LITUANUS
LITHUANIAN QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
 
Volume 39, No.4 - Winter 1993
Editor of this issue: Violeta Kelertas,
University of Illinois. at Chicago
ISSN 0024-5089
Copyright © 1993 LITUANUS Foundation, Inc.
Lituanus

THE KING AS MIRROR: AUTOBIOGRAPHIES IN 18th CENTURY POLAND-LITHUANIA

ARTURAS TEREŠKINAS
University of Illinois at Chicago

He [the King], a genuine philosopher of the Epicurean sect, took no interest in anything that happened in his country and even in the whole world, as long as he was able to amuse himself...1 (1795-1796)

During the course of these amusements devised for the King we complained that there was no foreigner who could testify to other nations how much the King loved his people, with what magnificence the monarch was entertained by the citizen [Karolis Radvila] in his house, and how fervently the province of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania declared its supreme attachment to the King.2

There was a massive output of autobiographical writings in 18th century Poland-Lithuania. The extent to which they gained popularity in the 17th and 18th centuries can be gauged from the number of memoirs written: 70 in the second half of the 17th century, 55 in the first half of the 18th.3 Memoirs were just one of a considerable variety of literary forms: travel diaries, court addresses, public and political speeches, chronicles, personal journals, domestic memoranda, etc. Both private and public lives were considered significant enough to record them in autobiographies or biographies. It was important to prove oneself as a text, to create one's own discourse which is a violence that we do to things, or in any case a practice that we impose on them.4

Some of the 18th century biographical writings to be examined in this essay were published by Count Edward Raczynski in Poznan5 during the 19th century. Heterogeneous in style, they contain accounts of social events, descriptions of traditions and customs, political correspondence, cooking recipes. Particular mention should be made of the modes of eating and drinking during the reign of August III, described by Jedrzej Kitowicz6 in Customs and Fashions. The orgiastic dining that prevailed under August III reflects the cultural norms of that society. The "Golden Freedom," considered a threshold in the lives of the nobility, is confirmed by food consumption. Indulging in the primitive delights of eating and drinking much of the nobility literally ate and drank up their estates. Their banquets and sessions of diets often turned into orgies. In the chapter of his memoirs entitled "About Gluttony and Drunkenness in the Diets," Kitowicz writes:

In the morning they [the noblemen] were given vodka to drink once, twice, and even three times, afterwards some loaves of bread, some chunks of butter, and some sliced cakes were put on the table for them; those who after all this felt thirsty were given beer. But, incidentally, their greediness was kept in check, so that they could work in the diet without losing consciousness.7

As structured social events which structure others in their own image, meals encode "messages about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across boundaries."8 What, when, and how one eats determines the meanings one ascribes to meals.9 Losing bodily control in eating and drinking can be commonly treated as a pattern related to the social anarchy in 18th-century Poland-Lithuania. It is convincingly expressed in Kitowicz's other story:

The third famous drunkard was Duke Karolis Radvila, the voivode of Vilnius. You could write long stories about the mischief he did to his family members while drunk, but I shall only tell you about the thing he did to Pacas, a secretary of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. One time Radvila's chicanery became so annoying to Pacas, that unable to stand it any longer, he threatened him with a duel. Not wanting to break up their relationship, Radvila sought to frighten him, pretending that he was furiously angry at Pacas. Radvila ordered him arrested, put into chains, and thrown into prison immediately. The next day, Radvila gave the command to dress Pacas in a death-shirt, to remove him to the square escorted by his executioner and a priest, and to execute the death sentence; all of Pacas's friends, frightened by this spectacle, threw themselves at Radvila's feet along with Pacas who with tears and prayers begged for mercy. But Radvila, pretending to have been steady as a rock and deaf to their prayers, hastened Pacas to lay his head under the executioner's sword. Finally, after Pacas asked to go to confession, Radvila content with the trick rushed to Pacas's side teasing him cheerfully: see, my trick frightened you more than your duel did! Then he accompanied Pacas, still dressed in his death-shirt into his manor-house, giving him the most expensive gifts in exchange for the prank that he had played, also giving a party and a drinking-bout. Not surprisingly, shocked by death, then overwhelmed by joy, Pacas, forced to drink in such a revolution of blood, got sick and three days later, he died.10

This orgiastic discourse must have been created as a denial of disgust resulting from the anarchy and chaos in private and public lives. This discourse manifests itself most directly in the descriptions of Poland-Lithuania's King Stanislaus Augustus, particularly in the episodes of the King's processions and civic rituals that served as traditional idioms for the social order. The processions and rituals provided a ready rhetoric for expressing concerns about social and cultural changes felt and experienced by society in the second half of the 18th century. The rituals defined the gestures, behavior, circumstances, and the whole set of signs which must accompany the discourse11 created by the speaking subjects.

Examination of Stanislaus Augustus and his role in popular ceremonies and processions reveals certain symbols and metaphors of society at that time as well as the society's most important qualities.12 The King derived his power from the symbols that he manipulated. But the symbols in turn depended upon the entire range of associations that the King invoked; moreover, he became a powerful symbol himself, one which possessed the thoughts of noblemen and noblewomen.

Writings such as autobiographies, memoirs, and travel literature by members of the nobility depicted general ways of thinking and feeling by that estate. The memoirs tended to be neither spiritual examinations of conscience by aristocrats, nor salon games of introspective analysis; rather they were more likely to give detailed accounts of political actions or of social events intermixed with scenes of ordinary human life. It may be proposed that a memoirist's interpretations of political events define his individuality, his self-concept, and social identity.13 The discourse he tried to create, in short, was the struggle, the power which he was attempting to seize. The impulse to chronicle one's individual experience also had much to do with the individual's sense of destruction and helplessness during the partitions of the state, accidental confederations, etc. in Poland-Lithuania of the time. Thus memoirs provide a more or less accurate record of events, yet at the same time convey the subjective and emotional qualities of the author.

Although many of the writings included in Edward Raczynski's compilation are attributed to the Polish literary tradition, strong affinities between Poland and Lithuania in the 19th century suggest that the authors' expressions of historical experience and formulations of patterns of their own selves are applicable to Lithuania as well.14

I. The King as Ceremony: Coronation and Visit to Nieswiez

At the outset, several obvious conclusions may be made regarding the historical situation during the era of Stanislaus Augustus. As the last act in a political drama, this situation was determined by the intellectual and moral character of the principal actors, such as Stanislaus Poniatowski, Catherine II, Frederic II, among others. Contrasts in cultural life, in customs, and in manners were another undeniable factor which influenced the development of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. "Sarmatism," on the one hand, embodied in the old-fashioned mustachioed nobleman, wearing a "kontusz," was confronted by "foreignness," on the other hand, expressed by the snob who had forgotten not only Latin, but even Polish in favor of French.

Two episodes in Raczynski's volumes, entitled About the Coronation of the King in 1764, by Jędrzej Kitowicz, and The Visit of Stanislaus Augustus to Nieswiez, by an unknown author, make a dramatic contrast between the defining boundaries of self and world, and of self and ceremony. The former debases the rhetoric of the coronation, suffusing it with extreme mannerism and decorativeness, depicting the King as a participant in a decadent masquerade:

There were only a few legates and senators at the ceremony, and more than half the chairs were vacant, either because of lack of interest in the scene prepared for the citizenry, or because they were catching up on sleep after last night's ball. The striking fact was that there were so many empty seats in the senate.15

This quote illustrates a central concern of the memoirist: the ceremony was not believed to be an expression of societal order. Neither was the King. He appeared unable to keep people in their places in the social order ordained by God. Irony and mistrust, permeating the author's depiction, minimize the explosion of emotions: the magnificence of power is transformed into a game without value or significance.

This game, supposedly appropriate for the style of the time, reflected the attached notion of the complete ornament. Both of the King's outfits, sewn according to German and Hispanic models, and the sacred ritual of the sword became images of the theater of the grotesque:

The King brandished the sword twice in every direction of the horizon... He did it quite efficiently and mightily (but instead of this action, he would rather have been defending his country against the partition)...16

This gesture, used as a psychological means to impress people, was overshadowed by the onlooker's scepticism and hostility, stemming from conservative nostalgia for the past:

...but at the bottom of my heart I felt that the reign of [Stanislaus Augustus] disgraced the honor of August III, the best of kings...17

The reign of August III (1733-1763) which has been traditionally conceived as one of the darkest periods in Poland-Lithuania's history18 was described by Kitowicz as the best period of all. In a disordered society, one like 18th-century Poland-Lithuania, where demoralization, political paralysis and private greed characterized much of the political life, the consensus on the meaning of more complex verbal symbols must have broken down. Abstractions like freedom, justice, virtue, democracy underwent a rapid succession of mutations in meaning, as revealed in Kitowicz's writings. They must be definitely associated with the corruption of terminology in Poland-Lithuania. Words ceased to reflect objective reality and to translate past and present experience with reliability. This "political" and "societal" pathology that reigned both in the words and behavior of the nobility was captured by foreigners:

'...the young Pole doesn't understand, what the citizen's duties and rights are,' wrote one of the travelers, Vautrin, 'he does not consider himself a part of a certain political organism, but rather its center, consuming everything around him...., Forcing such ideas into the child's mind, .... the magnate doesn't comprehend the limits to the material territory that isn't related to state power. The young Pole wasn't brought up to serve his country, because his country exists for his interests. The magnate's child grows up not as a member of a societal organism, but as a parasite, who might contribute to his nation's destruction.19

Kitowicz, in fact, describes the manifestations of loyalty to the King by the Warsaw population as a comedia dell'arte:20

Shortly after his coronation, a magnificent scene was presented to the King in Warsaw. There were flags, carpets and other pompastic decorations spread out above the Vistula, and six beautiful women were set in their midst. Naked to the navel, these were supposed to be mermaids, who sang to the King and called to him, as he stood on the bank by the river.21

The play collapsed after it was spoiled by signs of death. According to the author, a triumphal arch with the imperial eagle on top was built in Crakow. This eagle was crowned with a bowl full of hot tar with wine streaming down its claws. Ironically, instead of wine the citizens were accidentally given hot tar to drink. Some people died.22

By evaluating the ceremony of the coronation as a shameful ritual, the memoirist emphasizes his self's power to overcome it by negation. The self he creates favors immobility, stagnation and antimodernity, as he measures contemporary social life by counterevidence from the past. The memoirist perceives the King as representing withdrawal from a style of thinking and living which he considers "popular". The latter is seen as contrary to that of the "discreet man" (the King) with his reasonableness, worldliness, sociability, and taste.23 Kitowicz hates Stanislaus's lifestyle based on empiricism and sensuality.24 He therefore calls the King "a genuine philosopher of the Epicurean sect" whose only purpose was to amuse himself taking no interest in what was happening in Poland-Lithuania.25

An alternative version of biography and the self is presented by the unknown author of The Visit of Stanislaus Augustus to Nieswicz. The account of six days in Nieswiez includes a multitude of various details concerning landscape, architecture, dress, customs, behavior, etc. These memoirs are structured according to a linear time sequence, day by day, with sharp attention to detail (for example, the list of nobility running five pages, the detailed description of Karolis Radvila's theatre). Sermons, speeches, and the letters of Poniatowski are inserted into the text.

The author manipulates images of the King as the sun, the self as part of the ceremony, and the ceremony as a test for the self. These images illustrate the concern to ground the self in a solid universe of permanently changing society. The small body of the self corresponds exactly to the larger body of the social order. These assumptions are embodied in the sermons dedicated to the King, and in the ceremony of gifts given to the gentry by Stanislaus, etc.

The stylized panegyrics, full of pious epithets, extol the might, justice, clemency and piety of the ruler. Nevertheless, they seem to be a gracious play of artfulness. Even if the King reigns as the father of his people, for the biographer he is not the earthly image of divinity. The King might have been the sun, but this sun was artificial.

Descriptions of concerts, dances, opera, ballet, and hunting suggest that the kingship may have been regarded as an art. In the author's view, the King had to display a sufficient number of elements of the kingly code in order to be properly identified. The King's personal performances conveyed the message of his royalty. Moreover, the King broke down the distinction between art and life. As Countess Potocka later summarized the images of Stanislaus Augustus,

he revived the taste for art and letters in Poland, which the rule of the Saxon electors, whose brutishness had brought a fateful reaction in the country, had extinguished.26

In such a social arena the memorist's ego defined itself by its sensitivity to art. Political reality, whatever it might have been (defeat, partition of the state, shortcomings of anarchy, or occasional confederacies) did not conform to the playful game of self-invention by means of art. Every day in Nieswiez was characterized by new artistic experiences. Stanislaus amused himself with collections of paintings, ceramics, and the jewels of the Radvilos: "Our gracious King enjoyed them for about three hours..."27 Effort was made to delight him with a ballet performance that ended with "a sun made from panes of crystal and wheeling in the air, lighting up the bust of our Lord, to whom the entire ballet company offered garlands and burned incense."28

On the contrary, in Kitowicz's memoirs, the descriptions of the arts in which Poniatowski indulged are clearly ironical. "Everything that was created by painters, sculptors, and poets shone for Stanislaus Augustus,"29 writes the memoirist. Hostility to the arts and sciences stems from a long tradition. In the 17th century, after more than a century of contact between Poland-Lithuania and the Renaissance and Baroque culture in the rest of Europe, Aron Alexander Olizarowski could still write in his De politica hominum societate about the contempt that the Polish-Lithuanian nobility felt for the arts.30

Thus, the decadent masquerade, without any significance in The Coronation, in The Visit of Stanislaus Augustus became transformed into a display of elegant and eloquent communication, and a system of the self-as-art in which every pose and gesture embodied a metaphysics of collective and individual imagery.

II. The King's Body: Two Versions of the Kidnapping of Stanislaus Augustus

An attempt made by the Confederates of Bar to kidnap Stanislaus Augustus in 1771 failed. It discredited them in the eyes of monarchist Europe.31 The kidnapping of the ruler of Poland-Lithuania produced several interpretations. Two of them, published by Edward Raczynski, offer fascinating speculations of political fancy.

The King's body, attacked and meant to be destroyed, represented a unique metaphor for both "counter-revolution" and "revolution." On the one hand, the discrepancy between social and political realities and the King's body was taken into account by the Confederates, who expected his removal to result in the rebuilding of an appropriate state of government. On the other hand, the enlightened nobility surrounding Stanislaus considered the King's body a vision of the new world.32

It is appropriate here to refer to the sermon included in the description of the ruler's visit to Nieswiez. For the town's magistrate, the King's heart contained "not only common benefits for the whole country, but also singular ones for [his] towns and citizens: the flourishing of trade, the facilitation of sailing, the enrichment of towns."33 In the reformers' view, to attack Stanislaus Augustus was to offend the whole political body: the aristocracy, the Church, the salons, etc. This offence was experienced as a construct of disorder, the expression of active, malevolent and aggressive danger. Hence, one assumed that the renewal of the reign would mean reclaimed control over the totality of political life. Stanislaus Augustus himself saw it as the happiest day of his life: "It seemed that he, splashed with blood, at that moment was greater than at his coronation."34

The kidnapping may portray the agonistic struggle to maintain an anachronistic quality of existence. For Kitowicz, the abduction showed that the Polish could do neither good nor bad. The memoirist was therefore driven to depict it as theatre, viewed simply as a field of new possibilities: striking political dramas, or frolicsome games. Kitowicz asked himself what role the King would have played if he had not been saved, and what would the Russians have done, either to preserve the status quo or to bring Stanislaus back.35 The description implied other suggestions on how to interpret the abduction. As the biographer saw it, the act of kidnapping might have been "a conscious attempt by the King and his advisers to defame the people [of Poland-Lithuania]."36

In many respects these versions not only affirm a confession of loyalty to the King and indicate self-indulgence without any sense of responsibility, but they also exteriorize the constructions of the memoirists' selves. The first version assumes an image of the self that appeared to be in favor of monarchical order and a futuristic vision of enlightened ritual, requiring a high degree of conscious control. The latter presupposes a self that enjoys the role of a degenerate warrior, which threatens to become an ideology for sociopolitical orgy. Either way, the King and his body might have been an eloquent means to define the boundaries of the self of the biographer, who celebrated either the culture of reason, knowledge, and manners, or the wilderness of Dionysian passions, violence and unconfined freedom.37

III. The King as Mirror: Warrior, Coward, and Dandy

The memoirs, feeding on both ars historica and the effect of subjectivity, may function as a technology of selfhood. Moreover, the images of the king, projected as reflections of the biographer's self, produce a variety of self-definitions. Drawing on metaphorical parallels of the King and his ceremony, the ruler's body, the social order, and the self to allegorize the modes of self-invention, one can unmask fragments of the nobility's lifestyles of that time embedded in different sociopolitical discourses. But however fascinated one may be by the idea of self-representation, one must be aware of the illusoriness of the self-image, as reflected by the nervous mirror of Countess Potocka. "This monarch's noble visage, his silvery hair, and his beautiful, faintly perfumed hand—all this is still present in my memory," wrote Countess Potocka in her memoirs.38 Her description leads to the realization of the unreality of the self, as mirrored in her vague vision of the King. In the view of the Countess, the self could be metaphorically equated with the insignia of fading affections, dress, and etiquette, and with eclectic ornaments situated at the crossroads of cultural changes. Thus, signifying aspects of the personality are reduced to the most elementary level of physical appearance and gestures.39 In Potocka's description, the central perspective is that which subordinates the part to the whole, i.e. she uses the metonymic mode of vision which is inherent to the rococo. Even man and woman in her writings are sometimes replaced by the social stereotypes of the Beau and the Coquette.40

Whether adoring or criticizing Augustus and his behavior, the memoirist always lived in front of a mirror. "King! I do not want to be rich without you, nor can I be poor with you,"41 writes the author of The Visit of Stanislaus Augustus, Even the people surrounding the King would have been reflective sign conveyers.42 The continuous counter reflection must have evoked a complicated confusion between the coherent personality of the author and the mirror. On the other hand, it led to a Stoic freedom in defining the roles and masks of the self.

As Jędrzej Kitowicz wrote at the end of the 18th century, "... in such [perplexed] circumstances, the king-warrior had been necessary for the state. Poniatowski, however, was a coward, an effeminate person."43 According to the memoirist, a human being had to be a struggler, involved in both external and internal combat with the world and his own self. The aesthetic attitude toward life for him represented the decadent self, as a contrast to the life of man at perpetual war, as declared in 17th-century literature.44 The lifestyle of Stanislaus Augustus and his choice of self-as-art were depicted by the biographer as effeminate. The memoirist accused Poniatowski of indulging in the collections of objets d'art, of wasting time with arts, and of surrendering to artistic foolery rather than attending to politics. In his view, the King was a prodigal who wasted the glory of his ancestors and precursors (this is especially apparent in Kitowicz's description of the kidnapping of the ruler).

In the episode of Stanislaus's visit to Nieswiez, by contrast, the King-dandy acquired a liturgical dignity, mirroring the imagination of a certain part of society:

After the priest had finished, [Stanislaus] answered him and the crowd of vaivodes courteously: the sweetness and politeness of his words and his expression, his voice and his face made the listeners cry out.45

The listeners' failure to recognize the difference between elegant communication of the self-as-art and the faking of the language of didactic gospel was unmasked by the King, the preaching dandy.

One cannot help asking, to what extent Stanislaus's eloquence was a matter of trickery and an utterance of his imagined or real authority. Nevertheless, one should not try to define precisely what the King really was. It is probably more important to demonstrate that the memoirists' responses to the King must have been conditioned by the cultural practices and metaphors of the Polish and Lithuanian gentry during the period of 1764-1795. The noblemen made themselves, they established their own images, in part, through their symbolic identification with the King. One created one's identity either by denying the sociopolitical and personal order expressed by the King or by confirming it. The anachronistic discourse is characterized by violent passions, ignorance, superstition, unquestioning allegiance to tradition. It considers the King a threat to orgiastic freedom of the extremes. At stake is the loss of it. The discourse of the Enlightenment struggles for the power to forge a new language consensus about civic values.46 Stanislaus Poniatowski must have been a potent means of gaining this power in this discourse. The latter describes a whole new set of political symbols which has to be imposed on a whole new order of things.

In any case, as if playing out their selves in front of the King's mirror, the noblemen either reside in the reality or try to fictionalize it and to see only the images of themselves and the King that they choose to see. The self and the reflection of that self in the mirror set up a reciprocal relation in a closed system.47

Ironically, my essay, too, may be a case of mirror-writing, not unlike the memoirists' fictive selves, reflected on the surface of the King. I would like to end it with a description of the funeral of Stanislaus Augustus in Petersburg. The biographer depicts it as the ultimate humiliation of Poland-Lithuania and of his own self, as well. Paying obsessive attention to the funeral procession, which exposed a "mixture of grief and joy," 48 contemplating the King's vices and virtues, the writer summarizes Ponitowski's reign as a vanishing sign of degeneration:

Thus, Stanislaus Poniatowski, considered to have been the most sophisticated among contemporary European monarches, ended his life in shame and disgrace. The implication of his name "Poniatowski," translated anagrammatically, happened to be true: "He who will cheat the world." And the genitive of his name: "He whom the world will cheat."49

I would like to express my gratitude to Aušrelė and Arūnas Liulevičius whose help in writing the first draft of this essay was immeasurable. Thanks are also due to Professor Violeta Kelertas for presenting it at the Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies at Toronto (Canada, June 1992).

1 Jedrzej Kitowicz, Pamiętniki czyli Historia Polska (Warszawa: Panstwowy Institute Wydawniczy, 1971), 642. All the translations are my own.
2 Bytnosc Stanislawa Augusta w Nieswiežu," Obraz Polakow i Polski w XVIII wieku czyli zbior pamiętnikow, dyaryuszow, korrespondencyj publicznych i listow prywatnych, podrožy i opisow zdarzen szczegolowych, sužacych do wyjasnienia stanu Polski w wieku wspomnionym, wydany z rękopismow przez Edwarda Raczynskiego (Poznan, 1840-1843), v. 16, 79.
3 Memoirs of the Polish Baroque: The Writings of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, a Squire of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, ed. by Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1976), 1.
4 Michael Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. and introduced by Robert Young (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul), 67.
5 Obraz Polakow i Polski w XVIII wieku (Poznan, 1840-1843), v. 1-16.
6 Jędrzej Kitowicz—a priest, Bar confederate, and memoirist who wrote during the reigns of Stanislaus III and Stanislaus Augustus.
7 Jędrzej Kitowicz, "Opis obyczajow i zwyczajow za panowania Augusta III księdza Kitowicza...", Obraz Polakow i Polski, v. 9, 224.
8 Mary Douglas, "Deciphering a Meal," Myth, Symbol, and Culture, ed. by C.Geertz (New York, 1971), 61.
9 See Andrzej Wyczanski, "A Methodological Approach to the System of Food Consumption in 16th-century Poland," European Food History, ed. by Hans J. Teuteberg (Leicester: Leicester U. Press, 1992).
10 Jedrzej Kitowicz, "Opis obyczajow...", 200-202.
11 Michel Foucault, Op. cit., 62.
12 See Robert Darnton, "A Bourgeois Puts His World in Order: The City as a Text," The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Book, 1985).
13 See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1978).
14 At the beginning of his memoirs, Kitowicz says that he doesn't know Lithuania well enough, but he thinks that the Polish and Lithuanian nations are connected by common politics and that they borrow manners and customs from one another. By defining one nation, Kitowicz argues, he also defines the other, notwithstanding some differences in the judicial structure of the two countries. Jedrzej Kitowicz, "Opis opyczajow...", 220.
15 "O koronacyi Krola 1764," Obraz Polakow i Polski, v.l, 267.
16 Ibid, 270.
17 Ibid, 276.
18 Barbara Grochulska, "The Place of the Enlightenment in Polish Social History," A Republic of Nobles: Studies in Polish History to 1864, ed. & trans. by J. K. Fedorowicz (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1982), 241.
19 Vautrin, "Observator w Polsce," Polska stanislawowska w oczach cudzoziemcow, t.1. ed. W. Zawadzki (Warszawa, 1963), 793-794. Many philosophers of the Enlightenment expressed their negative opinions of Poland-Lithuania's political institutions. In L'Esprit des Lois, Montesquieu referred to it as the "most imperfect form of aristocracy," while David Hume considered Poland-Lithuania the most backward state in Europe. Jozef Andrzej Gierowski, "The International Position of Poland in the 17th and 18th Century," A Republic of Nobles, 236.
20 Rousseau, on the contrary, in his recommendation to the Polish-Lithuanian government, "had earlier called for the creation of civic festivals. These would have the effect, he wrote, of 'reinforcing the national character, of strengthening the new tendencies,' and giving 'new energy to all the passions.' Rousseau held in terms that would later be taken up by Durkheim, that participation in such festivals reduces the social barriers that separate people and thus brings about social solidarity." David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and the Power (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1988), 153.
21 Jędrzej Kitowicz, Pamiętniki, 673.
22 O koronacyi Krola", Obraz Polakow i Polski, v. 1., 276.
23 Harry C. Payne, "Elite Versus Popular Mentality in the 18th Century," Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, vol. 2, 2 (Winter/ l'hiver 1976,): 194. See also Domna Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art: A Study of the Honnete Homme and the Dandy in 17th and 19th -Century French Literature (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1980). It is possible to draw an opposition between "enlightened elitism" (Stanislaus Augustus and his court) and "sarmatic populism" (Kitowicz and others).
24 This lifestyle is most clearly related to the rococo. The rococo in aesthetics parallels the empiricism and sensualism stemming from Locke. See Patrick Brady, "A Sweet Disorder: Atomistic Empirism and the Rococo Mode of Vision," Studies in 18th Century Culture, 7 (1978): 455.
25 Pamiętniki, 642.
26 Memoirs of the Countess Potocka, Anna, ed. by Casimir Stryienski (London, 1901), 5.
27 "Bytnosc Stanislawa Augusta w Nieswiezu,", 50.
28 "Bytnosc," 54.
29 "O koronacyi Krola," 271.
30 Andrzej Wyrobisz, "The Arts and Social Prestige in Poland between the 16th and 18th Centuries," A Republic of Nobles, 158,
31 Aleksander Gieysztor, Stefan Kieniewicz, History of Poland (Warszawa: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1968), 326.
32 See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1957), 232.
33 "Bytnosc," 26-27.
34 "Porwanie Krola Stanislawa Augusta przez Konfederatow w Warszawie dnia 3 Listopada 1771," Obraz Polakow i Polski v. 16, 248.
35 "O porwaniu Krola," Obraz Polakow i Polski, v. 3, 148.
36 Ibid, 150.
37 See Michel Maffesoli, The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy, trans. by Cindy Linse and Mary Kristina Palmquist (Albany: State U. of New York Press, 1993).
38 Memoirs of the Countess Potocka, 4.
39 Domma C. Stanton, Op. cit., 4.
40 See Patrick Brady, Op. cit, 456.
41 "Bynosc," 63.
42 Domma C. Stanton, 110.
43 Pamiętniki, 671.
44 Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1986), 159.
45 "Bytnosc," 16.
46 This is an explanation of false republicanism: "The worst part of the republican form of government is that any effort to change old and inadequate laws offends frivolous minds and any effort to correct the mistakes of the past seems to them a sacrilege and demotion of freedom (103): a true republic: "The King is a creation of the nation, the laws are rules of government for the nation, freedom is a treasure, secured by the King and the laws, the citizens are legislators, and everyone is a subject of the laws and the government of the nation. This is an example of republicanism..." (116). Kazania i inne dziea JX. Michaa Franciszka Karpowicza, Biskupa Wigierskiego, v. 5 (Warszawa, 1813).
47 See Susan P. McNamara, "Mirrors of Fiction Within Tom Jones: The Paradox of Self-Reference," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 12:3 (Spring, 1979), 386-390.
48 Pamiętniki, 670.
49 Pamiętniki, 671. The play of sounds: "Poniatowski" — "On okpi swiat" and "Poniatowskiego" — "Okpi go swiat".