Stanisław August Poniatowski was elected King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania on the 7th of September 1764, on the field of Wola outside Warsaw, after the kind of election that had become standard in eighteenth-century Polish politics: Russian troops camped within walking distance, Russian bribes distributed among the deputies, the Russian ambassador in attendance, and a single candidate effectively pre-approved by Catherine the Great. Poniatowski was thirty-two years old, the son of a Polish magnate, a former secretary at the British embassy in St Petersburg, and — between 1755 and 1758 — Catherine's lover. The Russian sponsorship was not concealed, and Poniatowski's election was, on its face, an act of national submission. What followed, between 1764 and 1791, was a substantial attempt by the new king to use the institutional space provided by his Russian sponsors to reform the Commonwealth from within.
The first reforms
Poniatowski's coronation Sejm of December 1764 — held under the same Russian military escort as his election — produced, against expectations, the first round of substantial constitutional reform in the Commonwealth's modern history. The session abolished the liberum veto for ordinary legislation (preserving it only for matters of constitutional change). It standardised the weights and measures across the country. It created a permanent Treasury Commission, the first ever standing fiscal authority. It established a regular postal service. It abolished internal customs duties between the Crown lands and the Grand Duchy. It strengthened the artillery establishment. It founded the Knights' School (the Szkoła Rycerska, 1765), the first secular state-funded school for boys from noble families, and the precursor of the Polish national education system. It established the first state theatre. The 1764 Sejm was the most legislatively productive in the Commonwealth's history.
The Russian reaction was unsympathetic. Catherine the Great had supported Poniatowski's election because she believed he would preserve the constitutional weakness that allowed Russia to dominate Polish affairs. A reform programme that abolished the liberum veto and built up a Polish treasury and army was precisely the opposite. From 1765 onward Russian diplomacy worked, with progressive success, to slow or reverse the reform programme. The principal tool was the encouragement of Polish noble factions hostile to the king's reforms: the so-called Confederations of Radom (1767) and Bar (1768) — armed magnate-led leagues that demanded the restoration of "Golden Liberty" against the king's "absolutist" reforms. The Bar Confederation, in particular, became a four-year guerrilla war, fought across the Commonwealth's eastern lands between Polish royal forces (often supported by Russian troops sent in by Catherine to protect the constitution she had also sponsored Poniatowski to reform) and the Confederate guerrillas.
The First Partition
The Bar war became the pretext for the First Partition. The three neighbouring powers — Russia, Prussia and Austria — concluded a secret agreement in July 1772 to annex substantial portions of Polish territory, jointly, on the argument that the Commonwealth's internal disorders required external intervention. The annexations were ratified by a Russian-controlled Polish Sejm in 1773, after a months-long campaign of bribes, threats and arrests of opposing deputies. Russia took the eastern Belarusian lands (about 92,000 km²); Prussia took Royal Prussia minus Danzig and Toruń (36,000 km², notable because this connected East Prussia to Brandenburg for the first time); Austria took Galicia (83,000 km², including Lviv and the salt mines of Wieliczka). The Commonwealth lost about thirty percent of its territory and about thirty-five percent of its population — but, paradoxically, the rump state that remained became more governable, because the partition had removed many of the more turbulent peripheral lands.
The reforms of the 1770s and 1780s
Between 1772 and 1791, Poniatowski and the reformers around him — particularly the Czartoryski family, the priest-scholar Hugo Kołłątaj, the educator Stanisław Konarski, and the soldier and statesman Stanisław Małachowski — built up the institutional capacity of the rump state. The 1773 Sejm — the same that ratified the First Partition — also created the Commission for National Education (the Komisja Edukacji Narodowej), Europe's first ministry of education. The Commission's revenues came from the seized estates of the Jesuit order (suppressed by papal decree in 1773); the commission's authority covered all primary and secondary schools, and within fifteen years had built a network of schools across the country that produced, by the standards of the eighteenth century, a remarkably well-educated noble generation. The Knights' School graduated officers including Tadeusz Kościuszko (who would lead the 1794 uprising) and Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (who would draft sections of the 1791 constitution).
The Constitution of 3 May 1791
The Four-Year Sejm — convened in October 1788 in the unusual circumstance that Russia was simultaneously at war with the Ottomans, with Sweden, and with internal turmoil, and therefore lacked the bandwidth to suppress Polish reforms — sat for four continuous years (a constitutional anomaly in itself, requiring a confederated Sejm format to bypass the residual liberum veto). On the 3rd of May 1791, the Sejm adopted, by acclamation, a written constitution that would have transformed the Commonwealth into a constitutional monarchy of a modern type. It abolished the elective monarchy and made the throne hereditary (in the Saxon-Wettin line, by treaty). It abolished the liberum veto entirely. It established a bicameral legislature with majority rule, a permanent cabinet of ministers, an independent judiciary, and a uniform code of civil rights. It gave political rights to townspeople — the urban patriciate of Warsaw, Kraków, Lublin and the other major Crown cities — for the first time. It did not abolish serfdom (this was politically impossible in 1791) but it placed peasants under royal protection and limited the magnates' jurisdictional power.
The 3 May Constitution is the second-oldest national codified written constitution in the world, after the United States' 1787 document and before France's 1791. It was modelled, in substantial parts, on the American example (the framers' library at the Royal Castle in Warsaw included copies of Hamilton's Federalist, Madison's notes, and the American constitutional debates, which the king is documented to have read). It was unmistakably influenced by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of August 1789.
What stopped it
The constitution was, in the end, unenforceable. Catherine the Great, having defeated the Ottomans and finished her northern wars, turned her attention to Poland in 1792. She sponsored a Polish opposition confederation — the Confederation of Targowica (May 1792) — composed of magnates who declared the 3 May Constitution illegal and called on Russia to restore the previous "Golden Liberty". A Russian army of one hundred thousand crossed the eastern frontier. The Polish army, perhaps fifty thousand under Prince Józef Poniatowski (the king's nephew) and Tadeusz Kościuszko, fought a competent two-month defence (the engagement at Zieleńce, June 1792, was the first Polish victory in seventy years), but was unable to halt the Russian advance. The king, after consultation with his ministers and a final personal appeal to Catherine that received no answer, joined the Targowica Confederation in July 1792 — effectively repudiating his own constitution. The 3 May settlement was suspended.
The next chapter is the closing of the country: the Second Partition of January 1793, the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794, and the Third Partition of October 1795, which removed Poland-Lithuania from the map of Europe for the next 123 years.
End of Chapter VIII