The Polish uprising of 1863–1864, one of the failed uprisings against Russia that shaped Polish political memory, appears in The Peasants less as a heroic national origin than as a contested inheritance. The revolt was initiated by the szlachta, and peasants also took part; but the novel’s account insists that participation did not automatically bind rural people to the political aims of the landowning class. Its recollection instead reveals how the history of serfdom, unequal land relations, and punishment for supporting the uprising conditioned what Polish independence could mean to the villagers of Lipce.

Historical and Social Background

The uprising belonged to a longer struggle to recover Polish independence, but its patriotic language carried different meanings for different social groups. Polish Romanticism had made the patriotic Pole an ideal figure, often a noble willing to sacrifice himself in battle or conspiracy. Yet the majority of landowners had opposed peasant enfranchisement, and that history left many peasants reluctant, or openly hostile, toward rebellions initiated by the szlachta. The question was therefore not only whether people would fight Russia, but whether former serfs could be persuaded that the cause of national freedom included their own interests.

The novel places that question against a history of coerced labor and material insecurity. Under serfdom, peasants had been obliged to work for landowners without pay for a prescribed number of days each week. The abolition of serfdom in the Russian partition in 1864 came after the uprising, while the land conflict between villagers and the manor continued to shape life in Lipce. In this setting, calls for national solidarity could not simply set aside disputes over land, livelihood, and the social authority of the nobility.

Participation and Its Unequal Meaning

Peasants did participate in the uprising, but the novel resists treating that participation as proof of a settled national consciousness. Maciej Boryna had taken part, and the rallying cry associated with the revolt joined the Polish people to the Polish nobility. Yet the lasting image of the manor in the villagers’ present is not political fellowship but a hostile relationship described as that of a wolfish neighbor. The patriotic promise of shared struggle sits uneasily beside the villagers’ remembered experience of dependence and oppression.

Kuba’s story makes the limits of a celebratory account especially plain. He is a disregarded farmhand at Boryna’s, and his explanation to Witek that “when they all went off … they took me too” presents his participation as an enforced choice rather than an expression of patriotic conviction. The graves of the insurrectionists do not form a celebrated national monument in village life: they are an anonymous row beside a fence. Kuba’s family connection to the dead makes the past intimate, but neither that intimacy nor his own involvement gives him public honor or status.

Memory, Blame, and Distrust

The uprising’s memory remains divided between the nobility’s language of national sacrifice and the peasants’ account of what followed. Participation earns no automatic respect within the community. The villagers remember that they were punished for supporting the revolt, and one reported response dismisses the cause as not belonging to them. Boryna’s presence in the uprising therefore does not resolve the division between him and the manor; it sharpens the irony of a man who fought alongside nobles yet later names the relationship between peasants and the estate as one of hostility.

Jacek, a member of the szlachta and Boryna’s former comrade-in-arms, voices a different memory when he speaks over Boryna’s body. He calls Boryna a true Pole, recalls that he joined freely and fought without sparing himself, and admits that the nobility’s cause ruined him. His tribute ends in a sense of inherited guilt: the enmity, he says, rests on the nobility’s responsibility. That confession complicates any simple opposition between patriotic nobles and disloyal peasants. The novel gives the noble witness room to acknowledge the injury his class helped create, while showing that such acknowledgment does not undo its consequences.

Political Meaning in the Novel

The uprising becomes a test of whether a Polish political community can be formed across class lines. Reymont’s novel, written decades after the revolt and set in 1883–1884, approaches this question through village life rather than through scenes of revolutionary action. It shows a peasant community for whom secure land and a viable life weigh more immediately than the abstract restoration of national independence. The characters’ grievances are rooted not in the partitions alone but in older relations of serfdom, renewed by the repression that followed the revolt and by policies that set nobility and peasants against one another.

This perspective also gives the uprising’s memory a political edge. Rocho’s conspiratorial activity is viewed with suspicion by older villagers who associate the gentry’s version of Poland with a return to serfdom, oppression, and the whip. Their distrust is not simply a failure to understand patriotism; it reflects a historical judgment about who had benefited from the old social order. The uprising thus remains consequential in Lipce not because it creates unity, but because its unresolved legacy exposes the conditions any genuine unity would have to confront.