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

Poland, but very few could imagine a free peasantry. Peasant support did, indeed, play a key role at the battle of Raclawice - but Košciuszko could at best only admonish, cajole and plead with landowners to reduce peasant obligations. His Proclamation of Polaniec of 7 May 1794, declaring all peasants personally free and cutting back their labour services, was largely a dead letter. As for revolutionary France, it offered revolutionary rhetoric, but nothing else.

It was to anticipate the arrival of Russian reinforcements under General Suvorov that, on to October, a badly outnumbered Košciuszko attacked General Fersen’s corps at Maciejowice, southeast of Warsaw. Košciuszko’s army was defeated; he was captured. On 4 November, Suvorov’s troops stormed the poorly fortified suburb of Praga, across the Vistula from Warsaw. Around т0,000 people were massacred. Warsaw capitulated the following day. The Rising was over.

This time, Vienna would not miss out. It had begun to send troops across the Polish border in June. Catherine was now ready to include the Austrians. On 3 January 1795, Austrian and Russian diplomats signed a fresh treaty of Partition in St Petersburg, carving up what remained, and assigning a share to Prussia. Russia, once again, took the greatest share. The Austrian portion, smaller than Prussia’s, was economically far more valuable. Prussia’s would include Warsaw - which would now become a frontier town - but it would have to disgorge Krakow. Catherine was determined to make it quite clear to her allies that it was by her grace and favour that scraps of Poland were being thrown to them. Not that the Prussians were grateful - their relations with Austria had deteriorated so much during their joint offensive against France that the two powers were on the verge of war. It was not until 24 October that a furious Frederick William agreed to accept what he had been given and to hand Krakow over to the Austrians. Prussia was too exhausted to do otherwise.

Since the Rzeczpospolita no longer existed, parliamentary ratification of the recent proceedings was irrelevant. On 25 November

1795, Stanislaw August Poniatowski signed an act of abdication. He died in St Petersburg on 12 February 1798. On 12 January

1796, a tripartite convention between Russia, Austria and Prussia in St Petersburg insisted on ‘the need to abolish everything which can recall the memory of the existence of the kingdom of Poland’. The experiment in noble-democracy was over, a resounding failure. What lived on was the resentment of a noble-nation which, despite being torn apart, still felt itself a coherent unity and which, in its final years, had experienced a new pride in cultural and political resurrection.

PART II

POLAND, AFTER 1795

4

Challenging the partitions, 1795-1864

Poland’s cultural and civic revival during the reign of Stanislaw August Poniatowski, impressive as it was, was unable to save the Polish state from annihilation in 1795. If anything, by challenging Russia’s domination, the Polish reformers had precipitated the very disaster they were desperate to avoid. One can only speculate whether greater patience would have enabled a compliant Poland to survive intact into the nineteenth century under the watchful eye of Empress Catherine’s successors, or whether the Napoleonic wars would have dragged Poland, in any case, into some disastrous international quagmire. One way or the other, it is difficult to imagine the Poles escaping unscathed from the upheavals of the Napoleonic period.

Be that as it may, from 1 795 until the end of the First World War the extensive lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth remained politically divided and under foreign rule. This long period of partition, punctuated with several heroic but unsuccessful bids for independence, did not destroy Polish high culture or many of the traditions and values of the szlachta, out of whose ranks was to emerge the modern Polish intelligentsia, or indeed the Roman Catholicism which distinguished most Polish-speakers from Protestant Prussians and Orthodox Russians, if not Catholic Austrians. Nevertheless, the different patterns of political, economic and social development of the separate parrs of historic Poland were to accentuate regional differences, while the emergence of several mutually exclusive ethnic and linguistic nationalisms was to add a further twist to the complex issue of national identity. The answers to the questions ‘Who is a Pole?’ or ‘What is Poland?’ would be very different in 1918 from those given in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Not surprisingly, the recreation of a Polish state after 1918 was to be no easy task.