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The Third of May 1791

Norman Davies

Compared to the events in the USA or in France, the Polish Revolution was rather mundane. The scene in the Senate Chamber of the Royal Castle in Warsaw on 3rd May 1791, was tense enough but not in itself specially prcmati c. Some two hundred members of Parliamept were meeting on the second day after the Easter recess, and a noisy crowd, twenty or thirty thousand strong, was listening expectantly in the gallery and beneath the windows. They were witnessing a sort of peaceful, parliamentary coup d’état. The parliamentary agenda had been changed without notice, and, in the absence of many potential opponents, a bill for the radical reform of the country’s government was being pushed through. The bill’s promoters, who included the King, the Speaker and self-stled “Patriotic Party,” had been preparing in ill-kept secrecy. Its opponents, who had met the previous night in the Russian Ambassador’s residence to discuss armed intervention, had been caught off balance. When they raised points of order against the breach of parliamentary procedures, the Speaker told them: “This is a day of revolution, and all formalities must be suspended.” The King (who was to prove the last king of Poland) was present with an armed retinue. When his throne was mobbed by supporters, eager for the royal assent, he swore an oath proffered by the Bishop of Cracow, then spoke the words, Juravi Domino, non me poenitebit. “Przysięgałem Bogu, żałować tego nie będę.“ (I have sworn to God; I shall not regret it.) The company then trooped out to the cathedral for the new Constitution to receive the Church’s blessing. At the same time, a group of oppositionists headed for the Warsaw courthouse to lodge a legal protest. It was the sort of controversial day which might have taken place in any of the few countries which possessed a parliamentary system at the time. It would probably not be so well remembered if it had not led first to war with Russia, and within four years to the desitruction of the entire State. For the Constitution sparked a crisis which was to cut short Poland’s independent political history until the twentieth century.

The Constitution of 3 May was the culmination of the work of the Great Parliament which had been in almost constant session for the past three years. The extensive reform programme of that Parliament had been conceived by the King as a corollary to his intended revision of the Republic’s humiliating relationship with its neighbors. Ever since the disaster of the First Partition of 1772, he had been hoping to re-establish an independent position in foreign affairs, and, after the death of Frederick the Great in 1786, and the succession of a more sympathetic Prussian King, he had felt things moving his way. In 1787, when he met the Empress Catherine at a galley on the Dnieper at Kaniów, he had urged the Russians to accept Poland-Lithuania as a genuine partner and ally. He had hoped to put an end to the decades of chaos and resentment resulting from Russia’s constant interference in the Republic’s affairs. At Kaniów, however, he had received a rude shock. The Empress turned him down flat - indicating that she had no interest either in a reformed Poland or in a Polish alliance. She wanted Poland-Lithuania to remain a Russian protectorate. But the parliamentary reform programme went ahead regardless. From the start, therefore, the work of the reformers proceeded in defiance of Russia’s wishes, and was seen by all concerned as a process designed to shake off Russian domination of Poland. The recovery of independence, desired by the King and reformers, but opposed by a clique of pro-Russian magnates, lay at the center of the operation.

At the same time the Great Parliament had been turned into a confederation, so that it could operate by majority voting. This procedure was aimed at defeating the liberum veto, the nefarious practice retained at Russian insistence ever since 1717, and regularly used by St. Petersburg’s Polish agents to block unwelcome changes. The liberum veto was cynically recalled by Russian and Prussian propaganda as evidence of Poland’s unfitness to govern itself. In reality, it had only survived thanks to the treaties of guarantee which had held the Republic in subjection for seventy years.

Logically enough, the first celebration of the Constitution took place on the first anniversary, that is on 3 May 1792. The streets of Warsaw were lined with troops in gala uniforms. The bands and banners of the city guilds supplied the music and the decorations. A procession to the Church of the Holy Cross was headed by ministers, senators, and by delegations from distant towns and palatinates. Amidst the ringing of bells, and shouts of Vivac rex, and patriotic songs, the King arrived in a crystal coach to deliver his speech: “Prawcdziwy i jedyny cel utworzenia nowej formy rządu nie był inny, tylko żeby, ile po ludzku być może, wszyscy narodu polskiego współziomkowie równie byli uczescnikami udziahi wolnośći i ubezpieczenia własnoŚci swoich...” (The real and exclusive aim of this new form of government was none other than to ensure, as far as is humanly possible, that all fellow-citizens of the Polish nation should in equal measure share in the common liberties and the security of their property.)

After a solemn Mass, the King laid the foundation stone of the Church of Divine Providence (which was destined never to be built). For even as they celebrated in Warsaw, a Russian Army was preparing to invade, and to crush the Constitution and all it stood for. Less than two weeks later, the Russians crossed the frontier, accompanied by a group of Polish collaborators. That invasion began the cycle of events which was to destroy the Polish-Lithuanian state.

Three May 1792 proved to be the last occasion for many years when the Constitution could be openly celebrated. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth-century Warsaw has been ruled by alien powers - by Prussians, Tsars, Nazis, or Communists, none of whom were eager to permit the anniversary to be publicly remembered. In the last 200 years, the anniversary celebrations of 3 May have been permitted on less than one quarter of the possible occasions. It is a fair barometer of Poland’s subjugation. In our century, they took place, interestingly enough in 1916, 1917 and 1918 under German Occupation, from 1919-1939 during Poland’s briefinter-war independence; and for a couple of years after the Second World War. After that, they were totally suppressed by the Communist Government until revived, under pressure from Solidarity, in 1981.

So, one is dealing with a Constitution that never really took off, that was suppressed almost as soon as it was enacted. It was an infant strangled in its cradle. That is why it raised such emotions, why it has become one of the prime symbols amidst all of Poland’s other terrible oppressions.

The Constitution of 3 May needs to be discussed in the context of the country which produced it. The Commonwealth, of Poland-Lithuania - the Rzeczpospolita - was a very different country from the Poland of today. Like the United Kingdom of England and Scotland, it was a dual state which had passed from a personal union of crowns to a voluntary constitutional union. In 1791, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had been joined together for more than four hundred years, that is longer than England and Scotland. It was no passing aberration, no Saisonntaat as the Prussians were apt to say. Indeed, it was much older, and better established than the neighboring Kingdom of Prussia.

The Polish Commonwealth was also very large. Suffice it to say, that its population of 11 million was twice that of Great Britain, and its territory of roughly 1 million km² was similar to that of France or of Texas. Prior to the rise of Muscovy, it had been absolutely the largest state in Europe.

More importantly, Poland-Lithuania was not a democracy of the modern type, but a democracy nonetheless, with ancient roots and strong principles. It was a democracy of nobles, who elected their King and who undertook their deliberations both in provincial assemblies and in the central Diet or Parliament. Contrary to what its enemies said, it was a democracy which worked - at least till the era of its terminal decline. If it resembled any of its neighbors, it was less like the great Russian Republic of Novgorod, destroyed by the Muscovites, and more like the Holy Roman Empire on the other side in Germany. Its noble citizens enjoyed far-reaching liberties which included the Principle of Unanimity and the Right of Resistance. The former invalidated any law that was not guaranteed by all. The latter laid down that any ruler who broke the laws could be legally opposed. The fundamental privileges of the nobles, their Magna Charra, dated from 1374, their freedom from arrest, their Habeas Corpus, from 1425. Their statute from 1454 conceded that no new tax would be levied, and no army raised without the consent of the dietines. Their constitution of Nihil Novi daded from 1505 ruled that no new laws could be introduced without the consent of both chambers of the Parliament. The final Act of Union between Poland and Lithuania took place at Lublin in 1569.

One would like to add some nuances to this abbreviated, not to say rose-tinted picture, but one has also to say that even the basic facts do not always find their way into general textbooks. To those who point out, quite correctly that these noble democrats of Poland-Lithuania were serf-owners, and few historians would deny them the title of democrat for that. Serfdom in east and central Europe like slavery in the southern states, repulsive though it is to modern ideas, was a fact of life which Poland shared with all its neighbors - Germany, Austria, Russia. One thing looks slightly odd. Among all those thousands of American historians working on their early constitutional period, hardly anyone has noticed the very obvious similarities between the USA and Poland-Lithuania.

Old Poland was a multinational, multidenominational and multicultural society. Multiculturalism is a common term in modern politics; and one cannot suggest that Poland-Lithuania was somehow a forerunner of diversification. It is not entirely irrelevant to enquire how a pre-modern state sought to cope with the numerous national, religious and linguistic groups in its midst. It did so in ways, which for their day, were rare, if not exceptional.

At a time when most countries in Europe were intent on creating a modern, centralized and bureaucratic state, Poland-Lithuania persisted in maintaining its traditions of local and communal autonomy. At a time when most of Europe was racked by murderous religious wars, Poland-Lithuania succeeded in practicing a far-reaching, though by no means perfect degree of religious toleration.

The various communities involved make a long list. The vernacular languages were, in order of their frequency: Polish, Ruthenian (that is, in modern parlance, Ukrainian and Byelorussian), Yiddish, Lithuanian, German, Tatar, Armenian.

The official languages in order of importance, were: in the Kingdom of Poland, Latin, Polish, and with time an inimitable blend of Latin and Polish known as macaroni. in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to 1600, ruski (that is, Old Byelorussian), later, as in the Kingdom, Latin and Polish: and finally, in the cities of Royal Prussia, German and Latin.

The main religious communities included the following: Roman Catholicism (which was the religion of state), Calvinist Protestant (which attracted a large sector of the nobility in the late sixteenth century), Lutheran Protestant (in the German cities), the Unitarian Polish Brethren, Greek Catholics or Uniates (who appeared in force in the Ruthenian population after 1596), Orthodox Christians including refugee Old Believers from Russia, Armenian Christians, Moslems, Orthodox rabbinical Judaism, Chassidid Judaism (which began life in Poland, in the 1730s), Karaite Judaism, and lastly Jewish Frankism, which appeared in the 1750s. As a result, the sacred languages which were in circulation, and which were taught in the religious schools, included: Church Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Armenian, Arabic and Hebrew. What present-day Poles do not always realize: in those earlier centuries, the link between Polishness and Roman Catholicism was not so close as it became in later times, also, that Polish-speaking Roman Catholics formed barely 50% of the total inhabitants - it is impossible to say exactly because there was no census prior to the partitions.

Communal autonomy was one of the pillars of this complicated society. There were autonomous jurisdictions on the social plane where nobles, clergy, and burghers each governed their own affairs in their own assemblies, under their own privileges, and in their own law courts. And there were autonomous jurisdictions of different sorts relating to particular regions, cities, or religious groups. A couple of examples must suffice - the city of Gdansk-Danzig, and Polish Jewry.

Danzig, which was the chief port and the largest city of the Rzeczpospolita, enjoyed greater autonomy than any other comparable city in northern Europe. Having begged for incorporation into the Kingdom of Poland in the mid fifteenth century, it was granted extensive charter and liberties in 1585 by Poland’s great King, Stefan Batory who thereby ensured its loyalty for the rest of the Commonwealth’s existence. The citizens of Danzig were solidly German by language and culture, to the point where Polish visitors to the city were habitually reduced to conversing there in Latin. Yet these German Danzigers were fiercely proud of being Polish. The one person the Danzigers loved to hate was the German King of Prussia and hence Germany. That is why, when Danzig was so annexed in 1793, without their consent, they promptly rebelled.

The Jewish community of Poland-Lithuania also enjoyed far reaching autonomy. It was protected by royal charters going back to the thirteenth century, and frequently renewed. The Jews had the unconditional right to practice their religion without harassment. They governed themselves in a self-regulating kahalot “commune” in most Polish cities. They collected their own taxes; and for two hundred years, until 1764, they legislated and debated in their own parliament, the Council of the Four Lands. In an age when Jews were barred from practically every major country of Europe, most notably from Germany and Russia, Poland-Lithuania provided the one large safe haven where Jewry could survive and, generally speaking, flourish. It was the great “place of refuge,” and should not be forgotten. At least 80 per cent of all Jews alive today can trace their family origins to somewhere in Poland-Lithuania.

Of course, the old slogan “Paradise for the noble, purgatory for the Jews, and hell for the peasants” requires a detailed gloss. The realia are complicated enough.

The statutes Denon tolerandis Judaeis for example, deserve mention. Several Polish cities, including the capital, Warsaw, passed legislation against Jews residing and trading within the city walls: and that legislation is sometimes cited to suggest that Warsaw was guilty of discriminating against Jews. On the other hand, one has to recognize that the Jews were in a similar position to several other groups, such as nobles and peasants, who were also barred from residing in the city. Indeed, the great mass of the population who were serfs ad terram adscript!, tended to think of the Jews as over privileged. What is important, is to see what actually happened. In the case of Warsaw, the Jews, who were barred from the city, joined forces with the Polish nobles, who were also barred from the city, and set up a series of commercial and residential districts in the immediate vicinity of the city walls. The Noble-Jewish alliance was one of the dominant features of old Polish society. Without it, there is no way of explaining how the city of Warsaw, whilst trying to enforce a policy of not tolerating Jews, was also the center of absolutely the largest Jewish community in the world.

On the wider question of religious toleration, Poland-Lithuania had no equal. It was the only major state of early modern Europe to have a statute of universal toleration built into its fundamental laws. The act of the Confederation of Warsaw, first enacted in 1573 and many times renewed, required the King and all the nobles to settle religious differences without resorting to force. The only small group to be specifically excluded, on the insistence of the Calvinists, were the Polish Brethren, who, as Unitarians were regarded as less than Christian by the main Christian denominations. And even they were able to escape any effective persecution through the sympathy of various protective cities or magnates. It has to be said that the principle of toleration was sometimes observed in the breach; and that in the eighteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church grew more militant, more exclusive. Even so, in Poland-Lithuania there was no St. Barthelemy’s Eve, and no wars of religion. Compared with countries like Great Britain which did not fully emancipate its Catholics until 1829 and its Jews until 1860, the Polish record was impressive.

In all these questions of autonomy and toleration, there was one obvious and damaging gap - namely in Rus’, that is, in today’s Ukraine. Ukraine spent four to five centuries of its formative development first in Lithuania then in Poland- and it is that long experience which made it so very different from its fellow East Slav neighbor, Russia. It had a rich cultural identity, immense economic potential and great strategic significance. One might have expected that the supposedly democratic, and tolerant Republic would have paid attention to its interests. Yet, for a whole gamut of reasons, Ukraine was not granted the liberties which others enjoyed. The Orthodox Church of the East was never on an equal footing with Roman Catholicism, and for four decades in the early seventeenth century was actually suspended. The Uniate Greek Catholic Church to which most Ukrainians belonged after 1596, was not admitted to the episcopal benches of the Senate. The Dnieper Cossacks, who supplied the principal military force of the eastern palatinates were denied both the full autonomy and status of nobility which they much desired. As a result, after several bloody revolts, the Cossacks under Bohdan Chmielnicki launched the Rising to end all Risings in 1648. The stirring and tragic events of those years are known to all literate Poles through the historical novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz. Ten years after 1648, when a proposal emerged for the creation of a tripartite Republic, i.e. Poland-Lithuania-Ukraine, the proposal was no longer politically viable. The greater part of Ukraine, including Kiev, jumped straight from the Polish frying pan into the Russian fire, from which it is extricating itself only now. By 1791, twenty years after the First Partition, when Lwów and much of Galicia had passed to Austria, most of the Republic’s Ukrainians had long since passed under Russian control.

But to return to the Constitution. There are three salient points in its make-up that need to be borne in mind.

Firsdy, one has to remember that the once great Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania had fallen on hard times. Ever since the Cossack and Swedish wars, which killed more than a quarter of the entire population, it had been in severe economic regression. And for seventy years before 1791, it had been run as a form of Russian protectorate - reminiscent in many striking ways to the puppet states set up in eastern Europe by the Soviet Union after 1945. In 1772, it had been subjected to the first of three Partitions that dismembered it piece by piece. It had its own King and its own government, but ever since the time of Peter the Great it had been disarmed and subject to constant Russian interference and intimidation. It was in a state of anarchy that Russian policy deliberately maintained. The main aim of the new Constitution was to shake off this Russian control, and to recover genuine independence. (It was pushed through in a briefinterval when the Russian Army was preoccupied in a Turkish War.)

Secondly, the Constitution was formulated in the full flood of the Enlightenment. It introduced an enlightened, limited monarchy of the British type - that is, a hereditary but constitutional monarchy: the division of powers, a Parliament representing both halves of the state (Poland and Lithuania), a suffrage extended to both gentry and bourgeoisie. Associated legislation had brought in a strong standing army for defending it against Poland’s militaristic neighbors, and an effective civil service. To modern ears, this sounds rather unexciting. But for the time, and the place, it was well worthy of note. True enough, Poland’s Constitution had its shortcomings, especially in the social sphere. Unlike its French counterpart, it did not abolish serfdom at a stroke. In that sphere, it confined itself to bringing the serfs within the scope of the law. This was, in fact, a significant step forward. Indeed the Polish Constitution’s preference for evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary change, was one of the qualities which attracted the approval of many contemporaries. The enthusiasm of Edmund Burke, for example, whose criticism of the excesses of the French Revolution is generally taken to be the starting-point of modern conservatism, was unbounded. Burke’s approval of the Polish Revolution ought to be as well known as his disapproval of the French one. Of the Third of May, he wrote:

The means were as striking to the imagination, as satisfactory to the reason, and soothing to the moral sentiments... Humanity has everything to rejoice and to glory in—nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to suffer. So far as it has gone, it probably is the most pure...public good which ever has been conferred on mankind... Everything was kept in its place and order, but in that place and order everything was bettered. To add to this happy wonder this unheard-of conjunction of wisdom and fortune, not one drop of blood was spilled, no treachery, no outrage... Happy people if they know to proceed as they have begun.

At a later date, Karl Marx expressed a similarly fulsome opinion.

To my mind, the Constitution of 3 May is a classic product of the European Enlightenment. In political matters, the philosophes looked above all to British sources, both in the theories of John Locke and to the practices of the Westminster system; and the Polish reformers followed their lead. The pre-eminent Polish scholar of the subject, the late Emanuel Rostworowski, has described the Constitution as a compromise between the wishes of a lifelong Anglophile King, and the republican leanings of the “Patriot” leaders, who looked more to the example of the United States. This blend of British and American influences is not so common in eastern Europe to say the least. What is depressing, is that so little such information finds its way into general circulation. How often, in surveys of the European Enlightenment, can one look in vain for any mention of the Polish Constitution! How much space is given to Poland’s neighbors the so-called Enlightened Despots, such as Frederick or Catherine the Great, who were so very much more despotic than enlightened.

Thirdly, one has to keep track of the revolutionary context in Europe as a whole. Western Europe was transfixed by the extraordinary torrent of changes in France. Prussia and Austria, though not entirely hostile to Poland’s renaissance, were preparing for a French War. In eastern Europe, therefore, Russia was left virtually a free hand. The Russian Empress, Catherine the Great, had opposed the King’s schemes from the start, and in 1787, at the meeting mentioned earlier at Kaniów (near Czernobyl), she had rejected all suggestions of a Russo-Polish relationship of equal terms. What she wanted was a Poland permanently disarmed and permanently accessible to any manipulations that suited St. Petersburg’s purpose. As a result, she regarded the demarche of the Polish Parliament as a calculated insult to herself and a breach of the treaties of guarantee. From there, it was a simple step for her to denounce the Constitutionalists as Jacobins (which they expressly were not), to treat her own Polish partisans as the only legitimate group (which they were not), and to resort to force. The Russo-Polish War of 1792-3: the Second Partition, the National Rising of Tadeusz Kościuszko and the final act of vivisection of 1795, all flowed from that decision. In the preamble to the treaties of partitions, the partitioned took care to emphasize that Poland-Lithuania had been destroyed reluctantly by the will of God and for the good of mankind, because it was ungovernable.

The events of the late eighteenth century no doubt s;em pretty distant from contemporary affairs. Yet there are good reasons for keeping the past in mind when considering the extraordinary collapse of the Soviet Block in Europe in recent years, and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. Poland’s loss of its Constitution had repercussions which are still being felt today. It provided the empires of eastern and central Europe with an unnatural political monopoly which lasted throughout the nineteenth century, and which in the twentieth century, provided the focus not only European, but of world conflict.

The destruction of Poland-Lithuania was a necessary precondition for the rise of Prussia and for the expansion of Russia-in-Europe. Without the partitions, it is hard to conceive either of a Germany dominated and united by Prussia, or of the German-Russian rivalry which provided the central issue of two world wars.

By turning against the Constitution of 3 May, Catherine the Great was setting the course which underlay much of modern European history. A strong Prussia, and a bloated Russia, with a common frontier running through the heart of historic Poland, were essential elements both of the nineteenth-century peace, and of the twentieth century’s wars.

By the same token, the crushing of the Constitution denied all the nations of Poland-Lithuania any chance of political evolution within the democratic framework which an undefeated Commonwealth might have provided. One cannot say how the Rzeczpospolita might have fared in the age of Nationalism. It may well have suffered the fate of Austro-Hungary. For Poles, Lithuanians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians and Jews, however, no alternative destiny can hardly have matched the miseries which awaited them under the partitions.

By losing their statehood, the former citizens of the Republic also lost their voice, their ability to state their case in the world with authority. The world fawns on success, and the empires, who in their day were mighty successful, were able to spread their propaganda with impunity. Most historians in the West get no further than simply repeating the partitioners’ own alibis. They simply repeat that official story about the Republic being destroyed because it was “ungovernable.” The fact is, it was destroyed exactly because the Constitution of 3 May had made it governable.

An abbreviated version of a paper presented to the Department of History, Harvard University on May 15, 1991 as the August Zaleski Memorial Lecture.