a new basis t they were nanded ab->y a strong before the ;nedictAn-Jt. Nation-da. During »vement of t advanced ait capable became the
CHAPTER 3
UPRISINGS AND REFORMS
The Struck for Independence and Modernization
THE WESTERN CHALLENGE AND EASTERN WESTERNIZERS
THE MODERN WESTERN ideals of freedom, liberty, and the independent nation-state gradually penetrated Central and Eastern Europe and sharpened the contrast between ideals and realities. Most of the countries of Europe experienced the frustration of remaining far behind the West in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Between 1800 and i860, the Northwest European countries more than doubled their per capita gross national product—the most comprehensive parameter of the level of economic development. The Scandinavian and Mediterranean countries, as well as the Habsburg empire, however, increased their income level only by 40 percent. Russia and the Balkans experienced stagnation, achieving only a 10 percent increase, and many of the Balkan countries saw a drop in GNP. During the 1860s, all these countries, from Sweden and Spain to Poland and Bulgaria, remained almost unchanged in their traditional agrarian structure: between 70 to 85 percent of the labor force continued to work in agriculture.
While this caused continued landlessness, robot work on the big estates, illiteracy, suffering for the majority of the population, and humiliation for the minority intellectual elite and enlightened nobility, it also produced a strong mobilizing effect. The broadening gap in economic development challenged the slow-moving countries, causing a frightening feeling of stagnation, "backwardness," and even military danger, a fear of the final "extinction" of the nation, as romantic poets and desperate reformers often expressed it (see introduction and chapter 1).
89
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90 UPRISINGS AND REFORMS
These countries nevertheless had a path to follow. They could adopt Western ideas and copy the legal systems, laws, and institutions of the West. They could invite experts, court investors, import skilled workers, and buy modern technology.
The challenge of the West, meanwhile, offered tremendous opportunities as well. The nonindustrializing countries could enjoy the advantage of an ever-growing Western marketplace and export potential. The rapidly industrializing West was hungry for food and raw materials. Agrarian and raw material-producing countries could sell everything they produced; indeed, they were unable to deliver enough to the Western markets. Around 1830, 86 percent of British wheat and 92 percent of French wool imports came from agricultural Europe, which, in the 1870s delivered more than 20 percent of the world's food and raw material exports. During the nineteenth century, Britain increased its imports by nearly thirty-twofold. The imports of France and Germany increased by seven-and fourfold, respectively, between 1830 and 1914. In the late 1870s, nearly two-thirds of world trade consisted of food and raw materials (Kuznetz 1967). Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of world trade remained intra-European trade. In 1831,86 percent of the wheat imported by Britain was from the European agricultural countries, and 78 percent of Holland's imports in 1880 came from Europe. World trade increased fiftyfold between 1750 and 1913, and ninefold during the sixty years between 1820 and 1880. The traditional division of labor was intensified and an unlimited market was opened for the agricultural countries. "The cpull' of industrialized Western Europe . . . opened the way. . . to joining in world trade. . . . The old socio-economic conditions, however . . . presented some fundamental impediments to progress. . . . For . . . [answering the Western challenge], the ancien regime had to be destroyed. . . . The temptation to do so was extraordinary" (Berend and Ranki 1982, 25).
The enlightened Hungarian reformer Istvan Szechenyi clearly expressed this recognition in his landmark book Hitel (Credit), published in 1830: "The annual wheat, rye, barley, and oat consumption of Britain is much more than 200 million Pozsony measures! Only 1.2 million is transported to the West between Buda and Pest on the Danube. . . .A bit more or less rain and starvation follows, such as in 1816 and 1817." "Hungary," Szechenyi wrote bitterly, "has no commerce, and the landowners are poorer than they should be. . . . Did we do enough to increase our output, improve its quality, and promote its marketing? Did we do our best to build connections with other nations?. . . We love harvesting but not plowing and sowing. . . . Many look down on commerce" (Szechenyi
ould adopt ions of the :d workers,
is opportu-the advan-ential. The ials. Agrar-g they pro-:stern mar-: of French 870s deliv-al exports. : by nearly 1 by seven-70s, nearly ; (Kuznetz ined intra-Jritain was Uand's im-d between and 1880. ed market ostrialized trade. . . . ome fun-^ Western station to
learly ex-published of Britain nillion is
. . .Abit '.""Hun-idowners rease our
e do our sting but
zechenyi
UPRISINGS AND REFORMS
91
1830, 131-32, 139-40,155-56). Szechenyi became an initiator of social reforms attacking serfdom and advocated the introduction of modern banking and credit systems, railroads, and food-processing factories.
The Western markets and the English model similarly attracted enlightened Polish aristocratic landowners. Dezydery Chlapowski, who, like Szechenyi, traveled in England between i8u and 1819, established his estate as a model modern farm. Andrzej Zamoyski, the founder of the Polish Agricultural Society in Warsaw in 1858, organized regular meetings at his Klemenson estate in the mid 1840s, demonstrated modern plowing, and held cattle shows (Trzecinkowski 1995,147-49).
Count Camillo di Cavour, the leading Italian enlightened reformer, clearly realized what the impact of the opening of Western markets would be on the noble elite of the non industrialized countries when he wrote in 1845: "The commercial revolution which is now taking place in England . . . will have a mighty impact on the Continent. By opening up the richest market in the world to foodstuffs, it will encourage their production, the principal aim, that is, of all agricultural industries. . . . Trade will then become an essential clement in the prosperity of the agrarian classes, who will then naturally tend to join the supporters of the liberal system" (quoted by Mori 1975, 91-92)-
Aristocratic conservative-reformer landowners, indeed, often became supporters of the liberal system of the West, while enlightened priests, radical intellectuals, and romantic poets and artists sought to follow the French and English pattern of social, economic, and political modernization. They all were students of enlightened romanticism, shared in the Zeitgeist, and believed in progress and the possibility of changing history by reforms from above and mobilizing the nation. The oppressive, antiquated Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman empires, however, blocked the road to change. In the Russian empire, the expression of progressive views and "conspiracy" to realize them were sufficient "crimes" to warrant deportation to Siberia. Nearly 100,000 Poles had suffered that fate in occupied "Russian Poland" during the nineteenth century.
The peoples under Ottoman rule had no opportunity for realizing their dreams through independent actions, and they remained shackled to the most outmoded regime in Europe. Any attempt at revolt generated ruthless repercussions. Turkish garrisons kept Ottoman subjects in line. Two British ladies who traveled throughout the Balkans during the 1860s recorded: "Having noted down all we heard from the lips of the speakers, and compared all accounts together, we must give it as our testimony . . . [that] Christians represented the native Mussulmans as op-
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pressing, robbing, and insulting the rayah [non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman empire] —for a rayah to be prosperous is to mark him out for destruction—thus industry is deterred and the country ruined" (Mackenzie and Irby 1867,391).
Even the relatively more liberal Habsburg empire did not tolerate reforms that weakened the centralized regime. Although the Hungarians had limited autonomy and their noble Diet initiated halfhearted reforms during the 1830s and 1840s, most of these were rejected by the Habsburg king, who long resisted introducing Hungarian as an official language in the Hungarian kingdom and flatly refused to institute protective tariffs accepted by the Hungarian parliament in 1844 to promote industrial development in the country. The leading reformers were persecuted: intellectuals who sympathized with die French Revolution, such as the outstanding language reformer Fercnc Kazinczy and the "guardsman-poet" Istvan Batsanyi, were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms in the 1790s. Those who openly argued for freedom of speech, such as Baron Miklos Wesselenyi and the radical reformers Lajos Kossuth and Mihaly Tancsics, were all arrested and spent years in prison during the 1830s and 1840s.
Reforms and national independence thus became inseparable. Romantic national poetry, drama, music, and art successfully propagated the powerful message of freedom and equality. The oppressed peoples became ever more convinced that they had to gain back independence in order to realize their dreams, implement the ideas of the Enlightenment, introduce modern Western institutions, and create a modern economy and society. Their religious belief in historical progress tied nationalism and modernization to each other in Central and Eastern Europe.
THE POLISH UPRISINGS
Oppression and military arbitrariness often provoked spontaneous revolts, sometimes no more than unorganized eruptions of deep desperation by hopeless and humiliated peoples. The most steadfast resistance and agitated reaction to foreign domination were found in Poland, a medieval great power that had preserved its independence up to the early eighteenth century. The numerous Polish nobility, Poland's "political nation," proudly cultivated the "golden freedom" of their Rzeczpospolita, or "noble republic," and jealously guarded their economic, social, and political privileges. The Russian victory in the Great Northern War, however, ended
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an era and endangered Polish freedom: in 1717, Tsar Peter the Great gained the upper hand and imposed a Russian protectorate on Poland. "Under the Russian protectorate," Norman Davies writes, "the need for radical reform became ever more pressing; but the chances of achieving it became ever more remote" (Davies r986, 306).
Eighteenth-century Poland was in a country in chaos. At his election, the powerless king of this "noble republic" had to sign apacta conventa— "legalization of impotence," Hans Kohn called it— guaranteeing the right of the nobles to exercise the so-called liberum veto, permitting any member of the nobility to veto any legislation. A "formal legalization of anarchy . . . Polish liberty expressed itself not in patriotic integration, but in chaotic egotism. ... In this chaos, tumult, and stagnation Poland had existed for so long that the conviction spread that Poland lived by disorder" (Kohn 1944, 519, 521).
In an attempt to protect the freedoms enjoyed by the nobles, the Confederation of Bar was formed in 1768 under the banner of the defense of Catholicism against Greek Orthodoxy and precipitated a bitter war against Russia, for which Poland was ill-prepared. The fighting lasted four years and ended with the first partition of Poland by the three neighboring powers, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, in 1772. This brutal awakening for the Poles generated a desperate attempt to modernize by the "four-year parliament" that convened in 1788. It culminated in the liberal constitution of May 1791, designed "to ensure the freedom of our motherland," according to its preamble. Although the constitution declared that all power was based on the will of the people, and that the members of the Sejm represented the entire nation, Poland's political regime preserved its traditional aristocratic character. Only the szlachta (nobility) were eligible to be members of the parliament, and political rights were restricted to those who owned real estate, which entitled burghers to participate in the political process but excluded landless gentry. Representatives of cities were only allowed to participate in the meetings, however, and had no voting rights. The serfs remained excluded from the political nation, and their conditions did not change. The only important concession granted to them was freedom of movement. The overwhelming power of the nobility was limited by the introduction of a hereditary constitutional monarchy, but the ruler's powers were further limited: he lost his right to ratify laws and appoint cabinet ministers. He wras a member of the Senate but had only one vote. The crippling liberum veto was abolished, but decisions still required a two-tthirds or four-fifths majority in the Sejm (Ring 2001, 187-90; Materiaiy do dziejów sejmu Czteroletniego 1955-69).
B8C
94 UPRISINGS AND REFORMS
Even these limited reforms brought on a vicious reaction from the high nobility, who formed the Confederation of Targowce to invalidate the constitution and sought help from the tsar. Russia exploited the situation bv sending in 100,000 troops, and a new partition of Poland followed. In 1793, the Polish Sejm, "protected" by Russian arms, approved this second partition and abolished the constitution, leading to a series of heroic uprisings and struggles for Polish independence.
The sequence of uprisings began on March 24,1794, when the charismatic leader Tadeusz Kos'ciuszko, who had been a volunteer in the American Revolution between 1776 and 1784, returned to Krakow. Instead of launching a noble insurrection, Kos'ciuszko sought to mobilize the nation, including the urban population and peasants, formed a national militia, and proclaimed "national self-rule" and "general liberty."
By promising personal freedom and reduced labor service for the serfs in his Polaniec Proclamation, Kos'ciuszko was able to mobilize a sizable peasant army, which defeated the Russians at Raclawice on April 4- He could not, however, control the agitated masses. Revolutionary courts were established in Warsaw, and traitors were sentenced. The streets of Warsaw and Vilnius were occupied by the mob. In June, seven leaders of the Targowce conservatives were lynched. These public hangings frightened the nobility and weakened their resistance to foreign intervention. The way was open for a successful attack on Warsaw by the Prussians and Russians, which began on November 3,1794 (Kowecki 1971).
A Prussian attack from the west was combined with a strong Russian strike by Field Marshal Suvorov from the east. On October 10, at Ma-ciejowice, Kos'ciuszko himself was wounded and captured. Suvorov's troops arrived in the Praga district of Warsaw, whose western sections were occupied bv the Prussian army. The Icing was arrested and forced to abdicate. The captured leaders of the insurrection were executed or imprisoned in Russian, Prussian, and Austrian prisons (Kos'ciuszko was freed two years later, however, by order of the Russian emperor Paul). A third partition of defeated Poland followed in 1795. The secret protocol of the Treaty of St. Petersburg stated that die "high contracting parties" agreed to "abolish everything which could revive the memory of the existence of the Kingdom of Poland . . . [which] will remain suppressed as from the present and forever" (quoted in Davies 1996, 722). Most of Poland— 62 percent of its territory, with 45 percent of the population—was incorporated into the Russian empire. Prussia occupied the western part of the country, roughly 20 percent, with 23 percent of the population, and Austria, the third victor, acquired Galicia, the southern 18 percent of Poland, with 32 percent of its population.
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All these Polish territories became districts and provinces of the occupying powers. Lwow, renamed Lcmberg, became the headquarters of the Austrian governor's office. Wavvel, the historic royal palace of Krakow, was occupied by an Austrian garrison. German settlers arrived in Prussian Poland, where confiscated land was sold to Prussian Junkers. Poznah, renamed Posen, was germanized, and the Prussian army recruited Polish peasants for twenty-year sendee. The occupied eastern territories of the Polish kingdom, regarded as ancient Russian land, were organized as the westerngubcrniia, or administrative district, of the empire. Polish peasants had to serve twenty-five years of military service in the Russian army. Each of die great powers introduced its own legal system. Poland, as Hugo KoMataj said and many Poles believed, "ceased to belong to actually existing nations." The legend was born that the wounded Kos'ciuszko had cried, "Finis Poloniae!" when he fell from his horse.
Within two years, however, a Polish legion of 6,000 troops had been formed in Lombardy to fight for revolutionary France under the command of General Jan Henryk Dabrowski, one of the military leaders of the defeated uprising. Generals Jozef Zajaczek and Karol Kniaziewicz formed Italian and Danubian legions. The spirit of struggle was kept alive. In 1806, the Polish legions participated in Napoleon's campaign and entered Warsaw. The next year, 40,000 Polish troops were fighting against Russia and Prussia under Napoleon's leadership; a kind of Polish state, the duchy of Warsaw, was created. The "Marseillaise" of Dabrowski's Polish legion, the legendary marching song that later became the Polish national anthem, began with the famous words: "Poland is not yet lost as long as we live" (Wandycz 1974, 22-23).
Romantic Polish nationalism became a secular religion. Inspired by Adam Mickiewicz's popular national drama Dziady, a great many Poles espoused "sacred suffering on earth" and self-sacrifice for the national cause. They learned from the character of Konrad the poet to challenge even God, calling Him a "tsar" when He allowed suffering and injustice. Over the course of nearly three-quarters of a century, between 1794 and 1864, romantic Polish self-sacrificing heroism led to the organization of Polish legions abroad and illegal secret societies at home. Each generation triggered a new uprising.
The summer and fall of 1830 were pregnant widi new revolutionary attempts: on July 28, Paris took the lead again, and, on October 14, Belgian independence was declared. This inspired the Polish revolutionary patriots to mobilize, and, on November 29, a group of conspirators set out to kill Grand Duke Constantin, the brother of Tsar Nicholas, and disarm the Russian garrison. Although dieir plan failed, the spontaneous for-
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mation of a national militia and a series of skirmishes liberated Warsaw, and the grand duke evacuated the country with his troops. A new chapter was opened in the Polish struggle for independence. The Polish army numbered 38,000 troops at the beginning, one-tenth of the Russian army in the country. The Sejm and the national government, appointed by the Sejm, assumed leadership in mid-December, and General Jozef Chlop-icki, the "dictator" of the insurrection, recruited peasants into the national army, increasing the number of troops to 57,000 by February and 85,000 by March. The ratio between the Polish and Russian armies changed from 1:10 to 1:2. The readiness to fight against the Russians increased after Field Marshal Ivan Diebitch's troops neared Warsaw in late January. The Polish army halted the Russians at Stoczek and Grochow. On January 25, the Sejm dedironed Tsar Nicholas from the Polish throne. The Polish nobility intensified the war of national independence. The uprising spread to Lithuania in March, and the rebels gained control over the entire province, except the big cities. The Polish offensive was successful in April and May.
Most of the military leaders of die uprising did not, however, believe in die possibility of a final victory. The five-member national government, headed by Prince Jerzi Adam Czartoryski, was divided between two conservatives and two liberals, while the fifth member, the left-wing Joachim Lelewcl, was isolated. Both Czartoryski and the majority of the Sejm supported the national uprising but opposed social revolution and rejected the radical social reform advocated by die Left. While the national struggle went its extreme radical way, social revolution did not accompany it. The uprising, consequently, remained a struggle between the Polish nobility and the Russian tsar, especially in Lidiuania and die Ukrainian provinces, where the local peasantry was strongly mxi-szlachta and anti-Polish.
Radicalization in the summer of 1831 led to rioting in Warsaw, where a mob attacked the royal castle, killing noblemen and generals. The leadership of the uprising became even more uncertain and lost its anti-Russian radicalism. Czartoryski escaped from the capital, and General Jan Stefan Krukowiecki took over the government and army. Although the Polish forces were almost intact, Krukowiecki did not resist a new Russian offensive under General Ivan Paskievich in early September 1831, and the Russians surrounded Warsaw, ending the second uprising.
In the repression diat followed, the Polish noble elite was virtually decimated. Seeking to avert further uprisings, the victorious Russians deported some 80,000 Poles to Siberia. From Lithuania and Podolia alone, more than 50,000 Polish gentry were deported. The 1815 constitution was suspended and replaced by an "Organic Statute" (1832). Poland became
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a part of the Russian empire. Viceroy Count Ivan Fyodorovich Paskevich Erivansky instituted a harsh dictatorship. Education, transportation, all domestic Polish issues were directed by Moscow. The Polish army was immediately disbanded; youths were recruited into the Russian army and sent to the Caucasus. Russification began: the Russian monetary system (184-1), criminal code (1847), and weights and measures (1849) were introduced. Poland became a part of the Russian tariff system (1851), and Russian became the official language (1864). The institution of viceroy was replaced by that of governor-general (as in other provinces), and the country was governed as the westem^ubemiia of the empire (Izdebsld 1995, 83)- The russification process was especially strong in the Lithuanian and Ukrainian parts of the former Polish-Lithuanian kingdom.
The most active part of the Polish elite left the defeated country, mostly for France. The roughly 9,000 Polish emigres, two-thirds of them members of the szlachta, represented most of the political and intellectual elite of the country. The "national bards," including Mickiewicz, Chopin, political leaders such as Czartorvski and Lelewel, and military leaders such as General Josef Bern, all left Poland to serve the Polish national cause from abroad.
Some of them learned the lessons of failure. Mickiewicz describes the hunting, feasting, parasitic world of the Polish nobility in his epic poem Pan Tadeusz (1834), whose hero liberates his serfs, unlike the real Polish nobility. Romantic poets advocated the modern concept of the nation, opposing the traditional Polish political nation of the nobility. The Left went much further to promote social radicalization of the revolution. The Polish Democratic Society (1832) announced a program of equality of the nobility and peasantry and the need to emancipate the latter. The society sought to transform the "military insurrection into a social revolution" (Brock 1977, 7). Emigrant soldiers founded the General Assembly of the Polish Emigration in London and stated in their Akt wiary (Declaration of Faith) in September 1834: "The sovereignty of the people is unlimited. . . .The people are infallible in their judgments and in their demands" (ibid., 10).
A radical revolutionary left wing went even further: Stanislaw Worcell and Kazimierz Alexander Pulaski, for example, established the Gmina Londonska (London Commune), the "first conscious populist [movement] of Eastern Europe," in Peter Brock's words. They declared property to be "at the center of all evil which oppresses mankind at present," quoting Rousseau, and demanded a "dictatorship of the people" with "equality of property for all" (Brock 1977,11,17, 27).
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Conservative nationalists, led by Czartoryski, dreamed, however, of an international intervention against Russia and carried on an enormous diplomatic activity from their Paris headquarters, the Hotel Lambert. Mickiewicz advocated the formation of a Polish legion and even traveled to Turkey to organize one. The majority of the Polish nobility, however, blinded by their "tribal myth," were convinced that Poland was the "defender of Europe," which was accordingly in the debt of the Poles. Not only independence but also a culture enabling it to face reality were lacking in Poland, Jerzy Jedlicki argues (Jedlicki 1999, 35, 45, 223).
Conspiratorial activity never stopped at home. Captain Szymon Konar-ski, an emigre emissary, established a network of underground organizations, the Zwiazek Ludu Polskiego. The center of national activity was shifted to Poznania and Galicia under the relatively less oppressive Prussian and Austrian regimes. In 1845, the Poznaii Central Committee decided to launch a new uprising in late February 1846. The plan, however, was reported to the Prussian authorities, and the leaders of the conspiracy were arrested. An uprising nevertheless took place in Krakow, where about six thousand people joined and sought to mobilize the peasants. The Gali-cian Polish peasantry, however, not without incentives from the Austrian authorities, turned against the Polish nobility. In certain districts, the majority of the manors were looted and burned and landed nobility killed. Nearly two thousand noble estates and families were affected. This failed attempt at a new uprising clearly exhibited the deep social conflicts in Polish society and the szlachta's lack of understanding of social problems and their connection to the national cause.
Romantic Polish nationalism was not characterized by rational self-control. Successive generations continued the heroic but hopeless struggle for the liberation of Poland. Although the liberal Left continued to promote social emancipation of the peasants, radicalization still characterized only the national movement. A new underground national government was established, called the National Central Committee. It even collected a voluntary "national tax" in preparation for a new insurrection in 1862. On January 6,1863, the European correspondent of the NewTork Tribune reported: "Agreat conspiracy is hatching in Poland which has its ramification everywhere there are Poles. An outbreak is expected" (quoted in Coleman 1934, 6). The committee decided to take the plunge without serious military preparation and proclaimed an uprising when the Russians and the puppet Polish government initiated the military conscription of twenty thousand Poles in January 1863. It rapidly recruited about six thousand volunteers, who attacked Russian garrisons and troops, but the
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straggle was hopeless from the start. Most of the Western world was convinced that it was actually counterproductive. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, wrote: "Great and universal as the sympathy of the civilized world with the wrongs inflicted upon unhappy Poland is, the recent insurrection will be almost unanimously regretted. . . .This new outbreak, we greatly fear, will postpone the realization of the ardent national wish" (quoted in ibid., 12-13). Unlike the previous insurrections, the January uprising remained a partisan war, although militarily quite successful: fighting continued for nearly a year and a Half. An underground state apparatus was set up, including a police force. However, several factors contributed to eventual defeat: military operations remained uncoordinated, Lithuania and Ukraine were not mobilized, and the peasants remained hostile to the nobility.
The historical turning point occurred in February 1864. The Russian tsar seemingly learned the historical lessons better than the Polish nobility and granted ownership rights to first the Lithuanian, then the Ukrainian and Belarusian peasantry by mid 1863. The tsar ordered preparations for major reform and the liberation of serfs in Poland in the fall of the same year. The emancipation decree was announced on February 1864. Paradoxically, the archconservative Russian empire thus played the peasant card against the Polish szlacbta, isolated it from the peasant masses, and undermined the Polish national cause. In spite of impressive peasant participation and the mobilization of about 200,000 volunteers, the number of Polish troops actually fighting never exceeded 30,000. An overpowering Russian army, led by General Fedor Berg, proclaimed victory in May 1864. Skirmishes continued, however, until the last "dictator" of the insurrection, Romuald Traugutt, failed in his attempt to reorganize the Polish partisan army in October 1864 and was captured and hanged. The uprising, hopeless from the very beginning, finally collapsed.
FROM REVOLT TO "ORGANIC WORK"
Despite the fact that romantic heroism kept the national cause alive, Poland paid a very high price for these national revolts. As a consequence of repeated defeats, however, reason gained ground over emotion, and the majority of the Polish elite gradually realized the need for radical socioeconomic change. Romantic nationalism, which had fueled die uprisings, was slowly rejected. The poet-philosopher Cyprian Norwid, who had been ten years old during the 1830-31 uprising, and, as a young adult, drew his
IOO UPRISINGS AND REFORMS
lessons from 1848, turned against Polish romantic mcssianism and, in a letter to General Jan Skrzynecki, called Mickievvicz "horrible for Poland" and denounced his "mystical heroic deeds." Norwid's Promethidion clearly expressed the ideas of a new generation:
not the Tartar deed, a blood-stained bridge Thrown on a scaffold glowing with flames But daily work by love relieved Until the toil of" toils is achieved.
Creative work to civilize the nation could lead to real progress, making martyrdom unnecessary, Norwid said. He accused romantic nationalism of being harmful and counterproductive. Poland "is a nation which is undeniably great as far as patriotism is concerned but which as a society represents nothing. . . . We are no society at all. We are a great national banner." Polish nationalism, in his view, served to "identify nations with tribes. Such a notion can bring us back to the barbarian hordes. . . . This is a return . . . from nationhood to tribalism." In his "The Annihilation of the Nation," Norwid argued that the Polish "unjustified [national] religion" destroyed all secular ideas (Walicki [1982] 1994, 320-32).
Norwid did not have a strong influence during his uncompromising spiritual struggle between 1848 and 1882. His ideas, however, gradually gained ground. Realizing that they had "learned how to die magnificently but never knew how to live rationally," the post-uprising generations began to value the "heroism of reasonable life," Piotr Wandycz observes (Wandycz 1974, 207). The Polish "political nation" was ready to radicalize the national struggle over more than a half century but remained blind to the need for social revolution. After repeated defeat, however, they opened a new chapter in the nation's history and started nation-building the other way around: a new concept of "organic work," or political, cultural, and economic modernization, emerged.
The leader of the Poznah "organic camp," Karol Marcinkowski, declared as early as 1842: "Education and work . . . these are the means for paving the path we seek." Continuous conspiracy and insurrections had proved as disastrous in the nineteenth century as the libemm veto had been in Poland before the partitions, the Galician Polish historian Jozef Szu-jski observed in 1867. "Conspiracy is absolutely unjustified. Only normal organic work is justifiable today" (quoted in Blejwas 1984, 45). National ideas remained the prime mover of Polish politics, but in a different wav. Instead of hopeless romantic uprisings, a pragmatic approach to nation-building emerged: Poles had to realize, said the Krakow newspaper Czas
UPRISINGS AND REFORMS IOI
(Time), that France's defeat by the Prussians at Sedan "should put an end to all hallucinations which for the past hundred years have cost so much blood and sacrifice . . . [it] decidedly put an end to a policy based on the West" (ibid., 76).
These were the years when Warsaw positivism emerged in the shortlived Central School. The deep disillusionment of the post-insurrection years and the influence of Auguste Comte's empirical method led to the emergence of an influential intellectual group. "The most immediate task of national work is not spreading ideas," Jozef Supihski, one of the founding fathers of the movement, said in an article in Pismct. "Our task is the formation and education of our society. . . establishment of reading rooms and schools, the improvement of moral and material well-being. . . . [These] provide a hundred times greater guarantee for the future, than political societies" (quoted in Blejwas 1984,73-74). Supinski used the term praca organiczna (organic work), which became the leading slogan and goal of Polish positivism for half a century. Heroic messianism was replaced by sober realism (Ratajczak 1992). As the spiritual leader of the pos-ltivists, Alexander Swietochwski, put it in 1873, what was required was "work at the foundations." Rejecting uprisings and foreign intervention, he declared: "It is necessary to create happiness and well-being" through commerce, industry, and agriculture (Blejwas 1984, 94). Swietochwski, Boleslaw Prus, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and other influential writers and scholars strongly and successfully advocated these ideas after the devastating defeat of 1864. As Swietochwski argued in his Political Directions (1882): "Dreams of regaining external freedom should today be replaced with efforts to acquire an internal independence. Such an independence can stem solely from a strengthening of mental and material forces, a comprehensive national progress, linked to general development and democratization of social life." He spoke of "industrial and trade conquests" rather than military victory (Trzeciakowski 1995, 144-46).
Boleslaw Prus published his novel Lalka (The Doll) in 1890 to propagate positivist ideas. In it, he attacked the high-living, do-nothing Polish aristocracy, with their national standard of misbehavior. Poland was burdened with antiquated values: "[L]abor stands in the pillory, and depravity triumphs! He who makes a fortune is called a miser, a skinflint, a parvenu," says Wokulski, the hero, in one of his monologues, "he who wastes money is called generous, disinterested, open-handed. . . . [Simplicity is eccentric, economy is shameful." Wokulski, a veteran of the 1863 uprising, comes from an impoverished gentry family. He becomes a successful businessman, because he can "modulate his Polishncss in order to
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do good business." He still cultivates noble habits, buying horses and fighting duels, but in his constant monologues, he struggles against these bad traditions: "[A]m I doing all this, I who despise it?" His business dealings are motivated by romanticism and altruism, but he has to make money because it is "the sole instrument for achieving his ideals" (Holmgren 1998, 70-74, 77, 80-84).
"The cultural and economic resources of the Polish nation were as yet too underdeveloped to sustain an independent state," the Warsaw posi-tivists believed (Davies 1986,170). The Filomat (Philomathes) group in Lithuania and the Stanczyk group in Krakow shared the new rational approach toward nation-building through industrialization, railroad construction, trade, and urbanization. A half century of peaceful modernization followed in Poland.
Industrial development and cultural and social modernization gradually transformed the country. It took decades for the peasantry to be incorporated into the national camp at the end of the nineteenth century. The tragic abyss that separated the noble and peasant societies, however, was not properly bridged until World War 1. The peasants in Wladyslaw Rey-mont's tale remain suspicious: "[I]t hath been so from all time: the gentry rebel and drive our folk to ruin . . . who has to pay, when payday comes? What are the people in their eyes. ... If they had their way, serfdom would be restored tomorrow! Let the nobles tear each other to pieces: 'tis no affair of ours" (Reymont 1925, 4: 181-82).
Wincenty Witos, one of the founders of the Polish peasant party Piast, confirms Reymont's account in his memoirs: "The majority of the peasants were very concerned, fearing that once the Polish state was restored, back would come serfdom and the total enslavement to the nobles" (Witos 1964,132). Stanislaw Grabski maintained that the peasantry had been won over to the cause of fighting for independence at the end of the nineteenth century in the Polish kingdom, and between 1905 and 1914 in Galicia (Molenda 1991,125,130).
THE PEACEFUL CZECH NATIONAL MOVEMENT
Although close neighbors of the Poles, the Czech people acted in a totally different way. After Bohemia and Moravia were incorporated into the Habsburg empire, following the bloody defeat of the Czechs in the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, and reduced to little more than a province of Austria, the native nobility, the Czech "political nation," ceased
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to exist. The Czech "revolutionaries'1 of the mid nineteenth century consequently haci only limited goals and did not demand national independence. On March n, 1848, motivated by the French and Italian revolutions of the previous weeks, the Czech elite, led by the moderate liberal intelligentsia, gathered at Saint Wenceslas Hall in Prague and received petitions aiming at the reestablishment of the Stmtsrecht—that is, the independent legal status of the Czech kingdom under the Habsburg monarch. They demanded free contract between the king and the nation, equal status for the Czech language in schools and government offices, and limited self-government for the confederated Czech lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. After the Vienna and Pest-Buda revolutions, which followed within the week, equal stanis for the Czech language in public life and the establishment of self-government in cooperation with the Czech National Committee formed at the Saint Wenceslas gathering were promised on April 8. The peaceful Czech rebellion soon failed, however. Within diree months, a military dictatorship was established under an Austrian general, Prince Alfred Windischgrätz. There was no resistance. No one took to the streets and built barricades. The Czech demands were dismissed and buried for decades. The "revolution" was over.
The Czech attitude was diametrically opposed to the emotional heroism of the Poles. First of all, the Czech "political nation" equivalent to the Polish szlachta had been entirely eliminated after 1620, and a new Austro-Czech aristocratic landowning political elite had been created in its place. The lands of the annihilated landowning class were confiscated and given to Austrian clients of the emperor. The new aristocracy, such as Prince Schwarzenberg and Counts Chotek, Sternberg, and Kinsky, were all Austro-Bohemians. The lower nobility, the gentry, the real body of the "political nation"—so important in the Polish case—totally disappeared (Melville 1998). No wonder neither the old nor the new Czech political elite sought national independence.
The romantic Czech poets, scholars, intellectuals, and other members of the emerging urban middle class who launched the Czech national movement were typically moderate. František Palackv and František Rieger, its acknowledged leaders, understood the geopolitical dimensions of their struggle. Although they wanted to be rid of Austrian oppression, they also worried about German expansionism. The year 1848 was the highpoint of decades of the German movement for national unification. The Grossdeutsch concept of a united Germany included the Czech lands as future parts of the German empire. Palacký and the leaders of the Czech movement accordingly decided not to participate in the Frankfurt pro-
I04 UPRISINGS AND REFORMS
visional Vorparlament, and also boycotted the elections to the Constituent Assembly in Frankfurt.
The anti-German trend was strengthened by the fear of the substantial German minority in the Czech lands. German nationalism among Bohemian Germans developed in parallel with Czech nationalism and stood in opposition to it. In August 1848, the Bohemian German Congress in Teplitz initiated the idea of the partition of Bohemia into Czech and German parts. This initiative was, in a way, an answer to the pan-Slav idea expressed by the first pan-Slav congress, which gathered in Prague in June 1848. Although Palacký and the Czech political leaders were rather cautious regarding an unqualified unification of the "Slav nation," they advocated an Austro-Slav concept. Austria, in their view, was a crucially important bastion against German expansionism, but it had to be reorganized to assure equal rights for the Slav nations. A riot on June 12, during the meetings of the congress, initiated by Czech radicals like Josef Fric, was easily suppressed by imperial troops and made Vienna more steadfast in rejecting any Czech demands. When the Reichsrat met in Vienna and then in Kremsier in the summer and fall of 1848, Palacký gave up the idea of constitutionally unified Czech lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, but demanded cultural autonomy and an autonomous legal status for all of them. In January 1849, he suggested the creation of a Czech unit within the monarchy, based on ethnic principles, consisting of the Czech-populated areas of Bohemia and Moravia (without the German-populated territories), together with Slovak territories from Hungary. A harsh and despotic Habsburg resistance crushed all of these attempts, however, and a new absolutist regime was introduced. The New Year's Eve patent of 1851 and the Alexander Bach regime from April 1852 on continued a ruthless germanization. Even the most minimal Czech language demands were flatly rejected.
Although it was never conceptualized by a Czech movement, paradoxically enough, Czech "organic work" in economic, social, and cultural modernization advanced strikingly during these decades. The Czech lands, politically and administratively subordinated provinces of Austria without any kind of cultural or political autonomy, flourished economically and culturally. The Czech provinces achieved by far the highest level of economic advancement in Central and Eastern Europe. Rapid and successful industrialization, social modernization, and the highest literacy rate in the region made the Czech lands more similar to the West than any other part of it. In other words, Bohemia and Moravia profited a great deal from being a hereditary province of the Habsburg empire and as a consequence enjoyed an equal status with Austria proper.
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Rapid economic progress certainly contributed to the further failure of Czech national demands during the 1860s and 1870s. The boycott of the imperial Diet and Reichsrat in 1867 in favor of the reestablishment of the státní právo, or a Rcchtsstaat, that is, equal legal-political status with Hungary, was again rejected. The Bohemian Declaration of August 1868 that renewed this demand generated mass rallies of support around the country. The imperial cabinet of Count Karl Hohenwart was ready to accept the concept of a "trialist" reorganization of the empire and granted cultural autonomy to the Czech people, although not equal status with Hungary, in the fall of 1871. Emperor Franz Josef, a hard-nosed defender ofAustro-Hungarian "dualism,1' rejected the "trialist" Austro-Hungarian-Slav concept, however, and dismissed the Hohenwart cabinet. The Bohemian and Moravian representatives in the imperial Diet renewed their boycott of it. As before, such passive resistance was ineffective. It did not shake the empire, and the prosperous Czech provinces were not ready for violence. The Moravian Czechs gave up the boycott in 1873, and a split in the Czech national movement in September 1874 led to the reentry of the "Young Czechs," a newly organized National Liberal party, into parliament. In the fall of 1878, even the "Old Czech" National party joined. The peaceful Czech national movement lost momentum and dried up for several decades. "Organic work" nevertheless became more vigorous and successful than ever.
THE "AGE OF REFORMS" AND THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION
Around 1800, at a time when the Polish "political nation" was fighting for its liberty, and before the Czech mass movement had begun, die Hungarian noble elite embarked on its own long journey toward national independence and social reform. At die outset, these two goals were not combined, but opposed to each other. The Hungarian nobility, like the Polish szlachta, had set out to safeguard its own "golden freedom," provoked by die reforms in the 1780s of the emperor Joseph II, an enlightened absolutist ruler seeking to adjust to a revolutionary era (Marie-Antoinette was his sister).
What most irritated the Hungarian nobles was the abolition of serfdom. Although this did not affect personal service in labor, land, or money, it allowed free migration, choice of obligation, marriage, and the elimination of noble patrimonial jurisdiction in criminal cases. Noble tax exemptions were not eliminated, but the nobility nonetheless felt its dominance threatened. Joseph planned to destroy its institutional fortress, the me-
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dieval county (comitat) organization, and replace it with ten administrative districts under royal commissioners.
The Hungarian nobility counterattacked, exploiting the centralizing and germanizing attempts of die Habsburg monarch, whom they accused of violating the traditional agreement by rejecting his oath to the Hungarian constitution, refusing to be officially crowned with the Hungarian crown, and ruling by royal edict without the Hungarian Diet. The Language Decree of 1784 made the German language compulsory in public offices and required Hungarian officials to learn it within three years (Kann 1974).
The nobility passionately proclaimed Hungarian national interests and organized national resistance, with the result that the dying Joseph II had to withdraw all of his reforms but three on January 28, 1790. Latin was reestablished as the official language of legislation and higher education, while county administrations used Hungarian. A noble-national movement emerged, led by the lower nobility. Peter ocsai-Balogh, a member of the seven-member court, drafted and circulated a constitution. Its point of departure was die broken agreement between monarch and "people." The rhetoric used the terms of Rousseau's Social Contract but translated "people," "popular sovereignty," and "national liberty" as the equivalents of nobility, noble rights, and freedom. Because of the unlawful rule of Joseph II, ocsai-Balogh announced afilum successionis interruptum, or interruption of succession, and declared the need for a new agreement. Hungary's king, he maintained, had to swear to govern lawfully before his coronation.
The draft clearly expressed the demands of the nobility: Hungary was an independent country, not subordinate to any other. A foreign army could not be stationed on its territory. Its administration was independent of that of the other parts of the empire. Decisions relating to war and peace were the exclusive right of the Diet. Legislation was the exclusive right of the "people," that is, the noble Diet. The king had veto power only once, but not in the case of a second resolution of the Diet. The "people" were also part of the executive power and controlled the king. Matters of state would be conducted by a senate, elected by the Diet, consisting of representatives of the lower nobility. The Diet sat every year, and its sessions could be delayed by its members, but not by the king (Merei 1983, 49-50).
The Diet, which opened in June 1790, attempted to imitate the French Constitutional Assembly, and die delegates took an oath not to leave without a new constitution. A royal agent sent an agitated report to Vienna
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107
and warned: "A similar revolution to the French may erupt in Hungary" (Marczali 1888,542). Nothing similar happened, however. In the summer of 1790, Leopold II, the younger brother of Joseph II and the new king of Hungary, took command, made an agreement with Prussia, and stabilized his power. He then mobilized die Hungarian peasantry against their lords, scared the "traitors" with imprisonment, and rejected all the radical demands of the Hungarian nobility, including official use of the Hungarian language. In the end, the Diet happily accepted a few concessions, such as the legal acceptance of Hungarian independence, stadng that the country was "not subordinated to any other country and has its own laws and rules." The most important concession was that the monarch and the Diet had to enact legislation joindy. Hungarian language teaching was also introduced in schools (Magyar Tbrvcnytdr 1901).
While the nobility promoted the national cause in its own interests, Hungarian radical intellectuals who had originally espoused Joseph's reforms adopted the ideas of the French Revolution. Secret societies were established in May 1794 to achieve their revolutionary goals, but by die summer, all of die conspirators had been arrested. Within a year, their leaders, Ignác Martinovics, József Hajnóczy, Ferenc Szcntmarjay, and other Hungarian "Jacobins" had been publicly executed in Buda, while others were handed down brutal prison sentences. The Habsburg empire, especially under Francis I, became a police state, with strict censorship and the suppression of any liberal-enlightened views.
The national and social causes coincided again, however, in the "Age of Reforms," during the Hungarian Vormdrz (the 1830s and 1840s, the decades before the revolution of March 15,1848). Linguistic nationalism and the romantic ideas spread throughout the public. Celebrated poets and artists fueled an increasingly powerful national movement. The first half of the nineteenth century, nevertheless, remained a period of permanent surrender for the Hungarian nobility and a slow inching toward minor reforms. The realization of the demand for Hungarian as the only official language of legislation and in the courts took several decades. In 1826, the Diet still demanded bilingual legislation, but the monarch allowed only the translation of laws into Magyar, Latin alone being accepted for the official text. Hungarian became the sole official language of the Diet and legislation only in 1844.
The Diet called for equal status for Hungary in trade within the monarchy, but the king rejected this at the beginning of the century. In 1841, influenced by Friedrich List, the Diet decided to introduce a Hungarian protective tariff against Austrian competition advocated by Lajos Kossuth,
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but the king denied its right to decide upon the issue. Kossuth initiated a social movement to promote Hungarian industrial products. The members of the established Honi Vedegylet (founded in 1844), an association for protecting domestic markets, volunteered not to buy foreign merchandise and "introduce the tariff at tiicir own threshold." The results were only partially successful, but the national idea slowly became imbued in the majority of the population, the Vedegylet became a sort of national political party, and a strong national mass political movement emerged from it (Kosary 1942).
Social legislation was similarly slow and even less conclusive. The Diet did grant peasants the right to dispose of their property at will in 1833; in the mid 1830s, the majority of the nobility rejected a proposal that remission of feudal dues be permitted by free agreement between landlord and peasant, as well as legislation initiated by the liberal lower nobility on personal freedom and property rights for the serfs. In 1836 and 1840, in the most radical reform during this period, remission was finally made possible by the onkentes orokvdltsdg, a mutual agreement between landlord and serf, and the more well-to-do peasants (mostly on the Great Hungarian Plain) liberated themselves and became owners of the land they cultivated. Small measures limiting the privileges of the nobility were also considered breakthroughs: tax exemption was suspended for the lesser nobles known as bocskoros, and, albeit largely of symbolic importance, nobles wrere subjected to the toll on the new Chain Bridge spanning the Danube between Buda and Pest. The need for general and proportionate taxation and equal rights to hold public office was discussed, but no measures to this effect were accepted or introduced.
The establishment remained intact, but the way of thinking about it radically changed. The pioneering works of Count Istvan Szechenyi and Baron Miklos Wesselenyi harshly criticized the outdated institution of serfdom. Szechenyi maintained that the productivity of wage labor was three times higher than that of serf labor. He convincingly proved that noble privileges were also counterproductive, since, among other things, they created an insurmountable barrier to the introduction of a modern credit system, a prerequisite of agricultural modernization. The burning agitation of Lajos Kossuth molded public opinion and mobilized a large segment of society in favor of the national cause and reform.
True, not only were the more radical demands rejected by the upper nobility and the royal court, but radical reformers such as Baron Miklos Wesselenyi and Lajos Kossuth were tried and imprisoned for years in 1839. It took a long time for the lower nobility to recognize the need for more
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radical social reform. The nobility could not alone realize the badly needed reforms, Kossuth wrote in an editorial in his journal, entitled "Disappointment," in the winter of 1843. Sterile disputes, unproductive sessions of the parliament, and partial results characterized the "Age of Reforms" in Hungary. The clear recognition of the importance of basic social reforms and economic modernization nonetiieless took root. Moreover, a strong and enthusiastic political camp was formed, which continued the struggle for change. Only a spark was needed for a real revolutionary explosion, and it was provided by the new revolutionary wave in Europe in 1848.
The newrs of the Paris revolution mobilized the hesitant Hungarian Diet, which hurriedly accepted the recommendation of Kossuth on March 3 and proclaimed the full emancipation of the serfs, who became owners of the urbaritd plots, nearly 20 percent of the cultivated land. The landlords received compensation from the state. Compensation for another roughly 20 percent of the land was paid by the liberated peasants themselves. About 60 percent of the peasants, however, were liberated without land or with an unviable fraction of a parcel, and the noble landowning class preserved its monopoly over nearly half of the land in the country. In a few days, the radicalized program of the revolutionary "Opposition Circle" demanded freedom of the press, civil rights, proportional taxation, jury trials, and the total elimination of feudal institutions. Its "Twelve Points" demanded the establishment of an independent, representative Hungarian government and a national guard.
The revolutionarv crowd took over the streets of Pest and Buda on March 15: the poet Sandor Petofi, with 5,000 people, occupied the printing house of Landerer and Heckenast and, rejecting censorship, printed the first products of the independent press: Petofi's "Nemzeti Dal" ("National Song") and the "Twelve Points." An increasing crowd of 10,000, later burgeoning to 16,000 people, gathered in front of the National Museum. Petofi, who had recited his powerful "Nemzeti Dal" standing on a table in the Pilvax Cafe in Pest two days before, now addressed it to the assembled crowd from the steps of the National Museum:
Rise up, Magyar, the country calls!
It is "now or never" what fare befalls . . .
Shall we live as slaves or free men?
That is the question—choose your "Amen"!
God of Hungarians, we swear unto Thcc,
We swear unto Thee—that slaves we shall no longer be!
(Makkai 1996,319)
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The crowd echoed the last two lines, the refrain, six times. The date was March is, 1848- The Hungarian revolution had begun.
A victorious revolution led to the formation of the first independent government of Count Lajos Batthany with the leading liberal noble reformers, Lajos Kossuth, Istvan Szechenyi, Jözsef Eötvös, and Ferenc Deak. The frightened King Ferdinand sanctioned the revolutionary legislation of thirty-one articles on April 11. Feudal despotism had come to an end in Hangar v.
Although the liberal lower nobility were ready to sacrifice their privileges and liberate the serfs, they were unable to go any further when it came to the land question, the remaining feudal services, such as the vine tithe, and the continued existence of the guilds and their political dominance. The franchise, decided by the parliament, excluded roughly 93 percent of the population and, consequently, the first "democratic" elections in June elected a "postfeudal" parliament: only one-tenth of the delegates belonged to the revolutionary Left, which urged more radical social legislation, while 72 percent of die elected delegates belonged to the landowning noble class. Although in April and May, local peasant uprisings and seizures of estates clearly expressed the mass demand for more radical legislation, the Kossuth-led lower nobility were basically unable to go further down the road—making only minor compromises—and turned against the mass movements. Kossuth flatly told the parliament on December 14,1848: "Everybody who agitates against the nobility ... is the enemy of the nation! Stirring up the people over the problem of some pasture lands or anything else ... at this time means weakening the forces we need to defend our fatherland" (Spira 1987, 284-85).
In contrast, they were ready to go to the most radical extreme on the road of national revolution to confront the Habsburgs, mobilizing a revolutionary army against the Austrian military offensive. The Diet rejected the newly appointed commander in chief, General Count Franz von Lam-berg, and when he arrived in Pest, an agitated mob lynched him. The Hungarian revolution soon turned against the Habsburg monarchy, provoked by the abdication of the somewhat mentally retarded Ferdinand on December 2,1848, prompted by General Windischgratz, because Ferdinand had made compromises in recognizing Hungary's revolutionary government and legislation in 1848 and was bound by his word. On January 7, the Hungarian parliament declared that it would not recognize the new Habsburg monarch, Ferdinand's eighteen-year-old nephew, Franz Josef I, until he was legally crowned and had taken his oath to the Hungarian constitution and the April Laws. This did not happen, and on
UPRISINGS AND REFORMS III
April 14,1849, the Diet declared Hungary's independence and dethroned the Habsburg monarch. Lajos Kossuth was elected governor-president.
After having been invaded in the fall, the country launched a life-or-death military struggle against Austria. The government mobilized all available resources, printed paper money, exactly like revolutionary France, and recruited peasants into the national army, which, after Win-dischgratz's initial military successes, recovered the entire country. The Hungarian revolution became the most radical and important episode of the European revolutions of 1848. "The European revolutionaries hailed the Hungarians as the Revolutionary nation par excellence" (Tal-mon i960, 484).
NATIONAL MINORITIES AND THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION
The Hungarian radical nationalist lower nobility were unable, however, to understand that all of the nationalities of the Hungarian kingdom, Croats, Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs, and others, altogether 46 percent of the population, had similar national goals and demanded the same national rights as the Hungarians. The nationalist gentry were blinded by their national ambitions and did not recognize the existence of independent Croat and Romanian nationalities within the kingdom. They forced the various ethnic minorities to magyarize, as Kossuth had advocated in his Pesti Hirlap, and as the Diet's language legislation had promoted in the 1840s. Confrontation was unavoidable. Croats and Transylvanian Romanians, awakened by their romantic language reformers and national bards, revolted first.
As early as March 25,1848, provoked by revolutionary Hungarian legislation that virtually incorporated Croatia into Hungary, Ljudevit Gaj's Croatian National party elected a "Provisional National Board." A mass meeting in Zagreb endorsed a petition demanding national independence, including an independent government, responsible only to the Croat So-bor, which was elected in May and held its first session in June. From the outset, the Sobor denied the legality of the laws of the Hungarian parliament in Croatia. Baron Josip Jclacic, newly appointed ban of Croatia by the emperor Ferdinand, set up an interim government, and rejected directives from Hungary. The unification of ethnically Croatian provinces thus created an administratively Greater Croatia. The Croat national movement intended to gain equal rights with the Hungarians and federalize the monarchy. However, Kossuth and the Hungarian parliament
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were not ready for major compromises, and Jelasic occupied Rijeka at the end of August and attacked Hungary with 40,000 troops on September 11.
A declaration, then a law (Article VTI.T848), on union with Transylvania passed by the Hungarian Diet prompted an immediate response from Transylvanian Romanians. A meeting on April 24, initiated by Avram Iancu, called on all Romanians to protest and demand full equality. On May 15, a mass meeting of 40,000 in Blaj (Balazsfalva) rejected union with Hungary and adopted the slogan "Nimic despre noi fara noi!" ("No decision about us without us!"). The proclamation reformulated the famous Supplex Libellus Vcdachorum of 1791, asking the emperor, the "Great Prince of Transylvania," to grant equal national rights to the "fourth recognized nation," the Romanians of Transylvania.
Stimulated by the Transylvanian Romanian national movement, a revolutionary committee in Bucharest also announced its program and elected a cabinet tiiat included the Golescu brothers, Nicolae Balcescu, and Maria Rosetti on June 23,1848. A crowd attacked and occupied the palace in Bucharest, with a death toll of seven. A Romanian revolution was in the making, and the dream of a greater Romania, among other ill-defined concepts, such as a Danube confederation and an enlarged Habs-burg monarchy, seemed to be a possibility (Bodea 1998). Bucharest was, however, occupied by 20,000 Turkish troops. A Russian invasion followed, and the tsar's troops remained in the Principalities until 1851. The revolutionary attempts were defeated, and the Habsburg emperor remained die only hope of the Transylvanian Romanians. Bishop §aguna submitted a proposal to the emperor at Olmutz in February 1849 on the "union of all Romanians in the Austrian state as a single independent nation under the scepter of Austria, and as an integral part of the Monarchy" (Seton-Watson [1934] 1963,286). Transylvanian Romanians joined the emperor's war against the Hungarian revolution. Avram Iancu organized fifteen peasant legions, massacred Hungarians in Zalatna and Kdrosbanya, and burned die famous Bethlen Library in Nagyenyed.
The Slovak and Serb national minorities in Hungary also mobilized and rebelled. In the name of the Slovak nation, a group of national leaders, led by Ludevit Stur and Josef Hurban, gathered in Liptovsky Mikulas (Liptoszentmiklos) and ratified a petition to the emperor calling for an autonomous Slovakia with its own parliament, language, and educational system. The Slovak delegation participated at the pan-Slav meeting in Prague in June 1848, and several Slovak nationalists preferred the Austro-Slav idea of forming a separate Slovak grand duchy or Czecho-Slovak crown land within the Habsburg monarchy. After failed negotiations, a
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Slovak National Council was organized, as well as military detachments, which launched three military campaigns against the revolutionary Hungarian army between September 1848 and the summer of 1849.
The Serb National Church Council also announced a sixteen-point political program in Novi Sad (Ujvidek) on March 27,1848. On May 13, the Skupstina gathered in Sremski Karlovci (Karlovac) and declared the independence of the "Nation of Hungarian Serbs" under the emperor's aile. Their delegates, who adhered to the romantic "Illyrian" concept of South Slavic unity, arrived in Zagreb at the end of May, where thev proposed a federal union of the Vbivodina with Croatia. A quasi-government called the Glavni Odbor was formed, and a sizable armed force was recruited from among Serb peasant-soldiers of the military borderland, under the command of George Stratimirovic. More than 10,000 partisans, led by Stefan Knicanin, joined from Serbia and attacked Hungary. On June 12,1848, skirmishes—a "little war"—began.
The Hungarian liberal nationalists offered a broad range of human and personal liberties, but exhibited a biased assimilationist, state-nationalistic view and denied the existence of any nation in Hungary but the Hungarians. "I will never ever recognize anything other than [the] Hungarian nation and nationality under the Hungarian crown," Kossuth proclaimed to the Diet. "I know people . . . who speak other languages, but we do not have more than one nation here" (Spira 1987,164). He was ready to fight those who did not accept this. "The sword will decide between us," he told Stratimirovic when the latter made it clear that the Serbs were ready to turn to Austria for their rights (Kapper 1851).
The multinational Habsburg monarchy offered an outstanding opportunity to divide et impera. As a contemporary joke went: "The Austrian emperor made an alliance with the Croat king and attacked the Hungarian king." All three were, of course, one and the same person, Franz Josef I, die Habsburg emperor, king of Hungary and Croatia. The Croat, Serb, Romanian, and Slovak national revolutions in Hungary turned against the Hungarian national revolution when it became clear that dieir demands had all been rejected. All of these nationalities had the same aspirations as the Hungarians, but the nationalist Hungarian noble elite did not recognize their rights and regarded diem as part of die Hungarian nation. A desperate suggestion from the radical Left to federalize Hungary did not gain ground, and the vain attempt to conclude an alliance— Kossuth reached agreement with the Romanian revolutionary Balcescu on July 14,1849—proved in vain. A proposed Danube confederation with the ethnic minorities went against the Zeitgeist: it was too little, too late.
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The revolutionary Hungarian army, however, was victorious, recapturing the entire country and even unsuccessfully attacking Vienna. General Windischgratz, commander of the Austrian army, attacked from the west. Franz Josef asked for military help from Tsar Nicholas I, and Russian troops invaded Hungary from the east in June. The Hungarian army was, at last, defeated and surrounded on August 13,1849. Former prime minister Lajos Batxhany was executed, along with thirteen generals of the revolutionary army. Thousands more were imprisoned. Kossuth and many others escaped the country. An absolutist Habsburg dictatorship followed, but all the revolutionary laws, including the emancipation of the peasants and the elimination of feudal institutions, were confirmed by a royal decree of March 1853. The nationalities that had joined the emperor in defeating revolutionary Hungary, as contemporary Hungarians noted with satisfaction, got as a reward what the Hungarians received as punishment. Their political movements and struggles for autonomy or independence were also defeated.
After being defeated by Prussia in 1866, a weakened Austria reached a compromise with die passively resistant but exhausted Hungarian noble elite. The Austro-Hungarian Agreement, or Ausgleich, of 1867 recognized a great part of the Hungarian national demands and granted far-reaching autonomy to Hungary within the framework of a modernized "dualis-tic" Austro-Hungarian empire. The Hungarian elite was able to preserve its rule over the nationalities, nearly half of the population of the country, and the Habsburgs saved the monarchy and their rule over Hungary.
FROM THE BROTHERHOOD OF NATIONS TO EXCLUSIVE, HOSTILE NATIONALISM
The Central and Eastern European national movements reached their zenith in 1848: the heroic Hungarian revolution and the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Croat, Slovene, and Hungarian-Serb struggles signaled the turning point from a national educational-propaganda program led by enlightened nobles and an intellectual elite to a modern mass political movement. The military defeat of the uprisings of 1848 could not save the multinational empires but only prolonged their existence by a few decades. The future of independent nation-states was clearly heralded.
At this turning point, die national movements not only permeated entire nations and mobilized huge masses but acquired new characteristics. Early nationalism had meant a euphoric unification of the entire people.
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Commoners and proletarians were promoted to equal citizenship and become inseparable parts of die nation, which because of die natural "brotherhood of nations" served mankind, a universalism expressed in the Polish national slogan "For our freedom and yours." "[Solidarity within one nation," as Jacob Talmon put it, "would be extended to members of other nations. . . . Liberated nation-churches would combine into the Church universal" (Talmon i960, 30).
In 1848, and during the second half of the nineteenth century, however, European nationalism lost these early, deeply democratic and universalis! revolutionary traits. Nationalism was henceforth socially conservative and exclusive. The concept of the nation was often used against the social demands of the lower strata of society. Rulers and governments "nationalized" nationalism for their own benefit. The nation became the "center of loyalty " for the entire society, supplying "a framework of a more concrete and tangible nature than the airy heavenly cities of the world proletariat or liberated humanity. National brodierhood makes class differences irrelevant. We all fulfill ourselves in the nation" (Talmon i960, 513-14).
The burgher middle class, which had been in the vanguard of democratic nationalism in earlier decades, now shifted to the conservative camp. Frightened by the awakened masses, the burghers ceased struggling against the ruling noble elite. They wanted rule, and turned against the dissatisfied, often organized and violent workers and peasants. The French revolution of 1848, which triggered the revolutionary wave of that year, clearly exhibited this dilemma of the revolutionary liberals. Already during the revolutionary euphoria of the February days, 12,000 people demanded the "abolishment of the exploitation of man by man" and the establishment of an "organization of labor." In the mid nineteenth century, "pauperism was the key issue of the age," and many were convinced that the "revolution will not be complete without the solution of the social question (Talmon i960,427,455). Moreover, February was followed rather soon by June, when the "slave war," the uprising of the "new barbarians," the workers and urban mob, shocked Paris and frightened the propertied classes. The bloody repression of the class war "had immense repercussions all over Europe. In February, Paris gave the sign to begin the revolution; in June it provided an example of the way to liquidate it" (ibid., 174).
The German bourgeoisie, already frightened by the possibility of a social revolution before it revolted against the establishment and attempted to unite Germany, made its compromise in advance and placed itself be-
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hind die protective shield of the absolutist Prussian state and noble army. The Polish and Hungarian political nations never forgot to preserve their own "historical rights" and sought to keep control of the lower social groups, which often equated with continued domination of peasants of Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovak, and other nationalities.
A switch from early universalism, deep solidarity, and the "brotherhood" of nations characterized the conservative, isolationist turn of European nationalism. The idea of the liberation of an oppressed nation helping liberate others was replaced by exclusive nationalism. Solidarity was replaced by rivalry and malice. Feelings of brotherhood gave way to xenophobic attitudes. As Konstanty Wzdulski, a pioneer of Polish anti-Semitism, phrased it, "the idea of brotherhood is a false idea ... it has brought those societies which believe in it not gains, but losses" (Porter 2000, r66). This transformation was also connected with the "nationalization" of nationalism—diat is, the manipulation and use of national feelings by governments as a weapon of Machtpolitik in mobilizing the nation against rival nations and scapegoated minorities.
These negative trends of nationalism emerged in 1848 all over Europe. During the "Spring of Nations," the year of thirteen European revolutions, the new forces not only bitterly attacked die establishment, but also, for first time in history, often turned against each other. In spite of uni-versalist rhetoric on the Italian and, most of all, Polish questions, Alphonse de Lamartine, the leader of the French revolution and minister of foreign affairs, in his manifesto to Europe in March 1848, made it clear that France "comes before every other consideration." He added in May that France's "most sacred" relations with the Poles were also the "most remote and most impossible," for which France must not sacrifice her interests. "We love Poland, we love Italy, we love all die oppressed peoples, but we love France before all," he said (Talmon i960,473,478). The German national struggle for unification collided head-on with the Danish and Polish national demands in Schleswig-Holstein and Poznania, respectively. The revolutionary Frankfurt parliament declared that all German-speaking people belonged to the German nation irrespective of the state in which they lived. This was a declaration of war against some neighboring countries and also a denial of Polish and other national demands in mixed-population areas. Moreover, the German revolution did not hesitate to declare a preference for "Germany's own security" and, for "healthy Volks-egoismus" sending troops against the Danes and the Poles. The Frankfurt parliament thus clearly demonstrated that German nationalists rejected Polish nationalists' attempts to realize identical national goals.
Austrian revolutionaries dealt Metternich's regime a deadly blow but
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simultaneously opposed the Czech, Hungarian, and Italian national movements. Czechs nurtured pan-Slav compassion, toyed with the idea of unifying the Slavs, and felt scant sympathy for Hungarian national goals. Moreover, in proposing the unification of the Czechs and the Slovaks, Palacký, die leader of die Czech national movement, did not address the national ambitions of the Slovaks, whom he regarded as Czechs. The Poles, while emphatically opposed to Russian, German, and Austrian domination, considered Polish dominance of Ukrainians "natural.'" To the Hungarians, it was likewise "natural" to preserve their rule over the Romanian minority in Hungary and Transylvania, and over the Croats in subordinated Croatia. All of the nationalities of the Hungarian kingdom realized that Hungarians strongly opposed their national goals.
German, Austrian, Polish, and Hungarian assimilationist nationalism concerning peoples who lived within their states was no different from that of die West, where British and French "melting pots" amalgamated and assimilated various peoples into one single nation. They simply sought to follow the same pattern. However, it turned out to be impossible in the nineteenth century, when national consciousness emerged and nationalism became a leading trend. Nations in revolt and minority nationalities demanded dieir own nation-building rights. If need be, they turned against oppressors who were themselves fighting their own oppressors. Ukrainians turned against Poles, just as Croats, Slovaks, Serbs, and Romanians turned against the Hungarian revolution and, hoping to promote their own national goals, assisted the Habsburg counterrevolution.
Nationalist movements emerged all over the region and mobilized even small national groupings that wanted to establish an independent nationality. A typical example was the case of the Ruthenians (Ukrainians) in Galicia, a former province of Poland with a mixed Polish and Ruthe-nian population. In East Galicia, however, 70 percent of the population was Ruthenian, and this part of Galicia became the cradle of "South Ruthenian" nationalism. Here, as everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe, the national movement began as a linguistic, cultural-intellectual program. Ivan Mohylnytsky argued in his "Discourse on the Ruthenian Language" (1829) that Ukrainian was a separate branch of the Slavic languages, equal to Polish, Russian, and Czech, "just as the Ruthenian nation is equal to the other Slavic nations." During the 1830s and 1840s, Ivan Vahylevych in Kozprawy 0 jezyku poludnioworuskim (1843) spoke about a separate "South Rus" language, as did Josyf Levytsky, who published a grammar of Galizian ruthenischm Sprache in 1834.
Many Galician-Ruthenian nationalists considered Ukrainians to be one nation, separated into two empires. Levytsky spoke in 1831 of Ukrainians
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forming one nation, 5 million of whom lived in Russia, while 1.9 and 0.5 million lived in Galicia and Hungary, respectively. Bishop Iakhymovych and the Eastern Orthodox hierarchy, however, "inclined to regard the local [Galician] Ruthenians as a separate nation, different from their kinsmen in the east" (Kozik 1986, 33, 85,111-12,163).
In October 1848, the Holovna Rada Ruska, the national organization of the Galician Ruthenians, sent a memorandum to the Austrian minister of the interior demanding the partition of Galicia: "Poles and Ruthenians, it is clear, cannot live together in peace. The partition of Galicia is a vital issue for the Ruthenians" (Kozik 1986,265). The Galician Poles, who gained autonomy from Vienna in 1867, reacted to Ruthenian nationalism much as die Hungarian elite did to minority nationalism in Hungarian lands when they tried to force an assimilation of Ruthenians into the Polish nation. A few enlightened Polish nobles, such as Prince Jerzy Lubomirski, argued "against a repetition of the Magyars' errors" (ibid., 334).
Nationalisms confronted one another sharply, and a "national hangover" followed the revolutionary euphoria of 1848. Xenophobic hatred and confrontation of nationalisms became stronger and stronger in Central and Eastern Europe. Romanian and Polish nationalism grew anti-Semitic. In Romania, successive governments refused to grant Jews citizenship. In late nineteenth-century Poland, a strong anti-Semitic movement equated Judaism with a mortal threat to die Polish nation.
Was such xenophobia specific to Central and Eastern Europe? "[T]he deep differences existing between the two parts of Europe . . . produced different types of nationalism—one based upon liberal middle-class concepts and the consummation of a democratic world society, the other based upon irrational and pre-enlightened concepts and tending towards exclusiveness," Hans Kohn maintains, comparing Western and Eastern nationalisms in Europe (Kohn 1944, 457).
In die Western world ... the rise of nationalism was a predominantly political occurrence [that was] preceded by the formation of the future national states. . . . In Central and Eastern Europe . . . the frontiers of an existing state and of a rising nationality rarely coincided; nationalism, there, grew in protest against and in conflict with the existing state pattern—not primarily to transform it into a people's state, but to redraw the political boundaries in conformity with ethnographic demands. ... [In Germany and Central and Eastern Europe] the political integration around a rational goal [in the West] was replaced by a mystical integration around the irrational, pre-civifeed folk concept. [Romantic nationalism was in] violent opposition ... to the liberal and humanitarian character of [the] nationalism of 1776 and 1789. (Kohn 1944,329, 351-52)
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Hysterical xenophobia indeed became more characteristic of the belated national movements of the "belt of mixed population" than in the West, which established its nation-states in an earlier period, based on a much luckier history of nation-building. In the West, Istvan Bibo has argued, peoples conquered existing states, democratizing die previously exclusive nation of nobles. In Central and Eastern Europe, most of the energy of national movements went into destroying existing multinational imperial states. The difference between historical states and ethnic borders generated hostile relations among nationalities living together. While democracy was the main vehicle of Western nationalism, it became dangerous for the elites of the majority groups in Central and Eastern Europe. Democracy endangered national communities and strengthened separatism. Rising Eastern nationalism thus became genuinely antidemocratic (Bibo 1986,191-94,215-19).
The contrast between Western and Eastern nationalism, however, was only partly an optical illusion. French, British, and ouher types of Western nationalism also lost their early liberal humanitarian, universalist characteristics and turned against each other in the harsh rivalry for colonies and spheres of interest. European self-confidence and the "missionary" enterprise to enslave "uncivilized" peoples had already been condemned by Herder in his Admstea (1802). Western nationalist ideology, however, became an agent of national rivalry and imperialism a few decades later during the last third of the nineteenth century. Western national self-confidence and strong belief in cultural superiority and the "white man's civilizing mission" was not better, only different, sometimes more hypocritical, than its Eastern petty xenophobic counterpart. True, the West did have a great period of humanitarian and universalist nationalism around the turn of the eighteenth century. Central and Eastern Europe emerged later on the road of nation-building and reached the climax of their national development in a period when a more controversial phase of European nationalism began.
FROM RELIGIOUS TO NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BALKANS
The Balkans presents an even more specific version of nationalism and nation-building. The "national" struggle began there, paradoxically enough, well before national consciousness was born. Under Ottoman rule and in a chaotic, unorganized oppression by local warlords and robber janis-