318 Chapter XIII
others had fought, the Poles formed an impression of revolution on a worldwide
scale. The abbé Switkowski, a former Jesuit, and now editor of the chief Polish lan-
guage journal in Warsaw, published the American and French Declarations of
Rights. “In 1789,” he wrote in February 1790, “the world was shaken by convulsions
and a new era began for the human race in Europe.... There has been nothing like
it since the crusades.... As men then fought for the Holy Land it is now for Holy
Liberty that they fight. The desire to be free has become a madness at Paris, and has
spread East, West and South.” Switkowski favored this “madness”; he even approved
the French Civil Constitution of the Clergy.^15
The great event in Poland in 1789 occurred in November. Over a year had now
passed since the diet met, and nothing positive had been done, when on November
24, urged on by Kollontay, spokesmen for 141 towns signed an Act of Union at
Warsaw. It seems very likely that the level of their expectations had been raised by
news of events in France. The act, submitted as a petition to the King, modestly
requested a few burgher rights, including representation in the diet itself.
In the diet the general feeling was one of shock. Some members were so in-
censed that they threatened to leave the assembly if burghers were admitted. All
members were gentry and noble, and even the patriots among them had hardly
imagined that anyone else should take part in saving the country. There was some-
thing subversive about 141 towns banding together. The effects of the French Rev-
olution cut both ways. However moderate the real intent of a Polish reformer
might be, if he spoke with favor of the French Revolution, or of the Americans, or
alluded to the revolutionary character of the age, or saw in it a sign of the direction
in which Poland should be moving, he aroused alarm and consternation, and called
up visions, even in 1790, the mildest year of the French Revolution, of aristocrats
humiliated by lawyers and country gentlemen insulted by peasants gotten out of
hand. Another year passed in the Polish diet with much talk and no action. In the
end what happened was a good deal of a compromise.
Late in 1790 the diet adopted the first of three measures for which it is remem-
bered. It excluded landless nobles from attendance at the regional assemblies. This
move was a blow against the magnates, and constituted a victory for the reform
party, or for the middling nobles who sought to “democratize” Poland by curbing
the great lords with their troops of personal followers. This accomplished, the re-
formers again took up the plea of the towns. There was still much opposition; there
were many who thought it outrageous, after disfranchising almost half the nobles,
to consider the grant of political powers to the burgher class. At the same time
there was a sense of crisis. The designs of Prussia on Danzig and Thorn were
known, and Russia, concluding its Turkish war, could be expected soon to make its
will felt in Poland. The high point in the debate on the towns was a speech by
Niemcewicz. It expressed one of the revolutionary ideas of this revolutionary era,
soon to be demonstrated also in France: that liberty, and the extension of rights, far
from making a country weak, as the old doctrine held, actually might contribute to
its power and its capacity for survival.
15 J. Grossbart, “La presse polonaise et la Réevolution française,” in Annales historiques de la Révo-
lution française, vol. XIV, 1937, 139. Lesnodorski, Dzielo, 84.