In 1764, Catherine placed Stanisław August Poniatowski, her former lover, on the Polish throne. Although the idea of partitioning Poland came from the King Frederick II of Prussia, Catherine took a leading role in carrying it out in the 1790s. In 1768, she formally became the protector of political rights of dissidents and peasants of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which provoked an anti-Russian uprising in Poland, the Confederation of Bar (1768–72), supported by France. After the rebels, their French and European volunteers and their allied Ottoman Empire had been defeated , she established in the "Rzeczpospolita", a system of government fully controlled by the Russian Empire through a Permanent Council, under the supervision of her ambassadors and envoys.