The Lessons of Poland 313
almost all cavalry. Few taxes were raised. The revenues of the Republic in 1750 are
said to have been one thirteenth those of Russia and one seventy- fifth those of
France. In the 1780’s after reforms, they amounted to about 12,000,000 French
livres, compared to 140,000,000 for Russia and 430,000,000 for France.
As in Sweden during the Freedom Era, so in Poland the great noblemen readily
called on foreign aid in their rivalries with each other. Some magnates favored
Russia, others Turkey, Sweden, or France. Foreign powers paid money to obtain
votes in the diet, and important Poles considered such income as their normal due.
The diet became an international meddling place, and many a Liberum Veto was
initiated by a foreign bribe, but the meetings at which the nobles elected a king
were the most notorious for this kind of intervention. As Russia entered into Eu-
ropean politics with Peter the Great, it became the most influential of the powers
in Poland. In 1764 the diet elected a Polish nobleman, Stanislas Poniatowski, as
king, carefully checking him, as in all such elections, with all sorts of guarantees of
the national liberties. King Stanislas, a former lover of Catherine of Russia, was
still her protégé and became King of Poland by her will. He was a philosopher-
king and a patriot, who understood the cause of his country’s troubles, and favored
many projects of reform; but he was well aware, from having lived there, of the
massive might of Imperial Russia, and he understood the difficulty of getting the
magnates to make any changes in a system of which they were the main beneficia-
ries. All three partitions of Poland occurred in his reign. The First Partition, ef-
fected in 1772, of which no more will be said here, was a natural consequence of
the weakness of Poland confronted by aggressiveness of Prussia and Russia. The
Second and Third Partitions were to be less simple.
The shock of the First Partition speeded up the development of a new kind of
political consciousness that had come into evidence since the middle of the eigh-
teenth century. It is hard to form an accurate impression of the social changes or
emerging interests that motivated the new ideas. Polish historians in recent years
have devoted a good deal of thought and research to this period. Their work seems
to me, by the usual Western standards, to be the best that has been done in any of
the countries where a Marxist frame of history is officially prescribed.
In Marxism, not much can happen in history without a “bourgeoisie,” and the
new writers therefore point to a bourgeois development. They note, for example,
how Warsaw quadrupled in size in the thirty years after 1764. This does not neces-
sarily prove much in the way of economic progress in the eighteenth century, when
Palermo was larger than Lyons, and Dublin twice as big as Manchester; still, the
number of Polish burghers, of a certain level of wealth, was undoubtedly increas-
ing. The new school emphasizes, however, that it was usually the landed nobles
who functioned as “bourgeois.” In Poland it was the nobles who controlled the
means of production. Using their rights of lordship and their unfree labor, they
undertook to enter more profitably into a market economy, either by intensifying
their agriculture, or by exploiting the mineral and forest wealth on their estates.
There was no strong separate productive or manufacturing interest, distinct from
the nobles; and since the nobles, even the economically enterprising ones, used
their incomes mainly for consumption, to obtain the amenities of civilized living
from the West, or to keep up their political followings, capital accumulation was