"[Polish nationalists--who were mostly Polish nobles and exiles] decided that a new Polish nation-state would require a democratic revolution that would involve all social groups, including especially the serfs, and set about planning one. They tried their hand at it in 1846, only their conspiracy went wrong from the start when the Prussian police discovered their plan and arrested the group's leaders. Undaunted, the activists in the Austrian province of Galicia went ahead with the uprising, but their movement against the government was a signal to the serfs to move against them. Noble insurgents were captured by serfs and, spurred on by the rumor that the Austrian authorities were offering rewards for insurgents, living or dead (an official had actually offered payment for information about their whereabouts), peasants turned on and murdered over a thousand nobles, priests, and estate managers. One Habsburg official remembered what happened when peasants came to him with the corpse of a Polish noble estate-owner to get their reward.
"We have brought Poles."
"Poles, how could that be," I answered, "what are you?"
"We aren't Poles, we are the emperor's peasants."
"Who are the Poles then?"
"Oh--the Poles! They are the lords, their estate managers, their clerks, the learned men, the well-dressed gentlemen."
The peasants thus denounced the revolutionaries and proclaimed their loyalty to the [Austrian] Emperor and even refused to refer to themselves as 'Polish.' Poles were the feudal landlords. In response to the modern, democratic conception of the nation proposed by the radical insurgents from the nobility, the peasants reasserted the old, medieval concept of the
natio: the nation was the nobility, their feudal overlords, and they would have nothing to do with them." --Jonathan Sperber,
The European Revolutions, 1848-1851
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