Introduction

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/10/2011, SPi Introduction As the eighteenth century closed, devout Catholics must have wondered whether the apocalyptic time of trial had begun, and whether they would survive it. Rome was occupied by the forces of the French Republic. Pius VI died in French captivity on 29 August 1799. The Church in France remained rent by schism. For all the signs of a popular religious revival, especially among women, non-juring priests were proscribed, juring priests had been compromised, and countless communities were deprived of religious ministry. The secular Revolutionary calendar was still in force. ‘Liberation’ had been meted out to the monks and nuns of France, and to most of those encountered by French soldiers elsewhere. The calamity of dechristianization in 1793–4 had sobered up almost all advo- cates of a more ‘philosophical’, ‘reasonable’,or‘enlightened’ Catholic religion. The allegations of a philosophic and masonic plot to destroy throne and altar, made by Augustin Barruel, Edmund Burke, and others, now seemed more plausible than at the beginning of the Revolution, or before its outbreak. The campaigns against the Jesuits in the Iberian monarchies and France, the upheavals inflicted upon the Church in the Habsburg lands by Joseph II, and the experiments of his brother Leopold in Tuscany were all tarred with the diabolical spirit of the eighteenth century. To travesty Lenin’s phrase, to be an enlightened Catholic on the vigil of the nineteenth century was to appear to be either a fellow-traveller or a useful idiot.1 While Catholic monarchs could not be relied upon to defend the Church (even the martyred Louis XVI had wavered), the heterodox powers of the North— Britain, Prussia, and Russia—had gained in strength. The Polish-Lithuanian Com- monwealth, once Europe’s largest Catholic state, had been partitioned among Orthodox Russia, Protestant Prussia, and Josephist Austria. Most at risk were about four million Uniate souls, whom Catherine II had begun to wrench from their obedience to Rome and drive into the Russian Orthodox fold. From the perspective of Rome, the demise of Poland was a lamentable blow to the faith, but attempts to resurrect her by revolutionary means would be worse. With the papacy assailed by modernity, so it would remain throughout the nineteenth century. 1 See O. Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford, 1981), chs. 5–7; N. Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1789–1804 (London, 2000), part IV; id., Christianity and Revolutionary Europe c. 1750–1830 (Cambridge, 2002), 211–59; D. Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 2003), part III; D. M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York, 2001), chs. 1–3. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/10/2011, SPi 2 Introduction Although, from the papal point of view, the rot had set in well before the French Revolution, in practice a chasm separated the states of the 1780s from those of the 1820s. Early modern polities, with few exceptions, were dominated by the monarchy, the Church, and the nobility. These three principal components of Europe’s Ancien Régime were bonded into a mutually supportive embrace, although everywhere they grappled for position. Even Joseph II had no intention either of abolishing nobility or of undermining religion. Until Joseph’s sole reign at least, in Catholic Europe the Church’s role was significantly more autonomous than in Protestant states or in Orthodox Russia. The position of most monarchs with regard to their nobilities strengthened between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, although historians have long since contrasted the practical limitations of royal ‘absolutism’ with its ideological pretensions. Although administration grew more bureaucratic, royal courts remained key theatres for the interplay between monarchy, Church, and nobility (retaining part of that role even in Josephist Austria and Frederician Prussia). The character of these links changed during the eighteenth century, but they remained vital until the French Revolu- tion.2 Then, during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, many Catholic monarchs and nobles sacrificed the Church, especially the regular clergy, usually in order to engorge themselves. Despite the partial restorations and expiations of 1815, the relationship was never quite the same again. Many nineteenth-century clergymen would have echoed the bitter reproach of Father Pirrone to Prince Salina: ‘you nobles will come to an agreement with the Liberals, and yes, even with the Masons, at our expense, at the expense of the Church.’3 In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this triangular relationship was more heavily weighted towards the nobility than elsewhere. This book seeks to explain the policies adopted by Poland’s noble citizens towards the Catholic Church in 1788–92, shortly before their Commonwealth was destroyed. In doing so, it shows how the balance between nobility, Church, and monarchy tilted first one way, and then another. Perhaps surprisingly, both throne and altar were strengthened by the challenge of noble republicanism, and some of the consequences of those shifts still affect Poland today. 1. THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH The Commonwealth of the Two Nations, Polish and Lithuanian, dismembered in 1772, 1793, and 1795, differed greatly from the Polish and Lithuanian states reborn in 1918, and still more so from those that reclaimed their sovereignty in 1990/91. At Lublin in 1569, after nearly two centuries of uneasy dynastic union, 2 See J. Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe: Ritual, Politics and Culture under the Ancien Régime 1500–1750 (London, 1999); M. Schaich (ed.), Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 2007). A classic study of a relationship between the monarchy, the Church, and the nobility is R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700: An Interpretation, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1984). 3 G. Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard [1958], trans. A. Colquhoun (London, 1998), 30. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/10/2011, SPi Introduction 3 the Kingdom or Crown of Poland (Corona Regni Poloniae) and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were joined into a federal polity. They shared an elective monarch and a parliament, or sejm. Laws, armies, ministries, and other offices remained separate. The political system was based on consensus.4 The Comonwealth was essentially her numerous nobility, the szlachta.5 After the extinction of the principal branch of the native Piast dynasty in 1370, Angevin and Jagiellon kings of Poland procured the succession of their heirs with concessions to the nobility. By the early sixteenth century the szlachta had gained the rights to consent to new taxes and new laws, and freedom from imprisonment without trial. By the middle of the century, they had won religious liberty as well. By degrees, these liberties became the share of Lithuanian and Ruthenian boyars. A self- confident political culture emerged, steeped in the ancient Roman republic, while claiming descent from the valiant Sarmatians who had defied the Romans. Nobles were ipso facto citizens; other pretensions to citizenship were rejected. Clergymen were citizens of the Commonwealth only if they were noble-born. The monarch, the senate, and the chamber of envoys together constituted the Estates of the sejm, in a self-consciously Aristotelian forma mixta. The ‘aristocratic’ element was the senate, which had emerged from the late medieval royal and grand ducal councils. Senators were appointed by the king for life. The element of politea, sometimes impolitely called democracy, was provided by the ‘knightly Estate’ or non-senatorial nobility. Its envoys (posłowie) were elected by local assemblies, or sejmiks. Although other ‘estates’ were often spoken of, they had no acknowledged political status. The Polish clergy were not the First Estate; they were represented in the Estates solely by their bishops, who ranked first in the senate, but were a small minority within it. The introduction of a fully elective throne following the death in 1572 of the last Jagiellon, Sigismund Augustus, weakened the monarchy further. His successors could not declare war, raise taxes, despatch diplomatic missions, or even marry without their leading subjects’ consent. Yet the monarch retained prerogatives such as the right to command the armies in wartime, summon the sejm, preside in the senate, nominate senators, ministers, and many other officials and dignitaries, and distribute thousands of Crown estates (królewszczyzny, apper- taining to the office of starosta), to the ‘deserving’. The targeted use of these powers kept the richest citizens—the magnates—from becoming overmighty. Until the 1640s a precarious constitutional balance was maintained, the Commonwealth prospered, and fought off her enemies. Thereafter, weakened by decades of warfare on her own soil, the Common- wealth sickened.6 Magnates grew in importance at the expense of the monarchy and middling szlachta alike—although the political outcome was debilitating 4 An accessible introduction is D. Stone, The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795 (Seattle, WA, 2001). 5 See R. I. Frost, ‘The Nobility of Poland-Lithuania, 1569–1795’, in H. M. Scott (ed.), The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ii, Northern, Central and Eastern Europe (London, 1995), 183–222. 6 For a cogent thesis of the Commonwealth’s military decline see R. I. Frost, The Northern Wars 1558–1721: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe (Harlow, 2000). OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/10/2011, SPi 4 Introduction rivalry rather than stable oligarchy. The inquisitive, enterprising, optimistic, often fractious, but generally open-minded culture of the Renaissance gradually gave way to an exuberant, but also conformist, xenophobic, and increasingly morbid Baroque. The principle of consensus at the sejm hardened into the liberum veto, which allowed a single envoy to curtail the proceedings, and nullify all legislation agreed until that point.

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