to elect ecclesiastical commissioners. Nor was service on the commissions in
Lithuania stipulated as a necessary preliminary to holding further office. VL 9, pp. 136–42;
cf. VL 9, pp. 146–56 for the Crown commissions. Cf. VL 8, p. 294 for the 1767–8 law – the
impact of which on the sejmiki has yet to be examined in detail.
100 See also the instructions of Czernichów, Kraków, Łęczyca, Różan, Warsaw, Zakroczym,
Podole, Wieluń, Wołyń, Grodno, Mozyr, Pinsk and Rzeczyca.
101 See also the instructions of Bracław, Chełm, Łęczyca, Podole, Sieradz, Wołyń, Grodno,
Minsk, Pinsk, Rzeczyca.
102 The usual practise in the Sejm was for an open vote, to be followed by a deciding secret
ballot if any envoy asked for one.
103 Ciechanów, Orsza, Rzeczyca, Wołkowysk.
104 Nax, op. cit., pp. 272. 280–1.
105 Restoration of the Order was sought by the assemblies of Chełm, Dobrzyń, Lublin, Łęczyca,
Liw, Nur, Warsaw, Zakroczym, Sandomierz, Sieradz, Brześć Litewski, Grodno, Kowno,
Livonia, Minsk, Mozyr, Nowogródek, Pinsk, Połock, Rzeczyca, Wiłkomierz, Wołkowysk and
Żmudź. See also R. Butterwick (2004), ‘Sprawa wskrzeszenia zakonu jezuickiego w dobie
Sejmu Czteroletniego’, in I. Stasiewicz-Jasiukowa (ed.), Wkład Jezuitów do nauki i kultury
w Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodów oraz pod zaborami. Kraków: WAM, pp. 89–114.
106 Ciechanów, Różan, Wyszogród, Sieradz, Wieluń, Wołyń, Wołkowysk and Żmudź.
107 I owe this figure to Richard Butterwick.
108 Puszet, op. cit., 1, pp. 177–81; 2, pp. 240–52.
109 Bans or restrictions were proposed only by individual sejmiki (admittedly, for smaller
samples than in 1790) in 1776 (Zakroczym sejmik – as a measure to stem the outflow of
specie), 1780 (Sochaczew sejmik – linked to the wish to restrict specie outflows), 1784
(Lublin sejmik), 1788 (Sandomierz sejmik). The 1784 Lublin sejmik equated travel with
irreligion and degeneracy – this in a constituency dominated by the Czartoryski family,
N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 0 1 – 2 0 5 307
one of the most widely travelled and cosmopolitan in Poland. It is difficult to see in this
anything other than a cynical appeal to noble parochialism at a time when the Czartoryskis
were at odds with the king and seeking to wrap themselves in a mantle of old Polish virtues.
110 Instructions from the sejmiki of Kiev, Łęczyca, Liw, Nur, Różan, Warsaw, Wyszogród,
Zakroczym, Sandomierz, Wołyń and Pinsk.
111 ‘Dyariusz seymiku woiewództwa mińskiego odbywaiącego się ru 1790 miesiąca listopada
16 dnia’, AGAD/ZP 130, pp. 519–25.
112 E. Rostworowski, ‘Marzenie dobrego obywatela’, p. 322.
113 Instructions of the sejmiki of Chełm, Czernichów, Dobrzyń, Kiev, Kraków, Lublin, Łęczyca,
Ciechanów, Nur, Różan, Warsaw, Wizna, Wołyń, Brześć Litewski, Lida, Mozyr, Pinsk,
Rzeczyca, Słonim, Wilno, Wołkowysk.
114 Instructions of Bracław, Kiev, Różan, Podole, Wołyń, Kowno, Lida, Livonia, Mozyr, Pinsk,
Rzeczyca, Wołkowysk. The Lublin sejmik wanted representation to be made proportional to
the Provinces’ tax contributions; that of Podole also declared itself to be ready to consider
relating representation to the individual palatinate’s tax burden.
115 Following the abolition of the Army Department of the Permanent Council in November
1788, an Army Commission, answerable directly to the Sejm, had been created; separ-
ate Treasury commissions for Poland and Lithuania, first set up in 1764, remained.
Among Lithuanian sejmiki, Kowno, Livonia and Mozyr were prepared to see the Treasury
Commissions merged. Smolensk and Wiłkomierz explicitly insisted on preserving a separ-
ate Lithuanian treasury commission. The tenor of other Lithuanian instructions suggests
that their assemblies would have preferred to keep the commissions separate. The only
other unified Commission was that for National Education.
116 See the instructions of Bracław, Czernichów, Ciechanów, Nur, Wizna, Wyszogród,
Sandomierz, Wołyń, Brześć Litewski, Grodno, Kowno, Lida, Pinsk, Połock, Upita, Wilno
and Żmudź.
117 Wołkowysk‘s support for Kołłątaj’s promotion is hard to explain. It is possible that his
family, which originally came from Lithuania (Kołłątaj was born in Wołyń in the Crown),
may have had some old connections with the area. Kołłątaj held the office of Grand
Referendary of Lithuania from 1786, but apart from that, appears to have had no connec-
tions to Lithuania, which he never seems to have even visited. B. Leśnodorski’s entry on
Kołłątaj in PSB, 13, pp. 335–46.
118 Quoted in Rostworowski, ‘“Marzenie dobrego obywatela”’, p. 344; and see pp. 344–54.
Notes to Chapter 10: Judaica
1 G. D. Hundert (1992), The Jews in a Polish Private Town: the Case of Opatów in the
Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. xi. Estimates of the
Jewish population are far from settled. For a brief review, see Z. Guldon and J. Wijaczka
(1995), Procesy o mordy rytualne w Polsce w XVI-XVIII wieku. Kielce: DCF, pp. 5–7. The
best recent work dealing with the whole subject is G. D. Hundert (2004), Jews in Poland-
Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: a Genealogy of Modernity, Berkeley, Calif., University
of California Press.
2 M. Butrymowicz, Sposób uformowania Żydów polskich w pożytecznych krajowi obywatelów
in MDSC, 6, p. 79.
3 For a concise accessible overview of Polish-Jewish relations, see J. Goldberg (1974), ‘Poles
308 N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 0 6 – 2 0 9
and Jews in the 17th and 18th centuries. Rejection or acceptance’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte
Osteuropas, N.F. 22, 248–82. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, esp. chs 1–2.
4 Quoted in K. Zienkowska (1986), ‘Spór o Nową Jerozolimę’, KH, 94, 358n.
5 A. Leszczyński (1994), Sejm Żydów Korony 1623–1764. Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut
Historyczny, pp. 23, 70, 144.
6 Prawo Polityczne Narodu Polskiego in H. Kołłątaj (B. Leśnodorski & H. Wereszycka eds),
Listy Anonima i Prawo Polityczne Narodu Polskiego. [Warsaw], PWN, 1954, 2, pp. 328–9
(hereinafter Prawo Polityczne).
7 J. Dębiński (1727), Domina Palatii Regina Libertas in idem, Różne mowy publiczne,
seymikowe przez Jegomości P. Jana z Dębin Dębińskiego. Częstochowa, pp. 123–4.
8 M. J. Rosman (1990), The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-lithuanian
Commonwealth During the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, paints a generally positive picture of magnate-Jewish economic relationships.
9 P. H. Pruszcz (1737 edn), Forteca Monarchów y całego królestwa polskiego duchowna z
żywotów świętych tak iuż kanonizowanych y beatyfikowanych, iako też świątobliwie żyiących
patronów polskich. Kraków, pp. 219–22.
10 Guldon and Wijaczka, op. cit., pp. 10–11, 17–36. On Żuchowski and his background, see
also M. Teter (2006), JEws and Heretics in Catholic Poland: a Beleaguered Church in the
Post-reformation Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xxiv–xxix, 1–4, 91–7,
113–9.
teraźnieyszych czasów’. Poznań, pp. 114–5. Three editions appeared in 1707 and two in
1727.
12 F. Jaroszewicz (1767), Matka Świętych Polska albo żywoty świętych, błogosławionych,
Polszcze chrześciańskiey wiary osobliwą życia doskonałością słynących. Kraków, pp. 596–9.
13 Guldon and Wijaczka, op. cit., passim. pp. 63–4, 141–6 for the Żytomierz judgement. There
are no comparable figures for the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but the authors suggest that it
saw significantly fewer such trials, pp. 94–5. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, pp. 57–78.
14 Guldon & Wijaczka, op. cit., p. 58.
15 S. Majchrowicz (1764), Trwałość szczęśliwa Królestw albo ich smutny upadek wolnym
narodom przed oczyma stawiona na utrzymanie nieoszacowaney szczęśliwości swoiey. Lwów,
1, pp. 18–28, 36–52; 3, pp. 62, 123.
16 Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, pp. 32–56. M. Matuszewicz (B. Królikowski, ed., with
commentary by Z. Zielińska) (1986), Diariusz życia mego. Warsaw: PIW, 1, pp. 116–7, 124–5.
17 Teter, op. cit., pp. 67–72, 75–6, 81–2, 84, 112. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, pp. 51,
63–4, 101, 238.
18 S. Garczyński (1753), Anatomia Rzeczypospolitey Polskiey. p. 89.
19 ibid., pp. 137–9.
20 [W. Rzewuski] (1756), Myśli w teraźnieyszych okolicznościach Rzeczypospolitey. Poczajów,
ff. 17v.–18r.
21 S. Konarski (1760–3), O Skutecznym Rad Sposobie albo o Utrzymywaniu ordynaryinych
Sejmów. Warsaw, 2, p. 6; 3, pp. 260–1.
22 J. Wybicki (Z. Nowak ed. with an introduction by E. Rostworowski) (1984 edn), Myśli
polityczne o wolności cywilnej. Wrocław: Ossolineum, p. 199.
23 J. Wybicki (K. Opałek ed.) (1955), Listy Patriotyczne. Wrocław: Ossolineum, pp. 108–11;
A. Popławski (1774), Zbiór niektórych materyi politycznych. Warsaw, pp. 72, 76. For a
N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 1 0 – 2 1 7 309
convenient survey of the role of Jews on Polish landed estates, see H. Levine (1980),
‘Gentry, Jews and serfs: the rise of Polish vodka’, Review: a Journal of the Fernand Braudel
Center, 4, (2), 223–50 and (1982) ‘Between Polish autarchy and Russian autocracy: the
Jews, the Propinacja, and the rhetoric of reform’, International Review of Social History, 27,
66–84.
24 G. B. de Mably (1797 edn), Du gouvernement et des lois de la Pologne (vol. VIII of Oeuvres
complètes de l’abbé Mably). Paris, pp. 90, 113–4.
25 E.g., instructions and lauda from 1764: Chełm, Dobrzyń, Halicz, Czersk, Nur, Rożan,
Wizna, Wyszogród, Płock, Sandomierz; from 1766: Dobrzyń, Kraków, Ciechanów, Łomża,
Wizna, Płock, Ruś, Sandomierz, Wołyń. For the 1775 law, VL 8, p. 113.
26 Instructions and lauda in 1764: Brześć Kujawski and Inowrocław, Łęczyca, Sieradz.
27 Czersk instructions, 1764, 1778. Zakroczym instructions, 1776, 1786, 1788.
28 [S. Szczuka] [attr.] (Polish translation by F. X. Kluczycki) (1902), Eclipsis Poloniae orbi
publico demonstrata. Kraków: Czas, pp. 132–3.
29 Matuszewicz, op. cit., 1, p. 278.
30 Domina Palatii, p. 123.
31 Garczyński, op. cit., p. 77.
32 J. Goldberg (1982), ‘Die getauften Juden in Polen-Litauen im 16.–18. Jahrhundert. Taufe,
soziale Umschichtung und Integration’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. N.F., 30,
54–99.
33 VL 8, pp. 95, 562.
34 Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, pp. 30–1, 45, 80.
35 A. Zamoyski (1778), Zbiór Praw Sądowych na mocy konstytucyi 1776 roku . . . ułożony.
Warsaw, pp. 95–8.
36 [F. Bieliński] (1775), Sposób edukacji w XV. Listach opisany, które do Kommissyi Edukacyi
Narodowey od bezimiennego autora były przesyłane, [Warsaw], p. 31. Hundert, Jews in
Poland-Lithuania, pp. 50–1, 215–7, 238. A. Eisenbach (1988), Emancypacja Żydów na
ziemiach polskich 1785–1870 na tle europejskim. Warsaw: PiW, pp. 52–3, 58–60. On the
position of the Jews in Warsaw, see A. Eisenbach (1975), ‘Żydzi warszawscy i sprawa
żydowska w XVIIIw.’, Warszawa XVIII wieku, 3, 230–48.
37 Eisenbach, Emancypacja, pp. 60–1, 71–2. Cf. idem, ‘Żydzi warszawscy’, p. 268.
38 S. Staszic (S. Czarnowski, ed.) (1951), Uwagi nad życiem Jana Zamoyskiego. Wrocław:
Ossolineum, p. 193.
39 Butrymowicz, op. cit., 6, pp. 78–93.
40 Kołłątaj, Prawo Polityczne, pp. 331–2.
41 S. Staszic, (S. Czarnowski ed.) (1926 edn), Przestrogi dla Polski. Kraków: Krakowska Spółka
Wydawnicza, p. 187.
42 J. Puszet de Puget (1788), O uszczęśliwienie narodów. Warsaw, 1, pp. 276–9; F. S. Jezierski
(1790), Katechizm o taiemnicach rządu polskiego. Sambor, pp. 8–9; idem (1791), Niektóre
wyrazy porządkiem abecadła zebrane y stosownem do rzeczy uwagami obiaśnione. Warsaw,
pp. 291–2; J. Pawlikowski (1788), O poddanych polskich, n. pl., pp. 31–2; idem (1789), Myśli
polityczne dla Polski. Warsaw, pp. 101–4. See also Staszic, Przestrogi, pp. 184–8.
43 Kołłątaj, Prawo Polityczne, p. 333; Pawlikowski, Myśli polityczne, pp. 103–6. Cf. F. S. Jezierski,
Niektóre wyrazy, pp. 291–2; Staszic, Przestrogi, pp. 188–9; Puszet, op. cit., 1, pp. 275–80.
44 Kołłątaj, Prawo Polityczne, pp. 329, 331. Staszic, Przestrogi, p. 191; Pawlikowski, Myśli
polityczne, pp. 109–110; Butrymowicz, op. cit., p. 93.
45 Kołłątaj, Prawo Polityczne, pp. 329–30; Pawlikowski, Myśli polityczne, pp. 110–4.
46 Jezierski, Katechizm, p. 9; idem, Niektóre wyrazy, pp. 291–2.
310 N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 1 7 – 2 3 0
47 Eisenbach, Emancypacja, p. 78.

48 Wiadomość o pierwiastkowej miast zasadzie w Polszcze (originally published January
1789), MDSC, 6, pp. 32–57, here esp. pp. 43–8. W. Smoleński (1976 edn), Mieszczaństwo
warszawskie w końcu wieku XVIII. Warsaw: PIW, pp. 107–113.
49 Wszyscy błądzą: rozmowa Pana z rolnikiem appeared in two parts in January and March
1790. Text in MDSC 1, pp. 284–302 and 303–34. Here especially pt. 1, p. 299.
50 ibid., pt. 2, pp. 326, 327, 329, 333.
51 Ciechanów, Czersk and Wyszogród instructions. The assemblies of Orsza, Wołkowysk and
Wilno in the Grand Duchy also demanded the removal of Jews from the alcohol trade.
52 Instructions of Nur, Grodno, Kowno, Pinsk and Minsk.
53 Pokorna prośba od Żydów warszawskich i prowincyj koronnych do Najjaśniejszych sejmujących
Stanów, MDSC 6, pp. 129–32. Eisenbach, Emancypacja, pp. 81–2. 97–101, 107–8, 116.
54 K. Zienkowska (1988), ‘Tumult w Warszawie w maju 1790 roku’, KH, 95, 121–48. For an
English version of this article see idem (1988), ‘“The Jews have killed a tailor.” The socio-
political background of a riot in Warsaw’, Polin, 3, pp. 78–101.
55 See H. Józefowicz, Myśli stosowne do sposobu reformowania Żydów polskich, MDSC 6,
pp. 98–105; Pokorna prośba, ibid., pp. 129–32; Żądania Żydów, ibid, pp. 276–8 and other
materials in the same volume. Eisenbach, Emancypacja, pp. 97–101, 111. Hundert, Jews
in Poland-Lithuania, pp. 211–31. On the Berlin salons, see D. S. Hertz (1988), Jewish
High Society in Old Regime Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press. On the limitations
of emancipations of the Jews in France and elsewhere at the turn of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, see D. Vital (1999), A People Apart: the Jews in Europe 1789–1939.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 31–69.
56 Reforma Żydów. Projekt od Deputacji do tego wyznaczonej, in MDSC 6, pp. 215–28.
Notes to Chapter 11: Towards new Utopias
1 On the strength of support in the Sejm for the Constitution, see J. Kowecki (1974),
‘Posłowie debiutanci na Sejmie Czteroletnim’, in A. Zahorski (ed.). Wiek XVIII: Polska i
Świat. Warsaw: PIW, pp. 195–210.
2 VL 9, pp. 215–9.
3 J. Jedlicki (1968), Klejnot i bariery społeczne: przeobrażenia szlachectwa polskiego w
schyłkowym okresie feudalizmu. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 93–4, 104–117; K. Zienkowska (1976),
Sławetni i urodzeni: ruch polityczny mieszczaństwa w dobie Sejmu Czteroletniego. Warsaw:
PWN, pp. 12, 125, 137–42.
4 E. Rostworowski (1963), ‘“Marzenie dobrego obywatela”, czyli królewski projekt konsty-
tucji’, idem, Legendy i fakty XVIIIw. Warsaw: PWN, pp. 415–6.
5 K. Zienkowska (1997) ‘Reforms relating to the Third Estate’ in S. Fiszman (ed.), Constitution
and Reform in Eighteenth-century Poland: the Constitution of 3 May 1791. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, pp. 340–1, claims the Law restricted citizenship to Christians
(i.e., not to Jews), but the text is not as clear-cut as she suggests. VL 9, p. 216. It is of course
highly unlikely that any Jew wishing to secure municipal citizenship would have succeeded.
6 Rostworowski, op. cit., pp. 267–464. See also R. Butterwick (1998), Poland’s Last King
and English Culture: Stanisław August Poniatowski, 1732–1798. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
pp. 285–309.
7 Rostworowski, op. cit., pp. 419–24.
8 ibid., pp. 397, 432–5.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 3 1 – 2 3 9 311
9 VL 9, pp. 107–8.
10 Rostworowski, ‘“Marzenie dobrego obywatela”’, pp. 291–9; VL 9, pp. 157–9.
11 [1790] Proiekt do Formy Rządu [Warsaw].
12 Proiekt., f. 2r., 3v.
13 ibid., ff. 9v–10r, 37v. –38v., 51r., 53r. –v., 65v., 79r. –v., 92v.
14 ibid., ff. 4r., 6v., 14v.–15r., 17v.
15 ibid., ff. 4v., 30v., 33r., 35v.–36r.
16 ibid., ff. 21v.–22r.
17 ibid., ff. 30r., 31r., 34r.–35v.
18 ibid., f. 5v., 24v.–36r.
19 ibid., ff. 6r.–v., 24r.–v., 47r.
20 ibid., ff. 50r.–v.
21 ibid., ff. 5v.–6r.
22 ibid., f. 7r.
23 ibid.,7v., 47r.–51v.
24 ibid., ff. 7r., 54v.-55r., 57v. –9r.
25 ibid., ff. 92r.–96r., 97r.-98v., 115v.
26 ibid., ff. 53r., 65r.–v., 79r.–v., 92v.
27 ibid., ff. 5r., 24r.–v., 55r.–v., 58v.–60r., 63v.–64r.
28 ibid., ff, 71v., 80v.–81r., 101r.–102v., 104v., 106v., 107r., 110r.–v.
29 ibid., ff. 5r., 24r.–v., 55r.–v., 58v.–60r., 63v.–64r. 74v.–75r., 89r.–v., 99v.–100r.
30 ibid., ff. 25v.–r., 60v., 63r., 74r.–v., 99r.
31 ibid., f. 24v.
32 ibid., ff. 47r.–50r., 54r., 66v., 80v.
33 ibid., f. 101v.
34 ibid., f. 14v.
35 ibid., ff. 84r., 106v.
36 ibid., ff. 11v.–12r. Cf. VL 9, p. 35.
37 Proiekt, f. 27v., note; f. 53v.
38 ibid., ff. 105v., 116v–117r.
39 ibid., f. 12r.
40 ibid., ff. 12v., 85r.
41 ibid., ff. 112v., 113v., 119v., 120v.
42 ibid., ff. 112r., 114r.-v., 115v.–16r.
43 Instructions of Chełm, Kiev, Kraków, Ciechanów, Liw, Nur, Warsaw, Wizna, Sandomierz,
Wołyń, Brześć Litewski, Grodno. Lida, Minsk, Nowogródek, Rzeczyca, Słonim, Wołkowysk.
44 Rostworowski, ‘Marzenie’, pp. 322–5, 346.
45 ibid., pp. 346, 351, 354; and 346–451.
46 VL 9, pp. 234–5, 240–1.
47 ibid., p. 238.
48 See A. Grześkowiak-Krwawicz (ed.) (1992), Za czy przeciw Ustawie Rządowej. Walka
publicystyczna o Konstytucję 3 Maja. Antologia. Warsaw: IBL, pp. 7–22. W. Smoleński (1897),
Ostatni rok Sejmu Wielkiego. Kraków: Gebethner, pp. 259–300.
49 T. Dłuski, JW.JP. Tomasza Dłuskiego . . . Usprawiedliwienie się przed publicznością, in Za czy
przeciw, pp. 50–67.
50 [T. Czacki], O konstytucji Trzeciego Maja 1791, ibid., pp. 80–108; cf. ‘Deklaracya stanów
zgromadzonych’, VL 9, pp. 223–4.
312 N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 3 9 – 2 4 8
51 Myśl obywatela o nowej Konstytucji in Za czy przeciw, pp. 33–49. Cf. Zastanowienie się nad
nową Konstytucją polską, ibid, pp. 139–52.
52 Dłuski, op. cit., p. 53; Czacki, op. cit., pp. 102–3; Zastanowienie się, pp. 150–1.
53 D. Tomaszewski, Dyzmy Bończy Tomaszewskiego, komisarza cywilno-wojskowego wojew-
ództwa bracławskiego, nad Konstytucją i rewolucją dnia 3 maja roku 1791 uwagi in Za czy
przeciw, pp. 161–92.
54 [anon.] Do Przyjaciela Burczybąka [1791or 1792], ibid., pp. 153–6.
55 [I. Potocki], Na pismo, któremu napis O Konstytucji 3 Maja do JWW. Zaleskiego i Matuszewica
brzeskiego litewskich posłów, odpowiedź, ibid., p. 114.
56 [I. Potocki], Na usprawiedliwienie się . . . Dłuskiego . . . odpowiedź, ibid., pp. 73–4.
57 K. Lubicz-Chojecki, Kopia listu istotnego do przyjaciela pisanego, ibid., p. 159.
58 [Potocki], Na pismo . . . odpowiedź, ibid., p. 120; A. Trębicki, Odpowiedź autorowi prawdzi-
wemu Uwag Dyzmy Bończy Tomaszewskiego, nad Konstytucją i rewolucją dnia 3 maja 1791,
ibid., p. 255.
59 F. Oraczewski, Proszę o Prawdę in Ł. Kądziela (ed.) (1991), Kołłątaj i inni: z publicystyki
doby Sejmu Czteroletniego. Warsaw: Wyd. Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, p. 70. Similarly dismissive
comments can be found in Trębicki op. cit., pp. 193–260, esp. pp. 231, 235, 241–2.
60 S. Konarski (1763), O Skutecznym Rad Sposobie. Warsaw, 4, p. 7; Trębicki, op. cit., p. 255.
61 Smoleński, op. cit., pp. 5–20, 69–79.
62 H. Stroynowski, [1791], Mowa Hieronima Stroynowskiego, kanonika kiiowskiego
o Konstytucyi rządu, ustanowioney dnia trzeciego i piątego Maia r. 1791. Czytana na
posiedzeniu publicznym Szkoły Główney W.X. Lit. dnia pierwszego lipca, r. 1791. [Wilno].
63 R. Butterwick (2008), ‘Between Anti-Enlightenment and enlightened Catholicism: provin-
cial preachers in late-eighteenth-century Poland-Lithuania’, in R. Butterwick, S. Davies and
G. Sánchez Espinosa (eds), Peripheries of the Enlightenment. (Studies on Voltaire and the
Eighteenth Century, 1), pp. 201–28, especially pp. 219–27.
64 Smoleński, op. cit., pp. 95–111.
65 W. Szczygielski (1994), Referendum trzeciomajowe. Sejmiki lutowe 1792 roku. Łódź, Wyd.
Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego.
66 [Potocki] Na pismo . . . odpowiedź, p. 119; A. Trębicki, op. cit., pp. 229–30, 237–8, 239–40,
243–4. See also VL 9, pp. 223, 266.
67 ibid., p. 265; cf. p. 222.
68 ibid., 9, pp. 259–60. Cf. Proiekt do Formy rządu, ff. 31r., 33r.
69 ibid., p. 251.
70 ibid., pp. 251–2, 261–2. Cf. Proiekt, f. 24r.
71 Montesquieu (A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller, H. S. Stone trans. eds eds) (1992 edn), The Spirit
of the Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 155.
72 VL 9, pp. 266–7; cf. Proiekt, ff. 47r., 48r., 50v.
73 VL 9, p. 267.
74 ibid., pp. 277–8; cf. Proiekt, f. 53r.
75 VL 9, p. 319.
76 ibid., pp. 222, 447, 457–64; cf. Proiekt, f. 67r.
77 VL 9, pp. 279–80.
78 ibid., p. 321.
79 ibid., 9, p. 250.
80 ‘Zaręczenie wzajemne obojga narodów’, ibid., pp. 316–7. J. Bardach (1997), ‘The
Constitution of 3 May and the Mutual Guarantee of the Two Nation’, in Fiszman (ed.), op.
cit., pp. 357–78.
N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 4 9 – 2 5 7 313
81 J. A. Gierowski (1996), The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the XVIIIth century: from

anarchy to well-ordered state. Kraków: PAU, p. 264. The weight of evidence presented by
Gierowski strongly suggests a much more conservative picture.
Sejmu Czteroletniego. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich, p. 60.
83 H. Kołłątaj (Z. Zielińska, ed.) (1991), Uwagi nad wpływaniem do interesów Rzeczypospolitej
dwóch mocarstw, z zastanowieniem się, co nam w tych okolicznościach czynić zostaje [1788],
in Z. Zielińska, Kołłątaj i orientacja pruska u progu Sejmu Czteroletniego. Warsaw: Pax,
pp. 43–108.
84 S. Rzewuski [1789], O sukcessyi tronu w Polszcze rzecz krótka. n.pl., pp. 12–4, 39–41.
85 [T. Czacki], op. cit., p. 84. Smoleński, Ostatni rok Sejmu Wielkiego, pp. 65–6.
86 E.g. Deboli to Stanisław August, 5 April, 13 May, 10 June, 30 July, 9 August, 2 December
1791, AGAD / Zbiór Popielów, ff. 16, 67, 84, 121, 141–3, 244.
87 See F. Potocki to Seweryn Rzewuski, 14 March 1791, in ‘Korespondencja Szczęsnego
Potockiego i Seweryna Rzewuskiego z lat 1788–1796’, E. Rostworowski, ed. (1954), Przegląd
Historyczny, 45, 722–40, here 736–7.
88 [F. K. Dmochowski, H. Kołłątaj, I. Potocki and S. Potocki] (1793), O ustanowieniu i upadku
Konstytucyi Polskiey 3go Maia 1791. Metz, Part II, pp. 103–7, 120–9, 132, 152–3.
89 Z. Kaczmarczyk (ed.) (1952), Volumina Legum, 10. Konstytucje Sejmu Grodzieńskiego z 1793
roku. Poznań: Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk, p. 326.
90 ibid., pp. 110–9, 121, 136, 144, 154, 197, 208, 326.
91 ibid., pp. 110–1; W. Smoleński (1903), Konfederacya Targowicka. Kraków: Gebethner,
pp. 424–5; J. Czubaty (2005), Zasada ‘dwóch sumień’. Normy postępowania i granice
kompromisu politycznego Polaków w sytuacjach wyboru (1795–1815). Warsaw: Neriton,
pp. 280–1.
92 Text of the Proclamation in J. Topolski (ed.) (1984), Uniwersał Połaniecki. Lublin:
Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, pp. 49–54. See also the editor’s introduction. A. Woltanowski,
‘Tadeusz Kościuszko i pierwszy etap reform włościańskich (28 marca – 1 maja 1794r.)’
(1987), Przegląd Historyczny, 78, 19–44.
Notes to Epilogue
1 J. Pawlikowski (E. Halicz, ed.) (1967 edn), Czy polacy wybić się mogą na niepodległość.
Warsaw: MON, pp. 69, 88–9, 107–110, 132. See also J. Szczepaniec, ‘Pawlikowski, Józef
Herman’ in PSB, 25, pp. 449–50; S. Herbst, ‘Kościuszko, Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura’,
ibid., 14, p. 437.
2 T. Konopka (M. Konopka, ed.) (1993), Historia domu naszego. Warsaw: Neriton, p. 150.
These reminiscences about the author’s father, Józef, were put together by his son, Tadeusz,
in the 1850s.
3 Pawlikowski, op. cit., p. 78.
4 J. Czubaty (2005), Zasada ‘dwóch sumień’. Normy postępowania i granice kompromisu
politycznego Polaków w sytuacjach wyboru (1795–1815). Warsaw: Neriton, pp. 131, 239–40.
5 Kościuszko formally repudiated his oath in August 1798, returning a gift of 12,000 roubles
he had been granted on his release. In April 1814 he reconciled himself to the prospect of
a Polish kingdom ruled by Alexander, though he refused to return to serve directly under
him. He died in Switzerland in 1817. Herbst, op. cit., pp. 437–8.
6 W. H. Zawadzki (1993), A Man of Honour: Adam Czartoryski as a Statesman of Russia and
314 N O T E S T O PA G E S 2 5 7 – 2 6 6
Poland, 1795–1831. Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 32, 121. See also Czubaty, op. cit., pp. 171–2,
180–2, 242–3, 246–50, 231, 262, 287–8, 337–8, 384, 565, 589. D. Beauvois (2003), Pouvoir
russe et noblesse polonaise en Ukraine 1793–1830. Paris: CNRS, pp. 16–20.
7 The words of prince Józef Poniatowski, nephew of king Stanisław August. Czubaty, op. cit.,
p. 665.
8 Zawadzki, op. cit., pp. 256–62.
9 ibid., pp. 79, 83–4, 90–1, 109, 169–74, 180–1, 199–204, 223–6.
10 W. Zajewski (1997), ‘Powstanie listopadowe 1830–1831’ in W. Zajewski (ed.), Trzy
Powstania Narodowe. Warsaw: KiW, p. 165; B. Szacka (1965), Teoria i utopia Stanisława
Staszica, Warsaw: PWN, pp. 149–93.
11 Zajewski (ed.), op. cit., pp. 152–60. Zawadzki, op. cit., pp. 281–2.
12 Pawlikowski, op. cit., pp. 79, 85–6, 107, 132.
13 Wincenty Witos, quoted in S. Eile (2000), Literature and Nationalism in Partitioned Poland,
1795–1918. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 6–7.
14 J. Jedlicki (1999), A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-century Polish Approaches to Western
Civilization. Budapest: Central European University Press, pp. 173–7, 222–3.
15 A. F. Grabski (1983), Perspektywy przeszłości. Studia i szkice historiograficzne. Lublin: Wyd.
Lubelskie, 1983, pp. 118, 151–85, 268, 378, 384–6, 403–4. See also Eile, op. cit., passim,
although the author is perhaps not always conscious of the genuine problems facing a
predominantly agricultural and fractured society. S. Kieniewicz (1982), ‘Wizja Polski
niepodległej’ in S. Kieniewicz (ed.), Polska XIX wieku: państwo, społeczeństwo, kultura.
Warsaw: WP, pp. 162–93.
16 Cyprian Kamil Norwid, quoted in Eile, op. cit., p. 131.
17 T. Snyder (2003), The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus,
1569–1999. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 19–51, 105–32.
Notes to Appendix: The Constitution of 3 May 1791
1 The envoys sitting in autumn 1790 ruled that they would continue to sit after the parlia-
mentary elections of November 1790, but would be joined by a fresh complement of
envoys. Hence the reference to the ‘doubled number’. Up to 359 envoys sat from November
1790, together with the 158 senators.
2 A separate law on the extraordinary Constitutional Sejm, registered on 28 May 1791, set
the date for the first such assembly as 1 October 1816. VL 9, p. 241.
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Łomża (Masovia)
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LMAB F 233–126’ ff. 124–30 (17 Nov. 1790)
Oświęcim and Zator
WAP Kraków. Acta Castrensia Osvecensia 97, pp. 728–34 (29 Oct. 1764); WAP Kraków.
Acta Castrensia Osvecensia 94, pp. 1174–81 (25 Aug. 1766)
Pinsk (Lithuania)
LMAB F 233–126, ff. 143–5 (11 Feb. 1790); 137–42 (16–18 Nov. 1790)
Płock
AGAD/ księgi grodzkie płockie. Oblaty 14, ff. 189–93 (6 Feb. 1764); ff. 232–6 (29 Oct. 1764);
ff. 98–101 (25 Aug. 1766)
Podole
AGAD / ZP 129, ff. 167–78 (15 July 1776); AGAD / ZP 125 ff. 219–22; (17 Aug. 1778);
AGAD / ZP 125, ff. 314–28 (21 Aug. 1780); AGAD / ZP 130, pp.186–95 (21 Aug. 1786);
317–23 (18 Aug. 1788); WAP Kraków, Archiwum Podhoreckie X 2/24 (16 Nov. 1790)
Połock (Lithuania)
AGAD / ZP 125, ff. 243–44 (17 Aug. 1778); LMAB F 233–126, ff. 159–68 (16 Nov. 1790)
Różan (Masovia)
AGAD / księgi grodzkie różańskie. Relacje, oblaty, 37, ff. 19–24 (6 Feb. 1764); BPAN 8337,
ff. 584–7 (22 March 1773); ff. 593–4 (15 July 1776); 597–600 (17 Aug. 1778);. 602–5 (21 Aug.
1780); 618–21 (16 Aug. 1784); 626–7 (21 Aug. 1786); 632–4 (8 Feb. 1790); 635–42 (16 Nov.
1790)
Rzeczyca (Lithuania)
LMAB F233–125, ff. 24–8 (19 Aug. 1788); LMAB F 233–126, ff. 183–91 (16 Nov. 1790)
Sandomierz
BPAN 8341, pp. 561–608 (6 Feb. 1764); 681–704 (29 Oct. 1764); 733–72 (25 Aug. 1766);
873–916 (25 July 1776); 953–92 (17 Aug. 1778); 1017–36 (21 Aug. 1780); 1069–92 (19 Aug.
1782);
AGAD / ZP 130, pp. 141–5 (16 Aug. 1784); 1161–80 (18 Aug. 1788); 1217–26, 1229–72
(16 Nov. 1790)
Sieradz
AGAD/ księgi grodzkie sieradzkie. Relacje 124, ff. 204–10 (6 Feb. 1764); Relacje 134, ff.
305–7 (29 Oct. 1764); Relacje 137, ff. 508–11 (25 Aug. 1766); BPAN 8345, pp.769–78
(21 Aug. 1780);
AGAD / Archiwum Roskie / Publica 95/4/5 (16 Nov. 1790)
Słonim (Lithuania)
LMAB F 233–126, ff. 196–99 (10 Feb. 1790); 200–03 (16 Nov. 1790)
Smolensk (Lithuania)
LMAB F 233–126, ff. 204–06 (17 Nov. 1790)
Sochaczew (Rawa)
BPAN 8347, ff. 378–82 (6 Feb. 1764); 405–6 (25 Aug. 1766); 439–40 (15 July 1776); 449–50
(17 Aug. 1778); 453–55 (21 Aug. 1780); 458–60 (19 Aug. 1782); 463–5 (16 Aug. 1784); 468–9
(21 Aug. 1786); 472–6 (18 Aug. 1788); 484–5 (16 Nov. 1790)
Troki (Lithuania)
LMAB F233–125, ff. 4–9 (19 Aug. 1788)
Upita (Lithuania)
AGAD / Archiwum Roskie / Publica 95 / 4 / 5 (19 Nov. 1790)
Warsaw (Masovia)
BPAN 993, ff. 299–306 (6 Feb. 1764); 322–5 (29 Oct. 1764); 331–5 (26 Aug. 1766); AGAD
/ Archiwum Roskie / Publica 95 / 4 / 5 & WAP Kraków, Archiwum Podhoreckie x 4/12
(16 Nov. 1790)
Wielkopolska (palatinates of Poznań, Kalisz and Gniezno)
AGAD / ZP 123, ff. 46–9 (5 April 1773); AGAD / ZP 125, ff. 195–203 (17 Aug. 1778); AGAD
/ ZP 130, pp. 231–49 (21 Aug. 1786); pp. 358–65 (18 Aug. 1788)
Wieluń
AGAD/ księgi grodzkie wieluńskie, oblata 19, ff. 15–19 (6 Feb. 1764); ff. 425–8 (29 Oct.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 319
1764); oblata 20, ff. 598–605 (25 Aug. 1766); oblata 21, ff. 575–6 (24 Aug. 1767); AGAD/
akta wieluńskie grodzkie, oblata 47, ff. 850–2
Wilkomierz (Lithuania)
LMAB F233–125, ff. 1–3 (19 Aug. 1788); LMAB F 233–126, ff. 216–7 (9 Feb. 1790); 218–24
(18 Nov. 1790)
Wilno (Lithuania)
LMAB F233–125, ff. 42–4 (20 Aug. 1788); 37–40 (17 Nov. 1790)
Wizna (Masovia)
BPAN 8351, ff. 224–9 (6 Feb. 1764); 241–3 (29 Oct. 1764);249–58 (25 Aug. 1766); 278–9
(26 Sept. 1768); 286–7 (22 March 1773); 311–13 (17 Aug. 1776); 341–3, 346–7 (17 Aug.
1778); 371–2 (21 Aug. 1780); 376–7 (22 Aug. 1780); 380–3 (19–21 Aug. 1782); 388–89
(16 Aug. 1784); 392–3 (21 Aug. 1786); 396–8 (18 Aug. 1788); 404–7 (8 Feb. 1790)
Wołkwysk (Lithuania)
AGAD / ZP 123, ff. 57–8 (22–23 March 1773); LMAB F 233–126, ff. 240–50 (16–18 Nov.
1790)
Wołyń
BPAN 314, ff. 27–30 (25 Aug. 1766); AGAD / ZP 129, ff.229–33; AGAD / ZP 125, ff. 213–17
(17 Aug. 1778); AGAD / ZP 130, pp. 259–63 (22 Aug. 1786); pp. 384–405 (18–20 Aug.
1788); AGAD / Archiwum Roskie / Publica 95 / 4 /5
Wyszogród (Masovia)
BPAN 8352, ff. 223–9 (6 Feb. 1764); AGAD / księgi grodzkie wyszogrodzkie. Relacje 28, ff.
432–3 (25 Aug. 1766); BPAN 8352, ff. 267–9 (5 April 1773); 287–8 (17 Aug. 1778); 293–4
(21 Aug. 1780); 295–6 (22 Aug. 1780); 304–5 (19 Aug. 1782); 308–9 (16 Aug. 1784); 314
(21 Aug. 1786); 318–97 (18 Aug. 1788); 373–80 (16 Nov. 1790); 381–2 (18 Aug. 1792)
Zakroczym (Masovia)
AGAD / księgi grodzkie zakroczymskie. Relacje 37, ff. 799–801 (25 Aug. 1766); BPAN 8354,
ff. 273–4 (5 April 1773); 281–7 (15 July 1776); 293–5 (17 Aug. 1778); 302–4 (21 Aug. 1780);
307–9 (19 Aug. 1782); 313–8 (21 Aug. 1786); AGAD / ZP 130, pp. 414–25 (18 Aug. 1788);
BPAN 8354, ff. 319–29 (8 Feb. 1790); 333–41 (16 Nov. 1790)
Żmudź (Lithuania)
AGAD / ZP 129, ff. 261–73 (16 July 1776); AGAD / ZP 125, ff. 205–12 (17 Aug. 1778);
LMAB F 233–126, ff. 251–55 (18 Nov. 1790)
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Index
(regnal dates only of rulers are given)
A Boczyłowic, Jakób (d.c.1698)

Albert, duke of Saxe-Teschen (1738–1822) Orator politicus 29
130 Bogusławski, Konstanty (1754–1819) O.S.P.
Albertrandi, Jan (1731–1808) 194–5 157, 162
Alexander (r.1501–06) 4, 16, 22, 91 Bohemia 8, 34, 56, 162
Alexander I of Russia (r.1801–25) 257–8 Bohomolec, Franciszek, S.J. (1720–84) 72–3,
Altranstädt, treaty of (1706) 37 101
Ancuta, Jerzy (d.1737) Bolingbroke, Henry St John, viscount
Full rights of the Catholic Faith 61, 63, 66, (1678–1751) 110
67, 193 Bona Sforza (1494–1558) 81
apostasy 62, 116, 220, 226–7, 261 Bourbon dynasty 21, 151
Athens 106 Brahe, Tycho (1546–1601) 13
Augustus, Roman emperor (r.27 BC– AD 14) Brandenburg, see Prussia, kingdom of
101, 180 Branicki, Jan Klemens (1689–1771) 21, 151
Augustus II (r.1697–1733) 16, 17, 23, 28–9, Branicki, Ksawery (1730–1819) 250
30, 33, 34–5, 37–8, 40, 43, 56, 63, 122 Breslau 58, 99
Augustus III (r.1733–63) 25, 27, 35, 40, Brześć Litewski 29, 208
41, 42–3, 52, 53, 56, 61, 64, 89, 93, 96, 99, Brześć Litewski, palatinate of 29
101,107, 149, 150, 208, 250 Butrymowicz, Mateusz (1745–1814) 214–6,
Austria (see also Habsburg dynasty) 34, 40, 217, 220, 222
56, 93, 95, 130, 147, 168, 169, 173, 180, 226, Bystrzonowski, Wojciech, S.J.(1699–c.1775)
253, 257, 258 The Pole, man of taste 35–6, 53
B C
Basilians, religious order 62 Cadet Corps, Lunéville (est. 1737) 27
Bauch, T. 101, 102 Cadet Corps, Royal (est. 1765) 101, 165, 168
Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan (1735–1822) Caesar, Gaius Julius (100–44 BC) 106
183–4, 218 Calasanza, José a (1556–1648) 69
Benedict XIV (pope 1740–58) 71 Calvin, John (1509–64) 63
Berlin 220 Carlowitz, peace of (1699) 26
Beza, Theodore (1519–1605) 61 Carthage 105, 106
Bielfeld, Jakob Friedrich (1717–70) 145 Casimir III ‘the Great’ (r.1333–70) 14, 58,
Bieliński, Franciszek (1742–1809) 153, 154, 207, 262
156, 158, 161, 168 Casimir IV (r.1447–92) 15
Blackstone, William (1723–80) 179 Catherine de Medici (1519–89) 7
340 INDEX
Catherine II ‘the Great’ of Russia (r.1762–96) Science of government 83

52, 56, 66, 94–6, 121, 123, 150, 151, 250, 251 Custodial Council (Straż Praw) 176–7, 197,
Charles IX of France (r.1560–74) 7 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 238, 239.
Charles X of Sweden (r.1654–60) 64 241, 245, 246–7, 264, 265, 266, 267–9,
Charles XII of Sweden (r.1697–1718) 26, 63 270–1
Chelucci, Paolino (1668–1754) 69 Czacki, Felix (1723–90) 103, 239
Chojnice, Privilege of (1454) 4 Complaint of the poor nobility 103
Chmielowski, Benedykt (1700–63) An interesting letter 88, 103
New Athens 13, 15, 57, 65 ‘Letters on the Monitor’ 103–9
Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 BC) 70, 106 Czacki, Tadeusz (1765–1813) 239, 242
civil-military commissions of the peace 174, Czarniecki, Stefan (1599–1665) 206
189, 196, 197–8, 199, 201, 221, 224, 230, 252 Czartoryski, family of 38, 52, 84, 93, 94, 102,
Clement XIV (pope, 1769–74) 96, 109, 151 123, 140, 145, 170
clergy, Catholic 5, 8, 28, 55, 57–8, 59, 60, 61, Czartoryski, Adam Jerzy (1770–1861) 169,
67–8, 74, 88, 107, 116, 134, 152, 156, 158. 226, 257, 258
163, 170, 190, 191, 102–3, 195, 196–7, 208, Czartoryski, Adam Kazimierz (1743–1823)
234, 244–5, 267 83, 102, 169, 199, 226
Commission for National Education Czartoryski, Michael (1696–1775) 149, 150
(Komisja Edukacji Narodowej) 96, 109, Czerwińsk, Privilege of (1422) 4
151, 152, 153, 154, 157, 159, 168, 170,
199, 201, 202, 217, 222, 230, 231, 233–4, D
237, 243 Danzig 3, 10–11, 14, 62, 64, 99, 173
confederacy (konfederacja) 25, 26, 55, 80, 129, Dębiński, Jan (d.1725)
130–1, 132, 180, 229, 233, 241, 245–6, 265 Domina Palatii, Regina Libertas 4, 16,
of Warsaw (1573) 7, 61, 62, 63 20–1, 26–7, 57, 206, 210
of Tarnogród (1715–17) 26, 63 Deboli, Augustyn (1747–1810) 250
of Dzików (1734–6) 41, 62 ‘Deluge’ 10–11, 24, 25, 26, 56, 206
General Confederacy of 1764–66 93, 94 Dembowski, Antoni Stanisław (1682–1763)
of Bar (1768–72) 66, 95, 109, 110, 123–4, Polish Freedom Examined 43
125, 126, 139, 145 Denmark 21, 56
of Targowica (1792–3) 250–1 Destouches, Philippe Néricault (1680–1754)
Congress Kingdom of Poland 258 101
Constantine, Grand Duke (1779–1831) 257, Dłuski, Tomasz ( c.1713–1800) 117–9, 161,
258 163, 238–9, 242
Constitution of 3 May 1791 173, 223–31, 237, Dohm, Christian Wilhelm (1751–1820) 213,
238, 239–47, 248, 249, 250, 251, 256, 260, 214
261–71 Dresden 99
Copernicus, Nicholas (1473–1543) 13 Dupont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel (1739–
Coxe, William (1747–1828) 110 1817) 150
Coyer, Gabriel-François (1707–82) Dutch Republic 1, 10, 11, 27, 83, 106, 109,
Histoire de Jean Sobieski 122–3 146, 161, 162, 169, 187
La noblesse commerçante 155 Dylewski, Michael (d.c.1764) 210–11
Crimean Tatars 2, 7 Dzieduszycki, Jerzy (1670–1730)
Curban, Gaspard Réal de (1682–1752) Treatise on the election 37, 40, 42, 53
INDEX 341
E Anatomy of the Commonwealth 57–61,

Egypt, ancient 106, 206 160, 208, 211
Elbing 3, 11, 62, 64 Genoa 83
elections, royal 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 15–16, 17, 19, 20, George II of England (r.1727–60) 84
23, 24–6, 30, 33, 35, 36–7, 40, 43, 44, 48, 55, Germany and Germans 1, 6, 11, 13, 24, 34, 37,
56, 58, 64, 70–1, 87, 89, 96, 101, 122, 131, 43, 56, 58, 62, 65, 70, 99, 100, 101, 103, 107
142, 149–50, 165–6, 196, 239, 241 Gniezno 14, 25, 55
Encyclopédie 121–2, 123 Göttingen 105
England 1, 10, 18, 21, 23, 24, 27, 56, 65, 73, Gottsched, Johann Christoph (1700–66) 13
83–4, 85, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, Great Northern War (1700–21) 10, 11, 17, 26,
121, 126, 129, 132, 144, 146, 155, 161, 162, 27, 35, 39, 56, 57, 63. 64, 70–1, 108, 206
175, 178, 179, 180, 187, 196, 214, 230, Greece, ancient 60
246 Grodno 3, 10, 67, 143, 233
Gröll, Michael (c.1722–98) 99, 100
F Grotius, Hugo (1583–1645) 115, 117
Felbiger, Johann Ignaz von (1724–88) 158
Filangieri, Gaetano (1752–88) 170 H
Ferney 123 Habsburg dynasty 7, 8, 21, 26, 95, 109, 119,
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de (1657–1757) 130, 164, 173, 192, 252
68 Halle 105
France 1, 8, 21, 24, 27, 30, 37, 40, 41, 43, 51, Henri of Valois (r. in Poland, 1574–89) 6,
52, 69, 70, 73, 85, 93, 95, 99, 100, 101, 102, 7–8, 23
103, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 122–4, Henrician Articles (1573) 7–8, 9, 28
126, 136, 137, 150. 157. 165, 170, 174, 180, Hohenzollern dynasty 7, 58
181, 191, 192, 194, 219, 220, 222, 227, Holy Roman Empire 1, 11
240–1, 245, 255, 256, 257 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)
Franklin, Benjamin (1706–90) 180 (65–8 BC) 108
Frederick II ‘the Great’ of Prussia (r.1740–86) Hume, David (1711–76) 110, 116, 145, 185
43, 56. 121, 136, 183, 256 Hungary 3, 8, 14, 24, 26, 56, 100, 162
Frederick Augustus III, elector of Saxony
(r. 1763–1827) 130, 196, 230, 238, 239, 241, I
250, 267 Italy 1, 3, 6, 37, 60, 70, 101, 103, 105, 168
Frederick Christian I, elector of Saxony Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’ of Muscovy (r.1533–84)
(r. Oct–Dec.1763) 52 8
Frederick William II of Prussia (r.1786–97)
169–70, 173 J
Fredro, Andrzej Maksymilian (c.1620–79) Jabłonowski, Jan Stanisław (1669–1731)
21, 26 SCRUPLE without scruple 4, 33, 39–40, 41,
Scriptorum . . . fragmenta 20, 24–5, 26, 41, 53, 101
57, 66–7, 91 Jabłonowski, Józef Alexander (1711–77) 101
Jagiellonian dynasty 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 15–16, 21, 22,
G 63, 66, 146, 149, 161, 227, 229, 243, 257, 262
Galicia 252 James I of England (r.1603–25) 56
Garczyński, Stefan (c.1690–1756) Jansenism 55, 73
342 INDEX
Jaroszewicz, Florian (c.1694–1771) Conversation between a landowner 38,

Poland, Mother of Saints 57, 207 43–4, 53
Jaucourt, Louis de (1704–79) 121–2, 123 Epistolae familiares 40–1
Jedlno, Privilege of, see Neminem De emendandis eloquentiae vitiis 69, 70, 71
Captivabimus De viro honesto 70, 71–2, 75
Jesuits 6, 14, 61, 68, 69–70, 72–3, 96, 99, 100, Ordinationes Visitationis Apostolicae 71
101, 105, 109, 151, 153, 159, 194, 199 On the Means to Successful Counsels 69,
Jews 11, 42, 55, 56, 59, 60, 62, 73, 107, 125, 77–94, 96, 102, 103, 108, 127, 138–9, 144,
164, 181, 199, 205–22, 224, 232, 234, 248 147, 162, 167, 175, 178, 242–3, 246, 251
Jezierski, Franciszek (1740–91) 14, 184, 185, Thoughts on the Thoughts 89
190, 217 De arte bene cogitandi 72
Jezierski, Jacek (1722–1805) 183–4, 218, 220 Königsberg 7, 99
John I Albert (r.1492–1501) 3, 16, 141, 262 Konopczyński, Władysław (1880–1952) 33
John II Casimir (r.1648–68) 24, 81, 180 Kościuszko, Tadeusz (1746–1817) 252–3, 255,
John III Sobieski (r.1674–96) 35, 42, 56, 121, 257, 259
122–3 Kraków 3, 10, 67, 95,168, 205, 207, 211
Joseph II of Austria (r.1780–90) 192 Kraków, palatinate of 36, 198, 237, 252
Justinian, Code of 115, 117 University of 13, 68, 168, 207
Krakus, legendary figure 16
K Krasicki, Ignacy (1735–1801) 102
Kalisz, palatinate of 5 Krasiński, Adam (1714–1800) 231
Kamieniec Podolski 207 Kretkowski, Zygmunt (d.1766) 21
Kamieński, Adolf O.S.P (1737–81) 153–4, Kruszwica 16
158, 168 Krzywkowski, Ludwik (c.1755–c.1797) 189
Karp, Maurycy (1749–1817) 163, 187–8
Karpowicz, Michael (1744–1803) 155, 156–7, L
158–9, 162–3, 245 Latin, use of 6, 11, 35, 44, 63, 70, 72, 73, 74,
Karwicki, Stanisław (c.1640–1724) 99, 100–1, 103, 108, 153, 199, 217
‘Exorbitancies’ 20, 44–8, 49, 50, 53, 79 Lech, legendary figure 14
De ordinanda Republica 15, 20, 44–8, 49, Leipzig 99, 105
50, 53, 80, 85, 196 Lelewel, Joachim (1786–1861) 260
Kochowski, Wespazjan (1633–1700) 57 Lengnich, Gottfried (1689–1774)
Kołłątaj, Hugo (1750–1812) 168, 181–2, 199, Ius publicum Regni Poloni 11–12, 100
202, 226, 228, 249, 252, 256, 259 Leszczyński, Rafał (1526–92) 122
‘On the reform of the Cadet School’168–9 Leszczyński, Rafał (1650–1703) 125, 137
Letters of an Anonymous Correspondent Leszczyński, Stanisław see Stanisław
170–1, 177, 179, 184–5, 186, 189–90. 193, Leszczyński
228, 249 Leyden 105, 110, 145
Political Law 179, 190, 191–2, 206, 216–7 liberum veto 21, 23–4, 25, 28, 30, 33, 34, 35–6,
Kołudzki, Augustyn (d.1720) 41–2, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50, 53, 60, 66–7, 69, 71,
Thron Oyczysty albo Pałac Wieczności 17, 207 77–97, 107, 108, 122, 127–8, 129, 131–2,
Konarski, Stanisław O.S.P. (1700–73) 68–71, 137, 143–4, 146, 147, 149, 167, 170, 173,
73, 75, 93–4, 96, 96, 100, 103, 108, 124, 137, 175, 180, 202, 229, 234, 241, 245–6, 249,
138, 153, 181 251, 265
INDEX 343
Liegnitz 109 Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527) 77, 78

Lipsius, Justus (1547–1606) Majchrowicz, Szymon, S.J.
Politicorum . . . Libri sex 9–10 Happy Endurance of Kingdoms 16, 55–7,
Lithuania, Grand Duchy 1–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 22, 66, 67, 69, 73, 74, 90, 208
24, 28–9, 38, 47, 55, 57, 66, 72, 107, 117, 124, Maffei, Francesco Scipione, marquis
140, 142, 143, 149, 202, 205, 206, 211, 214, (1675–1755) 60
217, 219, 233, 234, 235, 245, 247, 248–9, Malesherbes, Guillaume-Chrétien de
250, 258, 260, 261, 262 Lamoignon de (1721–94) 123
Locke, John (1632–1704) 70, 105, 116, 144 Małachowski, Jan (1698–1762) 100
Löllhöwell, Georg 23 Małachowski, Stanisław (1736–1809 )
Lorraine 27, 41, 122 170
Louis of Hungary (r.1370–82) 3–4, 14, 81, Małopolska 3, 47, 124, 140. 142, 202, 208, 234,
262 247, 248, 250
Louis XIV of France (r.1643–1715) 64 Maria Augusta Nepomucena of Saxony
Louis XV of France (r.1715–1774) 40, 122 (1782–1863) 230, 239, 267
Louise-Marie de Gonzague (1611–66) 24, 81 Maria Theresia of Austria (r.1740–80) 43
Lubicz-Chojecki, Karol (c.1740–c.1791) 242 Masovia (Mazowsze) 66, 90, 170, 196, 197
Lublin 159, 175 Massalski, Ignacy (1729–94) 151, 152, 156,
Lublin, palatinate of 5, 14, 117–8, 170, 211, 157, 168
225 Matuszewicz, Marcin (1714–73) 29, 77, 208,
Lublin, Union of (1569) 1, 2, 7 210
Lubomirski, Jerzy (1616–67) 25–6, 81, 180 Mercier de la Rivière, Paul Pierre le
Lubomirski, Stanisław (1720–83) 206 (1720–94) 150, 151
Lubomirski, Stanisław Herakliusz (d.1702) Michalski, Jerzy (1924–2007) 170
De vanitate consiliorum 33–5, 53 Michael I Wiśniowiecki (r.1669–74) 17, 42
Lunéville 27 Mieszko I (r.c.960–92) 27
peace of (1801) 257 Mirabeau, Victor de Riquetti, marquis
Luther, Martin (1483–1546) 63 (1715–89) 150, 151
Lwów 3 Mitzler de Koloff, Lorenz (1718–78) 13, 96,
100–1, 102
Ł Mohylew 10
Ładowski, Remigiusz O.S.P. (1738–98) 159 Moldavia 23, 24
Łęczyca, palatinate of 5, 117, 200, 221 monarchy, Polish, character of (see also
Łobarzewski, Ignacy (c.1750–1826) 176–7, elections, royal) 2–5, 6, 7–9, 15–20, 21, 23,
178, 182–3 24, 34, 36–7, 43, 45–6, 48, 52, 61, 71–2, 107,
Łyszczyński, Kazimierz (1634–89) 122–3, 127, 128–30, 131, 141–2, 149, 161–2,
De non existentia Dei 74 165–6, 174–7, 179–81, 226, 229–30, 233,
238–41, 242, 245, 246, 249, 251, 256, 258,
M 266–9, 270–1
Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de (1709–85) 137, royal patronage powers (ius distributivum)
151 18–20, 24, 29, 37–8, 45–6, 47, 49, 52, 84,
Du gouvernment et des lois de Pologne 85, 87, 107, 109, 127, 128, 129, 130, 141,
123–30, 132, 135, 136–7, 138, 139, 142, 162, 196, 230, 232
144, 209–10 Monitor 72, 96–7, 101–9
344 INDEX
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, pacta conventa 8, 9, 20. 122, 230, 267

baron (1689–1755) 110, 116, 145, 193 Paris 69, 70, 137, 151, 224, 225, 250, 255
Persian Letters 79 Parthians 135
History of the Grandeur and Decline of Partition of Poland, First (1772) 10, 11, 27,
Rome 77, 80 56, 95, 97, 100, 109, 110, 119, 121, 136, 137,
Spirit of the Laws 49–50, 51, 77, 84, 115, 138, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 174, 183, 184,
121, 138, 142, 161, 166, 175–6, 228, 246, 205, 239, 243
249 Partition of Poland, Second (1793) 251, 255
Monti, Antoine Félix, marquis (1668–1738) Partition of Poland, Third (1795) 138, 253,
30 255, 257, 258
More, Thomas (1478–1535) 79 Paul V (pope, 1605–21) 13
Muratori, Ludovico (1672–1750) 60 Paulmy, Marc Antoine René de Voyer,
Muscovy, see Russia marquis of (1722–87) 93
Pawlikowski, Józef (1767–1829) 185, 187,
N 217, 255, 259
Nancy 44, 123 peasants, see serfdom, serfs
Napoleon Buonaparte (1769–1821) 255, 257, Permanent Council (Rada Nieustająca) 96,
258 109, 170, 171, 174, 176, 196, 197, 251
Nax, Jan Ferdynand (1736–1810) 175, 183, Pestel, Friedrich Wilhelm (1724–1805) 145
186, 199 Peter I ‘the Great’ of Russia (r.1682–1725) 62,
Neminem Captivabimus (Privilege of Jedlno, 255, 256
1430) 4, 15, 175, 181, 198, 223, 240, 251–2 physiocracy 110, 117, 119, 145, 150–2, 154,
Nicolai, K.B. 100 155, 156, 157, 161, 162–3, 171,179, 181, 182,
Nieszawa, Privilege of (1454) 4, 15 184, 185, 186, 187, 191, 212, 225, 227, 233,
Nihil Novi, Statute of (1505) 4, 15, 22, 44, 91 235, 236, 242, 245, 248, 249
Norwid, Cyprian Kamil (1821–83) 260 Piarists, religious order 68, 69–73, 77, 99, 100,
Notko, Jewish bandit 208 101, 103, 105, 124, 151, 152–3, 154, 155,
Nuremberg 99 157, 159, 162, 181
Collegium Nobilium 68, 70, 71, 72, 75, 103,
O 153
Oliva, peace of (1660) 64 Piast, legendary figure 16, 190
Opaliński, Łukasz (1612–62) Piast, native candidate for throne 37, 40,
Polonia Defensa 15, 17–18 41, 42, 44, 48, 129–30, 227
Rozmowa plebana 27, 80 Piotrowski, Andrzej (c.1680–1736) 67
Opatów 205 Piramowicz, Grzegorz S.J. (1735–1801)
Oraczewski, Felix (1739–99) 242 Duties of a Teacher 159–60
Orthodoxy 61, 62, 200 Plato (c.428–347 BC) 48, 79
Orzechowski, Stanisław (1513–66) 9 Plutarch (c.46–120) 106.110
Ostrogski, Konstanty (1526–1608) 61 Połaniec, Proclamation of (1794) 252
Ottoman Empire 7, 23, 24, 26, 40, 42, 62, 64, Połock 62
95, 111, 124, 136, 166, 169, 173, 226, 241, 259 Pomerania, palatinate of 14
Poniatowski, Michael (1736–94) 168
P Poniatowski, Stanisław, the elder (1671–1762)
Pac, Michał (d.1729) 57 38, 83
INDEX 345
Poniński, Antoni (d.1742) 35 Q

Sarmatides seu Satyrae 35, 74 Quakers 116
Poniński, Jan Nepomucen (1735–c.1782) Quesnay, François (1694–1774) 150, 151, 163
‘Moralisation’ 52, 95, 141
popisy 38, 85, 68–9, 170, 171, 202, 256 R
Popławski, Antoni O.S.P. (1739–99) 155–6, Radzewski, Franciszek (pseud.Franciszek
161–2, 168, 209 Poklatecki) (1672–1748)
Potocki, Felix (1751–1805) 239–40, 250–1 Political questions indifferent 35, 37, 41,
Potocki, Ignacy (1750–1809) 156, 157, 159, 44, 53
161, 168, 175, 178, 191, 199, 201, 203, Radziejów 116
225–6, 231, 236, 237, 242, 245, 248, 250 Radziwiłł, Bogusław (1620–69) 61–2
Potocki, Jan (1761–1815) 174 Radziwiłł, Udalryk (1712–63) 100
Potocki, Stanisław (1755–1821) 176 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François
Potop, see Deluge (1711–96) 186
Poznań 3, 72, 211 Reichenbach, convention of (1790) 226
Poznań, palatinate of 5, 58, 119 Rochefoucauld, François, duke (1613–80)
Praga 253 34
Principles for the Reform of the form of Rollin, Charles (1661–1741) 68, 69
Government (1789) 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, Rome 27, 69
231 Rome, ancient 6, 8. 21, 60, 82, 83, 105, 106,
Project for the Form of Government (1790) 123, 130, 180
231–8, 245–7, 248 Rostworowski, Emanuel (1923–89) 404
Protestants 7, 27, 36, 45, 58, 61–7, 68, 74, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–78) 68, 110,
83–4, 94–6, 104. 105, 123, 151, 193, 200, 123, 141, 145, 151, 155, 159, 182, 183, 186,
210, 213 187, 188, 200, 228
Pruszcz, Piotr (1605–c.1668) Considérations sur le gouvernement de
Fortress of Monarchs 207 Pologne 124–7, 130–6, 137–8, 139, 143,
Prussia, Royal (Polish) 3, 7, 11–12, 62, 64 144, 160–1, 163, 176, 178, 179, 187, 209,
Prussia, duchy of (‘East’ Prussia) 7, 74 228, 232, 246, 249,
Prussia, kingdom of 23, 40, 52, 56, 58, 59, 73, Social Contract 51, 125, 131, 132, 163, 178
90, 94, 95, 96, 99, 108, 119, 121, 136, 145, Émile 105
147, 158, 164, 169–70, 173, 178, 180, 183, Rudawski, Wawrzyniec (1617–74) 100
200, 213, 220, 231, 249, 251, 253, 256, 258 Rulhière, Claude Carloman de (1735–91)
Przerembski, Maksymilian (c.1577–1639) Histoire de l’anarchie de Pologne 123
22 Russia 2, 7, 8, 10, 11, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 34, 40,
Ptolemy, Claudius (90–168) 13 41, 52, 56, 62, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 90, 94–5,
Pufendorf, Samuel (1632–94) 115, 117 96, 101, 108, 109, 110, 116, 120, 121, 124,
Puszet de Puget, Józef (c.1746–1819) 126, 136, 137, 143, 145, 147, 149–50, 151,
On the Happiness of Nations 331–2, 338–9, 169–72, 173, 174, 178, 180, 200, 226, 238,
340–1, 350–1 239–40, 242, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252–3, 255,
Pułaski, Józef (1704–69) 15 256. 258, 259
Pyrrhys de Varille, César (1708–c.1800) Rzewuski, Adam Wawrzyniec (1760–1825)
Lettres sur la Constitution actuelle de la On the form of republican government 19,
Pologne 6, 96 176, 182, 183, 185–6
346 INDEX
Rzewuski, Seweryn (1743–1811) 30, 95, 175, of 1735 64

176, 189, 250, 252 of 1736 23, 107
A short treatise on the succession 179–81, of 1748 210
249–50 of 1754 15
Rzewuski, Stanisław (d.1728 ) 30 of 1764 (Convocation) 93, 94, 107–8, 109,
Rzewuski, Wacław (1706–79) 30, 95 211, 225,
Thoughts on the present circumstances 42, of 1764 (Coronation) 94, 103, 106, 107–8,
88, 208–9 211, 225
Thoughts on the sure preservation 88–9 of 1766 94, 101, 137
Thoughts on the wise observations 89–90 of 1767–8 66, 95, 96, 110, 197, 225
of 1773–5 95, 96, 109, 151, 210, 211, 225,
S 239
Sagan 158 of 1776 95, 96, 109, 211
Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus) (86–34 BC) of 1780 96, 113, 117, 119
24 of 1788–92 138, 170, 171, 173–203, 205,
Sandomierz, palatinate of 5, 117, 205 214–21, 223–52, 255, 261, 263, 269
Sarmatia, Sarmatians 18, 21, 60, 88. 101, 109, of 1793 251
110, 144. 162, 164, 203, 225, 237, 256 sejmiki 3, 5, 8, 17, 25, 29, 33, 36, 41, 45, 46, 47,
Saxony 13, 27, 34, 35, 40, 43, 62, 63, 65, 69, 74, 48. 49, 50, 52, 55, 60, 64, 70, 80–1, 82, 85, 86,
99, 109, 130, 196, 230, 238, 250, 266–7 96, 109, 116–7, 119, 127–8, 130, 132, 133–5,
Sejm 2–3, 4, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16–17, 21–3, 24, 138, 139–41, 142, 144, 145–6, 163, 167, 170,
25, 27, 29, 33, 41–2, 43–4, 45–7, 48, 49, 174, 175, 176, 178–9, 189–90, 197, 200, 210,
50, 52–3, 55, 60–1, 67, 71, 77–86, 88–93, 212, 219, 221, 228–9, 230, 231, 232, 234,
94, 107, 124, 127, 128–9, 130, 131, 132–4, 237–8, 241, 245, 246, 247, 249, 251, 265, 269
139–41, 142–4, 151, 163, 166–8, 170, 175, of 1790 174, 192, 195–203, 218–9, 225,
176, 177–9, 180, 181, 182–3, 192, 197–8, 229–30, 236–7, 238, 248
200, 201, 202, 205, 210, 213–7, 219, 224, sejmiki, individual
228–9, 230–1, 232–3, 234, 235, 236, 238, Bracław (1790) 200, 201
239, 241, 243, 244, 245, 245–7, 248, 249, Brześć Kujawski (1778) 116
251, 252, 257, 264–6, 268–9, 270–1 Brześć Litewski (1788) 170; (1790) 197,
of 1605 23 198, 201
of 1647 22 Chełm (1790) 199, 200
of 1652 (first) 21, 23–4, 25 Ciechanów (1778) 116; (1780) 117; (1788)
of 1652 (second) 23, 25 170; (1790) 197, 198, 219, 237
of 1658 74 Czersk (1788) 170; (1790) 197, 198, 219
of 1669 9, 25 Dobrzyń (1778) 116; (1790) 198
of 1701 29 Kiev (1790) 199, 201
of 1717 (the 'Silent’ Sejm) 25, 36, 38, 64, Kraków (1718), 36; (1736) 36; (1790) 198,
149 237
of 1718 67 Livonia (1790) 198
of 1726 64 Liw (1778) 116; (1790) 197, 198,
of 1733 (Convocation) 64 Lublin (1764) 211; (1780) 203; (1788) 170;
of 1733 (royal election) 35 (1790) 225
of 1733 (minority electoral) 35, 149 Łęczyca (1780) 117; (1790) 200
INDEX 347
Minsk (1790) 200, 201, 236–7 Sigismund III Vasa (r.1587–1632) 7

Nowogródek (1790) 197 Silesia 2, 42–3, 59
Nur (1778) 116; (1790) 197, 198, 237 Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1902–91) 220
Orsza (1790) 219 Skarszewski, Wojciech (1743–1827) 116, 175,
Pinsk (1790) 198, 199, 199 178–9, 182, 193, 194, 195, 200
Podole (1790) 198, 199 Skrzetuski, Wincenty O.S.P. (1745–91) 152–3,
Rzeczyca (1790) 198 154, 155, 161
Sandomierz (1780) 117; (1788) 170; Sołtyk, Kajetan (1715–88) 95, 207–8
(1790) 196, 198, 201 Spain 1, 3, 109, 111, 180
Sieradz (1790) 199, 202 Sparta 105, 106, 123
Słonim (1790) 198, 201 Spectator 101, 102
Smolensk (in partibus) (1790) 196, 201 Spinoza, Benedict (1632–77) 74
Upita (1790) 219 Stackelberg, Otto Magnus von (1736–1800)
Wielkopolska (Poznań, Kalisz, Gniezno) 151
(1780) 119 Stanisław August Poniatowski (r.1764–95) 5,
Wieluń (1790) 195 52, 56, 66, 94, 99, 100, 101, 123, 134, 137,
Wizna (1790) 195–6, 197–8 168, 173, 178, 179, 196, 202, 223, 225–6,
Wołkowysk (1790) 199, 202, 219 227, 232, 239, 244, 246, 252, 261
Wołyń (1790) 196, 198, 200, 201, 202, Suum Cuique 149–50
218–9, 237 Stanisław Leszczyński (r.1704–10, 1733–5) 26,
Wyszogród (1764) 210; (1780) 206, 210; 27, 35, 37, 40–1, 63, 69, 123
(1790) 197, 198, 201 [attr.] A Free Voice 44–5, 46, 48–52, 53, 57,
Zakroczym (1790) 201, 202 79, 85, 125, 137
serfdom, serfs 1–2, 3, 14, 16, 19, 20–1, 33, La Voix Libre 51
51–2, 55, 58–60, 61, 67, 71, 72, 80, 96, 102, Staszic, Stanisław (1755–1826) 258
104, 105, 106, 110, 111–4, 15, 116, 117–8, Observations on the life of Jan Zamoyski
119–20, 121–2, 125–6, 134–5, 137, 147, 150, 163–8, 170, 177, 179, 181, 184, 193, 213,
151, 152, 155–61, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 216, 217
169, 171, 180, 183, 184–8, 191, 192, 193, Warnings to Poland 166, 167, 177
198–9, 200, 202, 206, 209, 211, 213, 214–5, Stein, Heinrich Friedrich Karl, baron
216, 217, 218, 219, 227, 228, 230, 231, 234, (1757–1831) 258
235, 237, 240–1, 244, 245, 251–2, 255, 256, St Petersburg 68, 109, 123, 173, 250, 251
258–9, 260, 263–4, 209 Stefan Bathory (r.1576–88) 6, 7, 8
Seven Years War (1756–63) 56, 84, 90, 99, 108 Stroynowski, Hieronim O.S.P. (1752–1815)
Siciński, Władysław (c.1615–72) 21, 23, 24, 154–5, 163, 243–4
146 Stuart dynasty 1, 22, 180
Sidney, Algernon (1623–83) 162 Suvorov, Alexander (1729–1800) 253
Sienicki, Szczepan (d.after 1792) Swinarski, Michael (1740–93) 217–8, 219
New Means of Concluding 15, 23, 66–7, 69, Szaniawski, Konstanty (1688–1732) 23, 64
90–3, 94 Sweden 10, 23, 24, 34, 37, 40, 56, 62, 63, 64,
Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph (1748–1836) 190 83, 112, 161, 173, 226, 242
Sigismund I (r.1506–48) 2, 3. 7. 9, 81, 262 Switzerland 83, 111, 124, 135, 146, 169
Sigismund II Augustus (r.1548–72) 1, 3, 7, 63, Szczuka, Stanisław (c.1652–1710)
122, 149, 262 [attr.] Eclipsis Poloniae 38–9, 42, 63–4, 210
348 INDEX
Szembek, Stanisław (1650 -1721 ) 25 Vienna 26, 43, 56, 255

Voltaire, François Marie Arouet (1694–1778)
Ś 68, 70, 73, 79, 102, 116, 122, 123
Świtkowski, Piotr (1744–93) Volumina Legum 69, 81, 100
Historico-Political Recorder 213
W
T Walpole, Robert (1676–1745) 84
Tacitus, Publius Cornelius (c.56–c.117) 240 Warsaw 3, 5, 10, 29, 40, 68, 72, 95, 99, 100,
Tatler 101 109, 143. 173, 174, 181, 183, 188, 195, 198,
Teutonic Knights 7, 242 205, 211, 213, 217, 218, 219, 220, 224, 233,
Theatines, religious order 69 251, 253
Theatre, National (Teatr Narodowy) 101 Warsaw, duchy of 256, 257
Thorn 3, 11, 62, 64, 99, 173 Washington, George (1732–99) 180
peace of (1466) 7 Wettin dynasty 27, 35, 41, 43, 44, 52
‘bloody judgement’ of (1724) 65 White Eagle, order of 17
Tomaszewski, Dyzma Bończa (1749–1825) Wielhorski, Michael (d.1790) 94, 124–5, 127,
Observations 239–41, 243 136–7, 151
towns, townsmen 3, 10–11, 12, 21, 42, 58, 59, On the restoration 27, 138–45, 147, 156
60, 62, 64, 65, 80, 86, 101, 103–5, 106–7, Wielkopolska 3, 47, 1124, 140, 142, 202, 206,
114–5, 117, 119, 121, 125–6, 135, 145, 156, 234, 247, 248, 250
159, 160, 164, 166–7, 171, 174, 181–4, 187, Wieruszewski, Kazimierz, S.J. (1681–1744) 30
188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 197–8, 202, William III of England (r.1689–1702) 84
205–6, 208–10, 211–12, 213, 214–5, 216–8, Wilno 10, 61, 143, 151, 157, 243
219, 221, 222, 223–4, 225, 227, 228, 230, ‘Wilno Resolution’ (1700) 28–9
233, 235, 240, 244, 247, 251–2, 258, 259, Wiśniowiecki, Jarema (1612–51) 206
263, 269 Witebsk 10
Transylvania 10 Władysław II Jagiełło (r.1386–1434) 2, 262
Trębicki, Antoni (1764–1842) 243, 245 Władysław IV (r.1632–48) 17
Tribunals 22, 25, 33, 35, 52, 55, 64, 65, 122, Wybicki, Józef (1747–1822) 14, 110, 119, 145
133, 236, 267, 269 Political Thoughts 145–7, 209
Turkey, see Ottoman Empire Patriotic Letters 110–113, 116, 118–9, 147
U Z
Ukraine 1, 5, 6, 24, 26, 51, 205, 206, 260 Zaborowski, Stanisław (c.1475–c.1530)
United States 169, 180 Tractatus de natura iurium et bonorum
Unrug, Zygmunt (1676–1732) 65 regis 5
Załuski, Andrzej Stanisław (1695–1758) 67,
V 68, 99, 100
Valois dynasty 8, 21 Załuski, Józef Andrzej (1702–74) 67, 68, 69,
Vanozzi, Bonifacio (c.1553–1621) 21 95, 99, 100
Värälä, peace of (1790) 226 Two Swords of Catholic relief 63, 65, 67,
Vattel, Emerich de (1714–67) 145 193
Venice 24, 27, 83, 109, 155, 162 Programma Litterarium 68
Versailles 69 Zamoyski, Jan (1542–1605) 6, 21, 26, 189
INDEX 349
Zamoyski, Andrzej (1716–92) 109–110, Ż

145,167 Żuchowski, Stefan (d.1716) 207
‘Zamoyski Code’ 110, 113–9, 152, 162, 163, Żytomierz 207–8
211–13, 227, 231, 235, 238

Jerzy Lukowski - Disorderly Liberty - The Political Culture of The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in The Eighteenth Century

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DISORDERLY LIBERTY

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Copyright © Jerzy Lukowski, 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

First published 2010

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978 1 4411 4812 4

Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand

1 The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania: an introductory survey 1

in Sachsenhausen), Emanuel Rostworowski, Jerzy Michalski – were his pupils.

have contributed to a wider historical perspective, while Karin Friedrich’s work

AGAD Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw

ą similar to the French ‘On’ if crossed with the ‘o’ of ‘home

chief constituency boundaries COURLAND

boundary after the 1772 Partition

Smolensk PODOLE Name of palatinate or principality

Kamieniec Podolski BRACŁAW

The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania:

nobles viewed monarchs with intense suspicion, harbouring designs against

Poland’s constitutional processes, they were adamantly opposed to any alteration

Most Polish and Lithuanian nobles lived in a pre-Copernican world. Those

on the subsequent accession of their sons (the one supposedly Machiavellian

endure heavy burdens . . . Informers . . . harsh punishments, imprisonment, arbitrary

no better way to introduce absolutum dominium ‘than by promising the privileges

available to the politicians of the loosely-linked Rzeczpospolita. King Alexander’s

This remarkable conﬁdence was delivered to a foreign diplomat, Georg Löllhöwell

of its particular libertarian virtues. The repeated failure of parliaments led to

A serious-minded gentleman could ﬁnd plenty of scope within the Commonwealth

My dear, much-esteemed Sir,

Kazimierz Wieruszewski’s popular and much re-printed textbook of 1720, Polish

In fact, ever since 1667, permutations of Poland’s neighbours had undertaken

The search for harmony

Every nobleman at the sejmiki, remarked Jan Stanisław Jabłonowski in 1730,

counsel/council and thereby perpetuate an anarchic condition which suited men

Substantial numbers of Poles did indeed ﬁght against the Russian-imposed

self-interested clauses into them. The instructions themselves were to be enacted

Keeping the faith

Rzeczypospolitey Polskiey, although the many criticisms that he also permitted

thronged the churches in ﬁlthy, malodorous congregations.25 He condemned the

insigniﬁcance warranted. Hankering after past glories, its leaders appealed to

I stand to arms at God’s command

Martyrdom, not constructive achievement, justiﬁed politics.

Catholicism. An anonymous clerical publicist in 1764 feared its abolition would

espouse. There is certainly a striking difference in the nature of literary language

Bohomolec, on Polish language and style (unlike Konarski’s, mainly in Polish)

Quite how serious a threat the forces of enlightened darkness represented in

Towards successful counsels

The publication of O Skutecznym Rad Sposobie, On the Means to Successful

by their impertinent and hypocritical appeals on behalf of Poland’s Protestants.

ministers of state and twenty-four elected szlachta representatives, with executive

to be tried by a special session of the Sejm under treason charges; if an ecclesi-

Confrontations with the Enlightenment:

The mid-eighteenth century saw something of a cultural and economic boom in

unprecedented for Poland. It succeeded where the initiatives of Mitzler and

The Monitor had a subscribing readership of some ﬁve hundred, scattered

industrious and learned townsmen, well-born advocates such as himself would

Wybicki’s moralisings were couched in a new language: not that of Christian

of sejmiki tactfully insisted on deferring the business to the 1780 Sejm, so as to

Malesherbes, who as directeur de la Librairie, was in charge of book censorship

to be beneﬁcial, it had to be made dangerous to its user. Rousseau proceeded

discharge of business (hence, less time to corrupt envoys), though it should be

rank of lesser or ‘deputy-senators’, restricted, in the ﬁrst instance, to a two-year