On October 24, 1795, representatives of Russia, Prussia and Austria agreed on the terms of a third partition, and the remaining territory of the Polish-Lithuanian state was divided between them. The king, Stanislaw August Poniatowski, was made to abdicate the following month and died in exile in Russia, and Poland ceased to exist as a state for 123 years. The state was gone. The three powers acted without any Polish consent and treated the country as property.
The partition followed two earlier ones. The first, in 1772, had taken about a third of the territory, and the second, in 1793, took more, and the state that was left was too weak to resist. A national rising in 1794 under Tadeusz Kosciuszko had been defeated, and the Polish army had been reduced and the reform constitution of 1791 cancelled. The last division took the lands around Krakow, Warsaw and Vilnius. The map was redrawn.
The Polish language and the Roman Catholic religion were kept alive through the period that followed, and the memory of the state was carried by exiles, writers and musicians. Risings against Russian rule took place in 1830 and in 1863 and were put down. The risings failed. Emigration to the west put Polish artists and soldiers in Paris and elsewhere, and the idea of an independent Poland was kept in public view in Europe.
The state was restored in November 1918, at the end of the First World War and after the collapse of the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires, and Jozef Pilsudski took power. The new borders were settled by war and treaty in the years that followed, and the date of the third partition is remembered in Poland as the point at which the country was taken off the map.