AGONIAworld. It is a marvellous technique which Catherine II was destined to master in
her own right, and which aspiring tyrants of later ages have been only too will-
ing to imitate.
To the modern observer, the perspicacity no less than the cynicism of
European statesmen regarding the consequences of the First Partition may seem
surprising. In a world where diplomacy was uncomplicated by moral scruples,
and where Frederick could cheerfully compare his Polish victims to defenceless
Iroquois Indians, the deeper effects of the Partition were observed and recorded
with cold precision. In reference to his fateful alliance with Russia, Frederick
freely admitted: 'How blind and insane is Europe to contribute to the rise of a
people which may someday become her own doom.' 'The Empress of Russia has
breakfasted', wrote Edmund Burke, 'Where will she dine?' Elsewhere, in refer-
ence to the inability of the western powers to intervene in Eastern Europe. Burke
commented that 'Poland must be regarded as being situated on the Moon.'^14
The more serious implications of the First Partition were apparent within a
few years of its completion. Writing in 1788, in his History of the Prussian
Monarchy, the Comte de Mirabeau, stated that it would be 'both impossible
and reprehensible' to justify the treaties of Partition, 'which have given Europe
but a servile peace'. 'In the future', he wrote, 'the destiny of Liberty, of Property,
and of Human Life itself will be determined by the whims of despots. ..' In the
following fateful year, speculating on The Peril of the Political Balance in
Europe, the Swiss journalist Jacques Mallet-du-Pin, predicted that the Partitions
would become 'the horror of our age'. By the mid-nineteenth century, such com-
ments were commonplace. In an era when repeated Polish Risings drew atten-
tion to the iniquities of the European System, it did not need a genius to see that
the much-vaunted principle of 'Legitimacy', and the 'Holy' Alliances of the
Empires had been built on international pillage. Macaulay was but one of many
who condemned the Partition as 'a shameful crime'.^15
In the last resort, of course, all such moral protests were distinctly double-
edged. As Bismarck was wont to point out, the partitions of Poland were no
more reprehensible, and no less, than the Polish partitions of Ruthenia in the
fourteenth century, or of Prussia in the fifteenth. They were no worse, or better,
than the colonial Partitions of Asia, Africa, and America, which all the
European powers were about to undertake. All states are created by force, and
all come into being by cannibalizing their predecessors. The special sense of out-
rage which attended the fate of the Polish Republic was partly due to the fact
that European princes had eaten a fellow European. But it was also due to the
particular moment. Poland was partitioned on the eve of the birth of
Nationalism and Liberalism, and thus became a symbol of all those people for
whom self-determination and the consent of the governed provide the guiding
principles of political life.
For the Republic, the most demoralizing aspect of the whole business was
seen in the spectacle of a large number of Poles who willingly served the inter-
ests of the partitioning powers. After fifty years of factional politics and Russian
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