Collective judgment and scapegoating

In The Peasants, collective judgment and scapegoating emerge from the same capacity that makes Lipce a political community: villagers can name a common injustice, assemble, and act as one. Their defense of shared rights against the manor shows the force of that solidarity; Jagna’s expulsion reveals how it can be redirected into punishment, with the community treating one woman as the source of its wider disorder.

Collective Justice and the Village

The novel first presents collective action as a response to material grievances. When the manor proceeds with felling the forest and refuses the villagers employment, the crowd gathers outside the inn and waits for Maciej Boryna, whose standing makes him the expected leader. The gathering is not yet a mob: people arrive, exchange greetings, and wait. But the shared account of injustice gives the assembly its momentum. The manor’s logging joins a longer list of grievances—harassment, confiscations, and failed appeals to courts—until the villagers decide to defend what they regard as their own.

The blacksmith and miller try to deter them, warning that resistance could bring imprisonment. The crowd disregards their warning because both men are known to have interests tied to the manor. A speaker calls on Christians, Poles, farmers, and hired hands to go together to the forest; the villagers answer by rushing home to prepare. Peasants, laborers, women, and older children then set out with poles, pitchforks, flails, and scythes. The episode makes collective judgment a source of political agency: people who have been ignored by legal authorities claim the right to defend their shared interests themselves.

That political possibility carries a larger weight in the novel. The question of how formerly enserfed peasants might become members of a Polish national community is complicated by their limited access to Polish educational and administrative institutions and by memories of landowners’ opposition to emancipation. The forest assembly briefly makes a broad appeal to common identity, gathering Poles and workers around a concrete injury. Yet the later persecution of Jagna will show the reverse movement: instead of solidarity enlarging the community’s claims, collective moral authority narrows belonging by defining a person as a danger to the village.

How Resentment Becomes a Verdict

The expulsion begins not with a new offense witnessed by the whole village, but with accumulated grievances suddenly given a single target. An accusation against Jagusia acts like a spark: old envy, anger, and hatred surface together, and villagers recite their past complaints as if each were further proof in a common case. Her alleged sexual conduct is made to stand for the village’s disgrace, while stories about her relationships—including the claim that she had tried to lure Jasio—turn private conduct into public evidence. The crowd’s rapid exchange of accusations leaves little room to distinguish what has been established from what is repeated in anger.

The villagers’ language enlarges the charge from personal misconduct to communal danger. They argue that sin and disorder will persist as long as Jagusia remains among them, and connect her to the Voyt’s theft, as though expelling her could prevent future wrongdoing by others. The proposed remedy is banishment to the woods, not an inquiry into the separate acts attributed to her or to the village authorities. In this logic, a complex field of desire, gossip, and public scandal is compressed into one person who can be removed.

A sermon at the inn supplies the crowd with a moral framework for that decision. The organist compares the village to a house whose beams and walls are being taken away, warning that unchecked theft and lust will bring its ruin. He invokes divine punishment and Scripture, presenting Jagusia as a source of contamination whose removal might avert judgment. Yet his warning also implicates the community: he declares those who permit wrongdoing to spread guilty alongside those who commit it. The contradiction is consequential. A collective that is itself implicated in the disorder turns toward punishing one woman, treating exclusion as proof that it has defended the moral order.

Consent, Complicity, and the Attack

When Płoszka asks Antek Boryna to state his position before the inn, the gathered villagers fall silent, expecting him to object to Jagusia’s banishment. He instead declares that he lives in the village and stands with it, accepting its decision while adding that he would accept the opposite if the crowd chose to honor her. His answer refuses to defend her, but its flatness also exposes the distance between a collective verdict and an individual’s judgment. He leaves without looking back, and the village’s decision proceeds without his further participation.

The public resolution soon becomes physical violence. As Lipce descends into what the narration presents as a fever of judgment, the more cautious villagers shut themselves inside or flee to the fields, while others gather in agitated groups. The crowd then surges toward Dominikowa’s house, led by the wives of the organist and the Voyt. Dominikowa tries to bar the way and is trampled; Jędrych intervenes and is beaten. Mateusz attempts to defend Jagusia at the storeroom with a bar, but the attackers split his head and leave him unconscious. These injuries show that the mob’s authority does not stop at its chosen victim: resistance itself is treated as an obstacle to be crushed.

Jagusia has been shut in the storeroom. When the crowd tears down its door, she stands pressed against the wall, silent and unable to defend herself. A mass of hands seizes and drags her into the farmyard. The Voyt’s wife orders that she be tied in case she escapes, and the villagers put her onto a cart harnessed to two black cows and piled with pig dung. The degrading cargo turns the punishment into a public spectacle: insults, laughter, and curses accompany the procession as it passes the church. The sequence replaces deliberation with coordinated force, converting the village’s claim to moral judgment into an assault carried out by neighbors.

Banishment and the Cost of Belonging

At the church, the procession does not stop to hear Jagusia or reconsider its verdict. She lies fettered on the cart, her clothes in rags, bruised and weeping, as the crowd carries the punishment onward to the village boundary. There, the villagers lift the cart’s boards and throw her down with the pig dung. The violence makes exclusion literal: the woman blamed for disgracing Lipce is cast outside its borders as refuse, rather than judged through any process that could separate accusation from proof or assign responsibility across the community.

The Voyt’s wife kicks Jagusia and threatens that the dogs will be set on her if she returns, then throws a clod or stone at her in the name of the injury to her children. Another attacker strikes her for shaming the village. Their declared reasons make the punishment’s logic visible: Jagusia is made to answer not only for alleged sexual conduct but for harms and reputational fears that the crowd gathers around her. The ritual of expulsion promises to protect Lipce by removing a supposed source of disorder, while the crowd’s blows and threats demonstrate that the village’s own moral authority has become coercive.

The novel’s contrast between collective action and collective punishment therefore does not reduce to a contrast between unity and division. In the forest dispute, villagers assemble around a material grievance and claim a right denied them by the manor; in Jagusia’s case, they assemble around a moral verdict and deny one of their own the standing to answer it. The same capacity to speak and act together can press a shared claim against power or enforce conformity through violence. Scapegoating offers the community a falsely simple resolution: it concentrates diffuse resentment and anxiety in one person, then treats her removal as if it repaired the conditions that produced the conflict.

The Limits of the Political Community

The novel places the villagers’ power to act together beside the unresolved question of whether that solidarity can make them a durable political class. Reymont’s account is skeptical: the peasants’ shared identity becomes vivid when a concrete conflict over land calls them to action, but the novel does not show that unity developing into a sustained national movement. Its setting in a village whose access to Polish educational and administrative institutions is constrained sharpens the problem of how formerly enserfed people might become citizens attached to Poland. Against that larger possibility, Jagusia’s expulsion is a bitter reversal. Lipce demonstrates its capacity to make a collective decision, yet directs that capacity inward, policing belonging through punishment rather than extending it into a broader political bond. The scapegoat episode thus gives communal power a double edge: it can assert a common claim against an outside authority, but it can also make conformity the condition of membership, leaving the imagined political community vulnerable to the same coercion it might otherwise resist.