Great Sejm - Origins

Origins

The reforms of the Great Sejm responded to the increasingly perilous situation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, only a century earlier a major European power and indeed the largest state on the continent. By the 18th century the Commonwealth's state machinery became increasingly dysfunctional; the government was near collapse, giving rise to the term "Polish anarchy", and the country was managed by provincial assemblies and magnates. Many historians hold that a major cause of the Commonwealth's downfall was the peculiar parliamentary institution of the liberum veto ("free veto"), which since 1652 had in principle permitted any Sejm deputy to nullify all the legislation that had been adopted by that Sejm. By the early 18th century, the magnates of Poland and Lithuania controlled the state – or rather, they managed to ensure that no reforms would be carried out that might weaken their privileged status (the "Golden Freedoms"). The matters were not helped by the inefficient monarchs elected to the Commonwealth throne around the start of the 20th century, nor by neighboring countries, which were content with the deteriorated state of the Commonwealth's affairs and abhorred the thought of a resurgent and democratic power on their borders.

The Enlightenment European cultural movement had gained great influence in certain Commonwealth circles during the reign of its last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski (1764–95), which roughly coincided with the Enlightenment in Poland. In 1772, the First Partition of Poland, the earliest of the three successive 18th-century partitions of Commonwealth territory that eventually removed Poland from the map of Europe, shocked the inhabitants of the Commonwealth, and made it clear to progressive minds that the Commonwealth must either reform or perish. In the last three decades preceding the Great Sejm, there was a rising interest among progressive thinkers in constitutional reform. Even before the First Partition, a Polish noble, Michał Wielhorski, an envoy of the Bar Confederation, had been sent to ask the French philosophes Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to offer suggestions on a new constitution for a new Poland. Mably had submitted his recommendations (The Government and Laws of Poland) in 1770–1771; Rousseau had finished his Considerations on the Government of Poland in 1772, when the First Partition was already underway. Notable works advocating the need to reform and presenting specific solutions were published in the Commonwealth itself by Polish-Lithuanian thinkers such as:

• Stanisław Konarski, founder of the Collegium Nobilium (On the Effective Conduct of Debates in Ordinary Sejms, 1761–1763);
• Józef Wybicki, composer of the Polish National Anthem (Political Thoughts on Civil Liberties, 1775, Patriotic Letters, 1778–1778);
• Hugo Kołłątaj, head of the Kołłątaj's Forge party (Anonymous Letters to Stanisław Małachowski, 1788–1789, The Political Law of the Polish Nation, 1790); and
• Stanisław Staszic (Remarks on the Life of Jan Zamoyski, 1787).

Also seen as crucial to giving the upcoming reforms their moral and political support were Ignacy Krasicki's satires of the Great Sejm era.