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cahnBackground: The kids' school has a topic for "Unit" every trimester that a lot of their work (reading, writing, some math) revolves around. These topics range from time/geographic periods ('Colonial America') to geography ('Asia') to science ('Space') to social science ('Business and Economics'). (I have some issues with this way of doing things, but that's a whole separate post.) Anyway, for Reasons, they have had to come up with a new topic this year, and E's 7/8 class is doing "World Fairs" as their new topic.
Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*
Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*
1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-03 04:59 am (UTC)In their quest to get the full extent of the dissenter legislation passed, the Russians are recruiting among all the Poles who isn't happy with the current government: local malcontents, Poles who are now living in exile and want to come back, etc. This is a good short-term strategy, but turns out to be not the recipe for the most stable government ever, long-term. Creating a government on the basis of "everyone who's unhappy with the current government, for whatever reason," doesn't lead to a united program or a lot of great teamwork.
At the very end of 1767, thanks to the Russian army, which is camping outside Warsaw and even in Repnin's very own garden, the Protestant and Orthodox dissenters get unrestricted freedom of worship and the right to occupy any public office, except the king still has to be a Catholic. And lest you think Catherine is super motivated by enlightened considerations, Catholics still won't be allowed to convert to Orthodoxy or Protestantism. If they try, they will be exiled. Why? If there are enough Orthodox believers in Poland, Russian serfs are going to desert across the border en masse to escape their terrible lives in Russia. And if there are enough Protestants in Poland, there might be a Protestant enlightenment! And enlightenment makes for stronger kingdoms! And we can't have that.
Yes, the so-called defenders of the Enlightenment specifically want to make sure the religions they're nominally trying to protect remain a minority so there's no widespread Enlightenment.
Realpolitik, I tell you.
Meanwhile...
Turks: You said something about "the Russian army camping outside Warsaw and evem in Repnin's own garden"?? We were not aware Poland belonged to Russia.
Russian ambassador to Constantinople: Yeah, the occupation is just a temporary measure to pass this one bit of legislation. Russian troops will evacuate Poland as soon as they can.
Turks: We're waiting…
Russian ambassador: Any minute now!
Russian ambassador: Catherine, psst, things are getting pretty hot here. The Turks are very worked up about those 40,000 troops on supposedly sovereign territory.
Catherine: Okay, fine. Troops will be withdrawn in the spring. Even though it means we won't be able to enforce these new laws very well.
On March 5, 1768, the laws have been successfully rammed through the Sejm, and the Russians start organizing the pulling out of troops.
But!
On February 29, the Confederation of Bar had just been formed. This is an alternate government to the establishment, i.e., a rebellion, made up of conservatives who don't want these new, unpopular laws. Their goals are:
* Annul the alliance with Russia
* Drive out the Russians
* Defend the Catholic Church
* Defend the constitution
* Free prisoners held by Russians (bishops, senators)
Russians, when they find out: Well! Guess we can't pull those troops out of Poland after all.
So a civil war breaks out in Poland. The Poles are not very organized. Spontaneous uprisings burst out across the country, with no effective leadership, and they're doing guerrilla warfare. However, spontaneous uprisings doing guerrilla warfare across a large country are actually kind of hard to put down, so the civil war lasts 3 years. It's impossible for Poniatowski and the official government to rule the country, but the Bar confederates are also not doing it. So lots of chaos.
Now, Poniatowski doesn't *want* a civil war, he wants to find some way of resolving this peacefully, but Repnin says either Poniatowski puts down the rebels, or the Russians will, and the Russians will take no prisoners. So Poniatowski reluctantly agrees.
Plus, Poniatowski still sees his political program as necessary to keep Poland alive, and he still sees Russia as the support he needs to put his program through. So he cooperates with Russian military forces, though he refuses Repnin's insistent request that he put himself at the head of a new, Russian-backed Confederacy, 'independent' of both Bar and the Czartoryskis. Poniatowski's desire to make peace and not crush his own subjects at all cost is part of the reason the Russians have so much trouble putting down the Hydra-like uprisings by or in support of the Confederation of Bar.
Meanwhile, the Czartoryskis, who have abandoned the Russian party and joined the anti-Russian party, are not happy with their supposed puppet king's behavior. What they want is no Russian guarantee of the Polish constitution (meaning the Russians will fight to keep the liberum veto), not so many concessions to the dissenters (like no political office), and also the liberum veto has to go.
Poniatowski: So on the one hand, I have the Russians occupying Poland, which I don't like, but they're giving me the support I need for my political program.
Poniatowski: On the second hand, there are my Polish subjects, whom I feel God has called me to protect, but I have to suppress them because they're in revolt.
Poniatowski: And because things are so bad that we need a third hand, my uncles and cousins are trying to put through their own reformist political program with the help of their own conservative anti-Russian supporters, in opposition to my liberal reform program that I'm trying to put through with the help of the Russians.
Poniatowski: And you wonder why this civil war doesn't get resolved except with a partition!
Poniatowski: Omg, it's getting worse?!! Russian Cossacks have just crossed into Turkish territory, committed a massacre, and the Ottomans have declared war on Russia. This kicks off the Russo-Turkish war, 1768-1774.
Poniatowski: And an outbreak of plague in 1769? Who wrote this episode? I demand a rewrite!
Due to all this chaos, it's very easy for the neighbors to use the fighting as an excuse to start moving *their* troops in. Austria starts, in 1768 already.
MT/Joseph/Kaunitz: We just want to keep the plague out! And keep the war from coming across our borders, so what happened to the Turks doesn't happen to us!
And reoccupy some territory that we suddenly realized we have claims to.Fritz: Yeah, same! If the Austrians are doing it, I'm in!
In hindsight, this is the first step of the Polish Partition. Fritz uses the Austrian decision to occupy part of Poland as a reason to escalate and excuse his own behavior, and as a way of dragging the Austrians into the partition. "I'm only doing it because they're doing it!" "Now that we've all done it, you can't object to what I did after what you did!" "You've already taken a piece of the cake; want a bigger one so you don't begrudge me mine?"
MT: No!
Joseph: Yes!
Kaunitz: Maybe, but can we get Silesia back instead? That would rock.
Joseph: You know he's never gonna go for that.
Fritz: You know I'm never gonna go for that.
So out of the many, many, *many* (Mildred had not realized there so many) proposed partitions of different countries and land exchanges, Russia, Prussia, and Austria eventually settle on everybody getting a piece of Poland.
Fritz: Austrians, don't worry about it. It's super easy to dredge up claims to neighboring territory. Dig through your archives and you'll find something!
Austrians: Did you find any claims to the part of Poland that you want?
Fritz: Not really convincing ones, but again, as long as Russia doesn't object, who cares?
The final step of the partition was to get the Polish Sejm to sign off on it, for PR reasons in the eyes of the rest of Europe. It took seven tries, lasting until 1775, because there was a small minority of Poles committed to futile resistance. The delays, of course, meant more time for the Austrians and Prussians to go, "Wait, we want to add in this bit of land too!"
Russia cares less about territory; their goal is to get Poland to be more compliant. Compliance will benefit them more in the long run than acquisitions (it's like unofficially annexing the whole country). Catherine drops the demands for dissenters to get the right to hold state office; all they get is freedom of worship. Which, as has been noted, is the most dissenters have in the rest of Europe anyway, in the most liberal countries (Britain, Netherlands)
So after all that posturing, the Enlightenment pretext has been dropped, and Fritz and Catherine unmasked as a pair of gangsters.
Next up, we'll get to see Russia's perspective on all this.
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-03 09:43 am (UTC)The Austrian Quaranteene because of the plague thing is mentioned in the conversation where "Let's partition Poland" is first brought up as a "joke", as reported by Heinrich to Fritz in a secret letter, which I used as the basis for the same scene in You should see me with a crown".
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-03 09:57 am (UTC)Thank you for reminding me.
There will be an entire section on Turkey/Ottoman Empire after the Russian section, but yes, good to have the map so you can see why the Turks are so interested in what Russia is doing in Poland, and how the civil war there spilled over into Ottoman territory.
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-04 02:57 am (UTC)Creating a government on the basis of "everyone who's unhappy with the current government, for whatever reason," doesn't lead to a united program or a lot of great teamwork.
Huh. Who would have thought :)
Catholics still won't be allowed to convert to Orthodoxy or Protestantism. If they try, they will be exiled. Why? If there are enough Orthodox believers in Poland, Russian serfs are going to desert across the border en masse to escape their terrible lives in Russia. And if there are enough Protestants in Poland, there might be a Protestant enlightenment! And enlightenment makes for stronger kingdoms! And we can't have that.
...wow!
Poniatowski: And an outbreak of plague in 1769? Who wrote this episode? I demand a rewrite!
GAH. I can see why Polish people hate this guy -- I mean, things really fell apart, didn't they -- but it doesn't seem to have been his fault at all, he was just given a completely impossible job :(
MT/Joseph/Kaunitz: We just want to keep the plague out! And keep the war from coming across our borders, so what happened to the Turks doesn't happen to us! And reoccupy some territory that we suddenly realized we have claims to.
Fritz: Yeah, same! If the Austrians are doing it, I'm in!
LOL! I also laughed at the resulting Joseph/Fritz exchange :)
Fritz: Not really convincing ones, but again, as long as Russia doesn't object, who cares?
Hee!
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-04 03:21 pm (UTC)Oh, good. I worry about boring you all, because I know you're here for gossip and Selena's here for personal relationships, especially the familial sort, and I'm the only one who's here for military history and foreign policy. But I wrote 25k words, and they're at least going to get posted. :P
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-06 06:54 pm (UTC)If there are enough Orthodox believers in Poland, Russian serfs are going to desert across the border en masse to escape their terrible lives in Russia.
Why don't they desert anyway? I mean, if enough of them do there will be more Orthodox believers in Poland...
Poor Poniatowski, he's really not having a good time!
Fritz: Austrians, don't worry about it. It's super easy to dredge up claims to neighboring territory. Dig through your archives and you'll find something!
*snorts* Why do they even bother fabricating claims?
ETA: Catherine drops the demands for dissenters to get the right to hold state office; all they get is freedom of worship. Which, as has been noted, is the most dissenters have in the rest of Europe anyway, in the most liberal countries (Britain, Netherlands)
Actually, Scotland has more than this. Although IDK if you want to count dissenters within Protestantism as actual dissenters--Scotland does not give Catholics the right to hold office. So in the 17th century Restoration, Anglicanism/Episcopalianism was imposed on the whole of Britain, and required of all state officials. Then in the Glorious Revolution the Presbyterian Kirk gained ascendancy in Scotland, so that all officials had to be Presbyterian there. But in 1712, the Toleration Act changed this (but only in Scotland!), so that it was okay for government officials to be either Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or Anglican (and perhaps further Protestant denominations, I don't know how far it stretched). Scotland having toleration but Ireland and England not having it caused some problems for example when regiments moved across borders. For example, there was an incident where a Presbyterian army chaplain was fired when his regiment was deployed to Ireland. He tried to fight this legally, but lost.
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-07 11:51 am (UTC)That's a good question. I expect it's like any game theory situation where if enough of a oppressed minority do something, they'll all be safer, but since it's so dangerous for the first ones to do it, and coordination is hard, it doesn't happen or else takes a long time. For example, if enough gay people come out of the closet, it becomes safer for everyone...but you can't blame individuals for not spontaneously coming out when they didn't see many other people doing it, and the stakes were so high.
Given that Russia is a big place and the serfs couldn't communicate with serfs outside their own estate, and given that Poland is a big place, my guess is there was a good chance that wherever you showed up, there wouldn't be an Orthodox priest to administer to your spiritual needs, and no one wanted to end up in that situation. Also, god knows what serfs kept ignorant on Russian estates were being *told* about treatment of Orthodox dissenters in Poland.
Plus, one of my university professors told me that if you do sociological computer modeling, you can get segregation just by programming individuals to have a desire not to be the only one of their kind where they live. If you program the black people in your script not to want to be the only black person/family in a white neighborhood, and you program the white people in your script not to want to be the only white person/family in a black neighborhood, and make neighborhood selection otherwise random, you will end up with a black neighborhood and a white neighborhood. Even if people don't mind being in a minority, if they just don't want to be the only one, risk aversion takes you the rest of the way.
*snorts* Why do they even bother fabricating claims?
Because PR-wise, there is a big, big difference between a gangster who says "I'm just following the law!" and a gangster who outright says, "I don't care about the law," even if both are equally breaking the law.
To take an example from American politics, given that election years are currently on my mind, why did Trump bother insisting so hard there was widespread voter fraud, instead of just leaning into storming the Capitol and saying he didn't care about free elections? I mean, maybe he was that delusional (Fritz he is not), idk, but at least some of his supporters had to realize that as a PR move, one claim is a *much* harder sell than the other, even if the outcome is the same: the will of the people being ignored by the ruler, contrary to all evidence.
Fritz was extremely big on good PR, he was the first modern monarch to take real advantage of the press and public opinion as his PR machine. His entire reluctance to participate in the First Polish Partition until he had his most important neighbors on board was about PR. He explicitly turned down Heinrich's first offer on the grounds that "If we're going to take a chunk of Poland, it needs to be big enough to counter the bad PR of taking anything at all."
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-07 10:47 pm (UTC)Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. (And I'm thinking about college and how people tended to clump.)
He explicitly turned down Heinrich's first offer on the grounds that "If we're going to take a chunk of Poland, it needs to be big enough to counter the bad PR of taking anything at all."
Ha! That's kind of awesome, actually.
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-07 11:20 pm (UTC)The quote is great:
As to the question of occupying the duchy of Warmia, I ruled that out, as the whole operation is not worth tuppence. The portion is so small that it fails to compensate for the song and dance it will necessarily drum up. On the other hand, Polish Prussia would be worth the trouble, even without Danzig, as then we would have the Vistula and what would be very important, free access to the kingdom [of Prussia] … If you are too eager to snatch at trifles, it gives you a reputation for greed and insatiability which I don't want to have any more than I do already in Europe.
Emphasis mine. :P
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-12 01:00 am (UTC)Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-08 11:59 am (UTC)Re: the fabricated claims, I guess I had the impression that declaring war just because you wanted to conquer a piece of land was more okay in the 18th century than today? I mean, European countries definitely did it all the time in the colonies, but the rules are probably different when making war within Europe. Sweden grew enormously in the 17th century and then shrank again--I don't suppose they could have motivated that growth with prior claims. How about Russia taking Crimea, was that just pure conquest or did they motivate it with prior claims?
Perhaps this is something that changed with the growth of the public sphere, when it became more important with good PR?
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-08 04:13 pm (UTC)They sure were after the Thirty Years War. Part of the Treaty of Westphalia was saying that wars of conquest against another Christian monarch were just not cool and not to be done and both Sweden and France were supposed to guarantee these conditions were listened to in the HRE. Now, obviously the wars for a landgrab still happened (long before Fritz invaded Silesia), but even 800 Pounds I Do What I Want gorilla of European might Louis XIV bothered with the justifications - it's his inheritance via his Spanish wife, or he's only fighting to push his sister-in-law's claim on her inheritance (this made Liselotte furious because she certainly did NOT want him to invade the Palatinate) ; what he doesn't claim he's doing is invading because he wants some more glory and land. Even though obviously that's what he does. And less powerful monarchs than Louis XIV have to bother even more with justifications.
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-13 09:05 pm (UTC)Foreign policy side note her: remember when I said Fritz kept offering mediation between Austria and Turkey for non-benevolent reasons? It's not only because mediating means you consider yourself militarily capable of intervening to support a treaty you guaranteed, it means you now have an excuse if you want to intervene in the future. If you can half-convincingly spin something another country does as a violation of a treaty (or constitution) you're supposed to guarantee, hey presto! you can invade and occupy and (attempt to) do whatever you want to enforce that treaty/constitution.
It's why Russia and at least some of the Poles are at odds over whether Russia should continue being the "guarantor" of Polish territorial integrity and the Polish constitution (i.e. can Russia invade any time it can find a convenient excuse, which not all the Poles want). It's why Catherine made Russia a guarantor of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1779, when she intervened to mediate in the War of the Bavarian Succession. Guaranteeing the Treaty of Westphalia gave Russia major intervention rights in Germany. Just add one semi-plausible excuse!
it's his inheritance via his Spanish wife
As flimsy an excuse as it gets, because the Spanish had required that she formal renounce her claims in the marriage contract specifically to avoid this scenario, but Louis XIV hand-waved it as "But the marriage contract also says they will pay X amount as her dowry, and they're so bankrupt they haven't managed that, so obviously the whole treaty is invalid, which means I can do what I want!"
Notice "The whole treaty was invalidated by them first!" is also the excuse Catherine used when annexing the Crimea. It's a popular one in our period.
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-13 08:39 pm (UTC)Not prior claims, but there was definitely some handwaving of excuses! Prior claims was only one way of justifying conquest. Another was "the other side started it, and this is just war damages!" Another was "But the locals *want* us instead of their current rulers!"
The Ottoman Empire being an empire, the original detachment of the Crimea from the Ottoman Empire was justified as a war of "liberation" (sound familiar?). The Russians were just rescuing the Crimean khanate from Ottoman oppression and restoring it to a state of independence! Then for almost ten years, there was local infighting and revolts, and their puppet khan kept getting overthrown, and finally, in 1783, again quoting from Madariaga:
In March Potemkin returned to St Petersburg and threw his influence into the scales in favour of outright annexation. A trumped-up excuse was found--an alleged incursion by the Porte in Taman'--and on 8 April 1783, Catherine signed the manifesto proclaiming her intention of annexing the Crimea. She justified the decision on the grounds that Russia had already spent twelve million rubles in defending the khanate's independence, and that the Porte had destroyed the mutual treaty obligations between Russia and Turkey by its attack on Taman'. The manifesto undertook to respect the persons and property of the Tartars, to grant them the free exercise of their religion, and to extend to them the rights enjoyed by Russians.
So as you can see, even with a non-Christian monarch, you still need an excuse if you don't want such bad PR that all your neighbors gang up on you. You want at least enough plausible deniability that at least some of your neighbors can decide it's fine to care more about their own self-interest and about the balance of power.
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Poland: 1768-1772
Date: 2024-01-07 11:53 am (UTC)Actually, Scotland has more than this. Although IDK if you want to count dissenters within Protestantism as actual dissenters--Scotland does not give Catholics the right to hold office.
Since the examples Fritz gave were of Catholics, I suspect he 1) didn't know this about Scotland, 2) would think the point still held: Catholics are oppressed in Britain the same way Protestants are oppressed in Poland, and we can hardly invade to force that change.