The Sejm of the Commonwealth was the most powerful single legislative body in seventeenth-century Europe, and the one most prone to paralysis. It met in joint session of two chambers — the Senate (consisting of 81 to 140 members at various times, ex officio, comprising the great offices of state, the bishops, and the wojewodas of the provinces) and the Chamber of Deputies (the Izba Poselska, comprising about 170 to 180 elected members representing the provincial sejmiki). It legislated on a deliberate principle of consensus rather than majority — and from 1652 to 1764, this consensus principle was enforced through the most controversial single constitutional mechanism of any early-modern republic: the liberum veto.
How the Sejm worked
The ordinary Sejm met every two years (and, when needed, for an extraordinary session). The deputies were elected by the provincial sejmiki, each of which produced "instructions" — written mandates — for its representatives, which the deputy was bound to defend. The session opened with the king's address, was followed by speeches from senators and deputies, considered legislative proposals (the proiektów), and concluded with the adoption of the konstytucje — the session's enactments, individually voted on but collectively bundled into a single act at session's end. The session could last anywhere from six weeks (the constitutional minimum, after 1573) to several months. The Sejm of 1611, which dealt with the Smolensk War and the Russian dimitriad crises, ran almost six months.
The deputies sat in a single chamber (although the senate had its own throne-room arrangements when sitting separately). They sat by province. They spoke in Polish (occasionally in Latin, especially for ceremonial matters). They voted by acclamation rather than by ballot. Most legislation, in the seventeenth century, passed easily. Some did not, and the means by which "did not" was registered evolved, in 1652, into something distinctive.
The mechanism of the liberum veto
On the 9th of March 1652, the deputy Władysław Siciński of Upita objected to the prolongation of that session of the Sejm beyond its scheduled close. The Sejm in question had been in session for several weeks, was working through a long agenda, and had voted to extend itself by one more day to finish business. Siciński's objection — stated, in Latin, as nie pozwalam ("I do not allow"), and recorded in the chamber's minutes — was framed as an exercise of the noble's right to oppose any act that violated his instructions. The session's marshal, after consultation, ruled that the objection was valid, that the Sejm could not legally extend, and that the session's acts to that point — all of them — could not be promulgated, because the entire session was procedurally invalid. The Sejm adjourned without enacting a single constitution.
This was an unprecedented ruling. It established, in effect, that a single deputy could nullify the entire session's work. The principle was articulated, after the fact, by jurists as the liberum veto: "free veto", the inviolable right of any deputy to halt proceedings. It was extended, in later sessions, from blocking the extension of a Sejm to blocking individual measures, then to blocking the conclusion of the session altogether, then to retroactively nullifying everything the session had done up to the moment of the veto.
Between 1652 and 1764, ten Sejms managed to enact substantial legislation; many were broken by a single veto; the historian Władysław Konopczyński calculated that, of fifty-five Sejms held in this period, fully thirty-two were broken by liberum veto. The country's central legislative apparatus was therefore not functioning for substantial intervals of time. Government — in the sense of laws being made, taxes being raised, the army being financed — had to operate by ad-hoc arrangements among the king, the senators, the regional sejmiki, and the great magnates.
Why no one removed it
The obvious reform, even at the time, would have been to abolish the liberum veto and convert the Sejm to ordinary majority rule. This was proposed, repeatedly, by reformers from the late seventeenth century onward. It was always defeated, for two reasons that deserve close attention because they explain a great deal of the Commonwealth's later history. The first reason was ideological: the szlachta regarded the unanimity principle as the defining feature of noble liberty (złota wolność, "Golden Liberty"), the constitutional guarantee that no minority — and any single noble was always at least a minority of one — could be overruled by majority pressure. To abolish it was to deny what made a Polish noble different from his German or French equivalent. The second reason was geopolitical. By the late seventeenth century, foreign powers (especially Russia and Brandenburg-Prussia) had learned that they could prevent any reform of the Polish state simply by paying one or two deputies to veto any reforming session. The liberum veto was now operating as a foreign-policy instrument on behalf of the Commonwealth's enemies, who had every incentive to defend it.
This produced what Polish historians call the paradox of the Commonwealth: the very feature that the szlachta regarded as the guarantor of their liberty against domestic tyranny had become the precise mechanism by which foreign powers prevented the Commonwealth from defending its territorial integrity. The veto was finally abolished, in part, by the Reform Sejm of 1764 (which converted general legislation to majority voting while preserving the veto on tax legislation), and completely by the Constitution of 3 May 1791 (which was then suspended by Russian invasion eighteen months later).
The sejmiki and the great magnates
The provincial sejmiki — the assemblies of the local nobility — were where the politics of the Commonwealth substantially happened. They met more frequently than the central Sejm, typically two or three times a year. They elected deputies, drafted instructions, ratified treaties referred to them, collected local taxes, organised local militias, and managed local courts. Some were large (the Mazovian sejmik of Czersk could number a thousand attendees); some were small (the Inflanty sejmik, perhaps fifty); all were lively. In the eighteenth century the largest sejmiki had become local fiefs of the great magnate families — the Radziwiłłs and Sapiehas in Lithuania, the Potockis in southern Poland, the Czartoryskis (later) in Mazovia and Ruthenia — who maintained their own private armies, their own commercial networks, and their own foreign policies, often more consequential than the king's. The Commonwealth, by 1700, had become as much a confederation of magnate fiefs as a republic of equal nobles. The liberum veto in the central Sejm reflected, and protected, this dispersion of power.
The next chapter looks at one of the things this decentralised noble republic was unusually good at: religious toleration.
End of Chapter III