Poland

TWELVE

Renewal

With the abeyance of Poland as an active political organism, its history becomes the story of the few men and women who still believed in its viability as a state and struggled to restore it. Their story cannot be told in terms of wars, treaties and statutes, only in terms of ideas and social mobilisation.

A desire for constitutional reform was never quite extinguished, and it was first translated into action by Stanisław Konarski (1700-73), a Piarist priest who had studied in Paris and Turin. With the backing of Bishop Andrzej Załuski in 1732 he began publishing all the legislation passed since the fourteenth century in a compendium entitled Volumina Legum, in the belief that the electorate must be acquainted with the constitution before it could be persuaded to reform it. In 1740 Konarski founded the Collegium Nobilium, a public school which removed young noblemen from their family background in order to imbue them with the ideals of the Enlightenment. Konarski’s next move was to reform the twenty Piarist schools in the Commonwealth. The Jesuits perceived that this modernisation of rival establishments might relegate their own colleges, and they transformed these by bringing in good teachers and widening the curriculum.

Konarski’s friend Bishop Załuski was an avid collector of books and manuscripts, a taste he shared with his brother Józef, and in 1747 the two pooled their collections, bought a palace in Warsaw, and donated to the nation the first public reference library on the European mainland. Its original holding grew, aided by a Sejm decree obliging printers to donate the first copy of any book to designated public libraries, to over 500,000 volumes when it was looted by the Russians in 1795 (to become the basis of the Russian Imperial Library).

At the political level, the regeneration of the Polish state was led by another two brothers, the princes Michał and August Czartoryski, supported by their brother-in-law Stanisław Poniatowski and a small group of relatives. They were united by an urgent desire, not devoid of personal ambition, to, as they saw it, rescue the Commonwealth. They worked as a team and were generally referred to simply as ‘the family’, Familia. They built up a sig—nificant following and there was talk of August standing as a candidate at the royal election of 1733, but this was scotched by the appearance of Stanisław Leszczyński, whom the Familia supported. It was while they were holding Gdańsk for Leszczyński in the hopeless war of 1734 that August had a son, Adam Kazimierz. A medal was struck to announce that the young prince would be brought up with royal pretensions; he was the descendant of Wladysław Jagiello’s brother, and therefore of royal blood.

Two years before the birth of Prince Adam Kazimierz, the Familia had produced another child, Stanisław Antoni Poniatowski. Although she could hardly entertain royal aspirations for him, his mother Konstancja Czartoryska did take great care with his upbringing, and he was sent abroad to complete his education. By the time he returned to Poland aged twenty, he had visited Vienna, Paris and London, was fluent in six languages, and had developed a wide range of tastes and interests. In 1755 he went to St Petersburg to stay with the British minister, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams, with whom he had struck up an intimate friendship. Sir Charles introduced him to the twenty-six-year-old Sofia Augusta Friederika of Anhalt-Zerbst, Grand Duchess Catherine Alekseievna, and the two became lovers. This was to weigh heavily on events.

The Familia had been preparing to overthrow Augustus III, but they had to contend with the probability that a Saxon party led by the Mniszech family and a group of politically incoherent but stubborn defenders of the state of anarchy, including Hetman Branicki, Franciszek Potocki and Karol Radziwiłł, would oppose this. In 1762 a coup placed the Grand Duchess Catherine on the imperial throne, and the Familia began to count on Russian support for their plans. The following year Augustus III died, and there was nothing to stop them from putting their man on the throne. But he, Prince Adam Kazimierz, preferred books to politics. Meanwhile, the Empress Catherine let it be known that she would favour her ex-lover Poniatowski as King of Poland.

Poniatowski was duly elected on 7 September 1764, taking the name of Stanisław II Augustus. With this election a new era dawned in Poland. Winds of change were already whistling through the Convocation Sejm, sitting under the marshalcy of Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski. The Sejm was confederated, which meant that it could pass legislation by majority vote, and implemented a number of measures on the Familia’s programme. Majority voting was made statutory for sejmiks, a small but important step towards abolish—ing the veto. Fiscal and military commissions were established. All proposals put forward by the fiscal commission were subject to approval by the Sejm, but with no right of veto. A national customs tariff was established, and a project for municipal reform was commissioned. In addition, the King put into action several ideas of his own. In 1765 he founded the Szkoła Rycerska, literally ‘College of Chivalry’, an academy for the training of military and administrative cadres.

In the following year, Chancellor Zamoyski laid before the Sejm his project for constitutional reform which included the abolition of the veto. This elicited an immediate response from St Petersburg and Berlin, both of which threatened war if it were not withdrawn and the Confederated Sejm not immediately dissolved. There was nothing for it but to comply. Alarmed at the renewal taking place in Poland, Catherine and Frederick decided to stir up the conservative anarchist elements and muddy the political waters. They seized on the fact that in Poland (as in every other country in Europe, including Russia and Prussia) members of religious minorities did not enjoy full civic rights. Russia demanded that all the Orthodox be granted the same rights to hold office as Catholics, and Prussia demanded the same for Lutherans.

The granting of such rights lay within the spirit of the King’s and the Familia’s programme. It was their conservative opponents who were against them. Yet the way in which the matter was raised turned the whole issue on its head. Russian troops moved in to support two confederations, one of Lutherans at Toruń, and one of Orthodox at Łuck. With Russia and Prussia firmly on one side, many patriots, whether conservative or progressive, ranged themselves on the other.

This left the King and his supporters with no room for manoeuvre. In October 1767 the Sejm assembled in a capital full of Russian troops and deliberated under the eye of the Russian ambassador, who sat in the visitors’ gallery. A couple of bishops and the hetman objected strongly to the emancipation of the dissenters. They were dragged from their beds that night and packed off to Russia under military escort. The Sejm bowed to Russian demands, which included the acceptance of five ‘eternal and invariable’ principles which Catherine then solemnly vowed to protect in the name of Poland’s liberties. These principles (the free election of kings; the rule of the veto; the right to renounce allegiance to the king; the szlachta’s right exclusively to hold office and land; the landowner’s power of life and death over his peasants) were an effective barricade against further reform.

On 29 February 1768 a confederation was formed in the little town of Bar in Ukraine by the brothers Józef and Kazimierz Pułaski and Adam Krasiński, Bishop of Kamieniec. It lacked leadership of serious calibre and its programme consisted of windy phrases about the faith and national freedom. The Russians put pressure on the King to declare himself against the confederation, but he prevari—cated, not wishing to fan the flames. At this point, France intervened by sending money to the confederates and encouraging Turkey to declare war on Russia, which broke out in October 1768. The confederation was now joined by several magnates opposed to the King, including members of the Pac, Sapieha and Potocki families, and Karol Radziwiłł. In July 1770 France sent Colonel Dumouriez as military adviser to the confederates. A provisional government was set up and Dumouriez advised it to take a more decided position. People like Karol Radziwiłł needed little prompting, and in October 1770 the Confederation of Bar declared the dethronement of Stanisław Augustus.

The forces of the crown joined Russian troops under General Suvorov and defeated the confederates at the Battle of Lanckorona. Russian intervention provoked sympathy for the cause, and a guerrilla war started all over south-eastern Poland. On the night of 3 November 1771, a group of confederates surrounded the King’s carriage in the middle of Warsaw and abducted him. The plan was as ill-executed as it was ill-conceived. The kidnappers lost their way, one of them changed his mind and allowed the King to escape, and by next morning Stanisław Augustus was back in his palace. But his authority was seriously undermined.

The confederates were gradually mopped up by the Russian armies, with the last of them holding out at Częstochowa until 1772. The magnates who had joined the confederation went into exile, but over 5,000 captured szlachta were sent to Siberia, endowing the cause with an aura of martyrdom. Both Rousseau and Mably had lent their support to it, seeing in it an expression of pure patriotism and civic spirit.

For the Commonwealth, the Confederation of Bar could hardly have come at a worse moment. Under the ministry of Choiseul, France was straining to bring a Franco-Turkish-Austrian-Saxon alliance to bear against Russia and Prussia. Hence the French interest in the confederation. Russia merely wanted to keep Poland docile. But Frederick the Great of Prussia had already announced his intention of eating up various Polish provinces ‘like an artichoke, leaf by leaf’. The sudden fall of Choiseul in 1770 brought an end to French schemes in the area. Frederick had already worked out a plan for weaning Austria away from France and binding her to Russia and Prussia—by dragging her into a tripartite despoliation of Poland. He had opened negotiations with Russia on the subject in 1771, and signed an agreement with her in February 1772. Both powers then approached Austria. The Empress Maria Teresa was at first reluctant, but then complied, and on 5 August 1772 the first partition of the Polish Commonwealth was agreed. Prussia took 36,000 square kilometres with 580,000 inhabitants; Austria 83,000 square kilometres with 2,650,000 inhabitants; and Russia 92,000 square kilometres with 1,300,000 inhabitants. Prussia’s share was the most valuable, since it included the most developed areas, linked up the two halves of the Prussian realm, and gave her control of the Vistula, Poland’s lifeline to the outside world. The balance of power in the area was dramatically altered, with Prussia enlarged by some 80 per cent and the Commonwealth, which had lost over a third of its population, reduced by a third.

The partition caused alarm in many quarters. It also shocked public opinion throughout Europe. The Polish Commonwealth was in alliance with Russia and was not at war with either of the other two powers when the arrangement was made. Moreover Russia was the self-proclaimed guarantor of Polish independence and the protector of Polish territorial integrity. In the hope of correcting this unfavourable impression, Catherine and Frederick enlisted the pens of their clients among the French philosophes to project an image of Poland as an obscurantist backwater which had been crying out to be liberated by enlightened monarchs such as themselves. They also insisted that the treaties of partition be ratified by the Sejm.

An assemblage of malcontents, magnates who had prospered under the Saxon kings and szlachta whose estates were now within Russia or Austria were elected, in the presence of Russian and Prussian troops, to a confederated Sejm under the marshalcy of Adam Poniński. Even so, some of the deputies raised havoc in the chamber, obstructing the ratification. The King and the Familia resorted to stalling tactics, while pulling every available diplomatic string to exert pressure on the three powers. Alarmed by the Prussian predominance in the Baltic, England lodged a strong protest, but nobody was prepared to go further. Russia and Prussia threatened to seize even more territory, so the Sejm had no alternative but to ratify the treaties of partition, which it did on 30 September 1773. Prussia took the opportunity to foist a trade agreement on Poland which included draconian duties on Polish corn shipped down the Vistula.

The five ‘eternal principles’ dictated by Russia excluded all possibility of constitutional reform, and neither Russia nor Prussia allowed their interest in what was happening in Poland to wane. Nevertheless, the next twenty years were to see a complete transformation of the Commonwealth. From 1775 the country was ruled by a Permanent Council, which carried out far-reaching improvements. The army, which could not be increased, was modernised. The treasury began to function in a regular way. The police department enforced legislation, reorganised the administration of towns, and made its mark on everything from roads to prisons.

In 1776 the King commissioned Andrzej Zamoyski to codify the laws, and the result was a proto-constitution which took Polish law back to its roots and restated or reinterpreted it with reference to eighteenth-century conditions. It effectively affirmed royal power, made all officials answerable to the Sejm, placed the clergy and their finances under state supervision, shored up the rights of cities and of the peasants and, most controversially, deprived the landless szlachta of many of their legal immunities and political prerogatives. Its publication in 1778 induced sabre-rattling in the minor szlachta and apoplexy in the clergy. Zamoyski’s collaborator Józef Wybicki was nearly hacked to pieces at a provincial sejmik. With feeling running high it was held back by the reformers until the Sejm of 1780, but even then it was thrown out. It was nevertheless an important document, accepted amongst progressives as the basis for future political reform.

An extraordinary renewal was taking place in public life, but unlike that of the Renaissance this was not a natural evolution, a process of ideas spreading gradually through print, by word of mouth, or by example. It was the result of a concerted effort, a war on obscurantism declared by a relatively small group whose aim was the social and political regeneration of the state, based on the re-education of society. In 1773 at the King’s suggestion the Sejm established a Commission for National Education, in effect a ministry of education. It comprised a selection of enlightened aristocrats—Bishop Ignacy Massalski, Joachim Chreptowicz, Ignacy Potocki, Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski, Andrzej Zamoyski—and its first secretary was the French physiocrat Dupont de Nemours. It was endowed with a part of the wealth of the Jesuit order, abolished by the Pope in 1773, and was put in control of every school in Poland, regardless of which religious order or institution it belonged to. It laid down curricula, commissioned and published textbooks, and supervised standards and teachers. With its extensive powers and resources, the commission was able to tackle the reform of the Jagiellon University and that of Wilno.

This was accompanied by a remarkable resurgence of literary activity, the majority of it didactic. The inspiration came from abroad, and the luminaries were Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, d’Alembert and the Encyclopedists, whose political and social comment seemed particularly relevant to the Polish predicament. But the majority of minor szlachta viewed this with suspicion marked by xenophobia. The sort of argument which would rage in Russia a hundred years later between Westerners and Slavophiles, between those who wished to bring the country into line with the rest of Europe and those who felt that foreign influences were corrupting the purity of the ethnic genius, now began to develop in Poland. While the progressives attempted to apply logic and reason, jingoism and ignorance came together in defence of such hallowed institutions as Polish dress and the veto.

In 1765 Stanisław Augustus had founded the weekly Monitor, modelled on Addison’s Spectator, and then a National Theatre. The editor of Monitor, Franciszek Bohomolec, also played a pioneering role in this sphere, writing plays for performance in schools and at the National Theatre, plays which mostly served to convey a moral through satire on subjects like sarmatian obscurantism or the oppression of the lower orders.

This second Renaissance produced only one great poet, Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801), Prince-Bishop of Warmia, a fief in which the spiritual incumbent was also the temporal ruler. A creature of the Enlightenment, Krasicki despised stupidity and ignorance, and wrote poetry and novels that satirised and ridiculed in beautiful, witty language. No other Polish poet of the age measures up to him, but he had many talented contemporaries, some of whom struck the first proto-Romantic notes of sentimental nationalism, which are also present in the History of the Polish Nation written in 1774 by Adam Naruszewicz, Bishop of Smolensk, at the behest of the King.

The thread that runs through the work of the writers of the day is the urgency they felt with regard to reviving the Polish state. An impressive array of enlightened magnates devoted their fortunes and their influence to the same cause, while less exalted figures, including many of the clergy, worked assiduously to further it.

The King himself was in the forefront of the changes. He was vain and pleasure-loving, but behind the languid frivolity lurked a strong sense of purpose and a profound love of his country. He had no personal wealth and no distinguished ancestry. He was widely despised as an upstart who had reached the throne via Catherine’s bed, who preferred the company of women to that of hard-drinking men, and who rejected sarmatian manners for foreign dress and taste.

At the outset, he was supported by the Familia, but during the 1770s this turned into the mainstay of a powerful opposition, which forced him into greater dependence on Russian support. His only assets were his personal charm, his intelligence and his patience. He had been a deputy six times, and was therefore familiar with the workings of the Sejm and the attitudes that prevailed in it. He was also aware as no other elected monarch had been of the considerable influence and powers still at the disposal of the crown. Skilful and diplomatic, he was prepared to compromise and bide his time on one project in order to further another.

His was not so much a policy as a vision. From his youth, he dreamt of a total ‘re-creation of the Polish world’, to use his own words, involving a return to the ideals of the Commonwealth on the one hand, and turning the sarmatian szlachta into a European nation on the other. His reading and his travels, particularly in England, had taught him the value of the state as an institution. When political reforms were cancelled out by the Russo-Prussian intervention of 1772, he concentrated on this aspect of his programme.

By the 1780s two generations had passed through the reformed schools and been exposed to the thought of the Enlightenment, and a new eighteenth-century version of the traditional political nation had emerged, leavened by significant numbers of artists, functionaries and tradesmen ennobled by the King.

The Convocation Sejm of 1764 had been revolutionary not only in its political attitudes—the speech by the chancellor which heralded so many political reforms also hectored the deputies that ‘To sell raw materials and buy finished goods makes one poor; to buy raw materials and sell finished goods makes one rich.’ During the 1730s and 1740s a number of magnates had already tried their hand at manufacturing. The Radziwiłł established glass foundries, a furniture factory, a cannon foundry and workshops producing cloth, carpets and articles of clothing at their seat of NieświeŻ and other estates. The range reflects a lack of specialisation which meant that the products were often of poor quality. The same was true of the factories set up by Ludwik Plater at Krasław near Vitebsk, producing velvet, damask, carpets, carriages, swords and rifles. The Potocki factories at Brody and Buczacz specialised in high-quality carpets, kilims, tents, hangings, sashes and cloth. During the same period the bishopric of Kraków, which owned large areas of what would become the industrial heartland of Poland, built several new iron foundries.

In 1775 the Sejm repealed the law forbidding the szlachta to engage in commerce, and the next twenty years saw a remarkable development of mercantile and capitalist activity among the magnates and szlachta.

Between 1764 and 1768, a royal mint was established at Warsaw, the currency was stabilised, weights and measures were standardised, and a state postal service was founded. In 1771 a canal was dug connecting the Vistula to the Warta; in 1775 the King launched a project for one between the Bug and the Pripet; in 1767 Prince Michał Ogiński had begun digging a canal linking the Niemen and the Dnieper, thereby making it possible to navigate from the Baltic to the Black Sea, which opened up alternative markets for exports.

Much of the industrial activity went hand in hand with a resurgence in the decorative arts. In 1774 the King founded the Belweder ceramic factory which produced high-quality vases and tableware; the Czartoryskis started a porcelain factory at Korzec which employed up to 1,000 workers in the 1790s in the production of more functional items of quality under the supervision of experts brought from Sevres, and the same was true of the new furniture centre of Kolbuszowa. But there was also a certain amount of purely industrial enterprise. The state built an ordnance factory outside Warsaw and a large cloth mill geared particularly to supplying the army. In 1767 a joint-stock wool-manufacturing company was floated. The treasurer of Lithuania, Antoni Tyzenhaus, launched a wide-ranging programme of industrialisation in Grodno on the King’s behalf. The most business-minded of all the magnates, Antoni Protazy Potocki, established banks in major Polish cities, factories in various parts of the Commonwealth, and a trading house at Kherson from which he operated a merchant fleet on the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

Much of the manufacturing was based on small towns or large estates; peasants were often used as cheap labour, so there was little attendant growth in the urban proletariat. The only exception was Warsaw, which grew from 30,000 inhabitants in 1764 to some 120,000 in 1792, and began to resemble contemporary European capitals, not least politically. It had a large and vociferous artisan class and an increasingly influential patriciate, including such figures as the mayor, Jan Dekert, and the banker and entrepreneur Piotr Fergusson Tepper, who were to play an important role in the last decades of the century.

The transformation of Polish society did not stop there. In 1760 Chancellor Andrzej Zamoyski had freed the peasants on his estates from all labour-rents and dues, and turned all tenancies into financial transactions. Other landowners followed suit, and some went further. Ścibor Marchocki turned his estate into a peasant cooperative, while Paweł Brzostowski founded the Peasant Commonwealth of Pawłów in 1769, a self-governing village with its own school, hospital and citizen’s militia. The Polish world was indeed being recreated, as the King had wished.

His most evident and personal contribution to the process was, ironically, viewed after his death as evidence of his frivolity: his exorbitant patronage of the arts. It began conventionally enough. In his youth he had admired the architecture of France and shown interest in the excavations being carried out at Herculaneum. When he ascended the throne in 1764, Stanisław Augustus decided to rebuild the Royal Castle extensively, and commissioned Victor Louis, subsequently architect of the Palais-Royal, and several craftsmen to submit projects for the building, the interiors and the furniture. By 1767 he had run into political problems, and financial ones were not far behind, so the project was discontinued. When he resumed his building plans, the French style was abandoned in favour of the Italian, and this, combined with many English and French elements, was to be a characteristic feature of the architecture of the Stanisłavian period. He did not allow financial considerations to stand in the way. The Royal Castle was turned into a fine representational seat for the monarch and the Sejm, and barracks, customs houses, and a variety of other civic buildings gave Warsaw the attributes of a modern city.

It was largely the King’s patronage that turned Warsaw into an important musical centre once more, and this would bear fruit in the first decades of the next century. He was also instrumental in reviving painting in Poland. He employed Italians but also encouraged native talent by sending young men to study abroad or putting them to work alongside the foreigners. He spent fortunes on the arts, running up vast debts in a number of countries, but he was not merely a spendthrift aesthete. He believed in the educational role of the arts, and hoped to improve those exposed to them. He was also trying to put across a message and to leave a legacy.

Detailed correspondence between him and his artists reveals that he participated intimately in the process of creation. He gave an astonishing amount of thought to the thematic aspects of every building and painting he commissioned. While planning the Senators’ Hall of the Royal Castle, he meant to turn it into a sort of Polish hall of fame, and spent years deciding which great figures of the past should be represented, which of them should be in oil, which in marble, which in bronze, and in what relationship to each other they should be placed.

As he confided to Adam Naruszewicz, he was building for the future, attempting to leave to posterity a statement on the Polish past which would serve to inspire generations to come. It was all part of his vision of a Poland regenerated intellectually and refurbished materially. There was to be a new university in Warsaw, a Museum Polonicum, an Academy of Sciences, and an Academy of Arts. Only a small part of his plans ever saw the light of day, yet he did succeed at the very last moment of the Commonwealth’s life in recapitulating and holding up its merits and its achievements in a form which would make their memory endure.