Democracy is Anti-Intellectual

The dark lessons of a peasant revolt.

There’s nothing quite like starting a book you know you’re going to like. The book in question is Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849.

Clark may be my favorite European historian. His Sleepwalkers is easily the best account of the lead-up to World War I. Iron Kingdom is the quickest way to understand the history of Prussia. And Prisoners of Time — well, it’s hard to describe that one. I’ll just say I’ve never read anything quite like it before.

I’ve not been able to make heads or tails of the revolutions of 1848. My attempts to read other works on the subject all failed. So I was delighted to see Clark confessing similar frustrations in his introduction:

These grim and often very violent days of reckoning mean, among other things, that the narrative of these upheavals lacks a moment of redemptive closure. It was precisely the stigma of failure that put me off the 1848 revolutions when I first encountered them at school. Complexity and failure are an unattractive combination.

I’m one chapter in past this introduction, and I’m hooked. Maybe I’ll share bigger observations when I’m done reading the whole thing. But for our purposes here, I’d just like to focus on one early episode: the Galician peasant revolt of 1846 — an episode, Clark notes, “rich in dark lessons for the people of 1848.”

These dark lessons, I assume, have to do with the disillusion that overcame the most committed radicals as the 1848 revolts dragged on, the lessons learned as reactionary forces joined with a broad swath of fair-weather middle class protesters to put down the proles.¹

The dark lessons for me today are broader. They have more to do with how badly we intellectuals, whether conservative or progressive, tend to understand democracy.

The Galician peasant revolt of 1846 was sparked off by a failed nationalist uprising of Polish intellectuals and nobility against the Austrian empire. In Clark’s telling, Polish elites had convinced themselves that a swift armed insurrection would bring the Austrians to their knees. But they needed soldiers for the fight. So they decided to bring the peasantry to their side by invoking the same rhetoric about self-determination with which they had already enchanted themselves.

The catch was that the peasants of Galicia were dirt poor, and had long been abused by the very notables who now sought to lead them. Clark captures the ensuing dynamic beautifully in one anecdote from early in the uprising:

Peasants from many nearby villages had been summoned to appear before the inn with their weapons in hand: scythes, pitchforks, flails and pickaxes. A priest by the name of Morgenstern, who was party to the plot, addressed the peasants, urging them to join forces with the Polish lords. Then Count Wiesiołowski spoke. He promised the peasants that the rewards for their participation would be generous indeed: all their feudal burdens would be lifted; there would be no further labour services; the hated Crown monopoly on salt and tobacco would be abolished. Armed with their scythes and flails, the peasants should join the march on Tarnów and help to found a new Poland.

After Wiesiołowski had finished, a village official by the name of Stelmach, who had been standing with the peasants, spoke up against Wiesiołowski, reminding the peasants of the good things the Austrian government had done for them and begging them to remain loyal to their emperor.

Emboldened by this appeal, another peasant spoke up, warning the crowd that ‘if you follow the lords, they will harness you and use you just as you use your horses and oxen’. There was a pause in which everything seemed to hang in the balance. Then one of the insurgent noblemen lowered his gun and shot the peasant who had just spoken. The intention was to intimidate the gathering, but the effect was the opposite: the peasants now furiously attacked the insurgents.

The landlords fired off their pistols and hunting guns but ‘in hand-to-hand fighting it was the peasants with their scythes, the terrifying weapon of the Polish rustic, who had the decisive advantage’. There were fatalities on both sides. The insurgents left forty men, most of them gravely wounded, in the hands of the peasants and the rest fled from the scene.

The ensuing slaughter that sweeps over Galicia is truly spectacular. Clark, who in Sleepwalkers showed a talent for vividly describing violence, doesn’t shy away here either:

On 19 February, according to one account based on eyewitness sources, ‘Tarnów, the district capital, presented a picture with scarcely any parallel in history.’ Sleds and carts converged on the town, surrounded by peasants armed with scythes, pikes, flails, pitchforks and guns, filled with the disfigured bodies of noblemen, officials and stewards, swimming in their own blood.

Having defeated the insurgents as they mobilized, the peasants, now armed in many cases with rifles taken from the dead, sought out suspects in their own houses. If, as sometimes happened, the now terrified insurgents or suspected insurgents sought to defend themselves by, for example, firing on the attackers from windows, the peasants stormed the house or set it on fire, sometimes killing all the men, women and children inside.

This violence continued for several days. Some bodies were brought into Tarnów; others were simply tipped into ditches outside the cemeteries and buried without ceremony. Flaying, mutilation in front of family members and theatrical decapitations all figure in the atrocity lore of the massacres.

The law of unintended consequences spread the slaughter in unexpected ways.

The priest Karol Antoniewicz, who was on a six-month missionary assignment to three Galician districts when the uprising broke out, walked for many days through scenes of devastation and trauma, astonished at the indiscriminateness of the savagery. He found manor houses in which everything had been either stolen or smashed. When he approached the ruins of a house and asked: ‘Where is the owner’, the locals would reply: ‘He died under the flails.’

Particularly shocking were the reports of murdered priests and the sight of desecrated churches. The very people who had been such good churchgoers had become ‘pillagers of churches’, ‘they broke and desecrated the crosses before which, a month earlier, they had knelt’. The entire ‘patriarchal social order’ had been destroyed. It did not occur to Antoniewicz that the insurgents, by enlisting the Galician Polish clergy as emissaries and propagandists, had themselves placed his colleagues in danger.

But really, there was no rhyme or reason to it all. A violent tempest consumed everything.

Particularly terrible was the lot of the Bogusz family. Stanislaus Bogusz, the 87-year-old owner of the estate at Rzendzianowice, was slain in his estate house. His sons Wiktoryn, who was ill, and Nicodem, who was almost completely paralysed, were both flailed to death in front of their wives and children. His grandson Vladimir, fourteen years of age, had his throat cut. Another son, Titus, was thrown from the attic of the estate house onto the cobblestones of the courtyard below and died of his injuries.

Stanislaus junior, who was forty-six, was captured by peasants in Jaworce and taken to the magistrate at Pilzno. But another peasant band forced the mayor to hand him over, tore off his clothes and, when he tried to run away, beat him so badly with their flails that ‘the brain protruded’. When the peasants caught up with another group of four men from the estate, including Victor, another Bogusz brother, and a local teacher by the name of Adam Pochorecki, they beat them for some time and then cut their throats.

Clark tartly drives the point home a few pages later:

Revolutions are never just about the dreams of revolutionaries. They unlock all the tensions and resentments building within a society, not just the progressive ones.

Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Russian parliamentarian of Chechen descent and an early ally of Boris Yeltsin, once said that “a peasants’ revolt is the ugliest, most stupid, and the most dangerous political phenomenon.” And for an intellectual, there is some truth to that. Big ideas and ideals often fail to sway the peasant. Even the church itself, thought to be close to the heart of the honest poor, stands to get defiled. A Polish noble looking back on the slaughter might be tempted to prefigure Thomas Frank by a century and a half in asking “What’s the matter with Galicia?” Does the peasant not know what’s good for him? Surely the Habsburg Emperor is no friend.

But therein lies the delight as well — the schadenfreude of seeing unmoored fantasies come into very bloody contact with reality. That’s why I like democracy above all else: it’s the ultimate proving ground.

For in the peasantry of yesteryear, you can discern the same horse sense that we try to impute to “the people” today. The people may not know all the details, but they know when they’re being lied to, or taken for granted, or abused. And their fury can seem ugly, stupid and dangerous to progressives — especially in democracies when the people choose to elect demagogues.

The people, however, are no simple reactionaries. They frustrate intellectuals of all stripes — even those who might celebrate blows against progressive overreach.

Clark quotes a famous Austrian official gloating in the aftermath of the revolt:

‘A new era has dawned’, Metternich crowed in a letter of March 1846 to Field Marshal Radetzky, the Austrian supreme commander in Italy. ‘The democrats have mistaken their base; a democracy without the people is a chimera.’ […] If the empire was more deeply anchored in popular sentiment than the Polish national movement, then this was reassuring news for the defenders of Imperial authority.

This reading of events fed complacency among Austrian elites, so much so that they were completely unprepared for when the unrest of 1848 came to Vienna. Metternich himself had to hastily flee the city to save his life. “Like so many ‘lessons from history’,” Clark writes, the Galician peasant revolts “merely confirmed the wishful intuitions of the learner.”

That’s the “dark lesson” right there, as applicable today as ever. It’s worth keeping firmly in mind as we here in the United States gird ourselves for elections this November. Anyone who purports to know what’s about to happen — and what it all means — is full of it.

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

1. To be fair, not all radicals were equally dispirited. Karl Marx thought it was a clarifying moment:

”To have the people lose its last illusions and break completely with the past, it was necessary that the customary poetic trimmings of French uprisings — the enthusiastic bourgeois youth, the students of the ecole polytechnique, the tricornes — should join the side of the suppressers. The medical students had to deny the wounded plebeians the succor of their science. Science does not exist for the plebeian who has committed the heinous, unutterable crime of fighting this time for his own existence instead of for Louis Philippe or Monsieur Marrast.”

But then again, Herr Marx had the luxury of not having his brains bashed in on the barricades. He just kept enthusiastically writing.

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