“The people are sanctioned to punish and sanctioned to reward!”

“The people are sanctioned to punish and sanctioned to reward!” is a declaration of collective authority in The Peasants, where the village’s power to judge is expressed not through formal institutions but through communal action. Spoken amid the stoning of Jagna, the phrase makes punishment sound like an entitlement shared by the people; its force lies in the distance between that confident claim and the violence it licenses.

The Expression at Jagna’s Expulsion

The phrase accompanies the villagers’ assault on Jagna, an outsider being cast out by a community that treats its own judgment as sufficient warrant. The paired verbs, punish and reward, present the village as both judge and dispenser of favor. Yet in this scene the asserted authority is not an abstract principle: it is enacted through collective violence against a woman who has become the community’s sacrificial victim.

The surrounding account connects this act to Lipce’s traditional and dogmatic social order. Ritual exclusion strengthens the boundary around those accepted as one’s own, and Jagna’s stoning is its starkest example. The expression therefore does more than describe popular power. It gives that power a moral vocabulary, making communal punishment sound sanctioned even as the scene exposes its coercive consequences.

Antek and the Limits of Dissent

Antek’s answer makes the phrase’s implications sharper. Once a rebel and Jagna’s lover, he says he lives in the village and stands with it; whether the villagers cast Jagna out or place her on an altar, he claims, makes no difference to him. His response offers no defense of her and no considered endorsement of either outcome. Instead, it registers a withdrawal from the possibility of changing the community’s decision.

That indifference sits uneasily beside the village’s language of authority. The crowd appears to act with conviction, but Antek’s stance suggests how little room remains for meaningful opposition once collective judgment has taken hold. The episode links the people’s claimed right to punish with the protagonists’ recognition that they cannot readily alter the social order or move beyond it.

The Village as a Political “People”

The phrase also resonates with the novel’s broader question of who may count as the Polish political community. The historical discussion behind The Peasants describes the effort to build a national identity among people formerly subjected to serfdom, and emphasizes that a strong, free Poland could not be imagined without cultivating national consciousness among the peasants. Against that background, the village’s self-assertion as “the people” carries a political possibility—but the scene of Jagna’s expulsion shows that collective authority can be turned inward, toward policing belonging, rather than toward a wider civic solidarity.

The novel sets that question against a village with a restricted public sphere, dwindling land, harsh economic competition, and fear of the outside world. These pressures help explain why communal belonging has such force, but they do not make the punishment just. The expression’s tension is precisely that the community speaks in the name of the people while its authority is exercised through exclusion.

Forest Grievances and Competing Claims

Elsewhere, the language of collective grievance takes a different form. Addressing farmers and hired hands, a speaker calls them honest Poles who have all suffered injustice: the manor is felling their forest, has refused them employment, and has repeatedly driven them toward ruin. He recalls that complaints and court proceedings have brought no remedy, then presents the felling of the wood as the last straw. This speech makes the forest conflict a shared material and political claim, grounded in lost access, work, and redress.

The contrast clarifies what is at stake in the expression about punishment and reward. A community’s collective voice can name common injuries and demand recognition, but it can also claim authority over a vulnerable individual. Nor does the village speak with one settled political judgment: during a later dispute, an accusation that Rocho is siding with the gentry and turning people against the officials is shouted down, yet the farmer who makes it persists. Together, these moments present collective authority as powerful but contested—not a single, stable voice, and not automatically a guarantee of justice.