Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History

Chapter 20: Stanisław Konarski (1700–1772)

PARt 9 the Polish Catholic Enlightenment 20 R Stanisław kon a rs k i (1700–1772 ) A Polish Machiavelli? JERzy LUkoWSkI Hieronim konarski was known invariably by the first name of Stanisław, which he received when he entered the order of Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools (commonly known as the Piarists). He was born on 30 September 1700, at żarczyce in what is now central Poland. His little village was situated toward the southwest corner of the largest state in Europe after Russia, sprawling eastward from the German lands, taking in what is now most of Poland, all of Lithuania, and much of Belarus and Ukraine, a gigantic patchwork which had been united under the Lithuanian Jagiellon dynasty after 1386. 433 434 Jerzy Lukowski the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century the impressive extent of konarski’s Poland, officially known as the Commonwealth of the two Nations (Rzeczpospolita), comprising both Poles and Lithuanians, masked uncomfortable realities. Between 1648 and 1667, it had been crippled by rebellions and wars with its neighbors , which had cumulatively inflicted at least as much damage as the thirty years’ War had on Germany. In 1700, it was about to be dragged into the Great Northern War, that prolonged duel between Charles XII of Sweden and Peter the Great of Russia, which was to come to an end only in 1721, ultimately inflicting at least as much damage again. Underlying so many economic and demographic losses were the strains of a dysfunctional governance. the commonwealth belonged to its nobility or szlachta, some 6 percent of a population of perhaps ten million. Some twenty aristocratic clans dominated, but half the nobility were little more than landless and often illiterate paupers . konarski himself, the youngest of eleven children, came from an impoverished family. one thing united the szlachta: they alone constituted the free citizens of their commonwealth. the szlachta alone had the right to participate in public life and to legislate, through their parliament, the Sejm. they could not be arrested unless caught in flagrante and could be sentenced only after due process. taxation required their assent. they largely elected their own judiciary. they held a near-monopoly on landownership and complete jurisdiction, including powers of life and death, over the serfs who worked their private estates. their local parliamentary assemblies , the sejmiki, elected envoys (posłowie) to the Sejm and furnished them with binding (in theory) instructions. the properties they owned in towns were largely exempt from municipal jurisdiction. the szlachta constantly feared the loss of their freedoms, a fear they identified with, and directed principally against, their own monarchs, for much the same reasons as monarchs throughout Europe were so often identified by privileged nobilities, corporations, and traditional estates as the greatest threat to liberty. So history was their guide, and in particular the history of ancient Rome, whose stories, thought, and Stanisław konarski (1700–1772) 435 rhetoric constituted the major plank of their education. only unceasing vigilance and corrections during interregna kept the threat in check. their monarchy was elective; all adult male nobles could vote in the election, which, moreover, had to be unanimous; monarchs were forbidden to work for the election of a successor during their lifetimes—a formal interregnum followed the death of each monarch , not only to elect a successor but to review the reign of the deceased incumbent, to put right any illegalities, and to lay down conditions under which the new king would rule. the political bonds that kept the commonwealth together were loose. Since the Union of Lublin of 1569, it had possessed in its Sejm a single national parliament, but that parliament was always weak: shackled by mandatory instructions and hobbled by powerful regionalisms , the Sejm had never developed into a dynamic, dominating forum in the manner of the parliament of England. It was more concerned with the preservation of noble freedoms than with the sculpting of the state and the framing of legislation. It had always mistrusted majority voting, for majorities could all too easily be corrupted by the king’s extensive powers of patronage. therefore, the Sejm had always sought to reach decisions by consensus, and preferably always by an overwhelmingly large consensus. In 1652 this collective preference had reached the point where a single parliamentary envoy could succeed in bringing proceedings to a halt. Poland’s liberum veto had...