314 Chapter XIII
very slow. Nevertheless, some nobles came more often into association with mer-
chants, bankers, and other burghers, and were even prepared for legal changes in
which burghers would have the right to buy and own land, since the value and
flexibility of landed assets would thus be heightened. Town capitalists, on the other
hand (such as existed in Poland), that is, burghers desiring to develop new indus-
tries, behaved somewhat like nobles in their reliance on servile labor. The new Pol-
ish school finds also that serf rebellions were more common than bourgeois histo-
riography has allowed for. The same argument exists in American historiography,
on the alleged degree of contentment or rebelliousness of Negro slaves before
1861, and, all things considered, it seems likely enough that sporadic serf uprisings
were common, or more common than one would gather from the works of many
historians. There was not, however, in Poland, even in 1794, any such mass up-
heaval as in Russia under Puga chev in 1773, or in France during the revolution of
1789, or in Hungary or even in Bohemia at the same time. That burghers offered
no leadership to peasants, that burghers and peasants felt no common ties, that
burghers in eighteenth- century Poland were not vehemently antiaristocratic, that
some nobles were beginning to operate as capitalist entrepreneurs, that capitalism
in Poland developed in conjunction with a kind of feudalism and carried over at-
titudes toward labor inherited from the days of serfdom, and that all this was deci-
sive for the history of Poland and Eastern Europe, and of capitalism and socialism,
into the twentieth century—seem to be propositions that historians under no ob-
ligations to Marxism can share with the new Polish school.
Poland, too, had its intellectual Enlightenment, which as in all countries in
varying degree was both native and imported. The papal dissolution of the Society
of Jesus was followed, as in other Catholic countries, notably France, by important
educational reforms. The Educational Commission set up in Poland in 1773 has
been called the first national ministry of education. It introduced new programs
into the schools vacated by the Jesuits, and the aim in these programs, made more
urgent by the lesson of the First Partition, was to offer a new training in citizen-
ship and the arts of state, in place of the older literary and rhetorical emphasis. The
University of Cracow was modernized by Hugo Kollontay, who observed that “we
want no colonies of Plato’s republic,” and sought to give a practical training in
public responsibilities.^9 The Jesuits, in their system of teaching, had provided for a
kind of Oxford Union, or mock parliament, in which young men learned how to
conduct themselves in the diet, and, in particular, how to execute a Liberum Veto
with éclat. Reformers now saw the Liberum Veto as a main source of Poland’s ills,
and in the new schools, as in the Collegium Nobilium of the Piarist fathers at
Warsaw, where many leaders of the revolutionary generation received their school-
ing, the Liberum Veto was dropped from the academic exercises of the youth.^10
By the 1780’s the works of Beccaria and Filangieri, of Adam Smith, Locke, and
Blackstone, of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Mably, and Condillac
were all known in Polish translation. The organization of Freemasonry also pro-
9 Lesnodorski, in Pologne au Xe Congrès, 18 7.
10 B. Lesnodorski, Dzielo sejmu czteroletniego (The Work of the Four Years’ Diet) (Wroclaw, 1951),- I am indebted to Mr. Andre Michalski for examining this and other works in Polish for me.