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The Polish-Lithuanian Republic of Nobles in the French Political Thought (1573-1795)1

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The Polish-Lithuanian Republic of Nobles in the French Political Thought (1573-1795)1 Open Political Science, 2020; 3: 231–242 Research Article Teresa Malinowska* The Polish-Lithuanian Republic of Nobles in the French political thought (1573-1795)1 https://doi.org/10.1515/openps-2020-0021 received July 1, 2020; accepted August 10, 2020. Abstract: The modern Polish-Lithuanian Republic drew the attention of many French political authors like Théodore de Bèze, Jean Boucher, Jean Bodin, Henri de Boulainvilliers, Montesquieu, Voltaire or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Sarmatian State appeared in French political literature in 1573, when the French prince Henri de Valois was elected king of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic, until 1795, when it disappeared from the map of Europe. It appeared not only in political treaties but also in pamphlets, manifestos and travel literature. This article aims at analysing this continuous presence, which constitutes a fascinating key for reading the French political debates of the modern era. Keywords: Modern republicanism; modern absolutism; mixed monarchy; modern political thought; European history; history of representations; Franco-Polish relationships. In his monography, Olivier Christin wrote about the elections in medieval and modern Europe: “It is precisely by recalling that past that we can understand some of the issues discussed today about the forms of democratic political life”2. This way, the French historian underlined the meaning of political concepts and practices inherited from the past. When talking about the electoral phenomenon in the modern era, one cannot forget the experience of the Polish- Lithuanian Republic. Yet, it seems that it was still poorly apprehended. In 2008, Marc Bélissa made an important statement concerning French eighteenth century studies: if the significance of the English or the Swedish model in the enlightenment republican thought was quite well-known in France and Europe, the influence of the Rzeczpospolita was often forgotten3. Nevertheless, in Poland some researchers, like Jan Dzięgielewski, Krzysztof Koehler, and Dorota Muszytowska, inscribed the modern Polish political and institutional solutions among the honourable achievements of European thought4. One possible way to evaluate the real impact of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic on the formation of other countries’ political concepts is to analyse its place in their political literature. Stanisław Kot followed this approach in his work Rzeczpospolita Polska w literaturze politycznej Zachodu (Kraków 1919) in which he presented different nations’ opinions about the Polish-Lithuanian political system. Despite him basing his study on a wide range of sources, the author himself admitted that “researchers will always add supplements”. Indeed, some historians did continue this research thread. For the 18th century, one can quote Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe… (1994), Ryszard Wołoszyński’s Polska w opiniach Francuzów o dawnej Polsce… (1964) or Marc Belissa’s, Jerzy Michalski’s, and Maciej Forycki’s works about Poland in the enlightenment republicanism5. There are also fragmentary works about 16th-century political 1 The article is part of the project nr 2016/23/N/HS3/00376 financed by the National Science Center (Poland). It presents a synthesis of the project’s results. Because of the limited space, I had to limit the footnotes to a minimum. The full bibliography of the presented research is available in open access online: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02427199 2 O. Christin, Vox populi. Une Histoire du vote avant le suffrage universel, Paris 2014, p. 12. 3 M. Bélissa, La République polonaise dans le débat politique des Lumières in G. Bonnot de Mably, Du gouvernement et des lois de la Pologne [1770-1771], Paris 2008, p. 8. 4 See for instance: J. Dzięgielewski, K. Koehler, D. Muszytowska (ed.), 1573. Our ancestor’s achievements made 440 years ago, Warszawa 2014. 5 L. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford 1994. R. Wołoszyński, Polska w opi- niach Francuzów w XVIII wieku. Rulhière i jego współcześni, Warszawa 1964. M. Bélissa, La République polonaise dans le débat politique des *Corresponding author: Teresa Malinowska, University Adam Mickiewicz, Poznań, Poland, E-mail: [email protected] Open Access. © 2020 Teresa Malinowska, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. 232 Teresa Malinowska thought, like Jean-Marie Le Gall’s article about Polish tolerance in French 16th-century debate6. The 17th century was much less studied from a political literature point of view. Existing works almost exclusively focus on travel literature7. Despite these achievements, it seems that, after Stanisław Kot, there was no other long-term study encompassing the whole modern era. The PhD thesis La République de Pologne dans les imprimés français (1573-1795). Penser les relations entre gouvernants et gouvernés (Paris-Nanterre 2019) aims at re-examining this research field in the long-term perspective. It analyses the image of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic in more than 150 French printings from 1573 to 1795. The expansion of the source material, thanks to the addition of previously unknown French writings, completes and sometimes revises some statements made at the beginning of the 20th century by the Polish historian (and then his followers). The chosen approach is also slightly different than Stanisław Kot’s. The Polish historian wrote: “my intention was not to make a study on Western political literature, […] but to analyse critically the judgements of this literature about the Rzeczpospolita”8. Here, the opinions of French thinkers about Poland are fully considered in the context of concrete French political debates and ideas. Hence, my research is a “study on Western political literature” examined from the point of view of the presence of the Polish theme. In this way, we can accurately determine the context in which the Polish example was quoted, which in turn allows answering two key research questions: whether the Republic of Nobles had any impact on the development of French political ideas and what that was; and how the image of the Republic itself was shaped by the changes of the Gallic political thought. As a consequence, the purpose of the research is to show the evolution of French representations of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout two centuries, not only in the context of events in Poland or Franco-Polish diplomatic relationships but mainly in the context of French disputes on the form of government. This issue is even more fascinating in that, at the dawn of modern times, the Kingdom of France and the Polish- Lithuanian Republic chose two totally different political paths. Whereas in France, the Valois and Bourbon dynasties promoted and introduced a centralized and absolute royal power at the expense of conciliatory and representative institutions, the Polish-Lithuanian nobility actively participated in the political life of the country and controlled the monarchical power. Elections, regular convocations of the Parliament (Sejm) or–from the mid-17th century–the liberum veto perfectly illustrated this Polish-Lithuanian divergence from France, where unconditional heredity, absolute royal power, complete obedience, and loyalty were highly predicated and asserted, and where the General Estates had never been convoked between 1614 and 1789. The analysis is enabled by the intense relations that France and Poland maintained throughout the modern era. The study begins at the election of Henri de Valois to the Polish throne in1573, a founding moment of diplomatic and cultural relations between the two states. This episode ended in 1575 with the deposition of Henri III in Poland after he ascended to the French throne in 1574. In 1645, Marie de Gonzague, princess of Nevers, married the king of Poland Ladislas IV and then his brother and successor John II Casimir. In 1674, John III Sobieski ascended the throne with his French wife Marie-Casimire de La Grange d’Arquien. In 1725, it was a Polish woman, Marie Leszczynska, who became queen of France by marrying Louis XV. After the war of succession of Poland (1733-1738), her father Stanislas Leszczynski, the doubly elected and deposed king of Poland, was made duke of Lorraine and Bar. These marriages created Franco- Polish courts, where the elites of the two countries had repeated contacts. In the second half of the 18th century, French diplomacy encountered many difficulties in Poland and Lithuania. Yet, cultural exchange did not diminish. During the Bar Confederation in 1768-1772, an unprecedented dialogue emerged between the Poles and French reformers such as Mably, Rousseau or the physiocrats, without forgetting Voltaire’s support to the politics of Catherine II of Russia. The partitions of Poland (1772, 1792, 1795), the constitution of May 3 1791, and the Kosciuszko Insurrection (1794-1795) also elicited many comments in France, where at the same time the revolution undermined the foundations of the Ancien Régime. These steady contacts left many testimonies in the form of political treaties, pamphlets, press articles, memoirs, and travel diaries, which constitute the source material of the study. Lumières, op. cit. M. Forycki, L’Anarchie polonaise : le système institutionnel républicain de la Pologne nobiliaire dans la pensée des Lumières, Poznan-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines 2001. J. Michalski, Rousseau i sarmacki republikanizm, Warszawa 1977. J. Michalski, Sarmacki republika- nizm w oczach Francuza: Mably i konfederaci barscy, Wrocław 1995. 6 J.M. Le Gall, La tolérance polonaise au prisme de l’intolérance française au XVIe siècle, „Renaissance and Reformation”, 2003/27, p. 53-84. 7 See for instance: T. Chynczewska-Hennel, Rzeczpospolita XVII wieku w oczach cudzoziemców, Warszawa 1994. W. Pawłowsla, Wiedza o Polsce we Francji w XVII-tym wieku, Poznań 2014. 8 S. Kot, Rzeczpospolita Polska w literaturze politycznej Zachodu, Kraków 1919, p. VIII. The Polish-Lithuanian Republic of Nobles in the French political thought (1573-1795) 233 The aim of this article is to summarize the image of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic in these texts to show its role in French political thought.
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