The Constitution was the dawn of a better future. After 3 May 1791, there was time for supplementary laws to be passed, institutions to get to work, and for a new kind of politics to bed down during the last year of the Great Sejm. On the whole, the indications are very promising. On the…
In 1791, members of the Four-Year Sejm passed a resolution to build a Temple of Divine Providence as a votive sign of gratitude to the Constitution of 3 May. Poland’s turbulent history made it necessary to wait 225 years for the resolution to be implemented. The Poles did not forget their word. by Piotr Abryszeński…
Ewa Zientara: Why was the Bar Confederation formed? Dorota Dukwicz: This question is only seemingly easy. In 1767 the Radom Confederates hoped that Russia would help them depose the hated King Stanisław II Augustus and move away the spectre of the demands made by the non-Catholic nobility, that is, dissenters, or dissidents, as they were…
The 18th century was a time of enormous cultural, political and societal upheaval for the West. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was a period of decline that was completed by the partitions. However, reducing the 18th-century history of the Polish-Lithuanian state to a mere falling into political non-existence would be a simplified and thus false…
The first years of the reign of Stanisław II Augustus, who was elected king in September 1764, abounded in events that polarized the political life of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Close to the king, the reformatory political faction called Familia was centered on representatives of the magnate families of Czartoryski and Poniatowski. The direction of the…
[Poland’s] final royal election took place on 7 September 1764 in the village of Wola near Warsaw. In the presence of the Russian military, noblemen convened in the village elected Stanisław Poniatowski to be Poland’s new monarch. Prof. Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski talks to the Polish History Museum about what happened behind the scenes of the election,…
