A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

430 Ch. 1 1 • Dynastic Rivalries and Politics

chy, abolished the system of noble veto, and proclaimed that all authority
stemmed from the nation. Reflecting the influence of the French Revolu­
tion (see Chapter 12), Poland became a constitutional monarchy, with the
king naming ministers but with the parliament and Poland’s major towns
retaining privileges.
But Poland’s days were numbered as an independent state, particularly
given the fact that its old protector, France, was in the throes of revolution
and had lost influence in East Central Europe. When Poles rose up in 1792
against Russian authority in the part of Poland that had been absorbed by
Russia twenty years earlier, Russian troops intervened. They were backed by
Polish nobles who opposed the liberal constitution. Prussia refused to come
to Poland’s aid, receiving in exchange for looking the other way annexation
of more Polish territory in the Second Partition in 1793. With the Third Par­
tition in 1795, Prussia and Russia ended Poland’s independence for more
than a century. The Constitution of 1791, perhaps the most progressive con­
stitution of the century, was torn to shreds. Russia’s new gains drew its
interests farther into Central Europe, and it now shared a border with the
Habsburg monarchy. Poles were now subject to the authority of three dif­
ferent states. In the lands acquired by Prussia, serfs gained some protec­
tion against abuses by landlords, but, as in the case of lands absorbed into
the Habsburg Empire, the Polish secondary-school system was ended,
imposing the German language.

Conclusion

Some historians have argued that movements against absolutism and

against privilege, such as the political unrest in Great Britain and the suc­

cessful rebellion of its North American colonies, constituted a general

Western “democratic revolution.” But despite the quest for political change

in several Western states, demands for universal male suffrage were rare,

and calls for the extension of political rights to women even more so (an

exception being Geneva in the early 1780s). Even in Britain, after a con­

tentious decade marked by demonstrations for political reform, the most

widespread riots of the 1780s were the anti-Catholic Gordon riots. In

France, calls for reform were less an attack on the nobles, per se, than on

privilege. The institutions of the Old Regime in continental Europe demon­

strated not only resiliency, but also some capacity to undertake reform.

Nonetheless, denunciations in France against privilege, shaped in part

by Enlightenment thought, would be revived in the late 1780s. The Seven

Years’ War and assistance to the Americans worsened the financial crisis of

the French monarchy, as the increasingly global dynastic rivalries and wars