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Social Change in the Polish National Movement in Prussia Before World War I∗

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

John J. Kulczycki
John J. Kulczycki*
Affiliation:
Institute on East Central Europe Columbia University
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Extract

In the eighteenth century, prior to the partitioning of the Polish Commonwealth by its neighbors, the Polish szlachta or gentry constituted the Polish “nation.” Then, of course, the term did not have an ethnic connotation but rather a political one: the gentry alone had all the rights that came with full citizenship in the Polish state. The existence of such a privileged ruling class or estate was not uncommon in Europe. The szlachta, however, differed in two important respects from the gentry of most other European states. First of all, the Polish gentry included an unusually large portion of the total population: 9–10 per cent (25 per cent of the Polish-speaking population). Secondly, in theory all members of the szlachta had equal political rights whether they were magnates or completely landless. Consequently, when in the nineteenth century economic forces gradually transformed Polish society from a feudal social structure into a more modern one, individuals of gentry origin acted as a leaven bringing their consciousness of membership in the nation to the new classes of society that they joined. Some of the szlachta, influenced by the Enlightenment and the “Democratic Revolution” as well as by the obvious need for internal reform, sought to broaden the concept of the nation to include the other social classes even before Poland lost its independence. They, however, still conceived of the nation in terms of citizenship in the state. It is therefore ironic that this social broadening of the concept of the Polish nation actually occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the Polish state did not exist.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , Spring 1976 , pp. 17 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

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