The Lessons of Poland 315
vided international contacts, and various of King Stanislas’ reforming advisers, like
the Swiss Glayre and the Italian Piattoli, were Masons. These foreign associations,
and the reading of foreign books, give evidence of a fermentation of political and
intellectual interests, but the idea that the Polish revolution was caused by Masons
and philosophes, though it has been alleged, is hard to sustain. Experience was to
show that no foreign Masons were to support the Polish revolution, and the influ-
ence of Rousseau operated in contrary directions. For example, the patriot Wiel-
horski, the man who had induced Rousseau to write his tract on Poland, had two
sons, one of whom supported the constitution of 1791, while the other fought
against it, both loudly declaring that they were carrying on their father’s and Rous-
seau’s true ideas.^11 Montesquieu’s doctrine of the balance of powers was appealed
to both by the old- fashioned party that sensed despotism in any strengthening of
the King, and by the reforming party that desired a more independent executive.
Elsewhere in Europe, Montesquieu was generally the favorite of the aristocratic
upholders of the constituted bodies—of the Hungarian diet, the French parle-
ments, or the English House of Commons. It seems that in Poland Montesquieu
was an oracle for the monarchists also, for the party that is, that sought to achieve
reforms by counterbalancing the aristocracy in the diet.^12
The first Polish periodical appeared in 1763, and by 1789 there were about a
dozen of them, mostly in Polish, but some in German for German- speaking bur-
ghers, and some in French for the Warsaw diplomatic community and for more
cosmopolitan Poles. The first public theater was established at Warsaw in 1765, so
that the stage ceased to be the exclusively private pleasure of aristocratic houses.
Efforts were made to modernize the Polish language, and increase its use in place
of Latin, German, and French; thus a book of 1782 set forth a vocabulary of Polish
terms for the iron industry. The twenty years following 1772 saw the appearance of
109 books devoted to agriculture, in which such far- reaching questions as the free
market in land, and emancipation of rural labor, were sometimes raised. By the
1780’s, books and pamphlets on political questions were fairly common. A few
reforms, of incidental kind, were enacted before 1788: the lord lost the right of
capital punishment over his serf, and judicial torture and the crime of witchcraft
were abolished. There had come to be, in place of the old speechifying of rustic as-
semblies, a public opinion of more modern kind on modern questions.
The two leading spokesmen of this Polish enlightenment were Stanislas Staszic
and Hugo Kollontay. Staszic, a burgher, in a book of 1785 that was widely read,
called for a hereditary instead of an elective monarchy, abolition of the Liberum
Veto, higher taxes, a larger army, industrial development, and emancipation of the
serfs. Kollontay, born into the lesser nobility and trained for the church, and al-
ready known as the reformer of the University of Cracow, was to be the chief lumi-
nary of the “bourgeois” or Western- type revolution in Poland, active both in the
Four Years’ Diet and in the ensuing rebellion under Kosciusko. In 1788, just before
the opening of the Four Years’ Diet, he began to publish his influential Anonymous
11 On Masonry and the influence of Rousseau, see Fabre, Stanislas- Auguste, 501, 656–57.
12 On the uses made of Montesquieu in Poland see Lesnodorski, Dzielo, 112–13, and W. Smolen-
ski, Monteskiusz w Polsce w 18 w (Warsaw, 1927), for knowledge of whose contents I am indebted to
Mr. Michalski.