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This chapter presents a compressed account of the Four Years' Diet of 1788–1792 and its background. Poland is first exhibited as a land of aristocracy triumphant. The question is then asked whether the Polish Revolution of 1791 was a revolution at all, and if so in what sense; and what observers in other countries—such as Burke in England, the revolutionaries in France, and the rulers of Prussia and Russia—thought that they learned from it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau drew lessons from Poland in 1771. With the country dissolving in civil war, subverted by Russia, and sinking into the First Partition, the author of the Social Contract, at the request of certain Polish patriots, offered his diagnosis of their situation. For Rousseau, the trouble with Poland was that it had no consistance, no staying power to resist pressure and infiltration from outside. What it needed was character, a character of its own, resting on the collective consciousness or will of its people.

After evoking the trials of the Roman Catholic Church at the end of the eighteenth century, the introduction briefly explains the nature of the Polish‐Lithuanian Commonwealth. It then reviews the work of the Four Years’ Sejm and its historiography, focusing on the sejm's under‐researched ecclesiastical reforms, and setting them in the contexts of both Catholicism and Enlightenment. In comparing the Commonwealth with Joseph II's Habsburg Monarchy and Revolutionary France,the question is posed of the relationship between the form of government and political outcomes, To this end a methodology for the study of political history is developed, drawing on the works of Sir Lewis Namier, Maurice Cowling, and Quentin Skinner. The sources for both the high politics and political culture of the Polish Revolution are discussed, leading to six premises for the analysis of political decision‐making in republican and parliamentary polities.

The first section of the conclusion traces the subsequent fate of the book's principal dramatis personae through counter‐revolution, insurrection, and foreign rule. The middle section summarizes the confessional policy of the Four Years’ Sejm, then reviews changes in discourse and political culture, including both ‘Catholic’ and ‘enlightened’ paradigms, before attempting a comparative explanation of different outcomes for the Catholic Church in the Commonwealth, the Habsburg Monarchy, and Revolutionary France. While the discursive position of the regular clergy in Poland‐Lithuania was weak, no high‐political intrigue triggered the kind of reform inflicted on the Commonwealth's bishops. Having contrasted the fates of throne, nobility, and altar in the Polish‐Lithuanian lands, the final part of the conclusion signifies some longer‐term legacies of the Polish Revolution for the relationships between the Catholic Church and the Polish nation.

The first part of this chapter analyses the Providential rhetoric and civic and religious rituals (including oaths) by which the Constitution of 3 May 1791 was propagated and celebrated in the following months. The second section focuses on the sejmiks of February 1792, which, especially in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, delivered a clear endorsement of the Constitution in what was effectively a referendum. Particular attention is paid to the role of clergymen in cheerleading for the Polish Revolution, and in promoting the new discursive paradigm of ‘ordered liberty’, as well as to the controversial question of ecclesiastical censorship and evidence of continuing tensions between clergy and laity. Finally, the celebrations of the first anniversary of the Constitution are examined via the messages conveyed by ceremonies, speeches, hymns, and sacral architecture. Again, the Providential theme is omnipresent in what became an apotheosis of the king.

This chapter examines the emerging Catholic press of Communist Poland in the years 1945–1948 (prior to the onset of Stalinism). Their debates transformed Catholic “revolution” from a program of charity and corporatism to direct collaboration in Marxists’ pursuit of a dictatorship of the proletariat. As the Moscow-inspired “Polish Revolution” unfolded, the Catholic writers of Dziś i Jutro developed a distinct edge over their counterparts at two other nascent postwar weeklies: Christian Democrats’ Tygodnik Warszawski (Warsaw Weekly) and the self-styled neo-positivist Tygodnik Powszechny (Universal Weekly), led by Jerzy Turowicz. Dziś i Jutro and Tygodnik Powszechny shared an affinity for Mounier’s writings, but the French philosopher’s three-week 1946 sojourn in Poland ended with privileges for Warsaw’s Catholic socialists and disappointment for Kraków’s neo-positivists. And still, in the face of Catholic socialism’s ascendancy, integralism survived within Bolesław Piasecki’s new movement—a fateful holdover that sowed the seeds of Catholic socialism’s eventual undoing.

This chapter explains how King Stanisław August and the Russian ambassador Otto Magnus von Stackelberg lost control of the confederated sejm that opened on 6 October 1788. With Russia engaged in war with the Ottoman Empire, the sejm, encouraged by Prussia, acclaimed an increase in the army to 100,000 men and threw off the Russian ‘guarantee’ of the Commonwealth's form of government. It took direct control of Poland's military, diplomacy, and government. The chapter analyses the clash between republican arguments and those advocating limited monarchy, explores the extraordinary atmosphere of the first months of the sejm, and considers the role of the Warsaw ‘public’ in the making of political decisions. It concludes with the implications of this ‘republican revolution’ for the clergy. By the beginning of 1789, following the collapse of royal authority and the influence of many bishops, ecclesiastical property was being targeted to fund the army.