Great Sejm

The Constitution introduced political equality between townspeople and nobility and placed the peasants under the protection of the government, thus mitigating the worst abuses of serfdom.

The reforms of the Great Sejm responded to the increasingly perilous situation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth,[1] only a century earlier a major European power and indeed the largest state on the continent.

[2] By the 18th century the Commonwealth's state machinery became increasingly dysfunctional; the government was near collapse, giving rise to the term "Polish anarchy", and the country was managed by provincial assemblies and magnates.

[4] By the early 18th century, the magnates of Poland and Lithuania controlled the state – or rather, they managed to ensure that no reforms would be carried out that might weaken their privileged status (the "Golden Freedoms").

[9] Even before the First Partition, a Polish noble, Michał Wielhorski, an envoy of the Bar Confederation, had been sent to ask the French philosophes Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to offer suggestions on a new constitution for a new Poland.

This group received support from all strata of Polish-Lithuanian society, from societal and political elites, including some aristocratic magnates, through Piarist and Enlightened Catholics, to the radical left.

[30] Spurned by Russia, Poland turned to another potential ally, the Triple Alliance, represented on the Polish diplomatic scene primarily by the Kingdom of Prussia.

[20] Potocki wanted to make the parliament (Sejm) the most powerful of the state's institutions, and Kołłątaj, for a "gentle" social revolution, enfranchising other classes in addition to the till-then dominant nobility, but doing so without a violent overthrow of the old order.

[15][39] The reform's advocates, threatened with violence from their opponents, managed to move debate on the new constitution forward by two days from the original 5 May, while many opposed deputies were still away on Easter recess.

[40] On 3 May the Sejm met with only 182 members present, about a half of its "dual" number (or a third, if one was to count all individuals eligible to take part in the proceedings, including the Senate and the king[a]).

Among the most notable acts passed after the 3 May was the Deklaracja Stanów Zgromadzonych (Declaration of the Assembled Estates) of 5 May 1791, confirming the Government Act adopted two days earlier, and the Zaręczenie Wzajemne Obojga Narodów (Reciprocal Guarantee of Two Nations, i.e., of the Crown of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) of 22 October 1791, affirming the unity and indivisibility of Poland and the Grand Duchy within a single state, and their equal representation in state-governing bodies.

On that day, soon after learning that the Russian army had invaded Poland, the Sejm gave the commander-in-chief position to the king, and voted to end the session.

[46] Soon afterwards, the Friends of the Constitution, regarded as the first Polish political party, and including many participants of the Great Sejm, was formed to defend the reforms already enacted and to promote further ones.