(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

Amid the political degradation, Augustus Ill’s reign saw a kind of healing. By the late 1740s, much of the worst damage after the Great Northern War had been repaired. Although Poland never regained its sixteenth-century pre-eminence as purveyor of grain to Europe, cereals and other commodity exports - timber, cattle, horses, naval stores - pump-primed prosperity for great and middling landowners. The Catholic Church, with its international connections, was in the forefront of a cultural reconstruction. The two teaching orders, the Piarists and the Jesuits, began to compete from the 1740s and 1750s to provide the kind of elite education they were offering in Italy and France. Dresden was a second home to many Polish nobles - and a channel for new ideas. ‘Enlightenment’ became chic. The most effective exponent of reinvigor-ating old traditions through new philosophies was the Piarisr Stanislaw Konarski, whose Collegium Nobilium, established in Warsaw in 1740, served as a model school for the more fashionable nobility. In 1733, as an active Leszczynski supporter, he had tried to persuade his countrymen that liberty without sovereignty was unsustainable. His On the means to efficacious councils of 1761 — 3 was a blistering demolition of the liberum veto and its evils. More than that, however, it was also a plea for something Poland had never had: a truly powerful parliament, which devised and decided policy, something far more potent than a tutelary body whose main function was to preserve noble liberties. It was to be, in its own right, an elected absolute ruler, more powerful even than the English parliament which Konarski admired so strongly. Those who saw in the veto a monstrous constitutional aberration could not praise Konarski enough; those for whom the veto was ‘the palladium of liberty’ could barely contain their vitriol at the presumption of a clergyman (even if nobly born) to lecture the ruling nation. Its recourse to new' ideas, not least in its unprecedented exaltation of the English constitution, forced even conservative critics to look beyond their homespun sloganeering.

Konarski’s ideas found favour with one powerful grouping - the Czartoryski family. Of ancient, princely Lithuanian stock, they had long languished in obscurity, until, under Augustus II, a combination of royal patronage and useful marriages built them up into a formidable political force. The Czartoryskis appreciated that if Poland were to be anything other than a passive victim of international circumstances, the whole shape of its politics had to be recast. Even under Augustus II they cautiously advocated restrictions on the liberum veto. They believed that they could both preserve liberty in the Commonwealth and run it themselves - in the manner of the Whig grandees of Britain, whom they so admired. The cultured, ruthless brothers August and Michael looked to Russia to break the impasse of domestic politics. To them, the worst danger came from Frederick II of Prussia. His conquest of Habsburg Silesia between Г740 and 1742 could only stimulate the traditional Hohenzollern appetite for Polish Prussia. Ties with Russia, the Czartoryskis felt, would offer some protection.

Under Augustus III, Poland periodically served as transit route for the warring armies of Prussia, Russia and Austria, even the Ottoman Porte. At least the full horrors of the past were not repeated. Exactions were localized, on occasion even orderly. To large landowners, insulated from the incidental damage which foreign armies caused, their custom furnished useful market opportunities. Poland was, technically, neutral during the Seven Years War of 1756-63, though quite unable to keep foreign troops off its soil. But it was neutral for the wrong reasons. Its army was pitiably weak, its parliaments paralysed and its leaders unable to formulate policy in the midst of a conflict which, as some of its politicians appreciated, was of vital strategic importance to it. At the very least, if Frederick the Great kept Silesia, Polish territories would surely be next on his menu. For most of the war, Austria’s client, Saxony, was under Prussian occupation. Augustus III, who, like his father, always preferred the delights of Dresden, was forced into a prolonged residence in Warsaw. He returned to a devastated Saxony only in March T763, to die that October. Russia again

settled the Polish succession - this time, single-handedly. Its troops had been stationed in Poland since 1757 - topping them up to ensure the return of the preferred choice of the new empress, Catherine II, was an easy matter.