Partitions of Poland

Between 1772 and 1795 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was divided among three neighbors. In the first partition of 1772, Russia, Prussia and Austria each took border provinces, about a third of the Commonwealth's land and population. In the second, in 1793, Russia and Prussia took more, and in the third, in 1795, all three took what was left. Poland disappeared as an independent state, and Poles lived under three different rulers until 1918.¹²

The Commonwealth was large but weak. Its nobility defended its liberties, including the liberum veto, which let a single deputy block a Sejm session, and elective kings made it easy for foreign courts to buy influence. Catherine the Great of Russia kept Poland under her protection and put her former lover Stanislaw August Poniatowski on the throne in 1764. A revolt by Polish nobles in the Bar Confederation, and Russia's wars against the Ottomans, led Frederick the Great of Prussia and Austria's Maria Theresa to demand compensation, and the powers agreed to the first partition. Poland then reformed, and its Constitution of 3 May 1791 was one of the first modern written constitutions in Europe.¹³⁴

Russia, alarmed by reform and the French Revolution, invaded in 1792 with the help of conservative Polish nobles in the Targowica Confederation, and the second partition followed in 1793. Tadeusz Kosciuszko led an uprising in 1794, which was crushed, and in 1795 the remaining territory was divided. Poles kept their culture and language through the nineteenth century, rebelling in 1830 and 1863, and the state was recreated after the First World War. The partitions are often named as an early example of great powers dividing a smaller country.¹²³