by Will Durant
IV. THE FIRST PARTITION: 1768-72
Polish patriots and priests agreed with Frederick in not accepting the situation. The Roman Catholic clergy forcefully condemned the surrender of Poland’s autonomy to a Russian infidel. Adam Krasiński, bishop of Kamieniec, and Józef Pulaski (father of the Casimir Pulaski who fought for America) roused the Poles, by sermons and pamphlets, to reassert their political freedom and religious dictatorship. Within a week after the surrender of the Diet to Repnin a group of Poles formed (February 29, 1768) the Confederation of Bar—a town on the Dniester in the Polish Ukraine. The magnates who financed the movement were inspired by hatred of Catherine and the King; the “imbecile mass,” as Frederick called their followers, burned with zeal for the one true faith; and this ardor was voiced by poets lamenting, in somber threnodies, the humiliation of Poland and the “apostasy” of its King. Arms and funds were sent to the patriots by Turkey and Austria, and Dumouriez came from France to organize them into fighting units. Poles who wished to restore the Saxon dynasty entered the movement, which soon spread to scattered points throughout the land; “All Poland is on fire,” Repnin reported to Catherine. Poniatowski thought of joining the Confederation, but the hotheads in it frightened him away by demanding his deposition, if not his death.29 If we may believe Voltaire,30 thirty confederates took an oath at Czéstochowa:
We, excited by a holy and religious zeal, having resolved to avenge the Deity, religion, and our country, outraged by Stanislas Augustus, a despiser of laws both divine and human, a favorer of atheists and heretics, do promise and swear, before the sacred and miraculous image of the Mother of God, to extirpate from the face of the earth him who dishonors her by trampling upon religion.... So help us God!
Repnin ordered Russian troops to suppress the rebellion. They drove the confederates over the Turkish border, and burned a Turkish town; Turkey declared war upon Russia (1768), and demanded Russian evacuation and liberation of Poland. Cossacks took advantage of the turmoil to invade the Polish Ukraine, killing landlords, Jewish stewards, Roman Catholic or Protestant peasants in an orgy of indiscriminate slaughter; in one town they slew sixteen thousand men, women, and children. The confederates retaliated by murdering all available Russians and Dissidents, so that Protestants and Jews suffered double jeopardy. Altogether in those years (1768-70), fifty thousand inhabitants of Poland died by massacre or war.31
All sides now began to talk of partition. The confederates were charged by their enemies with having agreed to divide Poland between themselves and their allies.32 In February, 1769, Frederick sent to St. Petersburg a proposal for dividing Poland among Russia, Prussia, and Austria; Catherine replied that if Prussia and Austria would help Russia to expel the Turks from Europe, she would consent to Prussian appropriation of that part of Poland which separated mainland Prussia from East Prussia—the remainder of Poland to be under a Russian protectorate;33 Frederick demurred. Choiseul, for France, suggested to Austria that it should seize Polish territory adjoining Hungary: Austria thought it a good idea in a good time, and in April, 1769, it occupied the Polish province of Spiż, which had been mortgaged to Poland by Hungary in 1412 and had never been redeemed.34 In 1770 the Turks, then at war as a defender of Poland, proposed to Austria a partition of Poland between Austria and Turkey.35
While these negotiations were proceeding, the Western powers resigned themselves to the partitioning of Poland as the fated result of her political chaos, her religious animosities, and her military impotence; u the catastrophe was recognized as inevitable by every Continental statesman.”36 But the anti-Confederation Poles at this time sent a member of the Diet to ask the socialist philosophe Mably and the antiphilosophe Rousseau to draw up tentative constitutions for a new Poland. Mably submitted his recommendations in 1770-71; Rousseau finished his Constitution of Poland in April, 1772—two months after the first partition treaty had been signed.
The Confederation of Bar had some moments of ecstasy before its collapse. In March, 1770, from the Turkish city of Varna, it proclaimed the deposition of Poniatowski. On November 3, 1771, some confederates intercepted him as he was leaving the house of an uncle at night, overpowered his escort, shot one of them dead, dragged the King out of his carriage, cut his head with a saber blow, and abducted him from the capital. In the forest of Bielny they were attacked by a patrol; in the melee Poniatowski escaped, and communicated with the Royal Guards, who came and escorted him, disheveled and bloody, back to his palace at five o’clock in the morning. All chances of reconciliation between the government and the Confederation disappeared. Poniatowski fell back upon Russian aid, and the Confederation was suppressed, leaving a remnant in Turkey—the Crescent protecting the Cross (1772).37
Meanwhile the advance of Russia’s armies to the Black Sea and the Danube disturbed both Prussia and Austria. Neither Frederick II nor Joseph II took pleasure in contemplating Russian control of the Black Sea, much less of Constantinople. By treaties of 1764 and 1766 Prussia had pledged help to Russia if Russia should be attacked; Turkey was formally the aggressor in the Russo-Turkish war of 1768; Prussia was now endangering its solvency by sending subsidies to Russia. Austria, resenting the entry of Russian forces into Wallachia, was threatening to ally itself with Turkey against Russia; in that case Russia would expect Prussia to attack Austria. But Frederick had had enough of war. He had fought two wars to take and hold Silesia; why risk it now? He preferred diplomacy. Perhaps the three powers could be appeased with servings of Polish soil? As things were going, with the Russian ambassador the real ruler of Poland, it was only a matter of time till Russia would completely absorb the country, under whatever phrase. Was it still possible to prevent this? Yes, if Catherine would consent to take only eastern Poland, to let Frederick take western Poland, and to withdraw from the Danube. Would a share in the spoils moderate Joseph’s belligerency?
In January, 1771, Prince Henry, Frederick’s brother, proposed the plan to the Russian diplomats at St. Petersburg. Panin objected that Russia had guaranteed the territorial integrity of Poland; he was reminded that this guarantee was conditional upon Poland’s adherence to her new constitution and her alliance with Russia, and this adherence had ceased when so many deputies joined the rebellious Confederation of Bar. Even so, Catherine was reluctant. Why give Frederick a part of Poland when she might soon take all? Why strengthen Prussia with additional territory, resources, Baltic ports, and more six-foot troops? But she did not want to fight Frederick; he had 180,000 men in arms; she preferred to have him keep Joseph from uniting with Turkey against Russia. Her present goal was not Poland but the Black Sea. On January 8, 1771, almost casually at a party, she indicated to Henry her tentative consent to Frederick’s scheme.
A year passed before negotiation could settle the division of the spoils. Frederick wanted Danzig; Catherine objected; so did Britain, whose Baltic commerce anchored on that port. Meanwhile Austria mobilized, and secretly allied itself with Turkey. On February 17, 1772, Frederick and Catherine signed a “convention” for the partition of Poland. Catherine softened Joseph by renouncing all Russian claims to Wallachia and Moldavia; and the failure of the 1771 harvest had made it impossible for him to feed his troops. On the other hand, Maria Theresa was using all her tears to keep her son from joining in the rape. Frederick and Catherine forced his hand by beginning actual seizure of their self-assigned terrain. On August 5, 1772, Joseph added his signature to the partition pact.
The treaty, after invoking the Blessed Trinity, agreed to let Poland keep two thirds of her soil and one third of her population. Austria took southern Poland between Volhynia and the Carpathians, with Galicia and western Podolia—27,000 square miles, 2,700,000 souls. Russia took “White Russia” (eastern Poland to the Dvina and the Dnieper)—36,000 square miles, 1,800,-000 souls. Prussia took “West Prussia,” excepting Danzig and Thorn—13,000 square miles, 600,000 souls. Frederick took the smallest share, but he had bound the conspirators to peace, and had “sewed together,” as he put it, West Prussia and
East Prussia with Brandenburg. After all, said the patriotic Treitschke, this was merely restoring to Germany “the stronghold of the … Teutonic Order, the lovely Weichsal Valley, which in days of yore the German knights had wrested from the barbarians.”38 Frederick reminded Europe that the population of West Prussia was predominantly German and Protestant, and Catherine pointed out that the region she had taken was peopled almost entirely by Russian-speaking Greek Catholics.39
The three powers soon occupied their shares with troops. Poniatowski appealed to the Western powers to prevent the partition; they were too busy; France was expecting war with England, and hesitated to oppose her ally Austria; England faced incipient revolt in America, with danger from France and Spain; George III advised Poniatowski to pray to God.40 The partitioning powers demanded that a Diet be called to confirm the new geography; Poniatowski temporized for a year; finally he summoned a Diet to meet at Grodno. Many nobles and prelates refused to attend; some who came and protested were sent to Siberia; others accepted bribes; the rump Diet changed itself into a confederation (in which majority rule was permitted by Polish law), and signed the treaty ceding the expropriated territories (September 18, 1773). Poniatowski, like Maria Theresa, wept and signed.
Western Europe accepted the first partition as the only alternative to the complete absorption of Poland by Russia. Some diplomats, we are told, “were startled by the moderation of the partners, who took only a third when the whole was theirs for the asking.”41 The philosophes rejoiced that an intolerant Poland had been chastened by their enlightened despots; Voltaire hailed the partition as an historic repulse of l’infâme .42 It was, of course, the triumph of organized power over reactionary impotence.
V. THE POLISH ENLIGHTENMENT: 1773-91
Poniatowski had to choose now between Russia and Prussia as his protector and master. He chose Russia, for it was farther away, and only Russia could prevent Frederick from taking Danzig and Thorn. Catherine was anxious to prevent the further aggrandizement of Prussia, whose army was the greatest obstacle to Russian aggrandizement in the West. She ordered her ambassador in Warsaw to help Poniatowski in every way consonant with Russian interests, and she sent to the King the proposals that Panin had drawn up for a more workable Polish constitution. It retained elective monarchy and the liberum veto , but it increased the royal power by establishing, under his presidency and as his executive arm, a Permanent Council of thirty-six members, divided into ministries of police, justice, finance, foreign affairs, and war; and it provided for a regular army of thirty thousand men. The nobles feared that such an army would endanger their domination of the King; they reduced the figure to eighteen thousand; but, with this and some minor exceptions, the Diet of 1775 ratified the new constitution, and Poniatowski could now proceed to restore some health to the nation.
Corruption continued but anarchy diminished, guerrilla bands were overcome, and the national economy grew. Rivers were deepened for large vessels, canals were dug between rivers, and a “Royal Canal,” completed in 1783, connected the Baltic with the Black Sea. Between 1715 and 1773 the population of Poland grew from 6,500,000 to 7,500,000, and the state revenue was doubled. A system of national schools was established, textbooks were prepared and provided, the universities of Cracow and Wilno were reendowed and revitalized, and teachers’ colleges were established and financed by the state. Poniatowski liked to surround himself with poets, journalists, and philosophers. “The King,” reported Coxe, “gives a dinner every Thursday to the men of letters who are most conspicuous for learning and abilities, and his Majesty himself presides at table,”43 leading the discussion of books and ideas. He took three authors to live with him, and quietly added to the income of others.44 Thousands of Poles, while making their courteous obeisance to the Church—even while serving as its priests—read Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, and Rousseau. The foundations were laid of the Polish, or Stanislavian, Enlightenment.
Adam Naruszewicz, a Jesuit, caught the ear of the King by his poems; he was raised to a bishopric, but continued to indite lyrics to nature; his “Hymn to the Sun” and his “Four Seasons” still endear him to those who can read him in the original. His Satires used a popular vocabulary sometimes Rabelaisian or profane. Stanislas asked him to write a readable but scholarly history of Poland; Naruszewicz gave nine years to the task, and in six volumes (1780-86) produced a work remarkable for its discriminate documentation. He lost heart after the second partition, fell into melancholy, and survived the final partition by only a year.45
The outstanding Polish writer of the period was Ignacy Krasicki. In his travels he won the friendship of Voltaire and Diderot.46 He became a priest, ultimately an archbishop, but Stanislas urged him to give rein to his poetic gifts. In a mock-heroic Mousiad (1775) he satirized the wars of his time as battles between rats and mice; in Monomachia (1778) he made fun of monastic disputes—the deadly weapons being theological tomes. Turning to prose, he told, in The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Find-Out (1776), how a young Polish noble, equipped with all fashionable attainments and sentiments, and wrecked on a strange island, discovered how men and women, though in a “state of nature,” could be industrious and virtuous. Having followed the lead of Homer, Swift, and Defoe in these works, Krasicki took up the style of Addison, and produced a series of genre pictures, Pan Podstoli (1778 f.), describing the life of a model gentleman and citizen. In Fables and Parables (1779) he challenged Phaedrus and La Fontaine, and struck with trenchant irony at the dishonesty and brutality that flourished about him. His final advice was Horatian: seek a quiet corner, and let happiness come by stealth.47
Although the influence of the French Enlightenment upon Naruszewicz and Krasicki was sacerdotally subdued, it appeared decisively in Stanislas Trembecki, who never mentioned religion except with hostility. His poetry idolized nature, but not in those pleasant aspects that most often stir sentiment; he liked rather her wilder phases—her mad profusion of plants and animals, her storms and torrents, the strife of life with life, of eaten with eater; his fables took their form from La Fontaine but their spirit from Lucretius. The power, subtlety, and finish of his verse won him a high place in this literary flowering. Poniatowski supported him through all his trials, and when the King was deposed the poet accompanied him into exile, and stayed with him till death.
There was much religious poetry, for religion was the ultimate consolation of the Poles in their personal and national misfortunes. Franciszek Karpiński’s “Morning Song,” “Evening Song,” and “Christ Is Being Born” are literature as well as piety. Franciszek Kniaznin passed readily between those ancient enemies, religion and sex: on the verge of ordination he discovered Anacreon and love; he published Erotica (1770), pursued worldly happiness, returned to religion, and died insane. The attempt to reconcile opposites may lead to madness as well as to philosophy.
In the drama the dominant figure was Wojciecz Boguslawski, whom his countrymen honor as “the father of the Polish theater”; we might call him the Garrick of Poland, but the Poles would call Garrick the Boguslawski of England. He was apparently the first Pole who gave his entire career to the stage—as actor, dramatist, and producer, as director of permanent theaters in Warsaw and Lvov, and as manager of companies that spread an appreciation of the drama throughout the provinces and over the frontiers. He presented Shakespeare and Sheridan in translation, and himself wrote comedies some of which still hold the Polish stage. The best play of this period was The Deputy’s Return , by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, himself a deputy; here the two sides of the political crisis were dramatically pictured in the devotion of a reform deputy to a girl whose parents defend the privileges of the magnates and the ways of the past.
Last and greatest of the Polish illuminés was Hugo Kollontaj. His education infected him with the ideas of the philosophes , but he concealed his heresies sufficiently to secure a comfortable canonry at Cracow. Poniatowski appointed him (1773) to an Education Committee, for which Kollontaj, aged twenty-three,
drew up a program of educational reform quite up to the best of its time. At twenty-seven he was entrusted with the reorganization of Cracow University; he carried this through in a few years, and then remained as rector. In Letters of an Anonymous Writer to the President of the Diet (1788-89), and in The Political Law of the Polish Nation (1790), he offered proposals which became the basis of the constitution of 1791.
Prodded by its poets and publicists, Poland struggled to transform itself into an effective and defensible state. An opportunity came when, to the “Four Years’ Diet” of 1788-92, Frederick II’s successor, Frederick William II, offered an alliance that pledged protection by the powerful Prussian army against any foreign interference. Russia was busy with war against both Turkey and Sweden; now Poland might deliver itself from its long subservience to Catherine, and from such depredations as Russian soldiers had committed on Polish soil during the last twenty-five years. Over Poniatowski’s protests the Diet dissolved his Permanent Council, voted to raise, subject to the Diet, an army of 100,000 men, and ordered Russian troops to leave Poland at once (May, 1789). Catherine, needing all her forces elsewhere, made no resistance, but vowed revenge. On March 29, 1790, the Diet signed alliance with Prussia.