Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/951

tyranny of his equals. He had in fact already summoned a Russian army corps to assist him to reform his country, which sufficiently explains his own haughtiness and the unwonted compliancy of the rival magnates.

The simplicity of the Czartoryscy was even more mischievous than their haughtiness. When the most enlightened statesmen of the Republic could seriously believe in the benevolent intentions of Russia the end was not far off. Their naïve expectations were very speedily disappointed. Catherine II. and Frederick II. had already determined (Treaty of St Petersburg, April 22, 1764) that the existing state of things in Poland must be maintained, and as early as the 18th of October 1763 Catherine had recommended the election of Stanislaus Poniatowski as “the individual most convenient for our common interests.” The personal question did not interest Frederick: so long as Poland was kept in an anarchical condition he cared not who was called king. Moreover, the opponents of the Czartoryscy made no serious attempt to oppose the entry of the Russian troops. At least 40,000 men were necessary for the purpose, and these could have been obtained for 200,000 ducats; but a congress of magnates, whose collective fortunes amounted to hundreds of millions, having decided that it was impossible to raise this sum, there was nothing for it but to fight a few skirmishes and then take refuge abroad. The Czartoryscy now fancied themselves the masters of the situation. They at once proceeded to pass through the convocation diet a whole series of salutary measures. Four special commissions were appointed to superintend the administration of justice, the police and the finances. The extravagant powers of the grand hetmans and the grand marshals were reduced. All financial and economical questions before the diet were henceforth to be decided by a majority of Stanislaus II. Poniatowski, 1764–1795. votes. Shortly afterwards Stanislaus Poniatowski was elected king (Sept. 7, 1764) and crowned (Nov. 25). But at the beginning of 1766 Prince Nicholas Repnin was sent as Russian minister to Warsaw with instructions which can only be described as a carefully elaborated plan for destroying the Republic. The first weapon employed was the dissident question. At that time the population of Poland was, in round numbers, 11,500,000, of whom about 1,000,000 were dissidents or dissenters. Half of these were the Protestants of the towns of Polish Prussia and Great Poland, the other half was composed of the Orthodox population of Lithuania. The dissidents had no political rights, and their religious liberties had also been unjustly restricted; but two-thirds of them being agricultural labourers, and most of the rest artisans or petty tradesmen, they had no desire to enter public life, and were so ignorant and illiterate that their new protectors, on a closer acquaintance, became heartily ashamed of them. Yet it was for these persons that Repnin, in the name of the empress, now demanded absolute equality, political and religious, with the gentlemen of Poland. He was well aware that an aristocratic and Catholic assembly like the sejm would never concede so preposterous a demand. He also calculated that the demand itself would make the szlachta suspicious of all reform, including the Czartoryscian reforms, especially as both the king and his uncles were generally unpopular, as being innovators under foreign influence. His calculations were correct. The sejm of 1766 not only rejected the dissident bill, but repealed all the Czartoryscian reforms and insisted on the retention of the liberum veto as the foundation of the national liberties. The discredit into which Stanislaus had now fallen encouraged the Saxon party, led by Gabriel Podoski (1719–1777), to form a combination for the purpose of dethroning the king. Repnin knew that the allied courts would never consent to such a measure; but he secretly encouraged the plot for his own purposes, with signal success. Early in 1767 the malcontents, fortified by the adhesion of the leading Catherine II.
of Russia
and Poland. political refugees, formed a confederation at Radom, whose first act was to send a deputation to St Petersburg, petitioning Catherine to guarantee the liberties of the Republic, and allow the form of the Polish constitution to be settled by the Russian ambassador at Warsaw. With this carte blanche in his pocket, Repnin proceeded to treat the diet as if it were already the slave of the Russian empress. But despite threats, wholesale corruption and the presence of Russian troops outside and even inside the izba, or chamber of deputies, the patriots, headed by four bishops, Woclaw Hieronim Sierakowski (1699–1784) of Lemberg, Feliks Pawel Turski of Chelm (1729–1800), Kajetan Ignaty Soltyk of Cracow (1715–1788), and Józef Jendrzej Zaluski of Kiev (1702–1774), offered a determined resistance to Repnin’s demands. Only when brute force in its extremest form had been ruthlessly employed, only when three senators and some deputies had been arrested in full session by Russian grenadiers and sent as prisoners to Kaluga, did the opposition collapse. The liberum veto and all the other ancient abuses were now declared unalterable parts of the Polish constitution, which was placed under the guarantee of Russia. All the edicts against the dissidents were, at the same time, repealed.

This shameful surrender led to a Catholic patriotic uprising, known as the Confederation of Bar, which was formed on the 29th of February 1768, at Bar in the Ukraine, by a handful of small squires. It never had a chance of permanent success, though, feebly fed by French subsidies and French volunteers, it lingered on for four years, Confederation
of Bar. till finally suppressed in 1772. But, insignificant itself, it was the cause of great events. Some of the Bar confederates, scattered by the Russian regulars, fled over the Turkish border, pursued by their victors. The Turks, already alarmed at the progress of the Russians in Poland, and stimulated by Vergennes, at that time French ambassador at Constantinople, at once declared war against Russia. Seriously disturbed at the prospect of Russian aggrandizement, the idea occurred, almost simultaneously, to the courts of Berlin and Vienna that the best mode of preserving the equilibrium of Europe was for all three powers to readjust their territories at the expense of Poland. The idea of a partition of Poland was nothing new, but the vastness of the country, and the absence of sufficiently powerful and united enemies, had hitherto saved the Republic from spoliation. But now that Poland lay utterly helpless and surrounded by the three great military monarchies of Europe, nothing could save her. In February 1769 Frederick sent Count Rochus Friedrich Lynar (1708–1783) to St Petersburg to sound the empress as to the expediency of a partition, in August Joseph II. solicited an interview with Frederick, and in the course of the summer the two monarchs met, first at Neisse in Silesia and again at Neustadt in Moravia. Nothing definite as to Poland seems to have been arranged, but Prince Kaunitz, the Austrian chancellor, was now encouraged to take the first step by occupying, in 1770, the county of Zips, which had been hypothecated by Hungary to Poland in 1442 and never redeemed. This act decided the other confederates. In June 1770 Frederick surrounded those of the Polish provinces he coveted with a military cordon, ostensibly to keep out the cattle plague. Catherine’s consent had been previously obtained by a special mission of First Partition of Poland, 1772. Prince Henry of Prussia to the Russian capital. The first treaty of partition was signed at St Petersburg between Prussia and Russia on the 6–17th of February 1772; the second treaty, which admitted Austria also to a share of the spoil, on the 5–16th of August the same year. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the unheard-of atrocities by which the consent of the sejm to this act of brigandage was at last extorted (Aug. 18, 1773). Russia obtained the palatinates of Vitebsk, Polotsk, Mscislaw: 1586 sq. m. of territory, with a population of 550,000 and an annual revenue of 920,000 Polish gulden. Austria got the greater part of Galicia, minus Cracow: 1710 sq. m., with a population of 816,000 and an annual revenue of 1,408,000 gulden. Prussia received the maritime palatinate minus Danzig, the palatinate of Kulm minus Thorn, Great Poland as far as the Nitza, and the palatinates of Marienburg and Ermeland: 629 sq. m., with a population of 378,000, and an annual revenue of 534,000 thalers. In fine, Poland lost about one-fifth of her population and one-fourth of her territory.