Hugo Kołłątaj
Hugo Stumberg Kołłątaj, also spelled Kołłątay (1 April 1750 – 28 February 1812), was a prominent Polish constitutional reformer and educationalist, and one of the most prominent figures of the Polish Enlightenment. He served as Deputy Chancellor of the Crown between 1791–92. He was a Roman Catholic priest, social and political activist, political thinker, historian, philosopher, and polymath. Biography Early life Hugo Kołłątaj was born on 1 April 1750 in Dederkały Wielkie (now in Western Ukraine) in Volhynia into a family of Polish nobility. Soon after, his family moved to Nieciesławice, near Sandomierz, where he spent his childhood. He attended school in Pińczów. He began his studies at the Kraków Academy, subsequently, Jagiellonian University, where he studied law and gained a doctorate. Afterwards, around 1775 he took holy orders. He studied in Vienna and Italy (Naples and Rome), where he would have encountered Enlightenment philosophy. He is thought to have gained two further doctorates abroad in philosophy and theology. Returning to Poland, he became a canon of Kraków, and parish priest of Krzyżanowice Dolne and Tuczępy. He was active in the Commission of National Education and the Society for Elementary Books, where he took a prominent role in the development of the national network of schools. He spent two years in Warsaw, but returned to Kraków where he reformed the Kraków Academy, on whose board he sat from 1777, and whose rector he was between 1783–1786. The reform of the Academy was very substantial. It established innovative standards. Notably, he substituted Polish for Latin which till then was used for lectures. The removal of Latin in favour of a national language in higher education was then still uncommon in Europe. The reform proved so controversial that his political enemies plotted successfully to have him temporarily removed from Kraków in 1781, on grounds of corruption and immorality. Although in 1782 the decision was rescinded. Reforms of the Great Sejm Kołłątaj was also active politically. In 1786 he assumed the office of the Referendary of Lithuania, and moved to Warsaw. He became prominent in the reform movement, heading an informal group that was on the radical wing of the Patriotic Party, and labelled by their political enemies as "Kołłątaj's Forge". As leader of the Patriotic Party during the Great Sejm, he set out its programme in his Several Anonymous Letters to Stanisław Małachowski (1788–1789) and in his essay, The Political Law of the Polish Nation (1790). In his works he advocated a republican-tinged constitutional reform and the need for other social reforms. Among the goals he pursued were the strengthening of the king's constitutional position, a larger national army, abolition of the liberum veto, the introduction of universal taxation, and the emancipation of both townspeople and the peasantry. An organizer of the townspeople's movement, he edited a text that demanded reform and which was delivered to the king during the Black Procession of 1789. Kołłątaj co-authored the Constitution of 3 May 1791. He also founded the Friends of the Constitution to assist