In the eighteenth century, the once mighty Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth suffered a humiliating decline. Flaws in its political system and foreign machinations hamstrung its central government, hollowed out its military, and rendered it defenseless against the dictates of neighbors, most notably Russia. Then in 1788, King Stanisław August and a circle of like-minded reformers launched a daring revolution designed to rescue the commonwealth from its predicament. While Russia was bogged down in other conflicts, the king and his allies summoned the Sejm (parliament) into session under extraordinary circumstances, and over the next four years it enacted major legislation culminating in the Constitution of May 3, 1791. Its achievements included the enlargement of the military, the establishment of a more effective model of government, and the expansion of citizenship.

This much is well known. More obscure is how the revolutionary developments of these years touched Poland's powerful Catholic Church. This is the subject of Richard Butterwick's smart new book.

The government of the commonwealth included a king, but ultimate power resided in the Sejm, an unwieldy body wherein every nobleman, in principle, had a voice. Butterwick skillfully summons this dense political landscape to life. He introduces readers to a broad cast of players active in the political drama of these years, the cultural norms they shared, and the bonds of kinship, patronage, and ideology that linked them into diverse clusters. He charts the myriad discursive streams they generated to rally opinion around competing objectives. Improbable harmonies began to emerge from within this cacophony, and the Polish government, so long a study in disfunction, realized historic achievements.

Butterwick's account unfolds in three parts. Part 1 covers the early phase of the revolution to July 1789. The core principle that animated the Sejm was overcoming Poland's humiliating subjection to Russia by greatly expanding its army and forging an alliance with Prussia. The first goal was expensive, and noble opinion coalesced around proposals to reach into the deep pockets of the Catholic Church. While never failing to trumpet their Catholic bona fides, proponents of this solution gave voice to deep wellsprings of anticlericalism. They echoed the concerns shared by elites across Catholic Europe in this era (overpaid prelates, idle monks and nuns, irrational deployment of resources, and the like). Despite spirited resistance, the church was forced into substantial concessions: clergy income would be taxed at twenty percent (twice the noble rate); the extensive landholdings of the Diocese of Cracow would be nationalized in exchange for much smaller annual revenues of 100,000 złotys; and steps would be taken to equalize the revenues and responsibilities of bishops across the commonwealth.

In part 2, Butterwick charts developments up to late 1790. These months proved more favorable for the church, as the king regained his political footing and fears of a potential schism with Rome tempered ambitions. Lawmakers drafted the Cardinal Laws, which defined Catholicism as the commonwealth's dominant religion, made apostasy from Catholicism a crime, and guaranteed toleration to religious minorities. The ruling elite widely accepted the desirability of religious unity, but enforcing this goal was not worth the disturbances it would cause.

In part 3, Butterwick details the genesis of the Constitution of May 3 and efforts to win public approbation for the document. Its defenders characterized it as a work of divine providence. Supporting the constitution, which promised to create “ordered freedom” in the commonwealth, was a patriotic duty. The constitution enjoyed broad approval among the Catholic clergy, who played a critical role in rallying popular opinion in its favor.

Tragically, the constitution's promise was never fully realized. In his conclusion, Butterwick notes how its implementation was cut short by a Russian invasion, the installation of a counterrevolutionary regime, and the second partition. He then reflects on how the Polish revolution compared to similar processes in other parts of Europe. Many of the religious concerns enunciated by reformers in Poland also found expression in France at this time, only here events took a much more radical course (mass closure of monastic houses, nationalization of all church property, comprehensive rationalization of church operations, and, in the face of clerical resistance, wholesale de-Christianization). He finds a closer analogue in the reforms of Emperor Joseph II in the Hapsburg lands, which were in some respects bolder than those in Poland (roughly one third of all monasteries were shuttered), and in some respects milder (the property of bishops was left inviolate). He offers insightful reflections on why the Polish example differed from French and Austrian models.

Butterwick demonstrates a deft mastery of the culture, piety, and politics of eighteenth-century Poland. He constructs his account on a prodigious array of primary sources, including letters, sermons, pamphlets, treatises, speeches, and voting patterns. His analysis of this material is discerning and fair-minded. A gifted writer, he highlights the comic, tragic, and ironic dimensions of the human endeavors he describes.

In some respects, Butterwick's account is too tightly focused for its own good. His analysis is so fine-grained that at points the details obscure his larger narrative. At other points he assumes too much knowledge of Polish history on the part of his readers, which renders the book less accessible to non-specialists. He endeavors to root his history in its wider European context, but more could have been said here, thereby allowing the Polish case to more fully inform our understanding of religious dispositions and church-state relations in the Enlightenment era.

In the final analysis, Butterwick's book represents an important scholarly contribution. It offers a detailed account of a fascinating and strangely neglected chapter in Polish political and ecclesiastical history. In the process, it helps nuance our understanding of the moral climate and political culture of the Enlightenment and the revolutionary consequences of the same for the Catholic Church and church-state relations. It also offers a sophisticated model for analyzing complex political systems that merits emulation.