Even though King Frederick Augustus I was the sovereign of the Duchy of Warsaw that does not preclude it from being a French client state. The Duchy's political structure was inseparable from the context in which Napoleon created it.

Napoleon's decision to gift the Duchy to the Saxon king was a component of the Emperor's German policy. There was something of a power vacuum within Central Europe after the dissolution of the HRE and the twin defeats of Prussia and Austria. Napoleon looked to "third Germany" (ie states like Bavaria and Saxony) as a means to fill in this vacuum. These enlarged German states were to collectively be a check on either Prussia or Austria, but not so strong that they could challenge French hegemony in Central Europe. Territorial adjustments in favor of these German monarchs were an inducement to loyalty, with the stick of the Bonaparte-ruled Kingdom of Westphalia and French armies of observation preventing moves to rebellion. In the case of Saxony, it received an expansion of territory after the defeat of Prussia and the Polish duchy was part of this strategic spoils system. Saxony was to replace Prussia as the main power in this corner of Central Europe and having the Duchy under the control of a French client kingdom was putting this new political entity into reliable hands.

The Wettin's possession of the Duchy did not come from the ether though. Frederick Augustus I's grandfather, Augustus III, was not only the Elector of Saxony but had been a King of Poland. The Wettin monarch spoke Polish and there were various connections between Saxony and the Polish nobility. The King's proclamation of the Duchy and its constitution stressed that the Wettins were not a foreign dynasty, but rather one with longstanding connections to Poland, including the King's grandfather. Frederik Augustus I had been offered the Polish crown before the Partitions and refused.

Frederick Augustus I's 1791 refusal of the Polish crown was in no small measure because he did not want to place himself as a target for Russian ire. Although the geostrategic situation had changed in 1807, the Wettin monarch's reluctance to take the Polish throne had not diminished in the intervening sixteen years. A number of contemporaries noted that during the ceremonies in which Napoleon granted the Duchy its constitution, Frederick Augustus I looked just as subservient and pliant as the various Polish nobles around Napoleon. Although there is not much in the way of direct evidence, there is much anecdotal evidence that suggests that Frederick Augustus I did not really want the Duchy, but could not refuse Napoleon. The new Duke of Warsaw did not really relish his title and only visited the Duchy four times while it existed. Nor did Frederick Augustus I really put much investment in new regal titles as Duke; he was not among those who petitioned Napoleon to elevate the Duchy to a resuscitated Kingdom of Poland. Moreover, the King also never appointed a viceroy to act in his name even though the constitution granted him this power. The Duchy's constitution granted the Duke broad executive powers, Frederick Augustus I did not really aim to use them personally, preferring instead to delegate to various Polish nobles and servitors.

This opens up the thorny question of who actually governed the Duchy. On one hand, the the Duchy was a personal union with the Wettins and the constitution provided for a legislature the Sejm, and a variety of enlightened measures. But things were quite different on the ground. Many of the promises of the constitution were deferred, such as the emancipation of the Duchy's Jews, or imperfectly implemented like the abolition of serfdom. The constitution's provided for a seven-men Council of Ministers composed of Polish nobles and a division of the Duchy into departments and while these were French-inspired innovations, Frederick Augustus I's disinclination to rule directly created a power vacuum in this political order. The Council of State filled in some of the gaps and managed to keep the Duchy running for its absentee Duke.

The Council of State however was not the only power at play within the Duchy. The French ambassadors were a power base onto themselves as they managed to have a direct line to Napoleon and often conveyed the Emperor's desires to the Council. More often than not, the Council was not answering to Frederick Augustus I but to the various French forces within the Duchy. During the Duchy's first two years, Davout as commander of the French corps in the Duchy was arguably the de facto ruler of the Duchy as military needs trumped civilian ones. Much of the French court gossip in this period suggested that Davout was angling to ape Murat and have his master reward his faithful military service by being given a regal territory. Davout eventually took up a position in northern Germany in 1809, but his replacement was Prince Josef Poniatowski, who like Frederick Augustus I was the scion of a Polish king. Poniatowski's role in the Duchy's military forces in the 1809 Austrian war suggested that he was priming the military as its own power base. Much like Frederick Augustus I, Poniatowski was not willing to court an open break with Napoleon, but he was much ore active in encouraging a Polish kingdom. By strengthening the Duchy's military, Poniatowski had a chip which to bargain for an independent Poland. It is unclear how well this worked, but Napoleon on St. Helena did claim that had Poniatowski not died in 1813 and had Napoleon triumphed, he would have made the Prince into a Polish king.

Whether or not Napoleon would have gone through with his St. Helena promises on a restored Polish kingdom is unanswerable, but even a King Poniatowski would have still found himself as a client of Napoleon in this scenario. Napoleon conceptualized Poland not as a matter of national self-determination, but rather as part of the strategic balance to maintain French hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe. Not surprisingly, the most powerful political agents within the Duchy were not its nominal sovereign but the Duchy's armed forces and Napoleon's own envoys. The Dukedom was something of an unwanted gift for Frederick Augustus I; he could not refuse it, but he did want it either. His family had wide experience with ruling Poland and appreciated that running Poland in a centralized manner Napoleon expected would have been extremely difficult. By washing his hands of the matter and delegating to various servitors, Frederick Augustus I found a way out of this bind.

Sources

Czubaty, Jarosław. The Duchy of Warsaw, 1807-1815: A Napoleonic Outpost in Central Europe. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Grab, Alexander. Napoleon and the Transformation of Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Planert, Ute. Napoleon's Empire: European Politics in Global Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.