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

The humiliation was compounded by a prolonged Sejm, insisted on by the partitioning powers. It was bludgeoned into giving formal approval for the whole partition. Stanislaw August’s hopes, that in return for loss of territory the monarchy’s powers might be strengthened or the liberum veto rescinded, were dashed. The 1768 constitutional settlement was reaffirmed, though the concessions to the dissenters were drastically scaled back - the great bulk of

Protestants were, in any case, now under Prussian rule. The bishopric of Mohylew, the last Orthodox see, had passed to Russia. A new administrative body, the ‘Permanent Council’, was set up to provide a minimum of day-to-day administrative continuity and coordination. The major innovation was the creation of a Commission for National Education, aimed at supervising and modernizing the curriculum in the secondary colleges and the two ‘Principal Schools’ (universities) of Krakow and Wilno. It was made possible by the papal abolition (under French and Spanish pressure) of the Jesuits in 1773: the Order’s schools and properties furnished the backbone of the new educational regime. But it took a decade for the Commission to extricate itself from its teething troubles - longer still to overcome noble suspicions of its newfangled ideas.

The Commonwealth was too weak to resist dismemberment. Its society and army were demoralized, bewildered, humiliated and divided. The most spectacular act of defiance, attaining near-mythological status in folk memory, occurred in April 1773, when Tadeusz Rejtan blocked access to the Sejm’s debating-chamber in a vain protest against the inevitable. Although the demographic estimates can be only tentative, Poland may have lost getting on for 5 million of its 14 million inhabitants, with Austria taking the largest number, over 2.5 million. Poland was deprived of about a third of its territory, including its richest provinces. The frontiers of Austria and Prussia advanced towards the old Polish heartlands. Russia’s gains were the most extensive, Prussia’s the least, but they were economically and strategically the most valuable. The Austrians rued the day they had allowed themselves to be manoeuvred into a settlement which disproportionately strengthened their hated rival. All three powers extended their guarantees, as solemn as they were worthless, of the new constitutional and territorial order.

The king hoped against hope that the new educational reforms and his generous cultural patronage would eventually permit the emergence of a more mature and responsible citizenry. His reign did indeed see a cultural efflorescence, the culmination of patient efforts of a long generation of individuals, many of them clergymen, many of them foreign immigrants fascinated by the sheer libertarian weirdness of the Polish world, to rebuild the Renaissance grandeurs of its language and literary world. The poetry of Ignacy Krasicki (r 73 5-1801) or Stanislaw Trembecki (1740-1812) matched anything produced during the Renaissance. The output of major political and social commentators such as Jozef Wybicki (1747-1822) or Hugon Kollątaj (1750-1812) deliberately eschewed the latinisms of their predecessors and gave the Polish language a new force and sophistication. A cadre of Piarists in Warsaw and Wilno, pupils of Konarski, eagerly collaborating with the Commission for National Education, consciously sought to reeducate the nobility into accepting the need to abolish serfdom, revive the economy and build a new and fairer Commonwealth. The king saw in the Warsaw theatre a means of propagating new ideas. The capital’s press was as free and exuberant as any in Europe. Yet all this was not enough. The great majority of the nobility had no time for new-fangled ideas of serf emancipation and were intensely suspicious of the reformed schooling their offspring were being given. The sole means of survival lay, Stanislaw August was convinced, in keeping with Russia in the hope of persuading Catherine to countenance further reform. But the last thing Russia wanted was any form of Polish revival. St Petersburg confirmed itself as Poland’s unofficial capital. Magnate coteries appealed to the Russian court to put them in positions of profit and power. The king was seen, even by his erstwhile allies, the Czartoryskis, as a Russian cipher, to be used, abused and circumvented. This was what Catherine wanted. So dependent did Poland seem that by 1780, she felt sufficiently confident to withdraw the great majority of her troops.