ABSTRACT
After his election in May 1764, the new Polish king took the middle name ‘August’ after that renovator of ancient Rome, the Emperor Augustus. There, the resemblance largely ended. True, in September 1766, Antonio Visconti, the papal nuncio in Warsaw, observed that the monarch
possesses talent, ability and above all, an ardent desire to reform in one day (if only he could) the entire country and the whole nation, to raise it to the level of other, more cultivated nations. 1
