The German Question, Part Thirty-One

"The Dismantling Of Poland" Part Two

Frederick the Great died in 1786 leaving no direct heir, as he was childless. His successor was Friedrich Wilhelm II (Frederick William II), the son of one of Frederick the Great's brothers. Meanwhile, in Russia, Catherine the Great was still in control (known as Empress or Tsarina). This information is important only because they were the rulers who participated in the Second Partition of Poland, during 1793.

What brought about this partitioning was simply this; the remainder of Poland after partition #1 was still a very troubled land, and much dependent upon Russia. The Poles decided to enter into an alliance with Prussia, hoping that it would give them some balance against Russia intervening in their affairs. Polish attempts to keep Russia out of their reforms only angered Catherine the Great, and she eventually sent in troops, who, along with Poles of pro-Russian sentiments, essentially took over Poland. Prussia chose not to intervene against the Russian military advance, in spite of its treaty with Poland. For this reason, and for Prussia's stand against the revolutionary government in France,* Friedrich Wilhelm demanded compensation of Polish territory from Catherine, and she agreed; thus the Second Partition of Poland.

Russia took a large part of what is known today as "Belarus," plus the area of Kiev, in the Ukraine (today just "Ukraine," with no preceding "the"), and part of Lithuania. Prussia received the very important city of Danzig (Gdansk, in Polish), some lands to the south of Prussia with a mixed German-Polish population (but mainly Polish), plus a large section of Polish populated territory. Many of the new lands were formed into the new province of "South Prussia" (Südpreussen, in German), with the provincial capital, for a time, at Posen (Poznań, in Polish). Poland still remained as an entity, but with only about a third of its former population (compared to what it had prior to the first partition). Worse was to come.

* Naturally, all absolute monarchies in Europe were worried that the ideas of the French Revolution would spread to their own lands, and Russia was certainly one of those lands.

WORD HISTORY:
Partition-This goes back to Indo European "per," which seemingly had variants, but the basic notion was "distributing;" and thus the idea of "dividing" and "portioning" comes out. This gave Latin the offshoot verb "partire," which meant "to divide up, portion off, split up." The verb's participle form "partitus," then gave Latin the noun form "partitio," which then was passed onto Old French (a Latin-based language) as "particion." English acquired it from French in about the 1430s, and one source notes that at first it was spelled "particioun" under the influence of the French of that time (modern French spells it as the English version), and with the meaning "division into shares," but within just a few decades, it had taken on the more modern extended meaning of "separation." The verb form seems to have come along in the 1700s.