The Commonwealth therefore continued in a state of suspended animation, with no central administration beyond that which could be paid for from the king’s personal revenue, and no organ of government other than the Senatus Consulta, which had no writ. Its internal and external affairs were as much the business of Russia, and to a lesser extent of Prussia and Austria, as its own. The three powers looked on its territory more and more as a sort of noman’s-land. Russia moved her troops about it as though it were a training ground, while Prussian and Austrian armies took short cuts through it, in times of war even setting up depots and garrisons in convenient Polish towns.
TWELVE
With the abeyance of Poland as an active political organism, its history becomes the story of the few men and women who still believed in its viability as a state and struggled to restore it. Their story cannot be told in terms of wars, treaties and statutes, only in terms of ideas and social mobilisation.
A desire for constitutional reform was never quite extinguished, and it was first translated into action by Stanisław Konarski (1700-73), a Piarist priest who had studied in Paris and Turin. With the backing of Bishop Andrzej Załuski in 1732 he began publishing all the legislation passed since the fourteenth century in a compendium entitled
Konarski’s friend Bishop Załuski was an avid collector of books and manuscripts, a taste he shared with his brother Józef, and in 1747 the two pooled their collections, bought a palace in Warsaw, and donated to the nation the first public reference library on the European mainland. Its original holding grew, aided by a Sejm decree obliging printers to donate the first copy of any book to designated public libraries, to over 500,000 volumes when it was looted by the Russians in 1795 (to become the basis of the Russian Imperial Library).
At the political level, the regeneration of the Polish state was led by another two brothers, the princes Michał and August Czartoryski, supported by their brother-in-law Stanisław Poniatowski and a small group of relatives. They were united by an urgent desire, not devoid of personal ambition, to, as they saw it, rescue the Commonwealth. They worked as a team and were generally referred to simply as ‘the family’,
Two years before the birth of Prince Adam Kazimierz, the Familia had produced another child, Stanisław Antoni Poniatowski. Although she could hardly entertain royal aspirations for him, his mother Konstancja Czartoryska did take great care with his upbringing, and he was sent abroad to complete his education. By the time he returned to Poland aged twenty, he had visited Vienna, Paris and London, was fluent in six languages, and had developed a wide range of tastes and interests. In 1755 he went to St Petersburg to stay with the British minister, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams, with whom he had struck up an intimate friendship. Sir Charles introduced him to the twenty-six-year-old Sofia Augusta Friederika of Anhalt-Zerbst, Grand Duchess Catherine Alekseievna, and the two became lovers. This was to weigh heavily on events.