National Democracy

National Democracy was a right-wing political movement that arose after the failure of the January Uprising. In the context of The Peasants, it is significant both as part of Władysław Reymont’s political milieu and as a point of reference for the novel’s difficult question: how could peasants, formerly subordinated to Polish landowners and liberated under Russian rule, become members of a Polish political nation?

Formation and political context

National Democracy emerged after the failed uprising against Russia. Reymont maintained close contact with politicians associated with the movement, including its leader, Roman Dmowski. The novel’s interest in the political potential of the Polish countryside therefore belongs not only to a broad account of peasant culture but also to a contemporary debate about national identity and political participation.

That debate was shaped by the legacy of serfdom. Before emancipation, peasants had been bound to landowners through unpaid labor obligations; emancipation ended those relations unevenly across the partitioned territories. In the Russian partition, where Lipce is situated in the novel’s historical setting, serfdom was abolished in 1864. The transition did not itself resolve the question of national allegiance: many landowners had opposed peasant emancipation, leaving some peasants reluctant or hostile toward uprisings initiated by the szlachta. Political thinkers consequently saw the formation of national consciousness among peasants as essential to the possibility of a strong, free Poland.

The national question in The Peasants

The novel places that problem inside the material conflicts of village life. Its central plotlines concern Maciej Boryna’s marriage to Jagna and Jagna’s affair with Antek, while the dispute over the forest turns on the peasants’ claim to a resource the manor intends to fell and sell. These local stakes make the question of political belonging concrete: land, labor, and the memory of relations with the landowning class shape how villagers understand justice and collective interest.

Reymont’s narrative can be read as testing whether a peasant class might become a Polish political community under conditions in which Polish educational and administrative institutions were not in its hands. The novel does not present a triumphant answer. Its account of the village is skeptical about the birth of a new political class, and the characters’ actions do not develop into the revolutionary politics visible in the historical world around the book. Although The Peasants was written from 1900 to 1908, during the spread of the 1905 Revolution into Polish lands, and more than 750 peasant strikes took place in the year of the revolution alone, revolutionary violence remains outside the novel’s scheme and its villagers appear caught in political indecision.

Village action and the limits of comparison

The forest mobilization shows how Lipce’s villagers can speak and act collectively without establishing a direct organizational connection to National Democracy. A growing crowd waits for Boryna because he is regarded as the village’s first farmer and natural leader. When the case for action is made, the speaker addresses Christian people, Poles, farmers, and hired hands, grounding solidarity in shared injuries: the manor is felling the forest, has refused the villagers work, and has repeatedly wronged them. The appeal is to defend what is theirs together, and the crowd answers by preparing to go to the forest.

That scene expresses a forceful local claim to rights, land, and justice, but the evidence does not identify the gathering as a National Democracy action. Its importance lies instead in showing the political material from which broader national affiliation might be made—and the limits of inferring such affiliation from village solidarity alone. In a separate dispute, a farmer from Przyłęk accuses Rocho of standing with the gentry and setting people against officials; the crowd shouts him down. The episode registers suspicion about political alignments rather than settled agreement on a national program.

Language, authority, and political belonging

At a confrontation involving gendarmes, villagers close around the officers, then let them pass while following in an angry crowd. From among them comes the complaint, “Every creature has its own tongue, but only we are ordered to use another’s.” The line links official command to the imposition of another language and makes linguistic authority part of the villagers’ experience of political subordination.

Together, the forest rally and the language protest illuminate the problem National Democracy’s historical setting raises without making the villagers proxies for the movement. Their collective action is rooted in immediate grievances, customary claims, and resistance to authority. The novel’s broader skepticism remains: a shared language of Polish identity and a capacity for local resistance do not, by themselves, resolve how a divided peasantry becomes a nationally conscious political class.