"A Free and feudal government": civic republican mentalities in the cities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

EN[...] Studies of republicanism in the Commonwealth have typically concentrated on the political nation of the nobility, with less consideration accorded to the outlook of the burghers. The nobility, of course, produced virtually all the political tracts of the Commonwealth and debates in dietines (sejmiki) have become well known thanks to comparatively abundant records and memoirs. Aside from the polemics of the 1789 burgher-rights movement known as the Black Procession, writings which reflect first and foremost the worldview of the wealthy and educated Warsaw magistracy, the memoirs of burghers are few and city records often formalistic. Nonetheless, I argue that one can reconstruct a similar, republican worldview among all city citizens and residents on the basis of complaints lodged to various authorities and commissions. Considering civic republicanism as a mentality and resource for assessing political developments provides a more convincing explanation for the activities of townspeople in the eighteenth century than the older view, in which burghers appeared as weak, politically immature and downtrodden, a perspective summarized in Rousseau’s claim that the Polish burghers “count for nothing.”Civic republicanism, which formed the basis of every articulate member of the Commonwealth’s worldview, becomes more salient as an explanatory tool for analyzing urban behaviour in the eighteenth century, when a rival vision of Enlightenment rationality, order and hierarchy captured the minds of the country’s elites.Civic republicanism explains the supposed docility of Polish-Lithuanian burghers in comparison to their French counterparts, as privileges of selfgovernment in the Commonwealth remained largely in force. As a result, burghers, Jews and others continued to respect the basic construct of their political system, and weaponized all available resources—including the institutions created by the newly activist government—to fight local battles and resist central oversight, a fact which has led historians influenced by Enlightenment thought to view Polish towns as disordered, backwards, and oppressive. [Extract, p. 159]

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