Patriotic Party

[1] The reform movement were responding to the increasingly perilous situation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth,[9] which only a century earlier had been a major European power and the largest state on the continent.

[10] By the early 17th century, the magnates of Poland and Lithuania controlled the state and they ensured that no reforms would be carried out that might weaken their privileged status (the "Golden Freedoms").

[12] Thanks to this device, deputies bribed by magnates or foreign powers, or simply content to believe they were living in some kind of "Golden Age", paralyzed the Commonwealth's government for over a century .

As a result, the King had proceeded with cautious reforms such as the establishment of fiscal and military ministries and a national customs tariff.

[15] Even before the First Partition, a Sejm deputy had been sent to ask the French philosophes, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to draw up a tentative constitutions for a new Poland.

[4] The party received support from all strata of Polish–Lithuanian society, from societal and political elites, including some magnates, through Piarist Enlightened Catholics, to the radical left.

[6] After the Constitution was passed, the Party formed the Society of Friends of the Government Ordinance (Zgromadzenie Przyjaciół Konstytucji Rządowej), a political club, to defend the reforms already enacted and to promote further, including economic, ones.

They formed the Targowica Confederation in defense of the traditional Golden Liberties and the Cardinal Laws, and called on the Russian Empire for assistance.

[24][25] After the War in Defense of the Constitution, which was won by the Confederates and their Russian allies, the Patriotic Party's principal leaders – Kołłątaj, Potocki, Małachowski – emigrated abroad, where they prepared the ground for the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794.