Former king of Poland, [Stanislas I]?, ousted after the [Second Northern War]? sought to return to power and had behind him the ethnically Polish nobility, France, Spain, and the [Kingdom of Sardinia]?. [Augustus III]?, Elector of Saxony and son of Augustus the second, was supported by the Lithuanian nobility of Poland, and by Russia and Austria.
The war opened in 1733 with a Russian invasion of Poland, which quickly took Warsaw and forced what portion of the Sejm they could round up to declare Augustus king. Stanislas was pushed into the north of the country where, backed by Polish and French forces, he held out for six months against the Russians and Saxons. He then left Poland entirely.
From then on, the war within Poland degenerated into one between Poles and Lithuanians over who was to be monarch, while outside the country Austria battled France in northern Italy, and Saxony and a few other German states held on grimly against the French in the Rhineland?. In Spring 1735, Austria finally cracked the French at the [Battle of Bitonto]?. Peace on all fronts was not finally obtained until 1738, when the [Treaty of Vienna]? obtained the crown for Augustus. Stanislas was compensated with the Duchy of Lorraine, but France was the most successful of the extra-Polish combatants in the long run -- Lorraine had been forcibly removed from France after the [War of the Grand Alliance]?, but now the treaty specified that it would return to the French crown after Stanislas' death.
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