Potocki, Ignacy

▪ Polish statesman

born Feb. 28, 1750, Podhajce, Pol.

died Aug. 30, 1809, Vienna

      statesman, political reformer, grand marshal of Lithuania, count, and a member of one of Poland's oldest aristocratic families.

      Potocki played a prominent part from 1773 in the Polish Commission of National Education; from 1781 to 1784 he was the grand master of Polish freemasonry. As a leader of the patriotic faction, he engineered a national alliance with Prussia (1790), pressed for broad administrative reforms, and, with his fellow reformer Hugo Kołłątaj (Kołłątaj, Hugo), wrote the major provisions of the centralizing constitution of May 3, 1791.

      After the invasion of Poland by Russian troops (May 1792) and the installation of a Russian client regime (July 1792)—the Confederation of Targowica—Potocki fled to Dresden, where he planned a national uprising with Kołłątaj and the military leader Tadeusz Kościuszko (Kościuszko, Tadeusz). Returning to Poland in 1794, he conducted foreign affairs for the insurrectionary government, but was unable to win external support for the Polish cause. After the fall of Warsaw to the Russians in November 1794, he was sent as a state prisoner to St. Petersburg. On his release in 1796 he returned to Poland. He died while on a diplomatic assignment to present a petition to Napoleon for the incorporation of Galicia in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw.

Additional Reading

Samuel Fiszman (ed.), Constitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Poland: The Constitution of 3 May 1791 (1997).

* * *