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. Their model has been the Hungary of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, systematically at work on an illiberal project since 2010. The process is gathering pace.

The Law and Justice Party has turned the Polish lower house of Parliament, or Sejm, into a rubber stamp for its agenda. It has also waged a relentless campaign against an independent judiciary.

“We are witnessing a slow but insistent and intentional process of undermining the courts so that they will not enforce the Constitution against the executive and the legislature,” Sarah Cleveland, the American member of the Venice Commission and a law professor at Columbia University, told me. “It’s a process of death by 1,000 cuts.”

War of the Polish Succession, (1733–38), general European conflict waged ostensibly to determine the successor of the king of Poland, Augustus II the Strong

The war resulted mainly in a redistribution of Italian territory and an increase in Russian influence over Polish affairs

After Augustus died (Feb. 1, 1733), Austria and Russia supported the election of his son Frederick Augustus II of Saxony as king of Poland

In the middle of the sixteenth century Poland was a wealthy country governed by the Jagiellon Kings, whose riches had been built upon a monopoly of the Baltic Sea trade around Gdansk. By the end of the eighteenth century, Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided the country between them and Poland was wiped off the map for 123 years.

The abolition of the hereditary monarchy placed the election of the king in the hands of the nobles. If no Polish heir to the throne was available, foreigners were eligible to stand.

After suffering several devastating defeats at the hands of the Swedes, including a period of five years, 1655-60, known as ‘the Deluge’, Poland was severely weakened and could offer little resistance to the combined power of Russia, Prussia and Austria

In a short time his judicial and administrative reforms transformed those territories into model states. He succeeded his brother Alexander I as grand prince of Lithuania and king of Poland in 1506. Although he established fiscal and monetary reforms, he often clashed with the Polish Diet over extensions of royal power. At the Diet’s demand he married Barbara, daughter of Prince Stephen Zápolya of Hungary, in 1512, to secure a defense treaty and produce an heir. She died, however, three years later, leaving only daughters. In 1518 Sigismund married the niece of the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian, Bona Sforza of Milan, by whom he had one son, Sigismund II Augustus, and four daughters.

a top court’s decision to ban nearly all abortions, even as the nation’s leading politician urged his conservative supporters to “defend Poland.”

One group of women donned long red dresses and white bonnets meant to evoke the subjugated women in the Handmaid’s Tale novel and television series and marched into a cathedral and down the aisle between worshipers.

Twice before, in 2016 and 2018, the ruling party moved in Parliament to impose a ban on abortion. But it backed off both times after nationwide demonstrations underscored the political cost. This time, the ban came through the Constitutional Tribunal, which is firmly controlled by party loyalists.

t the beginning of the 18th century, Poland was one of the largest states in Europe, a sovereign, multi-ethnic republic. By the end of the century it had vanished from the map, absorbed by the expanding empires of Russia, Prussia and Austria.

Poland was brought down not by invading armies, but by the weaknesses of its political system, which could be paralyzed by a single noble’s veto and thus easily compromised by outside powers offering bribes.

In short, the Kremlin appears to have directly interfered with an American election in order to boost a presidential candidate with a Russia-friendly foreign policy.

Academics have rallied to the defence of one of the world’s leading Holocaust historians after reports that Poland intends to strip him of a national honour because he claimed that Poles were complicit in Nazi war crimes.

He is best known for his 2001 book Neighbors, which describes in graphic detail the 1941 massacre by Polish villagers of up to 1,600 Jewish men, women and children

The move against the historian comes as the nationalist Law and Justice government, elected in 2015, comes under European scrutiny for law changes that, critics say, threaten democracy. President Andrzej Duda signed into law a controversial move bringing the attorney general under the control of the justice ministry. Critics say this will put political pressure on the judiciary.

On July 31st, 1589, a young Jacobin friar, Jacques Clément, left Paris for the suburb of Saint-Cloud where Henry III of France had set up his military encampment.

As he did so, the friar produced a knife that he had hidden in the capacious sleeve of his habit and plunged it into Henry’s abdomen

Henry died early the next morning bringing to an end the Valois dynasty that had occupied the French throne since 1328. Henry III was the first king of France to be assassinated by one of his own subjects

under whose reign the prolonged crisis of the Wars of Religion was made worse by dynastic rivalries arising because the male line of the Valois dynasty was going to die out with him

In 1572 she presented him as a candidate for the vacant throne of Poland, to which he was finally elected in May 1573. In May 1574, however, Charles died, and Henry abandoned Poland and was crowned at Reims on Feb. 13, 1575. He was married two days later to Louise de Vaudémont, a princess of the house of Lorraine. The marriage proved childless.

The French Wars of Religion (1562–98) continued during Henry III’s reign

Throughout most of Europe the medieval system of estates evolved into absolutism, but in the Commonwealth it led to a szlachta democracy

The end of the Jagiellonian dynasty meant the beginning of unrestricted election to the throne. The first king elected viritim (i.e., by direct vote of the szlachta) was Henry of Valois, the brother of the king of France. On his accession to the throne (reigned 1573–74), which he quickly abandoned to become Henry III of France, he accepted the so-called Henrician Articles and Pacta Conventa. Presented henceforth to every new king as a contract with the noble nation

The most spectacular achievement of Báthory’s reign was a series of military victories (1579–81) over Ivan the Terrible of Russia.

leading to a conflict with his half brother Erik XIV, king of Sweden from 1560. Erik limited John’s authority and imprisoned him in 1563 after the Duke had acquired a base in Poland by marrying Catherine (1562), sister of Sigismund II Augustus of Poland. After his release in 1567, John joined with his younger brother, the future Charles IX of Sweden, in 1568 to overthrow Erik and secure the throne for himself.

In 1586 John nominated his son Sigismund, who had been brought up as a Catholic, for the vacant Polish throne but withdrew his sponsorship when the Poles demanded the return of Estonia as a condition of Sigismund’s accession.

John and Charles, who had contested his brother’s religious policy, became reconciled in common opposition to the nobles’ aspirations, but Sigismund nevertheless assumed the Polish throne in 1587.

Soviet-imposed communism, I wrote that night in an article for The Post, had suppressed the politics that drove events in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other East Bloc states before World War II

Thirty years later, the politics of the 1930s are still playing out in the former Eastern Bloc. Poland is governed by an authoritarian-minded right-wing government closely aligned with a reactionary Catholic Church. An uneasy peace prevails in the splintered remains of Yugoslavia after a devastating ethnic war.

They are authoritarian and socially reactionary — anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is a favorite theme of Poland’s ruling party. Prewar evils such as irredentism and anti-Semitism are alive in mainstream politics to a degree they are not on the other side of the former Iron Curtain.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warns he'll retaliate against NATO missiles

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia will retaliate against the placement of U.S. missiles in nearby countries such as Romania, according to Russia's state-run news agency TASS.

The United States launched a ground-based missile defense system earlier this month in Romania. The system is meant to defend Europe against rogue states like Iran and not intended to target Moscow's missiles, Washington has said.

PARIS—When history books are written on Europe in the early 21st century, this week may stand out. Pro-independence parties gained a majority in Catalonia’s regional elections, exacerbating a constitutional crisis in Spain. This occurred just days after Poland’s defiant right-wing government pushed back against the unprecedented threat of European Union sanctions by moving ahead with changes to the judiciary that European officials say threaten the rule of law.

All politics are local—until they’re not. The developments in Poland and Catalonia stem from unique circumstances, but each case tests the European Union from opposite sides, right in one case, and somewhat left in the other.

Other tectonic plates are shifting. Germany, once the most politically predictable country in Europe, has not yet formed a government, and Chancellor Angela Merkel is weaker than ever before. This week, an editorialist in Der Spiegel called for an end to the Merkel era—a position unthinkable months ago—saying her emphasis on stability was in fact causing more instability.

In October 1812, Napoleon, conqueror of an empty and fire-blackened Moscow, pondered retreat. In Cassel, his youngest brother Jerome, King of Westphalia, had problems too

the King’s army would have done its work but for the disobedience of his corps commanders, especially General Reynier; secondly, that Jerome was dismissed before Napoleon knew the effect of his alleged failure; thirdly, that Jerome delayed leaving Warsaw because he was still playing the political role for which he had really been brought to Poland

even if Napoleon re-established the Kingdom, the Poles would insist on a Polish lung.2 This settled, Jerome turned to his military duties