316 Chapter XIII
Letters, in which he demanded much the same radical changes as Staszic. On the
basic requirements of a reviving Poland the most active- minded nobles and bur-
ghers were agreed, and together they formed the patriot party; but for reasons that
should now be clear, most of the reformers were in fact nobles.
THE POLISH REVOLUTION: THE CONSTITUTION OF 1791Neither Russia nor Prussia desired a strong or independent Poland on its borders,
and Catherine II in particular, enjoying a paramount influence throughout the
whole country after the First Partition, wished for matters in Poland to remain just
as they were. Since she now expected to dominate Poland through the Polish gov-
ernment itself, she did force the diet, in 1773, to create a few new executive organs,
notably a Permanent Commission of thirty- six members, who subdivided into
special branches which functioned as ministries. She also kept Russian troops in
occupation of the country. Otherwise she was an eloquent partisan of the “Polish
liberties” under the old constitution. It was this constitution, with its elective mon-
archy, its Liberum Veto, and its fifty regional assemblies, modified only by the ad-
dition of the Permanent Commission, that she guaranteed in 1773. European
monarchs, as Rousseau told the Poles, were fond of liberty for their neighbors be-
cause they believed that liberty made men weak. Nor can this cynical opinion be
called mistaken, so far as liberty meant the aurea libertas of Poland, or the Swedish
liberties of the Freedom Era, or the ware vrijheid of the Dutch, or the liberties of
the ancient Holy Roman Empire or of new American states under the Articles of
Confederation.
The reform party therefore had two adversaries to contend with: on the one
hand, a strong group among the Polish magnates, and, on the other, Russia.^13
Among magnates partial to the old ways, the most important were the Branicki
and Felix Potocki, whose holdings in the Ukraine have been described. They saw in
the Russian influence a protection for liberty and for serfdom. Prominent in the
reform party was King Stanislas himself, restless in the satellite position to which
Catherine had consigned him, surrounding himself with Polish and West Euro-
pean liberals, wishing well to all his people, even the Jews—for he had met Am-
sterdam Jews in his youth, and seems to have been the only Polish reformer to take
an interest in the Jews of Poland, and in the problem which they presented. Ea-
gerly receptive to all kinds of new ideas, Stanislas in 1788 hired Jefferson’s friend,
Philip Mazzei, as his agent in Paris, to report on events there, and to plant the
picture of a new and reviving Poland in the press of France and Holland. The re-
forming group was led also by certain of the magnates, notably Ignace Potocki, the
13 On the Polish Revolution, 1788–1792, see the works cited in notes 4 and 10 above; C. Dany,
Les idées politiques et l ’esprit publique en Pologne à la fin du 18e siècle: La constitution du 3 mai 1791 (Paris,
1901); J. Klotz, L’oeuvre legislative de la Diète de Quatre Ans (Paris, 1913). The chief account by partici-
pants available in a Western language is that published anonymously in 1793, in two volumes in Ger-
man translation, by Kollontay (Kołłataj) and others: Vom Entstehung und Untergang der polnischen Kon-
stitution vom 3 may 1791. I shall deal later with the more fully revolutionary effort of Kosciusko’s
rebellion of 1794.