The Last King of Poland

The Last King of Poland is Adam Zamoyski’s biography of Stanisław August Poniatowski, the final monarch of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. It follows his early relationship with Catherine the Great, election in 1764, cultural patronage and efforts to strengthen and modernise a political system increasingly constrained by Russian power and the interests of neighbouring states.

The narrative culminates in the Constitution of 3 May 1791, foreign intervention and the successive partitions that erased the Commonwealth from the map and forced the king to abdicate in 1795. Zamoyski reassesses a ruler often blamed for national collapse by placing his choices inside the international power politics of the eighteenth century. The work is nonfiction biography.