Chapter 1
______
Poland’s Function
Polenliteratur begins with force being condoned. The first partition of Poland in 1772 removed about one third of its territory. Such seizures of land were not unknown in the eighteenth century, but when one European state took from another, it could be condemned as aggression. However, this time intellectuals interested in politics all over Europe applauded the act as progressive. It was seen as a victory of enlightened absolutism over a discredited feudal order. This applause stemmed, depending on who was speaking, from genuine conviction or from public pose. In either case, Poland received only isolated sympathy. Isabel de Madariaga summed up prevailing attitudes in western Europe this way:
No court was prepared to act on behalf of Poland, nor was public opinion much moved by her fate—in public . . . the confederate Poles had been portrayed in the English press as fanatical Catholics anxious to exterminate all Protestants and Orthodox. Edmund Burke at least saw the danger: “Poland was but a breakfast . . . where will they dine?” he exclaimed. Most of the philosophes, however, including Voltaire, approved or did not disapprove, of the partition, largely because Poland represented in the age of Enlightenment an even more fanatical Catholicism than that of Spain. Diderot himself was too deeply
Poland’s Function / 1committed to Catherine to make any public protest against what he described in private as “une offense à l’espèce humaine.”[1]
As regards the climate in Germany, there were fewer dissenting voices and the approval of the act was much more genuine.
Why was this the case? De Madariaga’s two suggestions, the Enlightenment’s hostility to Catholicism and religious fanaticism and the political opportunism of certain intellectuals, played a role in the German lands as well. However, these motivations were not the fundamental impetus behind the animus. Instead, to explain favorable German perceptions of the partitions in depth, it is necessary to explicate the sense of progress that bourgeois intellectuals shared. This “sense” aimed at not only showing how humanity was developing, but also at guiding such progress onward. If onward motion was deemed impossible, this sense expressed disappointment at progress’s frustration. In concrete terms, an appreciation of progress equaled a conviction that European states were developing into higher, more civilized entities. Supporting the partition, therefore, was meaningful to the majority of German intellectuals because it seemed to confirm that Europe was indeed breaking through to this better age.
Thus, from the start, Poland signified something beyond itself, something as yet unspecified. This chapter aims to understand what this “something” is. It will show how intellectuals developed their conceptions of themselves as enlightened critics via their perceptions of Poland, during and after the first partition. The best place to begin is to look at the eight years preceding the partition, 1764-1772, an especially bloody and troubled time for Poland, for this period is what the intellectuals had in mind when they considered the benefits of the partition.
Ethical Partition
With the death of Poland’s Saxon king August III in 1763, a struggle began over whom to elect to the Polish throne. As usual, it was a foreign power, this time Catherine II of Russia, who dominated the competition, and she decided to install a native Pole, her former lover, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, on the throne. Poniatowski was the scion of the Czartoryski family, a powerful Magnate family that had plans of its own for Poland. Although Catherine’s troops had little difficulty in placing Poniatowski on the throne in 1764, violence flared up in the Polish lands from the very start. For the next eight years Poland was torn in a three-way struggle among the Russian court, trying to impose its will on Poland; the Polish nobility, trying to maintain its independence; and the Czartoryski family, trying to use Russian power to establish its own rule. These groups took arms against one another, although the Russians, with thousands of soldiers in Poland, usually had the upper hand.
Complicating political calculations was a ploy on the part of the Russians (and Prussians, who were also a presence) to expand their opportunities for intervention in Poland by championing the rights of the non-Catholic Christians, the “Dissenters.” Conservative Poles refused to tolerate the Orthodox and Protestant communities, both for reasons of religious intolerance and because it was clear that the Dissenters’ claims were manipulated by foreign governments to wrest control away from the nobility. Introducing the religious question in Poland sparked off a series of full-scale wars, the “Wars of the Confederations,” which lasted from 1768 to 1772. These wars were a procession of catastrophes: there were battles in which the various factions attacked one another viciously and chaotically, the Ukraine exploded in a major rebellion, the bubonic plague broke out, the king was briefly kidnapped, and foreign troops devastated the parts of Poland not devastated by native ones. Given this disordered situation, the great powers had a fairly easy time in 1772 of justifying their assertion that they were stepping in to restore religious freedom and stop civil war. This was indeed a pretext, but it seemed plausible when Poland looked so hopeless.
Yet there is something too broad and ill-fitting about linking the absolutist courts’ programs and ambitions to the intellectuals’ worldview. For the topic that most occupied intellectuals was not the great power calculations of Prussia, Russia and Austria; it was the contrast between the messy, anarchic violence in Poland from 1768 to 1772 and the apparently opposing orderliness and authority following the partition. A good example of a work which portrayed the partition as an ethical antidote to anarchy is Friedrich Freiherr von der Trenck’s 1773 essay,[2] which fiercely defended the first partition. This short book was written in answer to a French pamphlet condemning the partitions. Trenck answered the condemnation with an argument of his own, then reprinted the entire pamphlet, adding numerous footnotes, refuting the author at every possible point. Trenck was one of the most eccentric and roguish figures of this periodand it is difficult to assess his true intentions in writing this book.[3] However, the arguments that he marshaled in support of the partition are a clear instance of the ways that absolutist arguments for the partition were taken up by intellectuals who themselves occupied no position of power.
Trenck’s basic argument was that the Poles themselves were better off being partitioned because a partition can only be considered a crime if the inhabitants are worse off because of it. He asked a rhetorical question designed to obviate the charge that the partitioning powers had motives ulterior to and higher than a basic desire to restore order and civilization:
If Poland, before this partition took place, was truly a happy nation where everyone themselves, and particularly every subject, enjoyed their natural and civil rights according to their relationship to their social estate. (Moreover) if this nation is presently weaker and more unhappy than it was before the last royal election, then the three powers are, with complete justice, to be proclaimed usurpers and dangerous neighbors, and then their justifications and manifestoes remain contrived, cheating conclusions of a Machiavellian reasoning.[4]
He goes on to emphasize that this is not at all the case, that the partition was good and fair. Yet Trenck’s rhetorical query tells us something more than what he thought about Poland. It also reveals what he expects from a state: a guarantee of freedom through rights and the maintenance of a just social hierarchy, which protects the citizen from every kind of tyranny by giving him/her a secure role. These things make a state happy and strong. We can see this clearly if we look at Poland, since it, the state with no rights and an unjust hierarchy, was unhappy and weak. Poland’s rulers abused their power, and history revenged itself upon them by taking their power away. This revenge of history can be seen as progress. Here is an argument that occurs again and again in Polenliteratur: because the Polish nobility used their liberty for license, they lost it altogether.
Why this misuse of freedom? It is because those who most represented Poland misunderstood it, and this misunderstanding was institutionalized in their social system. Trenck clarifies this underlying notion in a work published in 1786, VON der National-Tapferkeit, which traced the presence of bravery among the European nations. In it, Trenck grants that the Polish aristocrats, the “Polacken,” as he called them, had a virtue by which they guided their actions. It is ambition, which could make them quite brave in the pursuit of immediate gain. However (ignoring an ancient lesson), they do not recognize that ambition only becomes noble when it is attached to some higher end. Thus their ambition must degenerate into selfishness. When this flaw is projected onto the state as a whole, it shows the Poles had no conception of rational obedience. They should be considered as
a swarm of little despots, which, under the cover of freedom and patriotism, contemptuously oppress and mistreat every other estate, mutually covet each other’s status and wealth, and settle on no consistent plan for the general welfare whosoever.[5]
Therefore, taking away part of their state is not really destroying the state but is taking territory from rulers with a perverted sense of the general welfare. And in the eyes of enlightened intellectuals, general welfare was the state’s reason for being.
Such conclusions followed logically from an appropriation of the ideology of absolutism, which portrayed a state ruled by an independent nobility, i.e., a nobility that does not acknowledge the monarch as the sovereign authority, as a state devoid of public spirit. This also means that such a non-sovereign state must degenerate into petty tyranny because the noble recognizes no law but his own. Moreover, it must degenerate into weakness, since the noble as such has no patriotism but his own particular interest. This is where the sense of progress becomes evident. Trenck’s attack on Poland tells us that history has reached a point where free citizens can no longer tolerate the existence of ruling elites who consider the state to be part of an inheritance, to exploit as they please. Instead, the state is something that they must serve. It also becomes apparent that, in arguing so, he is trying to forge a compact with absolutist monarchs. Absolutist regimes taking over Poland must show themselves to be regimes that do indeed serve the general welfare, rather than their rulers’ ambitions. Furthermore, the intellectual foundation for a possible moral rejection of the partition is laid here, should some writers decide that absolutist regimes were not what they were asked to be. Celebrating the partitions was, therefore, also a way of admonishing the powers to live up to progressive ideals. However, the admonition we see here is muted and implicit. It is covered up by the outrage directed against conditions in Poland, an outrage both state and thinker can share.
The positing of this community of interest between state and thinker made the violence done to Poland into an “either-or” proposition. Either Poland would be taken over and Europe would begin its transformation into a system of humane and rational states, or Poland would continue on in its usual way, with the consequence that the evil it perpetuates will continue to fester. Why, then, should it not be allowed to fester? After all, it is the Polish aristocracy’s problem if they misrule their country. But the clinching argument for Trenck lies in the fact that he denies this. For him, Poland’s problem is that of the basic responsibility that all states hold toward their subjects. In the name of all those who are dependent, action should be taken against Poland:
Now should the neighbors of such a convulsed kingdom observe with indifferent eyes and cold blood the misery of so many millions of people and not select the most beneficial means to restrain a rebellious people, and, at the least, guard that their own subjects will not, someday, be inspired through scandalous example to exactly the same kind of outrages?[6]
Once again, violence against Poland is justified not in terms of any individual desires, but in the name of a better social order. However, this is not just any better social order. It is the better social order of bourgeois intellectuals, one where the polity finds its fulfillment in the abolition of vices and the creation of justice. It is in this respect that Trenck is emblematic. He shows us how the partitions can be imagined for the good.
Nevertheless, despite the air of conviction with which Trenck propounds his thesis, there is something unstable in his logic. It stems from his wanting to distinguish two kinds of violence: the graphic kind, which is what Poles inflict on each other, and the rational kind, i.e., not really “violence” but “actions,” which is what other nations inflict on Poland. This distinction is too tenuous and unstable to be asserted and accepted. For it to be effective, it has to be reiterated. Scholars more established and conventional than Trenck took up this task. For instance, in 1797, the editor of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, Johann Erich Biester, published a short biography of Catherine the Great.[7] It is an admiring, flattering work, and it takes interpretive effort to perceive Biester’s proposed alliance with absolutism. What is interesting about his effort is that while Biester takes the same stance on the first partition as Trenck, he does it in a calmer and ostensibly more objective manner. Biester seems aware that invective against the Poles might not justify the partition, and may even provoke the countercharge that the foreigners who intervened in Poland in the years 1764-1772 did not act in a superior manner, but with a callous disregard of virtue suspiciously reminiscent of the Poles themselves.
Thus Biester works to describe the actions taken against Poland in a way that shows them to be qualitatively different from the license that typically occurred there:
In subsequent years, the interventions in the Poles’ national freedom penetrated ever deeper, but always only as a result of salubrious protection, and, above all, as a necessary step for the foundation of religious tolerance, which certainly could only be established against the raging zealots of the Republic by force.[8]
Poland’s intolerance calls forth counterviolence, which is itself a protective measure. In order to convince us more fully, Biester adds that the “most enlightened” residents of Poland thanked Catherine for her intervention. Nevertheless, Biester’s platform still has the difficulty that there is no necessary connection between what he calls “necessary steps” and a partition. If the powers were really amputating out of concern for Poland, why did they keep what they had taken? Biester struggles with this, saying that if Europe were to form a “an allied system of states”[9]it could not remain indifferent to the violence going on in a particular country because it might spill over. Biester tried to buttress this theory, which still does not validate a partition, by invoking an abstract philosophical argument, namely that it is the person who starts the fight who is to blame for what happens. “Whoever conducts himself badly, thus loses the right to complain. He deserves what he gets. He gets what’s coming to him.”[10] This is still not enough for Biester, and he continues to elaborate on the problem for a few more pages (undermining his credibility by repeatedly insisting upon it) until he settles matters by declaring that Frederick II was responsible for the partition, but he was not to blame, and it had to happen:
What the hero and statesman of the century negotiated was realized: the powerful parties were satisfied, and this part of Europe remained quiet. Certainly, this satisfaction came at Poland’s expense, which however saw its cruel and fanatical civil war ended.[11]
Thus the powers only intervened to preserve religious freedom, the Poles asked for it, good Poles wanted it, the powers had to protect themselves, the political system demanded it, a civil war was ended, and everyone was better off because of it. What is most striking about Biester’s argumentation is not so much his ideas as the labor put into asserting their persuasiveness. He alerts us to the fact that retaining clarity on Poland required more effort than is readily apparent.
Indeed, the complexity of ostensibly simple opinions on Poland necessitates a stepping back from the sources. There are two overlapping but separate issues involved here. One is the sincerity of these authors, and the second is the justice of their positions. It is reasonable to presume that Trenck and Biester may have withheld some opinions that presented the partition in a less favorable light; however, there is no evidence to show that their true opinions contradicted their endorsement of it. Moreover, it is also clear that Trenck’s and Biester’s arguments are not as self-evident as they would have liked. Nevertheless, the claim is not that Trenck’s and Biester’s ideas were wrong, and that contradictions of them are thereby right. They each made clear-eyed observations about the conditions in warring Poland. They saw a polity which was not ruling itself, and which was taken over by governments legitimating themselves on their “good order.” The conclusions they drew from these observations followed from their premises.