Patriotic Party - Background

Background

The reform movement were responding to the increasingly perilous situation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which only a century earlier had been a major European power and the largest state on the continent. By the early 17th century, the magnates of Poland and Lithuania controlled the state and they ensured that no reforms would be carried out that might weaken their privileged status (the "Golden Freedoms"). The peculiar parliamentary institution of the liberum veto ("free veto"), in effect since 1652, had in principle permitted any Sejm deputy to nullify all the legislation that had been adopted by that Sejm. Thanks to this device, deputies bribed by magnates or foreign powers, or simply content to believe they were living in some kind of "Golden Age", paralyzed the Commonwealth's government for over a century . The government was near collapse, which gave rise to the term "Polish anarchy".

The Enlightenment had gained great influence in certain Commonwealth circles during the reign (1764–95) of its last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski. As a result, the King had proceeded with cautious reforms such as the establishment of fiscal and military ministries and a national customs tariff. However, the idea of reforms in the Commonwealth was viewed with growing suspicion not only by the magnates, but also by neighboring countries, which were content with the Commonwealth's contemporary state of affairs and abhorred the thought of a resurgent and democratic power on their borders.

The first of the three successive 18th-century partitions of Commonwealth territory that would eventually blot Poland from the map of Europe shocked the inhabitants of the Commonwealth, and made it clear to progressively minded individuals that the Commonwealth must either reform or perish. Even before the First Partition, a Sejm deputy had been sent to ask the French philosophes, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to draw up a tentative constitutions for a new Poland. Mably had submitted his recommendations in 1770–71; Rousseau had finished his (Considerations on the Government of Poland) in 1772, when the First Partition was already underway.

Supported by the more progressive magnates, such as the Czartoryski family, and King Stanisław August Poniatowski, a new wave of reforms was introduced. A major opportunity for reform seemed to present itself during the "Great" or "Four-Year Sejm" of 1788–92, which opened on 6 October 1788. Events in the world now played into the reformers' hands. Poland's neighbors were too occupied with wars – Prussia with France, Russia and Austria with the Ottoman Empire – and with their own internal troubles, to intervene forcibly in Poland. The new alliance between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Prussia seemed to provide security against Russian intervention.