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

Some hoped the European diplomatic conjuncture might yet bring salvation. In 1781, Catherine effectively ditched her Prussian alliance, to realign with Joseph II of Austria. Only the Habsburgs, not the Hohenzollerns, could offer effective support for her grandiose ambitions of throwing the Turks out of Europe and establishing her grandson, Constantine, as ruler of a new Greek Empire. Russia’s outright annexation of the Crimea in Г783 ultimately brought about a fresh Turkish declaration of war in August 1 787.

The Russo-Turkish war of 1787-92 furnished a final interval for the reassertion of Polish sovereignty. Catherine’s conviction that her interests were best served by preserving a tried, if not entirely trusted, Poniatowski on the throne led a frustrated opposition to cast about elsewhere for support - Prussia. At the same time, Prussia’s new king, Frederick William II, and his chief minister, Friedrich von Hertzberg, hoped to round off earlier gains with the acquisition of Danzig, Thorn and whatever other territories they could: their chosen means was to encourage Polish ‘patriotic’ indignation against Russia, to foment internal disorders, which they would exploit to secure their aims. When, in October 1788, a new Sejm met, it gloried in an orgy of virulent russophobia. The appalled king, who had a good inkling of the Prussian game, was unable to prevent emotions from running amok. In what amounted to a constitutional coup, the Sejm took over the running of the country. Egged on by Prussia, it repudiated the 1773-5 settlement and guarantees.

Russia’s distractions - the Turkish war, combined with a war with Sweden between July 1788 and August 1790 - allowed the Poles to conduct a prolonged debate as to how the state should be reformed. For the great majority, there could be no pushing back of the clock to the fat times and constitutional anarchy of Augustus Ill’s reign, although there also remained powerful individuals who hankered precisely after this. The offer of an alliance from Prussia (designed to reassure the Poles as to Prussian intentions), and successful insistence that the Russians should desist from using Polish territory as a transit route to the Balkan front helped convinced the ‘Four Years Sejm’ that the era of humiliations was over. The new parliament set about dismantling much of the constitutional machinery put in place after 1773; it voted to increase the army from around 18,000 to too,000 - but only too late did it give serious consideration to paying for it. Patriotic fervour, not political calculation, carried all before it. Events in France, of which the uncensorable press kept the public fully informed, added to the general excitement. Even the hitherto largely passive townsfolk of Warsaw - whose population during the Sejm exceeded 100,000 - began actively joining in the politics. Something like a true ‘public sphere’ of uncontrolled conversation and debate across the spectrum of the literate emerged, focused on the capital. It was possible to publish just about anything. The jovial clergyman Franciszek Jezierski, in his Miscellany of words alphabetically arranged of 1791, even tore apart Rafal Leszczyns-ki’s much-loved late seventeenth-century soundbite (which had so impressed Rousseau he used it in his Social Contract), ‘Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietam servitutem’ - ‘I prefer dangerous liberty to tranquil slavery’. It was nonsense - a nation which survived, no matter how oppressive its government, still had the chance to reform; a nation which lost its liberty would lose everything. Even a few years earlier, no one would have dared utter such sentiments in a society which did indeed seem to place ‘freedom’ above self-preservation.

The most important achievement of the dizzy years of 1788-92 was the experience of unprecedented rule-by-parliament. Ponia-towski’s reign had been a harsh political school. For all the brutality which accompanied them, the Sejmy of 1764, 1766, 1767-8, 1773-5 and 1776 hammered home a new principle: that parliament could and should legislate; and that it was for the rest of the country to follow. For two centuries or more, the szlachta had been unwilling to learn these lessons themselves. Now, others had inculcated them. The Four Years Sejm was the culmination of this process of forced political education, as a political elite-discovered that it could create new administrative bodies, vote new taxation, take diplomatic and political initiatives - that it could do more than simply defend old privileges, that it could govern. If old phobias of royal absolutism survived, some politicians at least came to appreciate that there was more to politics than the long-established keeping of the phantom power of monarchy in check.