Constitution of 3 May 1791
The Polish-Lithuanian Sejm adopted a constitution on 3 May 1791, the first codified national constitution in Europe and the second in the world after the American. The Commonwealth it was written to save had been paralysed for a century by its own institutions. The liberum veto let any single deputy annul an entire session; the monarchy was elective, which invited foreign bribery at every vacancy; and the nobility's confederations legalised armed rebellion. Russia had guaranteed those arrangements by treaty precisely because they kept the country ungovernable. The first partition of 1772 removed a third of the territory and shocked the political class into reform. The Great Sejm sat from 1788 and used the Russo-Turkish war, which occupied Catherine II elsewhere, as its opening. The document abolished the liberum veto and the confederations, made the crown hereditary, established separation of powers with a bicameral parliament, gave the towns rights and access to office, and placed the peasantry under the protection of the law and of the government — which was less than emancipation and more than they had. It was passed in a partly empty chamber during the Easter recess, by a manoeuvre its opponents called a coup. Russia invaded the following year, invited by a group of magnates who signed the Targowica Confederation. The constitution lasted fourteen months. The second partition followed in 1793 and the third in 1795, and Poland ceased to exist for 123 years. The third of May is Poland's national holiday. It was celebrated illegally under partition, banned again under Nazi and Soviet occupation, and restored as a holiday in 1990.
- Year: 1791 CE
- Category: Political
