Przemysław Milewicz: National identification in pre-industrial communities: peasant participation in the November Uprising in the Kingdom of Poland, 1830-1831

This article aims to discover to what extent the illiterate peasantry could be seen as having national consciousness before the advent of economic and social modernization. Exploring the behaviour and attitudes of the Polish peasants during the November Uprising of the Kingdom of Poland against Russia in 1830-1831, it challenges the prevalent scholarly notion that pre-industrial peasants had little knowledge of and even more limited affection for any community outside their villages, while their participation in wars was generally due to coercion by the local elites and threats to their immediate neighbourhoods.

This article therefore asks how the Polish peasants responded to the war against Russia and what might have motivated their responses. It analyses how far the peasants knew and used the elite vocabulary of fighting for the fatherland and for the nation and to what extent they felt a sense of ownership of such a national cause.

In answering these questions, this article draws from a wide variety of sources. Perhaps the most important of them are hitherto neglected archival materials from Warsaw, Cracow and Poznań. They show various forms of peasant self- expression during the conflict of 1831, such as signing the oath of loyalty to the nation, volunteering to fight in the Uprising, donating goods for the war effort and writing petitions to the Polish authorities. Such materials are enriched by investigations into the memoirs of the nobles, military reports and newspaper accounts, which contain a wealth of information about peasant responses to the Polish-Russian War. Finally, an invaluable source are the memoirs of former peasants themselves, which present firsthand insights into the perception of the nation by the lowest strata of the population. While this variety of sources poses a range of challenges to historians, such as the exceptional character of the peasant memoirs and the unreliable nature of those written by the elite, they nonetheless present a relatively coherent picture of peasant attitudes.

This article argues that many peasants easily identified themselves with the Polish nation, as they willingly contributed to the Uprising by volunteering to the army, conducting reconnaissance duties and providing supplies. They also largely understood that the nation was a community to which they belonged. Many villagers easily adopted the elite rhetoric of a unified national community, which is seen particularly clearly in their enthusiasm for singing the future national anthem “Poland is not dead yet”. Others demonstrated their sense of ownership of the national cause by putting their own interpretations on the Uprising, for example, defining it as an opportunity to prove that it was the peasants, not the lords, who truly loved Poland. While there was obviously a number of cases of resistance of some peasants to the burdens imposed by the Uprising, such occurrences usually indicated their concerns with their everyday well-being rather than their indifference to or lack of knowledge about the nation. This article could not and did not intend to show that all villagers were committed national patriots. What it discovered, however, was that many illiterate peasants could define themselves as belonging to a community they called the nation and that the lack of modernization, with its mass education, industrialization and print capitalism, did not create inherent obstacles for the existence of such national self-identifications among the masses.

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