Partitions of Poland

The Partitions of Poland were three successive annexations, in 1772, 1793 and 1795, by which Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg monarchy divided the territory of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth between them. After the third partition the Commonwealth ceased to exist, and no sovereign Polish state returned until 1918, 123 years later.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Commonwealth was one of the largest states in Europe. It was an elective monarchy in which the nobility held most of the power. Its parliament, the Sejm, operated under the liberum veto, which allowed a single deputy to block legislation and dissolve a session. Foreign courts learned to exploit this by bribing deputies, and by the eighteenth century the state's army and finances were weak.

Russia in particular treated the Commonwealth as a client. In 1764 Catherine the Great secured the election of her former favourite, Stanisław August Poniatowski, as king. Russian pressure for rights for Orthodox and Protestant minorities, and for keeping the old political system, provoked a noble revolt, the Bar Confederation, in 1768. Its defeat after four years of fighting left the country at the mercy of its neighbours.

Fearing that Russian gains against the Ottomans would upset the balance of power, Frederick the Great of Prussia proposed compensating the three eastern powers with Polish land. Russia, Prussia and Austria agreed in 1772. The Commonwealth lost roughly 30 per cent of its territory and perhaps a third of its people. Prussia took Royal Prussia, which linked its scattered lands and gave it control of the lower Vistula trade; Austria took Galicia in the south; and Russia took territory in the east. The Sejm was pressed into ratifying the losses in 1773.

The shock prompted a period of reform. In 1791 the Great Sejm adopted the Constitution of 3 May, often described as Europe's first modern written constitution, which abolished the liberum veto and strengthened the monarchy. Conservative magnates opposed to the reforms formed the Targowica Confederation and invited Russian intervention. Russian troops invaded in 1792, Prussia abandoned its alliance with Poland, and the reforms were undone. In 1793 Russia and Prussia took further large areas in a second partition, which a reduced Sejm meeting at Grodno was forced to approve.

In 1794 Tadeusz Kościuszko led a national uprising that won early successes, including the Battle of Racławice, but was crushed by Russian and Prussian armies within the year. After Russian forces stormed the Warsaw suburb of Praga in November 1794, with heavy loss of civilian life, resistance collapsed. In 1795 the three powers divided what remained, and Stanisław August abdicated.

Polish hopes turned to France. In 1807 Napoleon created the Duchy of Warsaw from Prussian and later Austrian shares, but after his defeat the Congress of Vienna redrew the lines once more. Most of the duchy became the Kingdom of Poland, known as Congress Poland, under the Russian tsar, while Prussia kept Poznań and Austria kept Galicia; Kraków became a small free city. Risings against Russian rule in 1830–1831 and 1863–1864 were defeated. Polish language and culture survived in all three zones, though under different degrees of pressure. An independent Poland was restored only at the end of World War I, when all three partitioning empires had collapsed.

Our 1715 map shows the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth before the partitions, and the 1783 map the reduced Poland after the First Partition. By our 1800 map Poland has disappeared, divided between the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg monarchy.