Liberation and Annexation 439
be army officers except in the cavalry, to govern themselves in their towns by new
electoral procedures, to be secure from arbitrary imprisonment, to be elevated to
noble status on relatively liberal terms, and to take part in a national assembly or
diet, which was still thought of as a body suited only for landed gentry, but in
which burgher representatives were admitted as observers with restricted voting
rights.
Such changes were sweeping enough to create opposition, especially among
some of the greatest magnates, and among the small, landless, or “barefoot” nobil-
ity, the golota, who supplied the personal followings on which the importance of
the magnates rested. These groups denounced the new order as a “revolution.” They
considered themselves to be counter- revolutionary in the good sense which the
word enjoyed among European conservatives. They were strongest in the eastern
parts of what was then Poland, that is in Lithuania, White Russia, and the Ukraine.
Their aim, at first, was to turn Poland into a federation of agrarian or gentry repub-
lics, in which monarchy would be elective and very weak, or even abolished. Their
leader was Felix Potocki, who had been known a few years before as an enlight-
ened and philanthropic grandee. He was a great builder of churches and palaces, as
well as an old- fashioned patriot, who had given millions of his own money to build
up a Polish army. His ideal of a good society was one that would exist by the bene-
factions of men like himself. He registered a formal protest against the constitu-
tion of 1791, tried without success to persuade the Emperor Leopold II to inter-
vene in Poland for the defense of its ancient liberties, and then in March 1792
went off to St. Petersburg, where Potemkin was one of his friends, to seek Russian
help.
It is important to contrast what the neighboring powers, Austria, Prussia, and
Russia, thought about the new Polish constitution at the time of its promulgation
in the spring of 1791, with what they said about it, or conceivably even thought
about it, a year later when military intervention began.
In the spring of 1791 the prevailing view in Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg
was that the new Polish constitution, far from being anarchic, would make Poland
into a stronger and more viable country. Leopold II spoke of the new order in
Poland with approval. The octogenarian diplomat, Kaunitz, thought that the Pol-
ish crown, now made hereditary, “would find in a free bourgeoisie as well as in the
peasant class a means of gradually limiting the power of the great houses” whose
rivalries had kept Poland in turmoil.^21 The Austrians regarded this prospect of a
stronger Poland as desirable. Prussians and Russians made a similar diagnosis of
fact, but found the fact unpleasant. The Prussian minister, Hertzberg, wrote confi-
dentially in May 1791 to his envoy in Warsaw that by its “revolution” (as he called
it) Poland “received a constitution more firm and better organized than the En-
glish.” He feared that such a Poland would be dangerous to Prussia, since it might
take back the losses of the First Partition. How, he asked, could Prussia defend its
exposed frontier “against a numerous and well- governed nation?”^22 And the Em-
21 Lutostanski, Les partages, 117.
22 Ibid., 115.