324 Chapter XIII
neither serfs nor Jews had obtained any rights. “I suppose that no one,” he said,
“can seriously argue that the ennoblement of a few bourgeois is a good thing for
the bourgeoisie.”^29 It became the settled opinion, in France, to scoff at the Polish
Revolution as a mere agitation among aristocrats. Meanwhile, however, the praises
at first received from revolutionaries and radicals in the West—from the Paris sec-
tions, the London clubs, Joel Barlow, Condorcet, Sieyès and others—had put King
Stanislas into a difficult situation. He felt obliged to dissociate himself from
charges of Jacobinism. By parading his own moderation he hoped to ward off in-
tervention by Russia or Prussia, and to win the support of gentry and nobles for
the new order.
“Our law of May 3, and everything that has come out of it since,” said King
Stanislas in April 1792, as Europe was going to war, “are almost the opposite of the
French Revolution and keep us very far from democracy, and hence all the more
from the Jacobins.” He insisted, to gain confidence in his leadership, that he had
himself suppressed peasant rebellions by force, and dissolved the artisan associa-
tions that might have grown into political clubs. “The Polish bourgeoisie,” he
averred, “far from affecting a tone of equality with the nobles, has always evinced
the greatest respect for its superiors, whom it rightly regards as its benefactors.”^30
By the first part of the year 1792, in short, there was general agreement that
nothing had happened in Poland that was at all like the French Revolution. West-
ern Conservatives and revolutionaries, and the Polish King himself and some other
makers of the Third of May, each took this position, each for his own reasons.
Yet there had been, it seems to me, as it seems to Professor Lesnodorski and
other modern Polish writers, a significant and even a dangerous revolution in Po-
land, or would be if the new constitution could be maintained.^31 This revolution
ignited a center of conflagration in Eastern Europe secondary only to the one in
France. The comparison and the contrast to the French Revolution were after all in
large measure irrelevant. By the French standard, in either action or principle, the
Polish Revolution was a tame affair. It was not so tame for Poland, or for Eastern
Europe. In Poland, the constitution of May 3 threatened to end the oligarchy of
the magnates. The middling landed nobles who were the chief gainers, reinforced
by less numerous burghers, were not wholly negligible in numbers; if there were
400,000 of them in a population of 8,000,000 they constituted over a twentieth of
the population, probably not very different from the proportion that voted for Par-
liament in Great Britain.
Eastern Europe, except for Poland, at this time meant the Russian, Austrian, and
Prussian monarchies. In none of them, with exceptions for Hungary, was there any
elected parliamentary body with powers like those now contemplated for the Polish
diet. All of them were lands of peasant serfdom, and while the Polish constitution
did nothing to emancipate the peasants, it was in part the work of men, like Kol-
lontay, whose thoughts moved in this direction. In none of the three monarchies did
towns enjoy such self- government as was envisaged for Poland. Even in the West,
29 Pp. 2, 143; see also Moniteur, January 7, 1792.
30 Fabre, 531.
31 Lesnodorski on p. 211, Jablonski on p. 256 of La Pologne au X Congrès international; but they
see the uprising of 1794 as far more truly revolutionary.