The Death of military culture? The citizen army and the military failure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1648-1717

EN[...] In conclusion, it is worth returning to Łoziński, and his picture of an anarchic, brutalised society. For all that the Commonwealth’s military system was not as disfunctional as is often claimed, the conscious decision to deny the state a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence undoubtedly had negative consequences. A citizen army meant an' armed citizenry, infused with military values and by no means hostile to military culture. This did indeed open up the possibility of the local feuding and rapid recourse to arms in private disputes which Łoziński describes in such detail. Yet he was, as the opening quote to this paper suggests, prone to exaggeration and hyperbole, and figures like the notorious Stanisław Stadnicki, the "devil of Łańcut", who exploited the legal protection provided to nobles by the system to evade punishment for his rapacious behaviour, and to whom Łoziński devotes a whole chapter, were the exception rather than the rule. Much of the lawlessness after 1648 was caused by the waves of warfare which engulfed the Commonwealth’s territory after that date, the effects of which were quite as devastating as those of the Thirty Years War in the Holy Roman Empire. Yet for all that the Commonwealth failed to sustain its position as a dominant power in eastern Europe, and for all its failure to create the sort of large standing army acquired after 1648 by all its neighbours and rivals, the rather different military culture of the citizen army survived, and was still capable of causing problems for regular armies, as the Confederation of Bar was to show in 1769, and Tadeusz Kościuszko demonstrated after 1792. The Commonwealth’s neighbours, however, acted swiftly to ensure that the military reforms of the Four Year Sejm (1788-92), which envisaged the creation of a 100,000-strong regular army, were not allowed time to take root.The citizen forces led by Kościuszko were crushed, and the third partition finally removed the Commonwealth from the map of Europe in 1795, at a point when the American Revolutionaries had just written the right of the citizen to bear arms into their new constitution, and the French Revolution was calling the nation to arms to defend itself against its enemies. Bunker Hill and Valmy had demonstrated that the standing armies of Ancien Regime Europe could be comprehensively defeated by a different conception o f how war might be waged. It was too late to save the Commonwealth, despite Kosciuszko’s valiant efforts, but the day of the citizen army was by no means over.