STANISLAUS II. AUGUSTUS [PornATowsm] (1732— 1798), king of Poland, the son of Stanislaw Poniatowski, palatine of Cracow, the friend of Charles XII. of Sweden. Through the influence of his uncles the powerful Czartoryski, he was sent to St. Petersburg in the suite of the English ambassador Hanbury Williams. Subsequently, through the influence of the Russian chancellor, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, he was accredited to the Russian court as the ambassador of Saxony. Through Williams he was introduced to the grand duchess Catherine, who was irresistibly attracted to the brilliant young nobleman, for whom she aban doned her other lovers. Poniatowski was concerned in the con spiracy to set aside the succession of the grand duke Peter and his son Paul in favour of Catherine, a conspiracy frustrated by the unexpected recovery of the empress Elizabeth and the consequent arrest of the conspirators.
Stanislaus returned to Warsaw much discredited, but neverthe less was (Sept. 7, 1764) elected king of Poland through the over whelming influence of Catherine, and crowned on November 25 to the impotent disgust of his uncles. He was hated by the no bility, yet he tried to do his best. He inaugurated some economical reforms. After the first partition he sought to restore the power of their country, while his eloquent oration before the Diet on taking the oath on -May 3, 1791, moved the deputies to tears. But when the confederation of Targowica was formed against the constitution, he was one of the first to accede to it, in this way completely paralysing the action of the army which, under his nephew Prince Joseph and Thaddeus Kosciuszko, was performing prodigies. On the outbreak of the insurrection of 1794 he was
obliged to sue for his very life to Kosciuszko, and saw his effigy expunged from the coinage a year before he was obliged to abdi cate his throne. The last years of his life were employed in his sumptuous prison at St. Petersburg (where he died in 1798) in writing his memoirs. He contracted a secret marriage with the countess Grabowska. He was capable of the most romantic friend ships, as witness his correspondence with Mme. Geoffrin.
See Lars von Engestrom, Minnen och Anteckningar, vol. i. (Stock holm, 1876) ; Correspondance inedite de Stanislas Poniatowski avec Madame Geoffrin (Paris, 1875) ; Jan Kibinski, Recollections of the Times of Stanislaw Augustus (Pol. Cracow, 1899) ; Memoires secrets et inidits de Stanislas Auguste (Leipzig, 1862) ; Stanislaw and Prince Joseph Poniatowski in the Light of their Private Correspondence, in French, edited in Polish by Bronislaw Dembinski (Lemberg, 1904)• Stanislaus's diaries and letters, which were for many years in thr Russian foreign office, have been published in the Vestnik Evropy for January 1908. See also R. N. Bain's The Last King of Poland and his Contemporaries (1909).