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Stanisław August Poniatowski was born on 17 January 1732 in Wołczyn, then located in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and now part of Belarus, to Stanisław Poniatowski and Konstancja née Czartoryska. The Poniatowski family of the Ciołek coat of arms was among the highest of the Polish nobility (szlachta). He spent the first few years of his childhood in Gdańsk; afterward, his family moved to Warsaw. He was educated by his mother, then by private tutors, including Russian ambassador Herman K...

Political career

Poniatowski spent the following year as an apprentice in the chancellery of Michał Fryderyk Czartoryski, then the Deputy Chancellor of Lithuania. In 1750, he traveled to Berlin. There he met the British diplomat Charles Hanbury Williams, who became his mentor and friend. In 1751, Poniatowski was elected to the Treasury Tribunal in Radom, where he served as a commissioner the following year. He spent most of January 1752 at the Austrian court in Vienna. Later that year, after serving at a Rado...

Final years

Poniatowski's plans were ruined by the Kościuszko Uprising. The king did not encourage it, but once it began he supported it, seeing no other honorable option. Its defeat marked the end of the Commonwealth. Poniatowski tried to govern the country in the brief period after the defeat of the Uprising, but on 2 December 1794, Catherine demanded that he leave Warsaw, a request to which he acceded on 7 January 1795, leaving the capital under Russian military escort and settling briefly in Grodno....

Patron of culture

Poniatowski may have been the most important patron of the arts of the Polish Enlightenment. His political goals included the overthrow of the myth of the Golden Freedoms and the reform of the backwards culture of sarmatism, and many of his artistic projects aimed to eradicate the negative qualities he associated with them. The "Thursday Dinners" he hosted were considered the most brilliant social functions in the Polish capital. He founded the Warsaw National Theatre, the first Polish public...

Conflicting assessments

King Stanisław August remains a controversial figure. In Polish historiography and popular works, he has been criticized or marginalized by Szymon Askenazy, Joachim Lelewel, Jerzy Łojek (whom Andrzej Zahorski describes as Poniatowski's most vocal critic among modern historians), Tadeusz Korzon, Karol Zyszewski and Krystyna Zienkowska, whereas more neutral or positive views have been expressed by Paweł Jasienica, Walerian Kalinka, Władysław Konopczyński, Stanisław Mackiewicz, Emanuel Rostworow...

Remembrance

Poniatowski has been the subject of numerous biographies and many works of art. Voltaire, who saw Poniatowski as a model reformist, modeled King Teucer in his drama Les Lois de Minos (1772) after him. At least 58 contemporary poems were dedicated to him or praised him. Since then, he has been a major character in many works of Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, in the Rok 1794 trilogy by Władysław Stanisław Reymont, in the novels of Tadeusz Łopalewski, and in the dramas of Ignacy Grabowski, Tadeusz Mic...

Poniatowski was the son of Stanisław Poniatowski (1676–1762) and Princess Konstancja Czartoryska (1700–1759); brother of Michał Jerzy Poniatowski (1736–94), Kazimierz Poniatowski (1721–1800), Andrzej Poniatowski, (1734–1773); and uncle to Józef Poniatowski(1763–1813). He never married. In his youth, he had loved his cousin Elżbieta Czartoryska, but her father August Aleksander Czartoryski disapproved because he did not think him influential or rich enough. When this was no longer an issue, she was already married. His pacta conventa specified that he should marry a Polish noblewoman, although he himself always hoped to marry into some royal family. Upon his accession to the throne, he had hopes of marrying Catherine II, writing to her on 2 November 1763 in a moment of doubt, "If I desired the throne, it was because I saw you on it." When she made it clear through his envoy Rzewuski that she would not marry him, there were hopes of an Austrian archduchess. A few historians believe th...

a ^ Sources vary with regards to whether Konstancja Grabowska and Kazimierz Grabowski were Poniatowski's children. They are listed as such by several sources, such as Jerzy Michalski's entry in the Polish Biographical Dictionary. However, a website dedicated to the genealogy of the Great Sejm participants, maintained by Marek Jerzy Minakowski, does not list neither Kazimierz nor Konstancja as children of Poniatowski. For Elżbieta, the genealogy lists only Kazimierz as a child of Jan Jerzy Grabowski.