Katarzyna Kuras

The book Could Revolution Be Legal? by Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz concerns various aspects of how the Constitution of 3rd May 1791 was established and overthrown. It raises, among others, the question whether the act of passing the Constitution was a revolution for contemporary people and why it was understood as treason by some people, especially from Republican milieus. A lot of  attention was paid by the Author to the issue of perception of the Constitution in Poland and abroad as well as to the rise of the myth of 3rd May 1791.

Between public and private life. Everyday dilemmas of the officers of Napoleon’s Great Army, on the basis of unknown letters of Jacques-Martin-Madeleine Ferrière of 1812 and 1813
The article constitutes an attempt to analyze the events of 1812 and 1813 from the perspective of an individual, in this case, Brigadier General Jacques-Martin-Madelaine Ferrière, governor of Białystok and military commander of Warsaw. It is based on a collection of letters which have not so far been used in the research on Ferrière’s biography. The correspondence between the general and his wife constitutes an interesting insight into the moods and feelings which prevailed in Napoleon’s Great Army in 1812, and particularly during the army retreat in 1813 (among numerous officers  and soldiers, there prevailed a feeling of weariness and even discouragement with the protracted war activities). Moreover, the analysis of the above correspondence reveals a lot of interesting details concerning the everyday life of the officers of Napoleon’s army in the capital of the Duchy of Warsaw as well as during the army maneuvers in Silesia and Lusatia in 1813.

The aim of this article was to establish if Le cuisinier françois, the famous cookbook published in the 17th century by de la Varenne, contributed to changing the culinary tastes of representatives of the Polish elite. For this purpose, selected collections of the inventories of libraries of Polish magnates and nobility were examined and, as a result, some few copies of the book by de la Varenne were found, in many cases connected with the personal tastes or cultural preferences of their owners. It seems, however, that in the process of transferring culinary patterns from France to Poland more essential than the presence of this book in the libraries was a permanent need to employ cooks from France in many courts of Polish magnates. They were responsible for changing the culinary tastes of their masters and strengthened the appetite for French dishes in the Polish cuisine in the early-modern era.
 

Louis XIV, King of France (1643–1715), was variously perceived and assessed by the Polish nobility. The reception of his person and his concept of ruling the state by Polish noblemen was to change during the 17th and 18th centuries. In this period the nobles who visited France during their Grand Tours were generally fascinated by the glamour surrounding the monarch and the splendour of the palace of Versailles. They sought an opportunity to contact personally the Sun King and talk to him. Later Polish travellers sent to their homeland detailed relations from audiences by or meetings with Louis XIV. On the other hand, for a considerable part of the Polish nobility Louis XIV was the incarnation of absolutum dominium and a symbol of potential threat to the freedom beloved by the Polish “political nation”. These fears were fuelled by the activity of the king of France in the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, especially his political and financial support for the followers of the French candidatures to the Polish throne and for the concept of election vivente rege promoted by Ludwika Maria Gonzaga, the queen of Poland of French descent. The reception of the person of the Sun King and the vision of his rule in the eyes of the Polish nobility changed in the second half of the 18th century. Most significantly, the motif of his person began to be used in the pro-royal propaganda at the time of Stanisław August Poniatowski (1764–1796), when the fear of absolutum dominium gradually lost meaning in the face of the necessity to reform the state.
 

The purpose of the article is to examine the career mechanisms at the royal court in Versailles mainly in the 60s and 70s of the 18th century in reference to the households (maisons) of Queen Marie Leszczyńska (d. 1768) and Dauphine Marie Josephe of Saxony (d. 1767). The structures and sustainability of these households went beyond the usual patterns as a result of accidental circumstances and ad hoc decisions taken by King Louis XV. The accumulation of problems and surprising circumstances forced him to take non-stereotypical actions. Reforms – even the smallest ones – revealed additionally the signs of crisis, which was systematically increasing at the entire court in Versailles. As a result, in the second half of the 18th century, the modernization of the court was also a sign of its serious crisis, and the careers of maisons’ officials were directed by new mechanisms that had previously not existed.