However, even the third partition of Poland was not final as far as the political distribution of territory is concerned. For a short interval the ghost of a semi-independent Poland dances fitfully about. Twelve years after the third partition, Napoleon I., in juggling with the political map of Europe and calling mushroom states into being, snatched the province of Great Poland from the grasp of Prussia, and turned it into the Duchy of Warsaw, a small Polish commonwealth under the rule of the Saxon King Frederick Augustus III., a grandson of Augustus II., the last Polish King of the Saxon dynasty. This took place in 1807, after the crushing blow which Prussia had received at the hands of Napoleon and after the conclusion of the Peace of Tilsit. Two years later, in 1809, when Napoleon had shattered Austria, he tore off a section of her Polish dominions, and joined them to the Duchy of Warsaw. 4. THE DUCHY OF WARSAW AND THE REACTION UNDER NAPOLEON Warsaw, having been cleared of the Prussians, once more became, after an interval of twelve years, the capital of a separate Polish state, resuscitated under the patronage of Napoleon. The Duchy of Warsaw, which was made up of the ten "departments," or districts, of Great and Little Poland, received from her French master a fairly liberal Constitution, two legislative chambers (the Diet and the Senate), and the "Code of Napoleon," which had just been introduced in France. The fundamental laws proclaimed the equality of all citizens; serfdom was abolished, and all class privileges were abrogated. The Jews too cherished hopes for a better future. The nimbus of Napoleon as the originator of the "Jewish Parliament" and the Parisian Synhedrion, had not yet faded from the minds of the Jews, and they cherished the hope that the Emperor would extend his protection to the Polish Jews as well, but they were grievously disappointed. The first year of the Duchy of Warsaw (1807-1808) coincided with a critical turn in Napoleon's own policy towards the Jews of France. The "Great Synhedrion" was disbanded, and its disbandment was followed by the humiliating Imperial decree of March 17, 1808, which for a decade checked in almost the entire French Empire the operation of the law providing for Jewish emancipation. This reactionary step was grist to the mill of those sinister forces in Poland which had learned nothing from the violent upheavals their country had undergone, and even now were not able to reconcile themselves to the idea of granting equality to the unloved tribe.