• DOI:10.1017/S0008938900018136
• Corpus ID: 143976746

The Partitions of Poland and the Crisis of the Old Regime in Prussia 1772–1806

@article{Hagen1976ThePO,
  title={The Partitions of Poland and the Crisis of the Old Regime in Prussia 1772–1806},
  author={William W. Hagen},
  journal={Central European History},
  year={1976},
  volume={9},
  pages={115 - 128}
}

• W. Hagen
• Published 1 June 1976
• History
• Central European History

The partitions of Poland can be likened to an assassination per-petrated on a victim who had long before succumbed to an al-most suicidal indifference to the dangers besetting him. Yet this episode in the “diplomatic slaughterhouse,” as Ludwig Dehio termed it, did not merely signify the demise, alternately ignominious and heroic, of an antiquated, quasi-medieval state which, at its height, had measured itself confidently against Habsburg Austria, striven for power in Russia, and scorned the pretensions of the Hohenzollern electors. The partitioning states soon discovered that by annexing large Polish territories and populations they had bequeathed to themselves a problem of political integration which, as modern nationalism spread through central Europe, proved to be increasingly intractable. The “Polish question,” settled in the treaty of 1797, and then again in 1815, never ceased to impinge on the minds of the governors of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, sometimes with the weight of an incubus, until their empires, antiquated in turn, collapsed in the wake of World War I.