THTvE SLAVONC1\1C AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW Volume 82, Number I January 2004 Political Ideas Among the Polish Nobility in the Eighteenth Century (to I 788) JERZY LUKOWSKI REPORTING on the collapse of yet another Polish Parliament in the autumn of 1729, the English minister George Woodwardobserved:'I am glad I was here in time to see the hurlyburly,for I do believe there is nothing in ye whole worldlikeit [.. .] 'Tiscertainwe hada mostextraordinary sceneat Grodno,whichI shall rememberas long as I live. Travellers maytalk,but thosethathavenot seen a PolishDyet can'thavean ideaof it;I do believeit to be beyond anythingin the world.One may very well say that confusionis there expressed tothelife.' In a sermon preached three years later, in September 1732, at the inaugurationof the Sejm, canon StanislawSienie'nskiclearlyagreed 'it to be beyond anythingin the world',though froma somewhatdifferent perspective.He compared the parliamentto the Holy Trinity,likening the king,Augustus11(i 697- I733), to God the Father,the lower house, or Chamber of Envoys, to God the Son and the upper house, the Senate, to the Holy Spirit. The breakdownof the previous two Sejmy only served to inspire the good canon's magniloquent rhetoric, as he enhanced his analogy by calling on the Crucifixionand the Resurrection .2 The Polish godhead remained stubbornlyentombed. The Sejm Jerzy Lukowski is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern History at the University of Birmingham. ' Woodward to George Tilson, undersecretary of state at the Northern Office, i and 28 September 1729. Public Record Office, State Papers 88/35 [unpaginated]. 2 St B. N. Sienieniski, Dzie1ona wuyobrateniey podobieuistwo BOGA, SgymKorony Polskiey.... WVarsaw,1733 [unpaginated]. A similar analogy was made by W. WCgierski, Classicum JI4Holnosci Po/skiej wQ ruinieOjczyzny.. ., n. pl., 1703 [unpaginated]. 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POLISH POLITICAL IDEAS ended amid procedural wrangles even before debates had properly begun. Eighteenth-century Poland was an object of bewilderment, if not contempt, to outside observers. The French philosophe and natural scientist,Charlesde LaCondamine(I 701-74), summedupaswellas anyone the prevailingview, when he asserted,in I760, 'Le gouvernement de Pologne, sa constitution, sa maniere de faire les 6lections, de tenir les Dietes, est si absurdequ'elle ne peut subsister'.3On the other hand, the loudly and continuouslyvoiced rhetoricof the Polishnobility about citizen rights and responsibilities,their mistrustof royal power, their attachment to liberty and equality could also be used to criticize the seemingly inexorable trend to ever-growing monarchic power in continental Europe, as the marquis de Jaucourt did in his article 'Pologne' in the Engcjclop&die.4 But overall, European opinion was hostile, agreeing with Montesquieu that 'the independence of each individual is the purpose of the laws of Poland, and what resultsfrom this is the oppression of all'.5There was to be no shortage of feeling that the Poles had largely brought the First Partition of I772 on themselves. They could certainly not complain of any lack of advice, particularly from the French, on how to repair their numerous deficiencies. As for warnings that the Polish-Lithuanian state was doomed to collapse and partition, these were almost as old as the Commonwealth itself.6 The valuesespousedby Poland'spoliticalculturehad to be palatable to a broad majorityof (at any one time) between 15o,ooo and 200,000 adult males of the Polish nobility, the szlachta (there were also some extremely powerful and influential females whom it was wise not to Quoted in J. Fabre, Stanislas-Auguste Poniatoweski et l'Europedes Lumieres,Paris, I95>2 (hereafter, Fabre, Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski), p. 84. 4 'Pologne', Enc)clopedie ouDictionnaire raisonnee dessciences, desarts,etdesmetiers f. . AIls en ordre etpubliepar.A/.Diderot[.. . et lM. d'Alembert, 17 vols, Paris, 175 I -65, 12, pp. 924--25. 3 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, TheSpiritoftheLaws,trans. and ed. A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller and H. S. Stone, Cambridge, I989, p. I56. See also the comments by J. A. Gierowski, 'Rozklad panistwowosci szlacheckiej wvczasach saskich', in T. Chynczewska -Hennel et al. (eds), Alifdzy wschodem a zachodem.Reczpospolita XVI-XVIII w. Studia ofiarowane Zbignieewowi 4dojcikowi w siedemdziesiqt(l roczniciurodzin, WVarsaw, 1993, p. i88. 6 'Tout emissaire des lumieres en Pologne croirait manquer a sa vocation, s'il n'apportait avec lui son plan pour l'abolition du...