Stanisław August Poniatowski

Stanisław August Poniatowski
King of Poland
King of Poland
Predecessor	August III the Saxon
Issue
with Elżbieta Szydłowska Stanisław Grabowski Izabela Grabowska Aleksandra Grabowska with Catherine II of Russia (informal) Anna Petrovna with Magdalena Agnieszka Lubomirska (informal) Konstancja Zwanowa, Michał Cichocki
House	Poniatowski
Father	Stanisław Poniatowski
Mother	Konstancja née Czartoryska
Born	17 January 1732(1732-01-17) Wołczyn, present day Belarus
Died	12 February 1798(1798-02-12) (aged 66) Saint Petersburg, Russia
Burial	St. John's Cathedral, Warsaw
Signature

Stanisław II August Poniatowski (born Count Stanisław Antoni Poniatowski;^[1] 17 January 1732 – 12 February 1798) was the last King and Grand Duke of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1764–95). He was the son of Count Stanisław Poniatowski, Castellan of Kraków, and Princess Konstancja Czartoryska;^[2] brother of Michał Jerzy Poniatowski, (1784–94), Primate of Poland; and uncle to Prince Józef Poniatowski, (1763–1813).

Royal titles

English translation of the Polish text of the 1791 Constitution: Stanisław August, by the grace of God and the will of the people King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania and Duke of Ruthenia, Prussia, Masovia, Samogitia, Kiev, Volhynia, Podolia, Podlasie, Livonia, Smolensk, Severia and Chernihiv.^[3]

Biography

Poniatowski was born in 1732 at Wołczyn, (now Belarus).^[1] By the age of twenty, in 1752, as a Sejm deputy, he had attracted attention with his oratory.

He owed his career ultimately, however, to his family connections with the powerful Czartoryski Family, who in 1755 sent him to Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, in the service of British ambassador Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams.^[4] The same year, through the influence of Russian Empress Elizabeth and Chancellor Bestuzhev-Ryumin, he joined the Russian court as ambassador of Saxony.^[5]

At Saint Petersburg he met the twenty-six-year-old future Empress Catherine Alexeievna (Catherine the Great).^[6] She was irresistibly drawn to the handsome, brilliant young Polish nobleman, for whom she forsook all other lovers.^[6] In 1755 he was appointed to the office of Stolnik Litewski and later he became Starosta of Przemyśl.^[7]

Election of Stanisław August Poniatowski (detail), Bernardo Bellotto.

In October 1763, upon the death of Poland's King August III, negotiations began regarding who should be elected king. After a coup d'état on 7 September 1764, supported by Russian troops, the ambitious 32-year-old Poniatowski was elected King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.^[8]

The formal coronation took place in Warsaw on 25 November 1764. The new King's uncles in the "Familia" would have preferred another nephew, Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski on the throne, but Czartoryski had declined to seek the office.

Stanisław August, as he now styled himself, combining the names of his two immediate royal predecessors, or "Ciołek" (bull calf, as he was derisively referred to in reference to his Coat-of-Arms), inaugurated economic changes by supporting the Familia's reform program until 1766, when he fell out with his uncles.^[9]

In 1768 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth effectively became a protectorate of the Russian Empire.^[10] As king, Poniatowski supported the Russian army's repression of the Bar Confederation between 1768-72.^[11] In 1770 the Council of the Bar Confederation had proclaimed him dethroned. In 1771 he was kidnapped by Bar Confederate sympathizers and briefly held prisoner outside of Warsaw.

Although he protested the first partition of the Commonwealth (1772), he was powerless to do anything about it, and in the face of implacable opposition from the Polish magnates.^[12]

The violent Jacobin excesses of the French Revolution as from 1789 would even lead to very much conservative political positions of the new bourgeoisie in many European countries, (France itself, Russia, Austria - Hungary, Germanic States, Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, Poland "tied up" to Russia till 1918 or 123 years, etc.) well till no least than 1848 or even much later in many of these countries.

Moreover, Poniatowski was obliged to place his reliance in Russia's ambassador, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg.

Stanisław August Poniatowski by Giovanni Battista Lampi, after 1788.

In 1783/1784 he married morganatically his lover Elżbieta Szydłowska (1748–1810), whose first husband Jan Jerzy Grabowski was general inspektor wojsk litewskich, and by whom he had an only son, born before marriage, Count Stanisław Konopnicy-Grabowski (1780-Dresden, 1845).

Poniatowski son married firstly Cecylia Dembowska (19 December 1787 - 17 January 1821 ), and secondly May 8, 1822 Countess Julia Zabiełło; he left issue, his descendants were the Counts Konopnicy-Grabowski. Acting in concert with him, he hoped to strengthen his authority and bring about essential reforms.

It was only during the Four-Year Sejm of 1788-1792 that he threw in his lot with the reformers, centered in the Patriotic Party, and with them co-authored the Constitution of 3 May 1791.^[13]

Poniatowski's eloquent speech before the Sejm on taking an oath to uphold the newly adopted Constitution moved his audience to tears. Shortly thereafter, the Targowica Confederation was formed by Polish nobility to overthrow the Constitution.^[14] The confederates aligned with Russia's Catherine the Great, and the Russian army entered Poland, starting the Polish-Russian War of 1792.

After a series of battles, Poniatowski, upon the advice of Hugo Kołłątaj and others, acceded to the Confederation. This undermined the operations of the Polish Army, which under Tadeusz Kościuszko and the King's own nephew, Prince Jozef Poniatowski, had been performing prodigiously on the battlefield. The war was ended, and Russia and Prussia undertook the Second partition of Poland in 1793.

Stanisław August Poniatowski by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, 1797.

King Stanisław August remains a controversial figure. He was accused by some of striving for absolutism, of doing away with the liberties of the szlachta (Polish nobility), of desiring the downfall of the Roman Catholic Church; by others, of weakness and subservience, even of treason, especially after he had joined the Targowica Confederation.

Nevertheless, he did accomplish much in the realm of culture and education. He founded the School of Chivalry (otherwise "Corps of Cadets"), which functioned 1765-1794 and whose alumni included Tadeusz Kościuszko; and the Commission of National Education (1773), the world's first national ministry of education. In 1765 he helped found the Monitor, the leading periodical of the Polish Enlightenment, and the Polish national theater. He hosted his famous "Thursday dinners", the most brilliant social functions in the Polish capital. He supported the establishment of manufactures and the development of mining. He remodeled the Royal Castle in Warsaw, and erected the elegant Royal Baths complex in Warsaw's most romantic park. He created a numismatic collection, a picture gallery, and an engravings room. His plan to create an even larger painting gallery in Warsaw was interrupted by the destruction of Poland; nonetheless, most of the paintings he had ordered can now be seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London.

After the final, Third Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Stanisław August was forced to abdicate (25 November 1795) and left for Saint Petersburg, Russia. There, a virtual prisoner, he subsisted on a pension granted to him by Empress Catherine the Great, and died deeply in debt. He was buried at the Catholic Church of St. Catherine in St. Petersburg.

In 1938 his remains were transferred to a church at Wołczyn, his birthplace, and in 1995, to St. John's Cathedral in Warsaw, where, on 3 May 1791, he had celebrated the adoption of the Constitution he had co-authored and/or endorsed. Among his living relatives is Elena Poniatowska, a famous Mexican journalist.

Ancestors

See also

• Ambassadors and envoys from Russia to Poland (1763–1794)
• History of Poland (1569-1795)
• History of philosophy in Poland

References

Bibliography

• Jan Kibinski, Recollections of the Times of Stanislaw Augustus (Polish), Kraków, 1899.
• Mémoires secrets et inédits de Stanislas Auguste, Leipzig, 1862.
• Stanislaw and Prince Joseph Poniatowski in the Light of Their Private Correspondence, in French, edited in Polish by Bronislaw Dembinski, Lviv, 1904.
• R.N. Bain, The Last King of Poland and His Contemporaries, 1909.
• Adam Zamoyski, The Polish Way: a Thousand-Year History of the Poles and Their Culture, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1994.
• Adam Zamoyski, Last King of Poland, New York, Hippocrene Books, 1997.
• Poniatowski's diaries and letters, held for many years in the Russian ministry of foreign affairs, appeared in the January 1908 Vestnik Evropy [Herald of Europe].

External links

• Poniatowski, in: The Historical Geography of the Ciołek clan AD 950-1950.
• Biography at www.poland.gov.pl
• Stanisław August w Gdańsku

Stanisław August Poniatowski House of Poniatowski Born: 17 January 1732 Died: 12 February 1798
Regnal titles
Preceded by August III the Saxon	King of Poland 1764–1795	Succeeded by Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor as King of Galicia and Lodomeria
		Succeeded by Frederick Augustus I of Saxony as Duke of Warsaw
		Succeeded by Frederick William III of Prussia as Grand Duke of Posen
		Succeeded by Alexander I of Russia as King of Poland
	Grand Duke of Lithuania	Succeeded by Alexander I of Russia

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh ed.). Cambridge University Press.