In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there came strong French influences through close intellectual relations with France and the introduction of French institutions by Napoleon. Napoleon's Civil Code is the law of the Kingdom of Poland to the present day.
When compared with the neighbouring civilisations, viz. with that of Germany to the West and that of Russia to the East, Polish civilisation is prominently distinct in character. It had two great and flourishing periods. The first was in the sixteenth century, at the time of the Renascence and the Reformation, when Poland was one of the most active participants in the intellectual life of Europe, when she gave Copernicus to the world, when she produced her own distinct movement of the Reformation, and when, the Polish Protestants having supplanted Latin by the vernacular, Polish literature reached a high degree of beauty and power. This great period was called the Golden Age. Its second great period came in the nineteenth century, after the partitions, when Poland, in the period of Romanticism, produced a poetry which ranks with the greatest in history, but which is unfortunately little known in the West of Europe where only a very few people learn Polish. In spite of most unfavourable conditions this Polish civilisation lives and progresses at the present moment, and contemporary Polish literature and Polish art can by no means be classed with the poorest of Europe.
In her political constitution and in her social structure Poland developed in the past characteristics quite different from those of other countries, some of which
