440 Chapter XVIII
press Catherine, in her zeal for the traditional liberties of Poland, feared in the new
Polish government not its anarchy but its despotism.^23
Hardly was the new Polish constitution proclaimed when a variety of develop-
ments raised up new alarms. Political clubs multiplied rapidly in Warsaw and other
cities, representing the heightening of political consciousness and participation
under the new regime. Free, open, busy, and extensive discussion of public matters
was not welcomed by the three eastern monarchies in their part of the world. The
Polish clubs, it was therefore alleged, were but the surface manifestation of an in-
ternational network of secret societies. It may in fact have been true that Poles
made some attempts at propagandizing for liberty within Russia at this time.^24
News arrived also of the arrest of Louis XVI at Varennes, to the great consterna-
tion of royal courts. In July 1791 the first French ambassador to Poland in twenty
years arrived in Warsaw. A former marquis, now an ardent revolutionary, named
Descorches, he mixed actively in the Polish clubs; in any case, his very presence,
after so long an interval, suggested to neighboring powers the possibility of an al-
liance between the two revolutionary countries. At the same time Edmond Genet
was shocking the Russian upper classes in St. Petersburg, where he was French
chargé d’affaires; and a colony of French émigrés added their own contribution.
One of them, Count Valentin Esterhazy, in April 1792, passed on a mixture of true
and false information to his wife: the King of Sweden had been murdered by Jaco-
bins; French democrats were being rounded up in St. Petersburg and sent to Sibe-
ria, the proliferation of clubs in Poland was “opening Russian eyes on the tendency
of that impious and regicide sect”; and it was feared in Russia that “the fire will
start up in this country.” Esterhazy, however, writing on the eve of military inter-
vention in France and Poland, was confident that “the counter- revolution is in evit-
able.”^25 The Russian army moved into Poland in May 1792.
The Russians in invading Poland were able to make common cause with the
Polish counter- revolutionaries, as the French in invading the Austrian Nether-
lands were able to make common cause with the Belgian democrats. The Russian
use of an internal Polish party, in fact, was more palpable and direct. The French
Revolutionary government did not, in the spring of 1792, before the war began
and hostilities opened in Belgium, take concerted action with refugee Belgian
democrats in Paris to prepare a ringing democratic manifesto calling for liberation
of their country. This is precisely what the Empress Catherine did with the Polish
noblemen in St. Petersburg. Poles and Russians in the tsarist capital, on April 27,
1792, signed a document in which their ideas were combined. It presented a long
indictment of the now year- old new order in Poland. To make its publication co-
incide with the Russian invasion, already in preparation, the document was given a
suppositious date and place—May 14, at Targowica, a village in the Ukraine a
23 Lord, Second Partition, 2 4 4 – 47.
24 Lesnodorski describes attempts at propaganda in Russia, 274, and gives an account of the clubs
in 1791 and 1792 on 131–47. He quotes, 146, a contemporary diarist for the beginning of 1792: “clubs
of servants are being organized, in which the people are informed of events in France and the Declara-
tion of the Rights of Man is read in translation, with other things relating to the freeing of the serfs.”
25 E. Daudet, ed., Lettres du comte Valentin Esterhazy à sa femme (Paris, 1907), 422–26. For Genet
in Russia see above, pp. 421–22.