Much of the manufacturing was based on small towns or large estates; peasants were often used as cheap labour, so there was little attendant growth in the urban proletariat. The only exception was Warsaw, which grew from 30,000 inhabitants in 1764 to some 120,000 in 1792, and began to resemble contemporary European capitals, not least politically. It had a large and vociferous artisan class and an increasingly influential patriciate, including such figures as the mayor, Jan Dekert, and the banker and entrepreneur Piotr Fergusson Tepper, who were to play an important role in the last decades of the century.
The transformation of Polish society did not stop there. In 1760 Chancellor Andrzej Zamoyski had freed the peasants on his estates from all labour-rents and dues, and turned all tenancies into financial transactions. Other landowners followed suit, and some went further. Ścibor Marchocki turned his estate into a peasant cooperative, while Paweł Brzostowski founded the Peasant Commonwealth of Pawłów in 1769, a self-governing village with its own school, hospital and citizen’s militia. The Polish world was indeed being recreated, as the King had wished.
His most evident and personal contribution to the process was, ironically, viewed after his death as evidence of his frivolity: his exorbitant patronage of the arts. It began conventionally enough. In his youth he had admired the architecture of France and shown interest in the excavations being carried out at Herculaneum. When he ascended the throne in 1764, Stanisław Augustus decided to rebuild the Royal Castle extensively, and commissioned Victor Louis, subsequently architect of the Palais-Royal, and several craftsmen to submit projects for the building, the interiors and the furniture. By 1767 he had run into political problems, and financial ones were not far behind, so the project was discontinued. When he resumed his building plans, the French style was abandoned in favour of the Italian, and this, combined with many English and French elements, was to be a characteristic feature of the architecture of the Stanisłavian period. He did not allow financial considerations to stand in the way. The Royal Castle was turned into a fine representational seat for the monarch and the Sejm, and barracks, customs houses, and a variety of other civic buildings gave Warsaw the attributes of a modern city.
It was largely the King’s patronage that turned Warsaw into an important musical centre once more, and this would bear fruit in the first decades of the next century. He was also instrumental in reviving painting in Poland. He employed Italians but also encouraged native talent by sending young men to study abroad or putting them to work alongside the foreigners. He spent fortunes on the arts, running up vast debts in a number of countries, but he was not merely a spendthrift aesthete. He believed in the educational role of the arts, and hoped to improve those exposed to them. He was also trying to put across a message and to leave a legacy.
Detailed correspondence between him and his artists reveals that he participated intimately in the process of creation. He gave an astonishing amount of thought to the thematic aspects of every building and painting he commissioned. While planning the Senators’ Hall of the Royal Castle, he meant to turn it into a sort of Polish hall of fame, and spent years deciding which great figures of the past should be represented, which of them should be in oil, which in marble, which in bronze, and in what relationship to each other they should be placed.
As he confided to Adam Naruszewicz, he was building for the future, attempting to leave to posterity a statement on the Polish past which would serve to inspire generations to come. It was all part of his vision of a Poland regenerated intellectually and refurbished materially. There was to be a new university in Warsaw, a
THIRTEEN
In spring 1787 Catherine the Great of Russia set off on an imperial progress through her southern dominions. As she drifted down the Dnieper greeted by crowds of subjects lined up along the banks by her minister Prince Potemkin, King Stanisław Augustus left Warsaw to greet her on the Polish stretch of the river. On 6 May the imperial galley tied up at Kaniów, and the King came aboard. With the formal greetings over, the two monarchs, who had last met as lovers nearly thirty years before, retired for a