The powerful Counter-Reformation traditions of Habsburg Central Europe and Poland, together with the widely repressive book censorship apparatus in the hands of the ecclesiastical authorities, might easily convince us that there was no easy path by which the Radical Enlightenment could penetrate and become a significant force in East-Central Europe during the eighteenth century. There was certainly no open attack on revealed religion.Reference Lukowski¹ However, the evidence of book history and print culture suggests it may well be an incorrect conclusion to infer that radical ideas had no impact.

The German radical and materialist, Wilhelm Ludwig Wekhrlin (1739–92), drew a ‘philosophical’ map of Europe in the first volume of his Chronologen,Reference Wekhrlin² with which he sought to indicate how far different European countries had succeeded in applying philosophical reason to the amelioration of human life, politically, educationally, in agriculture and every other respect. Like the radical enlighteners generally, Wekhrlin believed that the sharply varying circumstances of different European countries were the result of divergent political systems, institutions, laws and religious regulations. Sweden scored very high in his estimation because of the enthusiasm for science there, the implementation of new projects and the republican political system. Poland, by contrast, came off one of the worst, especially because of its dysfunctional political system and the unchallenged dominance of the Catholic Church. Poland appeared on his ‘philosophical’ map thus: ‘Pohlen: Unwissenheit, Faulheit, Laster, als Folgen der (anarchischen) Staatsverfassung – Fanaticismus- ein von der Natur so schönen und aufgeklärten Eindrücken geöffneter Nationalgenie unwirksam durch politicische Unterdrückung, durch physische Unmässigkeit, und durch übelverstandenen Nationalstok.’Reference Wekhrlin² A bad situation; but with better institutions and application of ‘philosophy,’ Poland had excellent potential, as good as anywhere else.Reference Israel³

One of late eighteenth-century Poland’s most forthright writers on general social issues, the priest Francisek Salezy Jezierski commented in the year 1790 – in the midst of the Polish Revolution of 1788–92 – that ‘the expression “our enlightened age” constantly reaches my ears from those who speak, and my eyes from those who write’.Reference Butterwick⁴ This seems to confirm the opinion of the historian Richard Butterwick that the expression ‘wiek oświecony’ ‘the enlightened century’ became ubiquitous in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century and also in Czech lands and the Habsburg Austrian heartland. Whereas during the first half of the eighteenth century the expression ‘oświecony’ was nearly always a religious metaphor, between the 1760s and the early nineteenth century the term ‘oświeconie’ was secularized, broadened and given a quite revolutionary new meaning, denoting an intellectually grounded, rational and true understanding of things in contrast to how traditional religious authority understood the human condition and reality more generally. ‘Nicoświecenie’ was simultaneously transformed into a synonym for ignorance, darkness, prejudice, unawareness of the truth of things, and blind adherence to religion.

What was involved, of course, was a vast change in reading and in print culture and it is this in particular that we need to consider. But it is of great importance when considering eighteenth-century Poland–Lithuania, as with the Czech lands, and Austria, and indeed all of Europe, to distinguish first between the Counter-Enlightenment, that is the tendency – whether Catholic or Protestant (or Jewish) – to reject the Enlightenment in all respects, on the one hand, and the category historians nowadays refer to as the ‘religious Enlightenment’, with ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ one of its principal dimensions.Reference Sorkin⁵ This is a very different tendency that fully recognized the need to adjust to Newtonian science, especially astronomy, and the necessity of educational reform and making society more tolerant and accepting of freedom of thought, at least to an extent, as well as the need for reform of many social abuses. Catholic Enlightenment also accepted the need to purge religion itself, including popular religiosity and also religious training and institutions, of ‘superstitious’ elements and excesses that had no real theological justification, but to do so while remaining loyal to the core of tradition and religious authority.

So we must distinguish between Catholic Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. But within the sphere of moderate Enlightenment, we must also distinguish between religious Enlightenment and the kind of Enlightenment that Montesquieu, Voltaire and Hume strove for, that rejected religion and religious authority altogether, adhering to deism or a veiled atheism, but at the same time kept social reform to a minimum, respecting existing religious authority in its educational and social sway over the majority of the population and deferring to aristocracy and monarchy. Finally, we come to that underground and later revolutionary wing of the Enlightenment that in the last 20 years has come to be called the Radical Enlightenment and which proved a crucial intellectual and social development in Holland, England, France, Germany and Italy. One might be tempted to think, given the relatively low levels of literacy, the strength of the Counter-Reformation impulse in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, that the relative strength of the royal censorship in Poland and the Habsburg Lands, and continuing Church campaigns against Protestantism of all kinds, that the Radical Enlightenment, remained at best a peripheral phenomenon in East-Central Europe and perhaps scarcely even perceptible. Such a supposition would seem to be borne out, after all, by the lack of any mention of such a Polish-Czech-Austrian irreligious, subversive tendency in the existing literature on the Enlightenment in these countries.

But I shall argue here that the Radical Enlightenment was already an established force in East-Central Europe prior to 1788 and that the 1788–92 republican Revolution in Poland, although chiefly led by men of the moderate Enlightenment, inevitably reinforced the radical tendency. I want to point out how we can use print culture and book history to demonstrate this. I will offer evidence using print culture under four different headings: (1) the reading habits and culture of key Polish and Bohemian nobles and political leaders in their youth whilst studying abroad; (2) the pattern of argumentation used by the (mostly French) Counter-Enlightenment theologians translated between the 1760s and 1790s into Polish and German; (3) the decisive role in East-Central Europe on key individuals of the Histoire philosophique des Deux Indes (1770) a joint compilation by Raynal, Diderot and a group of other radical philosophes; and (4) the attraction of radical ideas for those wanting to reform the Polish state apparatus and end serfdom.

To start with the first issue, we must bear in mind that seventeenth-century Poland, and even more Bohemia-Moravia, were lands of the Counter-Reformation where sizable Protestant and heterodox populations had been systematically repressed and muzzled and consciously compelled to submit outwardly to dominant religious culture and a set of doctrines to which they were privately antagonistic. As perhaps one would expect, the historiographical tradition and particularly the nationalistic side of that tradition in the Polish case seems to considerably underplay the importance of this factor. That there existed, even before the Enlightenment itself became a major influence, a widespread reading and censorship culture of conflict, antagonism and deep opposition to presiding structures of doctrine and thought can hardly be denied.Reference Madl and Wogerbauer⁶ As has often been pointed out, the Emperor Joseph II centralized book censorship in the Habsburg Empire in a drastic manner, ending all the regional and ecclesiastical censorship commissions and functions and centralizing the entire imperial book censorship administration under a single imperial commission, headed by Gottfried van Swieten (1733–1803), in Vienna. But the very effectiveness of the new system and its basic rules, focusing on deleting and warding off everything attacking or apt to call in question Catholic doctrine, was bound to generate its own dialectical reaction in society, and especially among the most literate social elites.

First of all, we should consider the personal experiences of members of the Bohemian and Polish nobilities in Paris and in connection with radical circles there. Many East-Central European nobles spent lengthy periods in Paris during the late eighteenth century and we can learn much about their book culture and the impact of their experiences from studying their lives and writings. Stanislaw Antoni Poniatowski, who became king of Poland, with Catherine the Great’s backing in 1764, was one such. At the head of this ‘enlightened’ aristocratic coterie, heroes of Warsaw’s salons noted for their French style of conversation and thought, stood a whole group of polished aristocrats, most notably, according to one contemporary list, Joseph Poniatowsky, Ignacy and Stanislaus Potocki, Stanislaw Malachowski, Mostowski, Weyssenhof, Niemcewicz, Matuscewic, and Kazimierz Sapieha (1757–98), who in 1788 became chancellor of Lithuania. Sapieha had been a conservative politically; but under the influence of Stanislaw Malachowski he became an ardent reformer and supporter of the Polish revolution of 1788–92. The ‘Polish Lafayette’, Ignacy Potocki (1750–1809), in particular, was fascinated by the republican forms and tendencies of the French Revolution (Ref. Reference Lukowski1, p. 245, Ref. Reference Zamoyski7).

Similarly, in 1770 a whole group of Bohemian-Moravian nobles accompanied the new French queen, Marie Antoinette, on her journey to Paris. Among them were John Rudolph, count of Chotek and his cousin Joseph Augustin, count of Wilczek. These two made a point of making contact with the Parisian philosophes from the very start of their long visit of several months and on a number of occasions attended gatherings of the atheistic circle of the Baron d’Holbach and also met Diderot with whom they were much impressed. Among the main topics of conversation, Chotek recorded in his diary, were Voltaire and the renewed suppression of Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie in France. Evidently, Diderot set them thinking on a number of issues.Reference Cerman⁸

We should also consider the intellectual background of Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746–1817), friend of Thomas Jefferson and one of the most important of all Polish national heroes, the most important link between the American Revolution and Poland’s own struggle for independence in the late eighteenth century. He was also, I shall argue, one of the most important representatives of the Polish Radical Enlightenment. Although his family belonged to one of the poorer sections of the Polish nobility, Kosciuszko distinguished himself at his military cadet school and won a royal stipend to study military engineering in Paris and the French naval base at Brest in 1768. On arriving in Paris, in 1769, Kosciuszko began his studies at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and began mixing with art students as well as other intellectuals. Perusing French books, steeped in French print culture, it was at this point, Kosciuszko later recalled, that he rejected Catholicism and became a deist; but it was not just his conversion away from the religion of the Polish people, in 1769–70, that should seize our attention, but also his key political shift: his religious allegiance went together with the idea that God had created and approved of the existing social order. Kosciuszko left Catholicism and, at the same time, not only embraced individual liberty and full freedom of thought as among the highest values and goals of philosophy, in the Enlightenment sense, but also became convinced that the purpose of government is to promote and provide for the happiness of all the people, including the serfs and most downtrodden.Reference Nash and Russell Gao Hodges⁹

Kosciuszko was still studying in Paris, in 1772, when the First Partition of Poland, with the acquiescence of Britain and France, hived off an entire third of Poland-Lithuania, allocating vast areas of the former commonwealth to Russia, Prussia and Austria. For Kosciuszko, as for most educated Poles, this was a deeply distressing and humiliating experience. Kosciuszko finally returned to Poland, after his long study and training sojourn in France, in 1774. The family estate being virtually bankrupt and his financial resources meagre, Kosciuszko took a job as a tutor – the vocation of several of the most radical figures of the age in France, Italy and Germany. He was appointed tutor to the daughters of the provincial governor Sosnowski, but became attracted to one of them, Ludwika, and on asking for her hand in marriage met with further disappointment and humiliation. Her father rebuffed him by reminding him that a vast distance separated the magnates of the upper Polish nobility from the poor, serfless nobility, the lower szlachta, from which he derived.

As a result, Kosciuszko left Poland again and, by mid-1776, the year the revolutionary war in America began, was back in Paris. At the point Kosciuszko left Europe and sailed for America to offer his services to the American Revolution, he was already a dedicated adherent of the Enlightenment, but not just of the Enlightenment in general. Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams and many other leaders of the American Revolution could claim to be as steeped in books, Enlightenment literature and ideas as was Kosciuszko (Ref. Reference Nash and Russell Gao Hodges9, p. 34). But hardly any of them, apart from Tom Paine, not even his close friend Jefferson, proved to be as radical as Kosciuszko on a range of social issues, above all striving for black emancipation, and this is where we see clearly the need to insist on the distinction also in the Polish case between moderate Enlightenment and Radical Enlightenment. Kosciuszko illustrates the character of the latter perfectly: irreligion defined as rejection of divine governance of human affairs and the elimination of religious authority linked closely to the idea that man’s auto-emancipation is his first duty, and the essence of Enlightenment all blended in his case with exceptional force, persistence and clarity.

One of the most important aspects of Kosciuszko’s role in America after 1776, as with Lafayette, was his vehement rejection of black slavery and his efforts to prod Jefferson and other friends and leaders of the Revolution to become more active in striving for the abolition of slavery. But we also know that Kosciuszko’s attack on both black slavery and Polish and Bohemian serfdom began during his study years in Paris. A book that became popular in Poland at this time, and equally linked in Polish readers’ minds the themes of colonial exploitation in the New World and tyranny in East-Central Europe, was Jean Francois Marmontel’s play The Incas. But in this process of opening Kosciuszko’s eyes and mind to the challenges of both slavery and serfdom, a key role, we see, was fulfilled especially by the Histoire philosophique des Deux Indes first published in 1770, the year after his arrival in Paris. At first appearing anonymously, like most earlier radical works, the Histoire philosophique later appeared under the name of the Abbé Raynal. By the mid-1770s, it had become the most widely diffused of all radical works of the later eighteenth century. This key work, a large part of which was written by Diderot, offered the most blistering attack of the entire era not just on the colonial empires but on tyranny and despotism generally, and especially kings and the ecclesiastical authorities. Part of its novelty lay in the fact that it discussed the entire world, and showed that misery, exploitation, oppression, intolerance and bad institutions were a man-made system that shared clear common attributes everywhere and that formed a set of shackles that in principle could be broken and cast off. Its revolutionary implications were unmistakable.

The Histoire philosophique circulated very widely in French, English, German, Dutch, and Spanish. As Janusz Tazbir has noted,Reference Tazbir¹⁰ the Histoire philosophique gained extraordinary popularity in Europe generally and found many readers in Poland and Bohemia, and was also later partly issued in a Russian translation, although the work in whatever version ran into continual clashes with the Russian censorship, as it did with the royal censorship in France – Louis XVI was compelled to repeal the royal ban during the Revolution – Spain, Austria and other countries, owing to its fierce attacks on the clergy and on political tyranny of all kinds.

The Histoire philosophique was crucially important in the Polish context in two different ways. First, it tightly connected Diderot’s and d’Holbach’s irreligion, rejection of the Catholic faith, and materialism to the campaign to overturn tyranny and emancipate mankind, and was the first widely read text that seemed to summon all peoples to revolt against the rulers and clergy and strive to transform all their laws and institutions. Second, it established a clear link, in general, and also specifically in Kosciuszko’s mind, between general emancipation, including ending slavery in North America, and the Polish situation and conditions – and in particular Polish serfdom (Ref. Reference Nash and Russell Gao Hodges9 pp. 29–31). It was no accident that this work was also the most important inspiration, as the Empress Catharine the Great angrily noted, behind the thinking of Russian’s first Radical Enlightenment author, Alexander Radischev (1749–1802), in developing and refining his critique of serfdom (Ref. Reference Israel3 pp. 618, 626–630).

If the connection demonstrated by book culture between Kosciuszko’s rejection of black slavery and serfdom, and his hatred of royal tyranny, and his reading works such as the Histoire philosophique seems undeniable, this in itself is a concrete step toward proving our essential thesis. This is because Kosciuszko was such a central figure in the Polish Revolution of 1791 to 1794 that this fact alone serves to establish that the Radical Enlightenment was integral to the Polish experience and history before 1800. During these years of upheaval and bitter struggle, the Polish revolutionaries themselves became deeply split between a moderate faction aiming at retaining noble dominance and monarchy, and a more radical tendency, which Kosciuszko himself favoured, seeking to utilize the peasant masses in the uprising and offer abolition of serfdom as an inducement. Among the principal Polish leaders Hugo Kollataj (1750–1812), a leading reformer of Krakow University, who pressed for an end to theology’s hegemony in higher study and an extension of the role of the university so as to enable it to reform and supervise education more widely, also showed a strong commitment to this social ideal (Ref. Reference Lukowski1, pp. 227–228, 232). When moderates close to Stanislaw August set up a provisional administration in Warsaw, a group mainly of dissatisfied intellectuals and officials, many close to Kollataj, set up their own ‘club’ to maintain and drive forward the Polish insurrection against Russian tyranny on a radical basis, with the democratic strands of the French Revolution as their model. They willingly embraced the ‘Jacobin’ label that was applied to them. But the opposition remained intense and these radicals remained very few. Finally, Kosciuszko found himself caught in a maze of contradiction (Ref. Reference Lukowski1, pp. 259–260).

One of the main channels by which radical ideas entered East-Central Europe, then, was the studying abroad on the part of leading figures in the Polish Enlightenment and Polish Revolution, combined with cultivating an aristocratic culture, including book culture, focused on things French and, we should add also, German. The travels abroad of a growing number of Polish, Bohemian and Austrian aristocrats from the middle years of the century (much as also with the Swedish and Spanish American Creole aristocracy), their coming into contact with the books, journals, reading societies and bookshops as well as the impressive urban and agricultural prosperity of countries such as France, the Netherlands, and England, rapidly convinced some of these nobles that they would lose status and prestige on the international, social and diplomatic scene if they did not adopt a strong veneer of ‘enlightenment’ and especially familiarity with French books themselves. They could not avoid concluding that their country, as Wekhrlin so rudely pointed out, had fallen dramatically behind in terms of cultural, educational, economic and general historical development.Reference Butterwick¹¹ Even if they lacked Kosciuszko’s passionate idealism and radical tendency, they still needed to wrestle with the intellectual challenge that radical ideas posed. Not only Voltaire and Rousseau but also Diderot, d’Holbach, Raynal and Helvétius, and also the participants in the great German philosophical controversies of the 1770s and 1780s, became familiar authors to many an aristocratic reader in Poland and Bohemia.Reference Cerman¹² The amateur Bohemian philosopher noble Joseph Nikolaus Windischgratz, for example, in his book Betrachtungen uber verschiedene Gegenstände, worüber man heute sehr viel schreibt (Nuremberg, 1787), even while promoting moderate Enlightenment positions, attempts to do so by refuting in detail the sensationalist psychology and moral philosophy of Helvétius, one of the most important materialist and crypto-republican authors.Reference German¹³

To move on to the second issue, the evidence of Catholic apologist works, it has, of course, been abundantly shown that the French Counter-Enlightenment writers before 1788 were obsessed with the naturalist, materialist and atheistic tendencies in the Western Enlightenment and their often highly-coloured, dramatic and sensational discussions heavily emphasized this philosophical threat to faith and tradition, including by Jesuit Claude-François Nonnotte, even though his chief claim to fame was his attack on Voltaire in his Les Erreurs de Voltaire. In his Examen du matérialisme (1771) Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier (1715–90), one of the best-known of the anti-philosophes, focused his attack almost entirely on the materialism and atheism of the radical wing. First published in French in 1771, the Examen already appeared in Italian the next year, at Venice in 1772, and in German, published at Frankfurt, in 1788. The Polish scholar Emanuel Rostworowski has drawn up a list of 160 French religious works (by 80 authors, counting 300 separate editions) that were translated into Polish during especially the second half of the eighteenth century. As late as the 1770s, five times as many religious as secular works were being translated from French into Polish. Since the delineation as well as refutation of the Radical Enlightenment was a central theme of French theological literature from the war against the Encyclopédie in the 1750s down to the early nineteenth century, there was no way in these circumstances to prevent the image and a fairly detailed awareness of the international Radical Enlightenment from being widely diffused in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth as well as Austria and the Czech lands.

The Polish Revolution of 1788–89 may not have been welcomed by Europe’s kings and ecclesiastics, but of course it was warmly welcomed by the French revolutionaries and all those radicals in Germany, Holland, Italy, Britain and America as well as France who had been converted to republicanism, the emancipation of the downtrodden, the curtailing of religious authority, and who were extolling radical ideas. This generated a degree of international renown for Kosciuszko and several other revolutionary leaders. Thus, Stanislaw Malachowski (1736–1809), marshal of the Great Sejm of Poland in the years 1788–1792, and one of the leading reformers, became a highly regarded figure internationally. Like his ally Hugo Kollatay, author of the Anonymous Letters to Stanislaw Malachowski (written from August to November 1788), Malachowski wanted to go some way, but not all the way, towards ending serfdom and freeing the peasantry. For his achievements, he was cited in the Pétition à l’Assemblée nationale, du 24 août 1792 ‘demandant les droits de citoyens français pour certains étrangers’, drawn up by Marie-Joseph Chénier, a document that called on the French National Assembly to offer honorary citizenship of the French Republic to those European writers and reformers who had done most to set mankind on the path to general emancipation. The Assembly wanted at least one famous Pole to be included among France’s honorary foreign citizens. The French were obviously a little confused by the complexities of Polish Revolution politics because they designated him ‘le maréchal de la confédération de Pologne’, whereas ‘Malakouski,’ as the Assembly called him, did everything he could to oppose the Targowica Confederation that overthrew the Polish Revolution and Constitution in 1792. But the French Assembly was right to acknowledge, as it had been advised, that Malachowski ‘n’ est point complice du découragement géneral; il offère un grand exemple à ses compatriots, et reste seul debout sur les ruines de la liberté polonaise.’

In Chénier’s proposal ‘General Malakowski’ was proposed in recognition of his leading the Polish opposition to the tyrannical empress Catherine ‘on the banks of the Vistula’, and aiding ‘la fraternité universelle’, the aim of philosophers and the purpose of the social order.Reference Chénier¹⁴ Malachowski was a co-author of the May Constitution of 1791. But both the Revolution in general and the 1791 constitution itself were very much products of a cautious, moderate Enlightenment, so moderate and cautious that they were bound to dissatisfy some. Malachowski and Kollatay for the moment kept the privileges and the nobility and clergy largely intact. The Polish Constitution of 3 May 1791, after all, was declared in the name of the king, and acknowledged and safeguarded the nobility’s privileges, proclaiming ‘the dominant national religion is and shall be the sacred Roman Catholic faith with all its laws.’ Rather amazingly in this late Enlightenment era, passage from the dominant religion to any other confession remained forbidden in law, under penalties of apostasy. All this provided grounds, presumably, why Chénier’s initial choice of Malachowski was changed during the National Assembly’s debate of 1792.

Chénier’s original list was debated in the French National Assembly and afterwards expanded, with some names deleted in favour of others. Reflecting Brissot’s own background, those afterward receiving honorary citizenship were in fact mostly British and American – Paine, Priestley, Bentham, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Mackintosh, David Williams, Hamilton, Washington, and Madison. But Continental Europeans figured prominently too, namely, Gorani, Cloots, Pestalozzi, Schiller, Klopstock were all being honoured along with Tadeusz Kościuszko now replacing Malachowski. It showed good discernment to replace Malachowski with Kościuszko. Kościuszko not only took command of the 1794 insurrection but clearly demonstrated his democratic and radical principles.

Appalled and shocked equally by the Russian repression of Poland, and, like all of Europe’s democratic republican intellectuals, by the brutal repressiveness of the Montagnard Terror that gripped France from the autumn of 1793, Kosciuszko left Paris for Italy in early 1794, conspiring with other exiled leaders of the Polish liberation movement and discussing schemes to resurrect the Revolution in Poland. When a national reform movement is defeated and driven abroad, those who persevere and strive to keep the cause alive become intellectually and ideologically radicalized. This happened in the case of Poland as it also happened elsewhere during the revolutionary age. In early 1794, Kosciuszko made it clear to his fellow conspirators scattered through Italy, France and Germany, and within Poland itself, that he would no longer fight for the Polish nobility and the privileged alone. Emancipation of the serfs and equality before the law must be publicly and forthrightly adopted by Poland’s revolutionaries if he was to lead.Reference Billias¹⁵ This was the joint American-French but also radical ‘philosophical’ perspective that the indomitable Kosciuszko brought to the Polish Revolution of the early 1790s. He was able to democratize the evolving Polish Revolution up to a point, but also had to make extensive concessions to the landowning nobility to gain their, and wider, Polish support. This renewed Polish Revolution proclaimed its principles in Kosciuszko’s Manifesto of Polaniec of 7 May 1794, a ringing one-page declaration that did not, however, amount to the full emancipation of the serfs that Kosciuszko sought. The manifesto granted the peasants limited personal freedom, a reduction but not complete liquidation of servile dues whilst the present crisis continued, and the outright freeing of those serfs who joined his volunteer army to fight Russia, as well as limited proprietary rights over the land they cultivated and a limited right of appeal to the royal courts against noble landowner abuses and oppression.

The Polish rising of 1794 was resolute, heroic and spectacular, and stirred all Europe and the United States. Under Kosciuszko’s leadership, the Polish rebels fought stubbornly, but were overwhelmed by Russian troops in the end. What survived both sides of the Vistula, and internationally, was the memory of their resistance; and the new Polish ideal. If Americans and Europeans alike had nurtured a rather negative view of Poland previously, due to the prevailing religious intolerance broadly characteristic of the country, the narrowly-framed, unworkable 1791 monarchical constitution, and the country’s domineering nobility, downtrodden Jews and abject serfs, the brutal Russian crack-down preceded by the Partition of 1793 which cynically and brutally divided what remained of the Polish Republic between Russia, Prussia and Austria shocked opinion everywhere due to its cynicism and disregard for rights of every kind. That unexampled act of royal and imperial arrogance and despotism, followed by the heroic 1794 Polish rising against it, bequeathed to the revolutionary age a suddenly changed and more positive image of Poland. Poland was now the martyred republic, seething with brave freedom-fighters ready to lay down their lives to fight tyranny and for liberty and justice. The leaders of the American Revolution expressed their sympathy. Addressing another Polish leader, in June 1798, Washington wrote that he ‘sorely lamented’ Poland’s unhappy fate and that ‘if my vows, during the arduous contest could have availed, you would now have been as happy in the enjoyment of these desirable blessings [national Liberty and the Rights of Man] under your own Vine and Fig tree, as the people of these United States may be under theirs’.Reference Cienciala¹⁶

Eulogized by the French Revolution, and a leader of the democratic tendency of the 1794 Polish Revolution, it was unsurprising that as a known enemy of conservative attitudes, Kosciuszko should have become a principal target of the Federalist reaction of the late 1790s in American Politics. Returning to the United States after his release from imprisonment in Saint Petersburg (where he had been taken following the defeat of the great Polish rebellion against Russia and the reduction of Warsaw) in 1794, he renewed his contacts with Jefferson and his efforts on behalf of black emancipation. But his radically enlightened attitudes were not welcome to the Federalist faction. With the help of the Protestant preachers, the opponents of Jefferson and democracy were able, from the mid-1790s, to swing much of the American public away from their previously positive attitude towards France and the French Revolution. Stoking up anti-French and anti-Revolution animosity became a conscious means of turning American opinion away from Radical Enlightenment ideas generally.

Thus, poignantly and also ironically, in early 1798, Kosciuszko – the renowned hero of both the American and Polish Revolutions, honoured by the democratic French Revolution – was cited under the reactionary new ‘Alien and Sedition Acts’, subjected to American government repression and, under threat of imprisonment, was expelled from America and compelled to return empty-handed to Europe. Radical ideas were indeed an integral component of the Polish and central European Enlightenment; but, as everywhere, on both sides of the Atlantic, they were resoundingly defeated in the 1790s.