The distinction between “the People” and “the people”

The distinction between “the People” and “the people” is a political framework for understanding how a community can act together yet remain excluded from the authority to shape its larger civic world. In The Peasants, the villagers of Lipce repeatedly assemble, resist, and speak in a shared voice, but this capacity does not by itself make them a politically recognized people: their collective energy remains vulnerable to social hierarchy, official command, and the absence of institutions through which they can govern themselves.

Political distinction and historical setting

The framework draws on Giorgio Agamben’s account of two meanings of a people. The People, capitalized, names a political subject that takes part in decision-making; the people, in lower case, names a population that can be ruled and exploited while excluded from political life. The division is not simply between a state and a community, but between possessing collective political standing and being treated as an object of administration. Agamben presents the two meanings as persistently in conflict, with their final unification remaining impossible in ordinary political life.

The distinction carries particular weight in the history of Poland. Serfdom in the Russian partition was abolished in 1864, after a tsarist edict in 1863, but emancipation did not automatically make former serfs participants in a national political community. In the period before Polish independence, national identity therefore raised a practical and ideological question: how could peasants become citizens attached to Poland when its educational and administrative institutions were controlled by Russia? Romantic political ideals had often centered on the noble patriot prepared to sacrifice himself for independence; the participation of peasants in uprisings did not erase the reluctance or hostility created by landowners’ opposition to their emancipation.

The novel’s setting makes that problem visible at village scale. Its Lipce is a representative village rather than a documentary portrait of one actual locality, and the narrative remains focused there instead of following characters into the wider world. That enclosure makes the community a microcosm in which the possibility of political formation can be tested. The novel’s central marriage and affair plots—Maciej Boryna’s marriage to Jagna and Jagna’s relationship with Antek Boryna—unfold alongside the dispute over the forest, linking intimate and material conflicts to the wider question of whether the peasants can become a political class.

From collective action to political membership

The forest struggle shows how Lipce can briefly appear as a unified public body. When villagers gather outside the inn, they wait for the elders to fetch Maciej Boryna, whom they regard as the first farmer and the person who should lead them. Their stillness is not an absence of feeling: the crowd grows dense, words and gestures flicker through it, and shared expectation holds its many participants in place. The episode presents collective power, but also its dependence on established village rank and leadership.

When the call to resist the felling comes, the appeal joins several kinds of grievance. The manor is accused of cutting the forest, refusing the villagers employment, and repeatedly driving them toward ruin; the speakers invoke common injury and a right to defend what is theirs. Farmers and hired hands are addressed together as Christian Poles, and the demand is for the whole village to act as one. The response becomes material and immediate: people race home to prepare, then assemble with poles, pitchforks, flails, and scythes. Women, farmhands, and older children join farmers in the procession. The scene makes solidarity visible across differences of work and status, but its immediate purpose is defensive action against the manor, not a lasting transfer of political authority to the villagers.

That distinction helps explain why mass participation does not settle the question of political membership. The peasants can articulate injustice and organize a confrontation, yet their action occurs in a world where the manor retains power and the state’s officials remain present. Their capacity to act together is real; the security and recognized authority that would make them the People are not thereby established.

Divisions within the village

The political divide also runs through the peasant stratum itself. Rural capitalism and hunger for land sharpen differences between farmers who hold land and the hired hands or tenants who must lodge elsewhere and earn their living through service. Witek’s observation that only farmers possess land, while others lodge, work for wages, or enter service, gives this inequality a blunt everyday form. A shared rural identity therefore cannot be assumed to produce equal interests or equal standing within the village.

The novel’s later scenes test solidarity against those divisions. During the men’s imprisonment, disruptions to male-dominated relations briefly activate mutual aid, and neighboring villagers arrive to provide free labor. Yet the poorest women, themselves described as hired hands, receive no help when they appeal to the priest; he leaves rather than attend to their complaint, while Rocho offers only the prospect of other assistance. The apparent opening toward a more sharing community is thus limited by the same hierarchy it seems to unsettle. When the men return and Jagna is banished, the social order stabilizes, and the possibility of a self-conscious political community recedes into the pre-political community it had seemed poised to exceed.

Public speech, authority, and the limits of emergence

The school-tax gathering offers a quieter measure of the villagers’ changing relation to authority. When the notary orders someone to go to the manor for fish, no one moves; a bold voice answers that they did not come to run errands. The refusal is modest but significant: the villagers do not automatically accept the official’s presumption that they are available for service. At the same time, a farmer from Przyłęk accuses Rocho of standing with the gentry and setting people against officials, while other peasants shout him down. The scene shows political language circulating within the crowd, but also suspicion and disagreement about who speaks for whom.

When gendarmes appear, the crowd closes around them and warns against laying a hand on anyone. It then parts to let them through, following them toward the prefect in an angry mass. The sequence holds confrontation and restraint together: the villagers can gather enough force to constrain the officials’ movement, but they do not simply replace official power with a recognized governing authority of their own. Their assertion that they are ordered to use another’s language condenses a broader experience of rule: they are present as a population to be instructed and commanded, while the terms of public administration remain outside their control.

The novel consequently presents political emergence as a possibility that repeatedly approaches but does not complete itself. Lipce’s assemblies, refusals, and forest resistance disclose a capacity for collective action; divisions of property and labor, reliance on local hierarchy, and the return of established social discipline limit what that action can become. The distinction between the People and the people clarifies the difference between acting together in a crisis and acquiring durable civic power. In this reading, the village’s forceful episodes do not cancel its political exclusion; their very incompleteness makes that exclusion visible.