On April 9, 1792, France unintentionally assisted Catherine by declaring war on Austria. The empress could now be certain that Austria would not honor its promises to Poland to support the May 3 Polish constitution. At the end of April, she informed Berlin and Vienna of her intention to invade Poland; on May 7, sixty-five thousand Russian troops crossed the Polish border, followed by another thirty-five thousand a few weeks later. Poland immediately appealed to Frederick William of Prussia on the basis of the 1790 defensive treaty. The king of Prussia behaved as Catherine had foreseen. Anticipating war with France, he betrayed his treaty obligation to assist Poland, declaring that he had not been consulted about the May 3 constitution and that this absolved him of treaty commitments. He was not, he declared, “obliged to defend a constitution drawn up without his knowledge.” Stanislaus, again playing both sides, first swore to fight for the May 3 constitution and then attempted to negotiate with Catherine by offering to give up the throne to her grandson Constantine. She was not interested. Having nothing further to offer, the Polish king ordered the Polish army to lay down its arms.
The military occupation proceeded smoothly, but Russia soon found itself caught in a thicket of political difficulties. The conservative Polish leaders Catherine was supporting fell to squabbling among themselves and proved unable to govern. By December 1792, Catherine had decided that the only solution to growing chaos was to formalize the occupation in a second partition. Frederick William was offered the areas in the north and west that Prussia had long desired. He accepted. Both Russia and Prussia declared that their actions were aimed at fighting Jacobinism in Poland. Frederick William announced that he was forced to send his army to protect Prussia from the raging Jacobinism across his border. Catherine continued to use this argument. “Apparently you ignore that the Jacobiniere of Warsaw were in correspondence with the Jacobin Club in Paris,” she wrote to Grimm. In January 1793, Russia and Prussia secretly signed a treaty that sealed the Second Partition of Poland.
Unaware of this treaty, Poland’s conservative leaders asked Catherine for assurance that she would protect the physical integrity of their country. It was too late; early in April 1793, Russian and Prussian manifestos announcing the new partition were published. Attempting to give their actions a cloak of legality, Catherine and Frederick William forced Stanislaus to leave Warsaw for Grodno, the center of the failing conservative confederation, and there to preside over a Diet that was to come to “an amiable understanding with the partitioning powers.” To help the Diet make this decision, the Russian ambassador announced that “soldiers of Her Imperial Majesty would occupy the lands of any deputy who opposed the will of the nation.” In July, members of the Diet sullenly gave consent to the new partition treaty with Russia, but, hating Prussia more, they refused to ratify the cession of territory to a nation that had betrayed them. The Diet building in Grodno was surrounded by Russian troops, and the deputies were told that no one would be allowed to leave until the partition treaty was approved. The session continued into the night. At first, the deputies shouted and refused to sit; then they lapsed into total silence and sat immobile in their seats. At 4 in the morning, the marshal of the Diet asked three times: “Does the Diet authorize the delegates to sign the treaty?” No deputy replied. Whereupon, the marshal announced: “Silence means consent.” In this manner, the partition treaty was approved by the Polish Diet.
In effect, the treaty with Russia turned newly truncated Poland into a protectorate—or, as one Polish deputy said bitterly, “a Russian province.” All domestic and foreign policies were to be submitted for Russian approval; the personnel of the government would be approved by St. Petersburg; the Polish army would be reduced to fifteen thousand men. Stanislaus kept his throne. Politically impotent, superfluous, and pathetic, he returned to his palace in Warsaw, despised by his subjects.
