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2 ||| New Political Directions A Transition toward Popular Participation in Politics, 1863–90 Stanislaus A. Blejwas The Polish democratic tradition reaches back over six centuries.1 Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, it was the near-exclusive preserve of the nobility, or gentry (szlachta). The conservative revolution culminating in the adoption of the Constitution of May 3, 1791, tentatively broadened the concept of nation (naród) to embrace other social groups, and modern nationalism transformed gentry democracy.2 In the ensuing seven decades, gentry democrats and radicals, their zeal sustained by the unfulfilled promises of May 3, sought to link social emancipation with the struggle for national liberation.3 The Polish democratic tradition matured to the promise of peasant emancipation and equality for Jews as a goal of the insurgents of 1863. The Central National Committee “declared all sons of Poland with regard to differences of faith or nationality, origin or class free and equal citizens of the country” and in a separate decree announced the emancipation of the peasantry with the freehold (uwłaszczenie).4 A separate appeal to the Jews promised them “all civil rights without any exclusions or limitations .”5 Nevertheless, the general population (lud) responded suspiciously and with caution. Peasants knew that the partitioning powers had enacted their legal emancipation, and peasant and Jewish participation in the struggle for liberation did not match the social inclusiveness of the democratic political agenda, raising disturbing questions about popular political loyalties and national consciousness.6 While gentry democracy evolved to embrace the entire nation, the democratic ideal remained to be expressed in broad-based political action. Reflecting upon a new program after the failure of the January Uprising of 1863, the Representative Committee of the Polish Emigration (Komitet Reprezentacyjny Wychodźstwa Polskiego) implicitly acknowledged this when it 24 | Stanislaus A. Blejwas declared that “above all the elevation and ever stronger unity with the recently emancipated people [uobywatelniony lud] must concern us. Emancipating the people only required solemn will and an enactment. Only with insistent work can we awaken in the people the feeling of true patriotism and predispose them to the future battle.”7 The modern nation and the democratization of Polish politics emerged only in the decades following the January Uprising, when the precursory outlines of mass political movements appeared. These changes were as much the product of changing socioeconomic conditions and an expanding social base as they were the evolution of an older, maturing political tradition. And they occurred in the atmosphere of despair following the insurrection.8 Postinsurrectionary Poland The defeat of the uprising is often considered a turning point in the history of partitioned Poland. “No defeat,” wrote Władysław Pobóg-Malinowski, “so fundamentally plowed up Polish life and lay with such extraordinary heaviness on the minds of at least the next two generations.”9 Those swept into the storm fired by patriotic enthusiasm and expectations of western assistance returned stunned, disillusioned, and depressed. Romanticism, which had glorified messianic Poland’s heroic and armed struggle against impossible odds, providing the rationale for repeated conspiracies and three insurrections, was reexamined. This rethinking of national objectives and tactics occurred largely in occupied Poland, not among émigrés, as had been the case after the failed 1830 November Uprising. By contrast, the post-1863 emigration played a lesser role.10 In the aftermath of another unsuccessful insurrection, so-called organic work became the strategy for national existence, replacing a discredited Romantic tradition. Organic work emphasized the development and strengthening of a Polish economic, commercial, and cultural infrastructure, which at that time implied acceptance of the status quo, including the loss of independence. It was a controversial approach to national life that, although actually considered prior to 1863, flourished only after the crushing of the January Uprising .11 The concept was not monolithic. Some democratic revolutionaries accepted economic and cultural development as either a necessary adjunct to the struggle for independence or a temporary tactical alternative. Mem- New Political Directions | 25 bers of the conservative nobility, by contrast, invoked the concept not only as an endorsement of Polish economic and cultural development but also as a justification for preserving the existing social order and the necessity of loyalty to the respective partitioning powers. The conservative variant of organic work suffused Austrian Galicia. Capitalizing upon Austrian military defeats in 1859 and 1866, and the constitutional reorganization of the Habsburg monarchy culminating in the Augsleich (compromise) of 1867, Galician conservatives in the 1860s and early 1870s successfully...

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