When nation-building comes a cropper.

 

Not to be confused with irredentista, a term used by historians to refer to people who believe that a certain part of the world ought to belong to them, typically because it used to.

They are amongst history’s biggest troublemakers, as recent events have only served to confirm.

Two years before the big ticket uprisings of 1848-9 described here, there occurred a disastrous insurrection of irredentists in Galicia, a highly ethnically-diverse province of the Austrian empire since absorbed into modern Poland and Ukraine.

It formally belongs to the horror genre, yet its “What have the Romans ever done for us?" element provides some darkly comic overtones.

 

A group of aristocratic landowners decided that it was time to do away with the empire and create something called 'Poland', which had never really existed before, except as part of the rather messy earlier entity known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

To do this they needed to get the illiterate peasants behind their cause, and this is where the trouble started. Many of these, especially in the east, were Ruthenians (we now tend to refer to them as Ukrainians) and so perhaps inherently suspicious of this newfangled Poland place, which some of the lords claimed would be different from everything before, socially-speaking.

At the first big meeting between the insurrectionists and the rustics, at the inn at Lisia Góra, about 7km north of Tarnów, one of the latter stood up and made a speech about all the reasons why the Habsburg empire and its ‘good emperor’ Ferdinand had been a positive thing for him and his chums, and he was not too sure about forming this new community of sentiment with the very people who had been exploiting them for centuries. 

One of the landlords decided it might be a good idea to take out his gun and shoot this clodhopper. It wasn’t.

From this moment onward things went pear-shaped pretty quickly and although the rebels briefly held Cracow, all around the countryside a bloodbath ensued in which indiscriminate savagery (that thing again) featured strongly, with flayings, decapitations and burnings fairly widespread whenever the peasants were not simply using their agricultural tools as improvised murder devices. 3000+ elite-level wannabe Poles came to a sticky end.

Low literacy had always been a problem when it came to spreading the propaganda of Polish solidarity in advance of this bold irredentist move, and efforts to use the priesthood as a delivery method of last resort in this respect would prove very costly for many men of the cloth, as this rebellion of upper class nationalists and their subalterns and their met with brutal resistance in the countryside. Some of the priests blamed the Jews for the whole debacle, naturally. 

 

Many patriotic Poles today are descended from these peasants who were determined NOT to become Poles, who described themselves as ‘imperial peasants’. Their insurrection effectively cancelled out the nationalist one of the landowners. Those thwarted elites might paint the peasants’ response as reactionary or counter-revolutionary, but looked at from a different angle, they were continuing a long fight against feudalism and did not believe in the emancipatory promises of (some of) the irredentists.