Institute of History

Przegląd Historyczny, vol. CIX, 2018, 1
The establishment of the Commission of National Education in October 1773 during a partition session of the parliament gathered in Warsaw under the auspices of the partitioning powers, especially Russia, was closely linked to the negotiations over the partitioner-imposed government reform and to the ratification of the partition treaties. So far only Władysław Konopczyński has pointed to these links and, in his study of the Permanent Council, mentioned the involvement of the Russian ambassador, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, in the establishment of the CNE. In order to shed more light on this thread, I refer to the Russian diplomatic correspondence. On its basis I describe the involvement of the Russian diplomat in the support for King Stanisław August’s ideas for reforming the education system. Stackelberg’s support for the king was a kind of reward for the monarch’s consent to the ratification of the partition treaties. In exchange the ambassador expected the king’s consent to the introduction of the Permanent Council. Indeed, the matters of education reform and the takeover — closely linked to the reform — by the state of the property of the dissolved Jesuit Order became one of the areas of rapprochement between the king and the ambassador. Thanks to the collaboration between the king’s and the ambassador’s supporters it became possible to submit to a duly authorised parliamentary delegation the CNE bill, which was subsequently quickly passed. In the last stage of the negotiations the king’s and the ambassador’s supporters worked on the text of an act establishing the commission at the Russian embassy. Stackelberg and with him his Saint Petersburg principals regarded education as an issue of no importance from the point of view of the Russian interests in Poland and thus did not seek to impose any specific solutions. This enabled King Stanisław August to introduce most of his own ideas.

It  is  a  common  belief  that  the first partition of the Commonwealth came as a shock for the noble society. Source studies, however, do not confirm this thesis. On the  contrary,  they  show  that  the  nobility reacted calmly, staying unexpectedly long under the delusion that this situation was only  temporary.  The  published  volume  of Jędrzej  Kitowicz’s  Correspondence  and  Handwritten Pamphlets from 1771–1776 is an excellent source of information about the moods, expectations,  and  illusions  of  noblemen throughout the broadly understood era of the first partition.

At the turn of the nineteenth century many European states began to publish multi-volume editions of sources illustrating the political history of these states in previous centuries (for example, the Prussian Politische Correspondenz Friedrich’s des Großen). The Russian Sbornik Imperatorskogo Russkogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva published by the Imperial Russian Historical Society is still used by researchers. It seems worthwhile to focus on the Sbornik and to assess its value as a scholarly edition using the Prussian diplomatic correspondence, included in that edition as a test-case.