The Restoration of Polish Independence in 1918 ended the long period in which Poland had existed only as partitioned territory under foreign rule. In The Peasants, it is both a historical endpoint and a political horizon: the novel examines whether peasants could become citizens attached to a country whose institutions they had not controlled and whose independence they had not yet regained.

Historical Background

The partitions divided Poland among Russia, Prussia, and Austria. After the final partition in 1795, Poland ceased to exist as a political entity until independence was restored in 1918. The partitions placed different parts of the former kingdom under different monarchies, languages, cultures, administrations, and dominant religions. Those divisions left consequences that persisted even after independence, shaping regional political differences in later Poland.

The question of who could claim to represent the nation had deep social roots. Before the partitions, the szlachta held extensive privileges, including political rights and authority over peasants, who were bound to provide unpaid labor. Serfdom ended at different times in the partitioned territories, and its abolition in the Russian partition came last, in 1864. Emancipation changed rural labor relations, but it did not by itself make peasants secure or politically influential: low agricultural wages and widespread illiteracy continued to limit their prospects.

National Identity and the Peasantry

The struggle to build a national identity among former serfs became a central issue before independence. Polish Romanticism offered a powerful model of patriotic sacrifice, often embodied by a noble prepared to fight or conspire for Poland. Yet the uprisings that helped shape this political mythology were initiated by the szlachta, while many landowners opposed peasant enfranchisement. That history could leave peasants reluctant or hostile toward a national cause identified with those who had once held power over them.

The political argument behind The Peasants is therefore not simply that rural life embodies an older Polish identity. The novel asks how people formerly subjected to serfdom, and then governed within the Russian partition, might become citizens sincerely attached to Poland. Independence supplies the larger historical destination for that question, but the book’s village plots do not present a straightforward march toward national unity.

Independence as the Novel’s Political Horizon

The Peasants was written between 1900 and 1908 and is set in 1883–84, before the 1918 restoration. During the years of its composition, the 1905 Revolution reached Polish lands and brought more than 750 peasant strikes in a single year. Yet revolutionary events remain conspicuously outside the novel’s scheme: its characters’ actions and motives do not turn into an account of organized national or social revolution. The restoration is thus a horizon against which the village’s apparent political inertia becomes meaningful, not the culmination of a revolutionary plot within the story.

Reymont’s political engagement with National Democracy, including his contact with its leader Roman Dmowski, gives this question additional weight. The novel investigates the nationalist potential of the Polish village at the threshold of modernity, while remaining skeptical about whether a new peasant political class can actually emerge. Its seasonal, village-centered form can make the community seem insulated from history even as the question of who will belong to an independent Poland presses beneath the surface.

The Village as a Contested Political Community

At one village gathering, a speaker addresses farmers and hired hands as Poles and links their shared identity to grievances against the manor: the felling of the forest, exclusion from employment, and repeated wrongs for which courts and complaints have brought no remedy. The appeal joins national language to material injury. It suggests that political belonging might grow not from abstract patriotic inheritance alone, but from a collective claim to rights and protection.

That appeal does not erase disagreement. In another debate, a farmer from Przyłęk accuses Rocho of siding with the gentry and turning people against the officials, even as those present shout him down. The exchange shows how contested political loyalties remain within village life. Read alongside the eventual restoration of 1918, these scenes sharpen the novel’s central tension: independence may return the country to the map, but the creation of a common political identity among people divided by class history and competing loyalties is a separate, unresolved task.