1848

by Mike Rapport

  I

  The European peasantry had played an important part in the revolutions in the first three months of 1848. They had hastened the collapse of the old order by rising up: in the East against serfdom; in the West against taxation, low wages, indebtedness and the surviving manorial rights of the landlords and over rights of access to forests and pasture. Politicians of all political hues produced newspapers aimed at a peasant readership - in many places for the very first time. In Hungary the radical Mihály Táncsics - who had been a peasant before becoming a tailor and then a schoolteacher - began to publish the Workers’ Newspaper at the end of March. Its title referred not to urban journeymen but to rural labourers: it backed universal male suffrage and demanded the abolition of all the remnants of ‘feudalism’ that the Hungarian liberals had left intact. The newspaper was distributed free to peasants on market days, which ensured that Táncsics was one of the few radicals to be elected to the new Hungarian parliament.13 Elsewhere, the revolutions brought the ballot box to the peasantry for the first time. It is not clear that they understood the nuances of modern political concepts: for example, Czech peasants understood the word ‘constitution’ merely as freedom from compulsory labour service. The liberal press complained that Czech peasants also did not understand such terms as ‘democrat’, ‘reactionary’, ‘despotism’ and ‘hierarchy’, though one can surely forgive them for finding the slippery notion of ‘sovereignty’ hard to grasp. The claim that they did not know what ‘aristocrat’ meant seems somehow less credible. 14 Still, peasants across Central Europe voted for the first time and some of them were elected as deputies. The Austrian parliament, which first convened on 22 July, had 383 delegates, of whom 92 were peasants. The Moravian assembly, which met on 31 May, boasted 97 peasant deputies out of 247 - enough to have it dubbed the ‘Peasant Diet’.

  The revolutions of 1848 were therefore not restricted to the urban crucibles, but politicised the peasantry on an unprecedented scale. Yet, understandably, this development only went so far as the dictates of the peasants’ own interests. Once those were met the rural population could fall back into detached neutrality. If (as in France) peasant proprietors felt threatened by the further radicalisation of the revolution, or if (as in Hungary and much of Italy) the liberal regimes did not entirely live up to the peasants’ hopes, the peasantry were open to the blandishments of opponents of the new order. Sometimes these were radical, but more often they were conservative. The liberals were either landowners themselves or believed strongly in the rights of property, which did not incline them to radical measures that would satisfy the peasantry entirely. For example, where serfdom was abolished, the landlords received compensation, some of the costs of which were borne by the peasantry themselves, which saddled them with debts for a generation or so. Rural ire therefore focused on the liberal regimes that had apparently failed to deliver on their early promise. Moreover, after the initial disorders of the spring, traditional habits of deference could also creep back, when the peasants, still faced with the overwhelming economic crisis and the uncertainties of the revolution, sought security in obedience to their landlords and above all in submission to their sovereign. Where elections were held on the basis of universal or a broad male suffrage, this conservatism of the countryside counted heavily against the liberals. And almost everywhere, it was one of the pillars - or perhaps the very keystone - of the counter-revolution.

  The impact of the revolutions on the countryside was most dramatic in Central and Eastern Europe, because there the peasants suffered under many heavy obligations to the state and to their landlords, including serfdom. Their counterparts in the West aimed primarily at wiping out the last relics of the old seigneurial (sometimes called ‘feudal’) system, which had already been eroded or all but levelled since the eighteenth century. In 1848 the fear of a jacquerie - an uncontrollable, unfathomable peasant uprising against landlords, government officials and other figures of hate - hastened the abolition of servile status in Central and Eastern Europe. Mindful of the slaughter of the Polish nobles of Galicia by Ukrainian peasants in 1846, European landlords were naturally jumpy over the prospect of an uprising of their serfs and tenants. In the spring of 1848 peasants almost everywhere in Eastern and Central Europe refused to perform their services or to pay dues, while the government’s weakness meant that landlords also could not depend upon the state to enforce them or to protect their own lives and property from peasant violence. Consequently, the only way to restore order was to give the rural insurgents what they wanted and abolish all seigneurial obligations and, where it existed, to end serfdom. Yet the latter policy also meant that landlords would have to make material sacrifices, since they would lose their free supply of labour. Moreover, since the serfs did not own the estates on which they toiled, freeing them without giving them land would create an impoverished, restless and potentially rebellious social group. On the other hand, to give the freed peasants land meant taking property from the landlords, who could claim (on the basis of the liberals’ own principles) that this was a violation of property rights. Consequently, it was argued, the owners would have to be compensated both for the loss of peasant labour services and for any grants of land that went along with emancipation. It was virtually impossible to find a solution that would satisfy everybody.

  In Austria, on 11 April, the government issued a manifesto promising to free the peasantry from all enforced services and dues on 1 January 1849. In fact, Vienna had already begun the process of emancipating the peasants wherever there was greater urgency. In Bohemia in March peasants meted out ‘people’s justice’, including acts of murder, as a groundswell of anger against the landlords rose in Czech villages. No fewer than 580 peasant petitions, representing over 1,200 villages, were stacked on the National Committee’s table in Prague - and they kept coming until the counter-revolution in June. The thoroughly alarmed nobles demanded an immediate government response to the rural crisis. On 28 March 1848 the hated robot - the labour obligation enforced on the peasants - was abolished in Bohemia, with effect from 31 March 1849. The Moravian ‘Peasant Diet’ unsurprisingly showed even less patience, making the abolition of the robot and other impositions effective from 1 July 1848.15 In Austria serfdom itself came before the imperial parliament on 24 July. A young Silesian deputy, Hans Kudlich, who was the son of a peasant, introduced a bill for the abolition of ‘all servile relationships together with rights and obligations coming therefrom’.16 While freeing the peasants did not present a problem, the issue of compensation burned on through the summer, splitting the revolutionaries between the radicals (who argued fervently against) and the government, the conservatives and the liberals, who all insisted that some indemnity was due. The peasant deputies were, of course, bitterly opposed to compensation: one Galician peasant delegate complained that in his community peasants had to doff their hats within three hundred paces of a nobleman’s home and that the landlords refused to receive peasants at home because they stank and were dirty: ‘For such mistreatment, we should now give compensation?’17 The debate was resolved by the decree of 7 September, a compromise in which compensation would be paid for those dues that stemmed from property ownership, but not for any obligations that implied personal servitude. The precise details took until 1853 to elaborate, whereupon the state and the peasants each paid a third of the indemnity, while the remaining third was deducted from the total compensation as a tax, on the grounds that the state had taken over from the landlords the tasks of administration, justice and policing of the peasants.

  In the short term, the landlords suffered a marked loss in income from these measures. They now had to pay those who worked on their land. They had to buy horses and oxen for ploughing and transport, whereas in the past the peasants had used their own when performing the robot. The peasants were emancipated with land, but the value of the compensation was fixed at far below the market value. The irascible Windischgrätz stormed about the emancipation: ‘the most outstanding of Communists has n
ot yet dared to demand that which Your Majesty’s government has carried through’.18 The marshal’s exaggeration actually touched on one of the government’s ulterior motives, for freeing the peasantry was not just a panicked reaction to the disorder in the countryside. It was clear very early on almost everywhere in Europe that whoever succeeded in winning over the peasant masses had a good chance of triumphing in the revolutionary struggles of 1848. It was for this reason that serfdom was swept away suddenly in Galicia on 22 April - months before it was abolished elsewhere in Austria. The governor, Franz Stadion, announced the immediate emancipation in order to pre-empt similar efforts by the Polish nationalists. For R. John Rath, freeing the peasants ‘was one of the shrewdest moves made by the government during the course of the revolution’. 19 The Emperor could bask in peasant adulation, taking direct credit for meeting the most urgent of all their demands. His name appeared above the emancipation decrees of 11 April and 7 September, so after the rural disturbances of March, by and large the country dwellers settled down to enjoy the fruits of their new freedom and took no further part in revolutionary outbreaks in 1848. While on 24 September Austrian peasants joined a twenty-thousand-strong celebration of the abolition of ‘feudalism’, they did not then meekly follow the Viennese radicals who had pressed their interests in parliament. They now sought to defend their gains, their religion and their beloved Emperor by siding with the forces of order. In Vienna’s final revolutionary torment in October, the hapless radicals, including Hans Kudlich, the original author of the emancipation bill, travelled into the countryside to rally support among the peasantry. The country folk, however, held them at the point of their pitchforks and fowling-pieces and handed them over to the authorities.

  In the long run the terms of the emancipation also reinforced the conservative order in the countryside. While the compensation that estate owners received was two-thirds the amount originally set, they were now free of direct responsibility for the peasantry, with all the costs and time that involved. The indemnity allowed them to introduce technological changes to agriculture, making their farms far more competitive than those of the emancipated small-holding peasants, who were now faced with paying indemnities, albeit in small instalments, over two decades.20 In Galicia the government undertook to pay the landlords outright, but still the peasants would, in turn, repay the state through an interest-bearing loan in smaller instalments, but over a lengthy fifty years. The resulting indebtedness left the former serfs heavily dependent upon their landlords for access to further land, for work and for credit. A Czech radical, J. V. Frič, would later ‘congratulate’ the parliament of 1848 for having solved the issue of emancipation ‘in the interests of the nobility and not of the people’.21

  On the outbreak of the revolution in Hungary, Kossuth rammed through a bill freeing the peasantry on 18 March. Rumours of the impending emancipation stirred the excited peasantry into action: they invaded seigneurial land, stopped paying rents and dues, ignored the special rights of the landlords, killed their game, pilfered the forests and destroyed manorial records. The Hungarian Diet’s abolition of labour services, tithes and other seigneurial rights and dues was enshrined in the April Laws. In practice, however, peasants found that there were limits to their emancipation. The urbarial peasants - those who held land from which they could not be evicted, but which they could neither pass on to their heirs nor legally sell without landlord interference - gained the most. They were granted absolute ownership of their tenures and they shed all their labour obligations. The majority, though, the landless cottagers, benefited less.22 While free of dues to their landlords, they still had to perform labour services to their county, and their taxes did not change. The Hungarian peasantry therefore pushed for more far-reaching reforms by further rioting, which became so severe that on 21 June the minister of the interior, Bertalan Szemere, declared the entire kingdom under a state of siege, sent the army and National Guard into the countryside and had the peasant leaders arrested. At least ten people were executed before rural peace was restored.

  Meanwhile, the landlords were compensated for the loss of services. Peasants were still not allowed to own the lucrative vineyards. Nobles still enjoyed exclusive rights (regalia) to sell wine, hold fairs, keep birds (which picked at the peasants’ seeds), hunt and fish. So while the nobleman Count Charles Leiningen-Westerburg one day warned his wife that they would have to ‘retrench our expenses considerably’, he soon afterwards judged that the initial loss of income could be made up considerably by exploiting other rights, such as tolls and ferry dues on their estates.23 The limits of reform, and the persistence of the belief that the Emperor, not the nobility, was the true protector of the peasants, meant that their reaction to liberal Hungary’s grave crisis in the autumn of 1848 was mixed. While some saw in the counter-revolution the threat of being reshackled as serfs, others welcomed the imperial forces as liberators.

  This was especially true in those parts of Central and Eastern Europe where the social chasm between lord and peasant coincided with ethnic differences. The Habsburg court, exploiting the monarchy’s reputation as the protector of the rural folk, enlisted the support of the Slav and Romanian peasantry against their Magyar landlords. In southern Hungary most of the Slav peasantry proclaimed their loyalty to the Habsburgs and attacked Magyar and German proprietors. In Transylvania the Romanian peasants - prodded by Habsburg officials - would rise up against the Magyars in what would become one of the most protracted and bloody ethnic conflicts in 1848-9. In Galicia the deep anger of the Ukrainian peasants towards their Polish landlords - and the knowledge that it was the Austrian governor who had emancipated them on 22 April - combined violently in a visceral sense of national feeling. In the Austrian parliament, the Ukrainian peasant deputies would stare menacingly at their Polish counterparts: ‘The only feeling that governed them, aside from their loyalty to the emperor, was a passionate hatred for the Polish nobles. Even in the parliament there were moments when one could read in their eyes that they were ready to let loose against [them] and bash their skulls in.’24

  Although rural life was ordered in a very different way in Western Europe, peasant action during the revolutions often followed the same course as in Eastern Europe, beginning with insurrection and finishing in counter-revolution. Western peasants found specific outlets for protest against the pressures exerted by changes in the agrarian economy (and in Germany against the remnants of seigneurialism). The small-scale, independent peasant farmers depended on free access to woods and common land for fuel, food and the grazing of animals. This was being endangered by the development of large-scale market farming and by the enclosure by wealthier farmers and landowners of forests and commons. Peasants therefore targeted the homes and property of the rich, which included both nobles and the well-to-do peasantry. In western Germany peasants occupied land, burned down manor houses and consigned tax registers to bonfires. In France, where the Forest Code of 1827 regulated access to woods, peasants chased away foresters protecting state-owned or communal forests and invaded privately owned, but disputed, woodlands. Such acts were also widespread in western Germany and northern Italy. In many places this behaviour was driven by misery: the public prosecutor in Toulouse in south-western France explained that the poor people of the mountains who lived in the midst of an abundance of trees were none the less obliged to burn their own furniture for fuel because they could not afford to pay for logs - or else they bundled themselves up in bed during harsh weather.25

  Against these early protests and the peasants’ initially high expectations, the 1848 revolutions offered them little. In France the property-owning peasantry were immediately crushed by the ‘forty-five centimes’ tax, which they resented as a subsidy to the workers. Some simply could not pay the tax anyway, as the economic crisis was too severe. Country people also feared the militancy of the ‘red’ urban masses, whose demands for a social republic seemed bent on expropriating their land. The fear inspired by the June days simply increased
the hostility of all property-owners towards the workers and pushed them firmly into the camp of those who insisted on ‘order’ and spoke of defending ‘civilisation’. As we have seen, the provincial response to the June insurrection was striking, with National Guard units from no fewer than fifty-three departments, many of them including peasants, travelling to Paris with the intention of crushing the radicals. Afraid of socialism and resentful of the workers, the peasants, while not necessarily hostile to the Second Republic itself, were instrumental in pushing it into reaction. Disappointed and fearful, they felt that they had few alternatives but to turn back to their traditional patrons, the rural notables, openly to resist those measures that they resented, or, ominously, to look for new political solutions. In areas such as the south-west, where the fall in agricultural prices bit deeply into their livelihoods, peasants took up arms against the tax collectors and government enforcers who dared to try to collect the ‘forty-five centimes’. In September the public prosecutor in Pau reported that some eighteen thousand peasants had taken up arms against the tax and managed to cut the town off from military reinforcements. In a village near Agen in November a tax official was bound with a rope and threatened with being thrown off a crag, or burned alive, but the peasants contented themselves with incinerating his papers instead. Further north, in the Charente-Inférieure, protesters were heard to yell ominously, ‘Down with the forty-five centimes! Long live the Emperor! Down with the Republic!’ Slowly, but surely, the figure of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was emerging from the shadows.26