The Constitution of 3 May 1791, titled the Government Act, was a written constitution for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that was adopted by the Great Sejm that met between 1788 and 1792. The Commonwealth was a dual monarchy comprising the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; the new constitution was intended to address political questions following a period of political agitation and gradual reform that began with the Convocation Sejm of 1764 and the election that year of the Commonwealth's last monarch, Stanisław August Poniatowski. It was the first codified, modern constitution (possessing checks and balances and a tripartite separation of powers) in Europe and the second in the world, after that of the United States.
The Constitution sought to implement a more effective constitutional monarchy, introduced political equality between townspeople and nobility, and placed the peasants under the government's protection, mitigating the worst abuses of serfdom. It banned pernicious parliamentary institutions such as the liberum veto, which had put the Sejm at the mercy of any single deputy, who could veto and thus undo all the legislation adopted by that Sejm. The Commonwealth's neighbours reacted with hostility to the adoption of the Constitution. King Frederick William II of Prussia broke the Prussian alliance with the Commonwealth, joining with Imperial Russia under Catherine the Great and the anti-reform Targowica Confederation of Polish-Lithuanian magnates, to defeat the Commonwealth in the Polish–Russian War of 1792.
The 1791 Constitution was in force for less than 19 months. It was declared null and void by the Grodno Sejm that met in 1793, though the Sejm's legal power to do so was questionable. The Second and Third Partitions of the Commonwealth (1793, 1795) ultimately ended Poland's and Lithuania's sovereign existence until the close of World War I in 1918. Over the ensuing 123 years, the legacy of the 1791 Constitution helped sustain Polish and Lithuanian aspirations for the eventual restoration of their sovereignty. In the words of two of its principal authors, Ignacy Potocki and Hugo Kołłątaj, the 1791 Constitution was "the last will and testament of the expiring Homeland".
Background
Polish constitutionalism can be traced to the 13th century, when government by consensus and representation was already well established in the young Polish state. The emergence of parliamentary bodies, the sejm and sejmiki, followed in the first half of the 16th century. By the 17th century, Poland's legal and political tradition was characterized as parliamentary institutions and a system of checks and balances on state power, which was itself limited by decentralization. The idea of a contractual state embodied in texts like the Henrician Articles and the Pacta conventa; the concept of individual liberties; and the notion that the monarch owed duties to his subjects, can be noted. This system, which primarily benefited the Polish-Lithuanian nobility (szlachta), came to be known as the "nobles' democracy".
End of Golden Age
The 1791 Constitution was a response to the increasingly perilous situation in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had been a major European power only a century earlier and was still the largest state on the continent. In the 1590s, at the peak of the nobles' democracy, King Sigismund III Vasa's court preacher — the Jesuit Piotr Skarga — had condemned the weaknesses of the Commonwealth. In the same period, writers and philosophers such as Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski and Wawrzyniec Grzymała Goślicki, and the egzekucja praw (Execution-of-the-Laws) reform movement led by Jan Zamoyski had advocated political reforms. In 1656, in what came to be known as the Lwów Oath, Sigismund's son King John II Casimir Vasa made a solemn vow on behalf of the entire Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that he would free the Polish peasants "from the unjust burdens and oppression." As he was struggling with the Sejm, in 1661 John Casimir — whose reign saw highly destructive wars and obstructionism by the nobility — correctly predicted that the Commonwealth was in danger of a partition by Russia, Brandenburg and Austria.
As the Sejm failed to implement sufficient reforms, the state machinery became increasingly dysfunctional. A significant cause of the Commonwealth's downfall was the liberum veto ("free veto"), which, since 1652, had allowed any Sejm deputy to nullify all the legislation enacted by that Sejm. As a result, deputies bribed by magnates or foreign powers — primarily from the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and France, which had an ongoing revolution — or deputies who believed they were living in an unprecedented "Golden Age" paralysed the Commonwealth's government for over a century. The threat of the liberum veto could only be overridden by the establishment of a "confederated sejm", which was immune to the liberum veto. Declaring that a sejm either constituted a "confederation" or belonged to one was a contrivance prominently used by foreign interests in the 18th century to force a legislative outcome.
By the early 18th century, the magnates of Poland and Lithuania controlled the state, ensuring that no reforms that might weaken their privileged status (the "Golden Freedoms") would be enacted. The ineffective monarchs who were elected to the Commonwealth throne in the early 18th century, Augustus II the Strong and Augustus III of Poland of the House of Wettin, did not improve matters. The Wettins, used to the absolute rule practiced in their native Saxony, tried to govern through intimidation and the use of force, which led to a series of conflicts between their supporters and opponents — including another pretender to the Polish-Lithuanian throne, King Stanisław Leszczyński. Those conflicts often took the form of confederations — legal rebellions against the king permitted under the Golden Freedoms — including the Warsaw Confederation (1704), Sandomierz Confederation, Tarnogród Confederation, Dzików Confederation and the War of the Polish Succession. Only 8 out of 18 Sejm sessions during the reign of Augustus II (1694–1733) passed legislation. For 30 years during the reign of Augustus III, only one session was able to pass legislation. The government was near collapse, giving rise to the term "Polish anarchy", and the country was managed by provincial assemblies and magnates.
Other reform attempts in the Wettin era were led by individuals such as Stanisław Dunin-Karwicki, Stanisław A. Szczuka, Kazimierz Karwowski and Michał Józef Massalski; these mostly proved to be futile.
The Enlightenment greatly affected the thinking of influential Commonwealth circles during the reign (1764–1795) of its last monarch, Stanisław II August Poniatowski. The King was an "enlightened" Polish magnate who had been a deputy to several Sejms between 1750 and 1764 and had a deeper understanding of Polish politics than previous monarchs. The Convocation Sejm of 1764, which elected Poniatowski to the throne, was controlled by the reformist Czartoryski Familia and was backed by Russian military forces invited by the Czartoryskis. In exchange for passing decrees favorable to them, the Russians and Prussians let the confederated Convocation Sejm enact a number of reforms, including the weakening of the liberum veto and its no longer applying to treasury and economic matters. A more comprehensive reform package was presented by Andrzej Zamoyski, but opposition from Prussia, Russia, and the Polish nobility thwarted this ambitious program, which had proposed deciding all motions by majority vote.
In part because his election had been imposed by Empress Catherine the Great, Poniatowski's political position was weak from the start. He proceeded with cautious reforms, such as the establishment of fiscal and military ministries and the introduction of a national customs tariff, which was soon abandoned due to opposition from Prussia's Frederick the Great. These measures had already been authorized by the Convocation Sejm; more legislative and executive improvements inspired by the Familia or the King were implemented during and after the 1764 Sejm.
The Commonwealth's magnates viewed reform with suspicion and neighboring powers, content with the deterioration of the Commonwealth, abhorred the thought of a resurgent and democratic power on their borders. With the Commonwealth Army reduced to around 16,000, it was easy for its neighbors to intervene directly — the Imperial Russian Army numbered 300,000 and the Prussian Army and Imperial Austrian Army had 200,000 each.
Russia's Empress Catherine and Prussia's King Frederick II provoked a conflict between members of the Sejm and the King over civil rights for religious minorities, such as Protestants and Greek Orthodox whose positions, which were guaranteed equal with the Catholic majority by the Warsaw Confederation of 1573, had worsened considerably. Catherine and Frederick declared their support for the szlachta and their "liberties", and by October 1767 Russian troops had assembled outside Warsaw in support of the conservative Radom Confederation. The King and his adherents had little choice but to acquiesce to Russian demands. During the Repnin Sejm (named after the unofficially presiding Russian ambassador Nicholas Repnin) the King accepted the five "eternal and invariable principles" which Catherine had vowed to "protect for all time to come in the name of Poland's liberties": the election of kings, the right of liberum veto, the right to renounce allegiance to and raise rebellion against the king (rokosz), the szlachta's exclusive right to hold office and land, and landowners' power over their peasants. Thus all the privileges ("Golden Freedoms") of the nobility that had made the Commonwealth ungovernable were guaranteed as unalterable in the Cardinal Laws. The Cardinal Laws and the rights of "religious dissenters" passed by the Repnin Sejm were personally guaranteed by Empress Catherine. By these acts of legislation, for the first time, Russia formally intervened in the Commonwealth's constitutional affairs.
During the 1768 Sejm, Repnin showed his disregard for local resistance by arranging the abduction and imprisonment of Kajetan Sołtyk, Józef A. Załuski, Wacław Rzewuski and Seweryn Rzewuski, all vocal opponents of foreign domination and the recently proclaimed policies. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had legally and practically become a protectorate of the Russian Empire. Nonetheless, several minor beneficial reforms were adopted, political rights of the religious minorities were restored and the need for more reforms was becoming increasingly recognized.
King Stanisław August's acquiescence to the Russian intervention encountered some opposition. On 29 February 1768, several magnates — including Józef Pułaski and his young son Kazimierz Pułaski (Casimir Pulaski) — vowing to oppose Russian influence, declared Stanisław August a lackey of Russia and Catherine, and formed a confederation at the town of Bar. The Bar Confederation focused on limiting the influence of foreigners in Commonwealth affairs, and being pro-Catholic was generally opposed to religious tolerance. It began a civil war to overthrow the King, but its irregular forces were overwhelmed by Russian intervention in 1772.
The defeat of the Bar Confederation set the scene for the partition treaty of 5 August 1772, which was signed at Saint Petersburg by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The treaty divested the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth of about a third of its territory and population — over 200,000 km2 (77,220 sq mi) and 4 million people. The three powers justified their annexation, citing anarchy in the Commonwealth and its refusal to cooperate with its neighbors' efforts to restore order. King Stanisław August yielded and on 19 April 1773, he called the Sejm into session. Only 102 of about 200 deputies attended what became known as the Partition Sejm. The rest were aware of the King's decision and refused. Despite protests from the deputy Tadeusz Rejtan and others, the treaty — later known as the First Partition of Poland — was ratified.
The first of the three successive 18th century partitions of Commonwealth territory that would eventually remove Poland's sovereignty shocked the Commonwealth's inhabitants and made it clear to progressive minds that the Commonwealth must either reform or perish. In the thirty years before the Constitution, there was a rising interest among progressive thinkers in constitutional reform. Before the First Partition, a Polish noble, Michał Wielhorski was sent to France by the Bar Confederation to ask the philosophes Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Jean-Jacques Rousseau for their suggestions on a new constitution for a reformed Poland. Mably submitted his recommendations Du gouvernement et des lois en Pologne (The Government and Laws of Poland) in 1770–1771, whereas Rousseau finished his Considerations on the Government of Poland in 1772 when the First Partition was already underway. Works advocating the need for reform and presenting specific solutions were published in the Commonwealth by Polish–Lithuanian thinkers: On an Effective Way of Councils or on the Conduct of Ordinary Sejms (1761–1763), by Stanisław Konarski, founder of the Collegium Nobilium; Political Thoughts on Civil Liberties (1775) and Patriotic Letters (1778–1778), by Józef Wybicki, author of the lyrics of the Polish National Anthem; (Anonymous Letters to Stanisław Małachowski (1788–1789) and The Political Law of the Polish Nation (1790), by Hugo Kołłątaj, head of the Kołłątaj's Forge party; and Remarks on the Life of Jan Zamoyski (1787), by Stanisław Staszic. Ignacy Krasicki's satires of the Great Sejm era were also seen as crucial to giving the constitution moral and political support.