Liberation and Annexation 445
in the Russian Empire. As the French promised the Belgians all the rights of citi-
zens in the French Republic, so Catherine II promised the Poles, in the territories
she annexed, “all the rights, liberties and privileges which our older Russian sub-
jects enjoy.”^32 In Poland as in Belgium there were elections superintended by an
occupying power. The Russian General Ingelström, in May of 1793 (and one
thinks of Belgium in February) gave instructions for the local assemblies to elect
certain acceptable Poles whose names were on lists which he submitted, and prom-
ised to supply either money or detachments of Russian soldiers in such amounts as
might be required. The local assemblies chose deputies to a new national gather-
ing, the Diet of Grodno. This diet, according to the Russians, really represented the
“general will of the better people and of the Nation.”^33 The diet, under irresistible
Russian pressure, ceded large tracts of White Russia and the Ukraine to the Rus-
sian Empire. Soon thereafter it ceded Danzig and Great Poland to Prussia.
In 1793 the central part of Poland still remained technically independent, and
here the Targowicans were briefly allowed to maintain a republic to their own lik-
ing. The Diet of Grodno enacted a new constitution. It followed lines which in
Poland were staunchly conservative. With a few exceptions—neither the liberum
veto nor the nobleman’s right of life and death over his serf was restored—the re-
sidual Polish state was to be much as in the 1770’s. Kings were again to be elected
by nobles. Attempts to strengthen the central government and to give representa-
tion to townspeople were abandoned. The work of the Four Years’ Diet was swept
away.
It has often been said, even by the best of historians, that the counterrevolution-
ary professions of the partitioning powers were a mere pretense to cover up crude
aggression. It has been thought that, since the French and Polish revolutions were
not alike, the loudly publicized need of suppressing “Jacobinism” in both countries
was nothing but an “insidious theory.”^34 On the whole, the view that still prevails
of the Second Partition (which, as Robert Lord said, was the true finis Poloniae)
was set by a historiography that antedates 1914 and the modern revolutionary age.
In the older diplomatic histories, often written with a belief in the primacy of for-
eign over internal politics, the expansion of the Great Powers of Europe seemed
more real and important than unsuccessful revolutions or the fears that they en-
gendered. Older histories of a liberal tendency, on the other hand, were perhaps
too ready to dismiss the claims of monarchical diplomats as merely empty or “cyn-
ical.” In either case the phenomena of revolution in Poland, of discontents in other
parts of Eastern Europe, and hence of the genuine counter- revolutionary inten-
tions of the three Eastern monarchies, may be excessively discounted.
The question in the summer of 1793 was whether France would go the way of
Poland. It was a question not so much of partition (though talk of carving up
French territory was heard) as of the imposition under foreign auspices of a form
of government approximating the old regime. The powers of the First Coalition,
together with Russia, after the defection of Dumouriez, the Austrian reconquest of
32 Ibid., 180, 223.
33 Ibid., 159.
34 Lord, 281, 504.