THE POLISH SUCCESSION; THE POLICY OF THE NATIONS
A subject of deep gravity soon claimed her attention—the approaching death of the king of Poland and the consequent opening of the succession. Two parties were contending for power in Warsaw—the court party with minister Brühl and his son-in-law Mniszek at its head, and the party which looked to Russia for support and had for chiefs the Czartoriski. The first-named faction wished to assure the succession to the prince of Saxony, an aim in which France and Austria shared, and the second, planning to elect a piast or native noble who should belong to their party, chose as candidate a nephew of the Czartoriski, Stanislaus Poniatovski. Thus France, which in 1733 had waged war in the cause of a piast against the Saxon candidate, now came to support the Saxon against Poniatovski. The face of affairs had completely changed, and the Polish monarchy, growing weaker day by day, arrived at the point where it could no longer stand erect save by the aid of Saxony, a German state. Frederick II had as much reason to dread an increase of power for Saxony as for Poland, since Saxony was an inveterate enemy of Prussia in the empire, as was Poland in the regions of the Vistula. Russia, which had formerly fought against Stanislaus Leszczynski, father-in-law of Louis XV, was now to oppose the candidate favoured by France and Austria; it was eager also to prevent the accession to the throne of any Polish noble wielding too much power of his own. The choice, therefore, of Stanislaus Poniatovski, a simple gentleman without personal following or influence, met fully the desires of Frederick II, the interests of the Russian Empire, and the private feelings of Catherine II, who was happy to bestow a crown upon one of her former lovers.
[1765 A.D.]
When Augustus III finally died, the diets of convocation and of election stirred up great agitation all over the country. The two rival parties waged fiercer strife than ever; at last the Czartoriski called upon the Russian army to help drive out their enemies, and it was under the protection of foreign bayonets that Poniatovski inaugurated that fatal reign during which Poland was to be three times dismembered and in the end wiped completely from the list of nations. Three principal causes were to bring about the ruin of the ancient royal republic:
(1) The national movement in Russia, which aimed to complete its territory on the west and recover, so said its historians, the provinces which had formerly been part of the domain of St. Vladimir, or White Russia, Black Russia, and Little Russia. With the national question was mingled another which had already led, under Alexander Mikhailovitch, to a first dismemberment of the Polish states. Complaints against the operations of the uniates had multiplied in Lithuania, and Russia had frequently attempted to intervene. Peter the Great protested to Augustus II against the treatment accorded to his co-religionists in Poland, and Augustus had issued an edict assuring free exercise of the orthodox religion; but this never went into effect owing to the inability of the monarchy to repress the zeal of the clergy and the Jesuits. In 1723 Peter begged the intervention of the pope, but his petition was refused and the abuses continued.
(2) The covetousness of Prussia. Poland being in possession of western Prussia, that is the lower Vistula including Thorn and Dantzic, eastern Prussia was completely cut off from the rest of the Brandenburg monarchy, which was thus made a divided state. The government of Warsaw committed, moreover, the serious error of confounding Protestant and orthodox dissenters and harassing them alike.
(3) The inevitable enkindling of Poland in its turn by the spirit of reform that spread abroad during the eighteenth century. Poniatovski and the most enlightened of his countrymen had long perceived the contrast presented by national anarchy as it prevailed at home and the order that was being established in neighbouring states. Nevertheless, while Prussia, Russia, and Austria were exerting every effort to re-form themselves into strictly modern states, Poland still clung obstinately to the traditions of the feudal ages, and allowed the other European monarchies to get so far ahead that when at last the impulse to reform did come it hastened the dissolution of the country.
From a social point of view Poland was a nation of agricultural serfs, above which had been superimposed a numerous petty nobility that was itself in bondage to a few great families, against whom even the king was powerless. There existed no third estate unless we can designate by that name a few thousand Catholic bourgeois and a million Jews, who had no interest in maintaining a condition of things that condemned them to everlasting opprobrium. From an economical point of view the country had only a limited agriculture carried on by serfs after the most primitive methods; but little commerce, no industries, and no public finances. From a political standpoint the “legal” nation was composed exclusively of gentleman—rivalry between the great families, anarchy in the diets, the liberum veto, and the inveterate habit of invoking foreign intervention having destroyed in Poland all idea of law or even of state. From a military point of view Poland was still in the feudal stage of undisciplined militia; it had scarcely any organised troops outside the cavalry formed of nobles, no infantry, but little artillery, and no fortresses worthy the name on frontiers that were thus left open to the enemy. What means of defence had a nation divided against itself, guilty of having received gold from the enemy, against the three powerful monarchies which beset it on all sides, and whose ambassadors had more power than its own king in his diets?