Part I: Polish Nobility until Napoleon

In terms of both their size and political culture, the nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, often referred to as the szlachta, was somewhat unique estate in East Central Europe. In terms of numbers, they were rather large and the political culture of the Commonwealth stressed collective equality before the law between members of the szlachta. There were of course large differences in wealth within this particular estate , with some of the szlachta not that much better off than wealthy peasants, and political power in the waning days of the Commonwealth shifted towards the larger magnates and landowners. But the existence of such a large and variegated noble estate posed a problem for the Partition powers. While they dissolved the executive bodies of the Commonwealth, if they transgressed too far in Polish domestic affairs, the nobility could form the leadership nucleus for a revolt to resurrect the Polish kingdom. By virtue of their education and elite status, Polish emigres could find employments in elite networks in Western Europe, and as Casimir Pulaski Revolutionary War career shows, even across the Atlantic. One of the persistent fears of the Partition governments that such networking would lead to one of the great powers sponsoring Polish nationalism as a geopolitical wedge against their interests.

Although each of the Partition powers approached governance of Poland differently prior to Napoleon's establishment of the Duchy of Warsaw, they shared several common traits. Firstly, they sought to co-opt the larger magnates into state service by promising to preserve their individual power and wealth if they accepted a restricted political role. This was perhaps most pronounced in Russian Poland where the Romanovs partitioned the land into guberniia ruled over by imperially-appointed servitors, but still left room for a degree of local control and autonomy. In Prussian Poland, the Partitions gave large magnates access to the Prussia's international grain market, which at the favored large estates and export agriculture. The large magnates in Prussian Poland experienced a short-economic boom that counterbalanced their loss of bureaucratic control. Prussian laws also favored the nobility in land disputes, allowing for the expansion of estates. Another trait that characterized Partition rule in this period, the winnowing down of the szlachta estate into a more manageable level. In Habsburg Galicia, Josephine reforms split the szlachta into two estates, the nobility and the gentry, based on the size of their estates and their direct petitioning of the Habsburg state. In Russian Poland, an aspiring noble had to prove his family's historical provenance and his estate status to the tsarist authorities or otherwise be downgraded in the imperial table of ranks. This death by bureaucracy had the intended effect of shrinking Poland's noble estates away from the egalitarian numbers of the Commonwealth.

But co-option was a very fraught process in Partition Poland. Even though the Kościuszko Uprising enjoyed relatively little support among the nobility, both the Prussian and Russian governments severely punished nobles suspected of holding sympathies for Kościuszko. The uprising also witnessed a hardening of the Partitioners' cultural policies such as the closing of Warsaw as a major center for learning and Polish culture which later became the groundwork for wider proactive policies against Polonization in the nineteenth century. These cultural policies helped to socially isolate the surviving szlachta from the wider peasant culture and the Partition legal system, although favoring large land-owners, decreased the nobles' actual political power vis-a-vis the peasantry. The presence of both the imperial and royal officials as arbitrators meant that nobles no longer possessed absolute rights to peasants' labor and their land. Various Partition reforms in land rights, often done in the name of Enlightened absolutism, subtly sapped away the szlachta's actual power over their estates.

The advent of Napoleon and his creation of the Duchy of Warsaw after the defeat of each of the Partition powers between 1805-1807 altered much of the politics of the Partitions. Although Napoleon's ardor for a resurrected Kingdom of Poland cooled, Polish nobles and troops proved to be some of the most reliable of Napoleon's satellite states. This helped to foster a sense within the bureaucracies of each of the Partitioners that Poles were innately rebellious and disloyal. Many of the officers of the Russian Army blamed a bulk of the excesses of Napoleon's Grande Armee in 1812 on its Polish contingent and Russian treatment of Polish PoWs cast them as disloyal subjects, not surrendered foes. Polish PoWs typically could not send correspondence home and officers could not manage their estates. The state often assigned the Poles to punitive military service in the distant provinces and the Poles were among the last cohorts of POWs to be repatriated after the Napoleonic Wars had ended. Although the Congress of Vienna saw the resurrection of the Partitions and the creation of a Kingdom of Poland under the personal rule of the Russian tsar, the Napoleonic interlude engendered feelings of distrust towards Poles that became increasingly apparent over the course of the nineteenth century.