438 Chapter XVIII
took part in the Second Partition were infused with an ideology of social conser-
vatism; and second, to what extent the intervention in Poland and France, which
began simultaneously in the spring of 1792, represented two branches of a single
movement of European scope, designed to put down a newly emerging and in
some sense “democratic” order.
The Poland of the eighteenth century was described in the first volume of the
present book.^19 Very different from France, it was a country of a kind admired in
America a half- century later by John C. Calhoun, since it was dominated by own-
ers of rural estates who elected their king, and kept the central government remote
and weak. Within the frontiers after the First Partition (shown on the accompany-
ing map) only about 40 per cent of the population was actually Polish in language.
In the eastern region (in what are now White Russia and the Ukraine) many of
the landowners were Polish, while the general population was not. It has been re-
cently estimated that, of true ethnic Poles, as many as 25 percent may have been
“noble.”^20 These nobles predominated the more easily because the burgher class was
relatively weak and the peasants were serfs—“subjects” of their lords. Numerous
changes, which left the peasants still in serfdom, had been introduced by the Four
Years’ Diet. They were embodied in the Constitution of May 3, 1791, of which the
king himself, Stanislas Poniatowski, was the main author.
It came to be widely asserted, in 1791 and 1792, by persons of most opposite
opinions, that there was nothing really “revolutionary” about the new order in Po-
land. The French Jacobins ridiculed the Polish Constitution for being so favorable
to gentry and nobles. Edmund Burke elaborately praised it for the same reasons,
the better to discredit the French. Even the Polish authors of the new constitution,
including King Stanislas, in the hope of protecting themselves from foreign inter-
vention and internal revolt, explicitly, emphatically, and repeatedly disavowed any
similarity in their work to French Jacobinism and democracy.
Nevertheless the Constitution implied changes which were revolutionary for
Eastern Europe. Since it was introduced by the king and his co- workers, it was not
brought into being by revolutionary violence from below. Since it preserved the
pre- eminence of the middle ranks of a serf- owning noble class, it was neither
“bourgeois” nor “democratic.” It was anti- aristocratic, however, in reducing the
powers of the great Polish magnates, and in strengthening the powers of the
crown, which it made hereditary instead of elective, and it granted rights to the
burgher class, rights which might seem little enough in France, but were without
parallel in Eastern Europe. Townspeople in Poland (unless they were Jews) re-
ceived the right to purchase rural or noble land, to own serfs and whole villages, to
19 Above, 316–25. The present section draws on B. Lesnodorski, Polscy Jakobini (Warsaw, 1960),
summarized for me by Mr. André Michalski; R. H. Lord, Second Partition of Poland (Cambridge,
Mass., 1915); H. de Montfort, Le drame de la Pologne: Kosciuszko (Paris, 1945); Jan Wasicki, Konfeder-
acja Targowicka (Poznan, 1952), with an eight- page résumé in French; and a very useful collection of
documents in French, edited by K. Lutostanski, Les partages de la Pologne et la lutte pour l ’ indépendance
(Paris, 1918). It is the plan of the present book to present the Second Partition in connection with
Belgium, and the Third Partition in connection with Eastern Europe as a whole in Chapter X X.
20 Lesnodorski, Jakobini, 92.