19. THE CATACLYSM OF REVOLUTION, 1789

Poland Extinguished, 1793–1795

Figure 19.3: MAP 19.3 The Second and Third Partitions of Poland, 1793 and 1795

Figure 19.3: In 1793, Prussia took over territory that included 1.1 million Poles while Russia gained 3 million new inhabitants. Austria gave up any claims to Poland in exchange for help from Russia and Prussia in acquiring Bavaria. In the final division of 1795, Prussia absorbed an additional 900,000 Polish subjects, including those in Warsaw; Austria incorporated 1 million Poles and the city of Cracow; Russia gained another 2 million Poles. The three powers determined never to use the term Kingdom of Poland again. How had Poland become such a prey to the other powers?

France had survived in 1793 in part because its enemies were busy elsewhere. Fearing French influence, Prussia joined Russia in dividing up generous new slices of territory in the second partition of Poland (Map 19.3). As might be expected, Poland’s reform movement became even more pro-French. Some leaders fled abroad, including Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746–1817), an officer who had been a foreign volunteer in the War of American Independence and who now escaped to Paris. In the spring of 1794, Kościuszko returned from France to lead a nationalist revolt.

The uprising failed. Kościuszko won a few victories, but when the Russian empress Catherine the Great’s forces regrouped, they routed the Poles and Lithuanians. Kościuszko and other Polish Patriot leaders languished for years in Russian and Austrian prisons. Taking no further chances, Russia, Prussia, and Austria wiped Poland completely from the map in the third partition (1795). “The Polish question” would plague international relations for more than a century as Polish rebels flocked to any international upheaval that might undo the partitions. Beyond all this maneuvering lay the unsolved problem of Polish serfdom, which isolated the nation’s gentry and townspeople from the rural masses.