CHAPTER 5

SOCIAL CHANGES
“ D u a l” and “ Incomplete” Societies

INDUSTRIALIZATION AND SOCIAL RESTRUCTURING

IN THE WEST

REVO LU TIO NS OR RADICAL sociopolitical reforms and industrial­

ization caused dramatic changes in traditional societies. The nobility, the
former leading elite, lost its privileges and had to adjust to a new capi­
talist market economy. Its “ natural” political and military power was elim­
inated or severely weakened. A new' elite emerged in the form o f the bank­
ing and industrial bourgeoisie, representing an overwhelming economic
power. A similar transformation took place in the lower layers o f the so­
ciety: the peasantry became free, and its numbers and proportion in so­
ciety rapidly decreased. The peasantry, which had made up two-thirds to
three-quarters o f the population o f agrarian societies, began to disappear.
Britain’s radical social transfiguration epitomized the future: bv the early
twentieth century, the agricultural-peasant population had faded to just
5 percent o f Britain’s population. France, Germany, and other Western
European countries remained far behind Britain, but the trend was the
same. The real disappearance o f the peasantry was only complete fifty to
seventy years later, during the second half o f the twentieth centurv.
The majority o f the rural population shifted to industry and became
blue-collar workers. Most o f them worked in big factories. They formed
a relative majority o f the new society, often more than one-third, and
in some cases even more than 40 percent, o f the population. In mid-
nineteenth-centurv Britain, at the height o f this spectacular transforma-

181
(82 SOCI AL C H A N G E S

tion process, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described the propensity
for social change and predicted the emergence o f a polarized class soci­
ety with an ever smaller and richer bourgeoisie accumulating the wealth.
At the other pole, they placed the growing number o f exploited indus­
trial proletarians lacking all “means o f production'1 and accumulating
nothing but poverty (Marx and Engels [1848] 1988).
In reality, however, nineteenth-century Western class society—in the
sense that thephilosophes, Marx, and M ax Weber used this term —changed
remarkably after 1870. A striking new phenomenon appeared: the rise o f
a modern middle class. An army o f white-collar service workers and bu­
reaucrats emerged, including a new professional layer o f teachers, lawyers,
medical doctors, journalists, and entertainers. Although it would be
nearly a century before thev became a majority in the advanced societies
o f the West, this growing middle class was the most rapidly expanding
social group around 1900.
Two layers became visibly different within a new entrepreneurial elite:
a financially and socially higher-ranked upper middle class, and a steadily
expanding modern lower middle class, including bureaucratic and pro­
fessional groups. This bourgeois middle class and the working masses
characterized nineteenth-century Western society The former nobility had
to adjust to the new situation. The landowning aristocracy went through
a gradual process o f embourgcoiscment. The former middle class, most o f
all the lower nobility, the gentry, with smaller landed estates, and the priv­
ileged urban patrician class became declasse and virtually disappeared into
the various layers o f the new society.
This new, “ ideal typical” social pattern, using a Weberian category, did
not, however, break through entirely in the West before World War I. Arno
Maver clcarlv recognized the “ importance o f the modern forces that un­
dermined and challenged the old order.” He rightly argued “ that until
1914 the forces o f inertia and resistance contained and curbed this dynamic
and expansive new society within the ancicns regimes that dominated E u ­
rope’s historical landscape1' (Mayer 1981, A). The nobles retained much o f
their wealth and status and dominated strategic economic stations, while
compensating for their loss by moving into kev positions in the new armies
and state bureaucracies. They learned to adapt and renew themselves, pre­
serving their interests by a gradual cinboiirgcoisemcnt. T hc grands bour­
geois, the “ aristocratizing barons o f industry” in Britain, France, and Ger­
many, imitated the wavs o f the nobility, built mansions on their country
estates, and assumed aristocratic poses and lifestyles. The old elite, in
Joseph Schumpeter's words, remained a classc dingentc in “ active svm-
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 185

biosis” with the rising bourgeoisie (Schumpeter 1955). I f the aristocratic

establishment was not vet passe in most o f nineteenth-centurv Western
Europe, it remained vigorous in Central and Eastern Europe, which did
not start to transform itself along Western lines until the last third o f the
century, and then onlv in piecemeal fashion. The absence o f successful in­
dustrialization and die preservation o f agrarian economies buttressed the
role o f the noble elite and perpetuated the status o f the peasantry, still
somewhere between two-thirds and more than three-quarters o f the to ­
tal population.
A modern working class accounted for only one-tenth to one-fifth o f
the population. Although the traditional nobility lost its privileges, it pre­
served economic power through ownership o f 40 to 50 percent o f die land.
Nobles continued monopolizing political power. The emerging bour­
geoisie remained small and much less influential than its Western coun­
terpart. It could not, and did not even trv to, share political power with
the traditional elite o f the region. Similarly, a modern middle class hardly
emerged; the traditional gentrv middle class preserved its social status.
There was thus a special “ symbiosis” between the old and new social strata,
which coexisted in a unique “ dual society.”
The least industrialized Balkan countries were the former provinces o f
the Turkish empire that became independent in the 1860s and 1870s, which
long continued to bear the marks o f Ottoman rule and remained wholly
peasant societies, with neither a modern working class nor a modern mid­
dle class. The most peculiar feature o f the Balkan societies, however, was
the almost total lack o f a national elite as a proprietor class or a politically
dominant layer. The former landowning military and political elite had
consisted o f the occupying Turks, and, to a much lesser extent, o f con­
verted, “ Ottomanized” Bosnian, Albanian, and Bulgarian elites, subor­
dinated to the Sultan. After the liberation o f the Balkan countries led to
the disappearance o f the bulk o f the previous elite, Balkan societies were
left “ incomplete,” “ eliteless” societies. The gap began to be filled by mem­
bers o f the military and bureaucratic classes o f the newly independent
countries, but these soon followed the Ottoman pattern and became rich
bv exploiting the opportunity to hold office. Urban and rural peasant-
merchants also became a substitute bourgeois layer and part o f an emerg­
ing elite.
Just as in economic modernization, social transformation remained
partial and unfinished in Central and Eastern Europe. “ Dual” and “ incom­
plete” societies represented both the dominant traditional characteristics
and the new elements o f a rather sluggishlv modernizing society. While
18+ SOCIAL C HA NG ES

in the West, a new society started to replace the old, in Central and East­
ern Europe, old and new lived in parallel, but the new was unquestion­
ably subordinated to the old.

THE DUAL SOCIETY: THE SURVIVAL OF THE NOBLE ELITE

Between 1848 and the 1860s, the serfs were liberated, noble privileges were
abolished, and feudal institutions were mostly eliminated. Nonetheless,
C. A. Macartney exaggerates the decline o f the old elite when he charac­
terizes the aristocracy o f Cis-Leithania, the Austrian-Bohemian region o f
Austria-Hungary (i.e., on the Austrian side o f the river Leitha), as no more
than a decadent relic o f the past:

Bv 1890 the direct power ot the aristocracy was a shadow of what it had been in
1848. . . . They formed a tight little clique in which everyone knew everyone
else . . . and spent their rime in gambling, horse-racing, exchanging scandal and
seducing other people’s wives and daughters . . . [others] shut themselves up on
their country estates, which the)' formed into . . . a dream-world which had been
reality in the eighteenth [century]. (Macartney 1968, 620)

Although several elements o f the above description are true, especially

regarding the parasitic lifestyle o f the old elite, the old nobility in reality
remained the dominant social class even in the most advanced western
provinces o f Austria-Hungary. The reform measures did not threaten the
socioeconomic command o f the noble elite. Unlike in Western Europe,
big estates continued to dominate in the Czech lands, Poland, Hungary,
Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Romania. Because the reforms were
introduced from above either by the old elite itself or bv the absolutist
governments o f the Habsburg and tsarist empires, they « ere socially ex­
tremely cautious. Even the most radical reforms carefully salvaged the lead-
ing positions o f the old elite and preserved “ law and order.”
Large noble estates continued to occupy from one-third to one-half o f
the land in these countries. Around the turn o f the century, big estates in
Austria took up 8.7 million hectares, 29 percent o f the land. A few hun­
dred families o f the high aristocracy (Hochadcl) owned at least one-fifth
o f the land. In Bohemia, 151 families owned nearly 1.5 million o f the
province’s _s. 2 million hectares. One-quarter o f Moravia’s land was in the
hands o f seventy-three noble families. Moreover, post-1848 legislation in­
troduced the fidci-cowmissitm, the legally institutionalized entailed landed
estate, a clear continuation o f privileged feudal property. At the turn o f
 SOCI AL C H AN G ES 185

the century, fidei-commissa occupied roughly 2.2 million hectares o f land

in Cis-Leithania. B ig estates occupied 35 percent o f the land in Poland,
40 percent in the Czech lands, 45 percent in Hungary, and 50 percent in
Romania. The aristocracy' thus preserved the basis of its economic power.
Moreover, the aristocrats relatively easily transformed their estates from
low-efficiencv feudal manors to modern, more productive capitalist en­
terprises. Their income increased, because output grew about threefold,
and, thanks to extensive railroad construction, they gained easy access to
the market.
After customs barriers were lifted between Austria and Hungary in 1851,
competition from Hungarian agriculture caused serious trouble for the
Austrian-Bohemian landed nobility, which skillfully adjusted to the new'
situation by reducing the land under cereals and focusing on cash crops,
mostly sugar beets, supplied to their own sugar refineries. Similarly, they
modernized their forestry management and integrated production with the
timber and paper industries. Consequently, a somewhat modernized aris­
tocracy held strong positions in modern industry as well. Three-quarters
o f the distilleries, two-thirds o f the sugar refineries, and nearly 60 per­
cent o f the breweries—that is, the leading branches o f Czech in d u stry -
belonged to magnates in late nineteenth-century Bohemia. M ore than
400,000 workers, day laborers, foresters, and so on, worked for the Bo­
hemian nobility.
Aristocrats also had a strong grasp on political power. They m onopo­
lized the innermost circles o f the court o f Emperor Franz Josef and filled
the leading positions o f high state bureaucracy: even in the early twenti­
eth century, 40 percent o f the top positions in the Ministry of the Inte­
rior, nearly half o f the heads o f departments at the state railways, and all
the heads o f the state governorships, the Statthaltereien, were aristocrats.
Thev were strongly overrepresented in the Herrenhaus, or upper house
o f the Reichsrat. The Hochadel families were granted hereditary seats by
the emperor, who also made lifetime appointments for more than 150 top
representatives o f the old elite. It was only at the end o f the period un­
der discussion, in 190", that the introduction o f universal male suffrage
radically changed this situation. Until the introduction o f general mili­
tary service, aristocrats as a rule held at least the rank o f major or captain
in the armv, and thev monopolized its upper ranks as well.
The economic and political positions o f the Hungarian aristocracy were
even stronger. At the beginning o f the twentieth century, fewer than four
thousand people, 0.2 percent o f the landowners, owned 32 percent of the
land. One-fifth o f the land belonged to the biggest estates. The “ preserved'’
l86 SOCI AL C H A N G E S

feudal type o f property, ninety-two fidei-commissa (sixty o f them were

sanctioned bvthe emperor between 1867 and 1912), covered 35 percent o f
die country (Magyar Statisztikai Évkönyv 1913). In 1905, more than 150 aris­
tocrats had important positions on the boards o f leading Hungarian banks
and industrial firms (Magyar Pénzügy 1905). Legislation in 1886 granted
life membership in the upper house to every male adult member o f an
aristocratic family (with the rank o f count or baron). H alf o f the prime
ministers and more than one-third o f all cabinet ministers in Hungary
between the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867) and the Great War
came from aristocratic families. The highly exclusive electoral system o f
the country granted the right to vote to only 6 percent o f the population,
including all noblemen. Small wonder, then, that 58 percent o f the
deputies came from noble families, 16 percent o f them from the aristoc­
racy (Mayer 1981,173).
The Romanian boyar class, although it lost its privileges in 1864, pre­
served its economic power. The mosierime, the large landowners, some
2,000 families, owned three million hectares, 38 percent o f the arable land.
Later, they were able to enlarge their estates: the Land Law o f 1889 au­
thorized the sale o f state-owned estates, amounting to 1.2 million hectares
o f land, and the bulk o f it, as Robert Seton-Watson noted, “ passed into
wrong hands,” that is, to the landlords. “ The country was but a big es­
tate, administered like an estate —a complex o f latifundia in which pri­
vate law is public law, the inheritance o f landed wealth is the inheritance
o f power in the State,” said die prominent Romanian writer Michai Em-
inescu (quoted in Mitranv 1930, 24). Romania was, indeed, characterized
by “ irresponsible landlordism” (Seton-Watson [1934] 1963, 368-69).
When the country became independent, the Romanian “ political nation”
was composed entirely o f the propertied class o f 4,000 voters, whose fran­
chise was based on wealth and position. Their number was approximately
equal to the upper-level bureaucracy.
The new constitution o f 1864 introduced nearly universal male suffrage,
but with the severe restriction o f a collegial electoral system under which
the propertied class directly elected 80 percent o f the deputies, while the
majority o f the population, the entire peasantry and other lesser taxpay­
ers, elected the remaining 20 percent via delegates. The upper chamber
was entirely occupied bv the landowning and top bureaucratic elite
(Michelson 1987, 27, 72, 138). In Romania, the big “ landowner was him-
selt the law” (Seton-Watson [1934] 1963, 389).
The situation o f the nobility in partitioned Poland was somewhat dif­
ferent. The szlachta, the Polish nobility, was bv far the largest noble elite
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 1 87

in Europe: probably 20 to 25 percent o f cthnic Poles, by some calcula­

tions, and 10 percent o f the overall Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian pop­
ulation o f the kingdom. In principle, the entire szlachta had equal rights
and privileges in the “ noble democracy,” leading public posts were not
hereditary, and the titles o f “ baron” and “ count” did not exist. In reality,
however, the noble elite formed three distinct layers. The first consisted
o f landed nobles with serfs. At the end o f the eighteenth century, only
roughly 4 0,000 nobles had more than ten serfs. Some fifteen families,
among them the Radziwills, Czartoryskis, and Potockis, which had ac­
cumulated exceptional wealth and power, acquired the title o f prince and
virtually ruled the country forming a real Polish grand aristocracy, total­
ing fewer than 2,000 people. Szlachta with ten to twenty serf families made
up about 8 percent o f the nobility or around 25,000 people. Finally, about
a third o f the szlachta had around ten serfs. The largest number, however,
belonged to the two lowest levels o f nobilitv: the peasant-nobles, with
small parcels o f land they cultivated themselves, and the landless nobility
who served the landed nobility and rich urbanites in various posts. This
latter group numbered from 400,000 to a million (Korzon 1897-98,159-
61; Ring 2001, 69-95).
Although the szlachta preserved economic power and most o f their
landed property, their privileged position had been undermined. In Con ­
gress Poland, established under Russian rule after the 1815 Congress o f
Vienna, the Polish nobilitv enjoved local self-government at the provin­
cial (gubemiia) and district (uezd) levels, held assemblies, and elected ad­
ministrative and judicial functionaries every three years. Polish law and
aristocratic institutions were abolished after the failed uprising o f 1830-31,
however, when the constitution o f 1815 was replaced bv an “ organic
statute” (1832) diat made Poland a part o f the Russian empire and excluded
the Polish nobilitv from political power. Conversely, substantial auton­
omy was granted under Habsburg rule in neighboring Galicia in 1867,
when the province became one o f the seventeen Kronlander, with a Sejm
KrajowT (Galician Diet) dominated by Polish nobles (Izdebski 1995,
80-85).
The survival o f the old elite was not, however, limited to the preserved
economic and political power o f the aristocracy. The lower layers o f the
nobilitv, the gentry and the so-called petty nobilitv, who cultivated small
parcels o f land and lived as peasants, also preserved their noble privileges.
Unlike the high aristocracy, the gentry were hit hard bv the emancipation
of serfs, which deprived them o f the pillars o f their noble existence: a free
labor force and tax exemptions. The ongoing changes, including the un­
T88 SOCI AL C H A N G E S

bearable competition o f modernized large estates and the possibility o f

losing their heavily mortgaged lands, undermined the economic position
o f a broad laver o f the Central and Eastern European gentrv. In this sit­
uation, the agricultural depression o f the 1870s and 1880s was a mortal
blow' for them.
As a consequence, the gentry gradually lost their landed property and
became landless. In Hungary's Sáros County, 170 landed gentry families
were recorded in mid eighteenth century, for example, but the 1895 cen­
sus registered only 34. Landowners with estates o f 200 to 1,000 cadastre
yokes, or 114 to 570 hectares (a cadastre yoke was defined as the amount
o f land that could be plowed with a yoke o f oxen in a day), were consid­
ered to belong to the gentry in Hungary. The number o f these landowner
families decreased from 30,000 to 7,000 during the second half o f the
nineteenth century. The Polish gentry, the most numerous gentry class
in the world, was virtually eliminated as a landowning class. Moreover,
in response to their leadership in the fight for independence, the Russian
government deliberately launched devastating attacks against them. Be­
tween 1836 and 1861, the authorities carried out a “ legitimation” o f the
Polish nobility by limiting the number o f privileged estates. The status
o f the petty nobility—roughly 250,000 people—was not confirmed, thus
eliminating them from noble status. As a consequence, the number o f the
Polish nobility in the Polish kingdom under Russian rule dropped from
more than 300,000 to nearly 50,000. In Prussian Poland, their number
decreased by 40 percent during the nineteenth century.
The bulk o f the Hungarian, Polish, Czech, and other Central and East­
ern European gentry—at least two-thirds in real terms —became déclassé.
In a modern society, thev would have lost their traditional positions in
the political-economic elite o f their country and have become either pro­
letarians, service workers, or professionals, as often happened in the west­
ern provinces o f the Habsburg empire, in Austria proper, and partly in
Bohemia, where the embourgeoisement o f society advanced the most.
That was not, however, the case in most o f Central and Eastern E u ­
rope. The déclassé gentry found compensation in occupying prestigious
positions in the new state bureaucracy and army. Although financially
bankrupt and mostly with relatively low incomes, thev were thus still
able to preserve their status in the ruling new bureaucratic and political
elite.
In the case o f Hungary, the preservation o f the gentry's power through
absorption into prestigious and often lucrative state positions has been
well documented bv Andrew C. Janos in his portrayal o f the “ politics o f
 SOCIAL C H A N G E S 1 89

backwardness” (Janos 1982, 108-u). After the Austro-Hungarian C om ­

promise o f 1867, especially during the 1870s and 1880s, the government
o f Kálmán Tisza (1875-90) built up a huge state bureaucracy, partly to res­
cue the declining gentry and create a haven for them. The 16,000 civil
servants inherited from the Austrian administration had doubled bv 1875
and then increased to more than 60,000 by 1890, and to 120,000 by 1910.
Roughlv 3.5 percent o f the labor force was employed in the civil service.
“ N o other age in Hungarian public life came to be so completely identified
with the gentry as were the years o f Kálmán Tisza’s premiership” (ibid.,
quoting Lippav 1919, 98). As a consequence, 57 percent o f the Hungar­
ian state bureaucracy was o f gentry origin in 1890. In the office o f the prime
minister and in the Ministry o f Interior, they made up two-thirds o f the
employees. Although this extremely high representation somewhat de­
creased during the next quarter o f a century, it was still 46 percent in 191 o.
Between 1875 and 1918, 61 percent o f the employees in the prime minis­
ter’s office, 64 percent in the Ministry o f Interior, and 38 percent in the
Ministry o f Commerce were members o f the gentry; altogether, they oc­
cupied 48 percent o f the positions in die four most important ministries
(Berend and Szuhay 1979, 141-42).
The gentry continued to play a decisive role in the political arena: be­
tween 1887 and 1910, more than 48 percent o f the representatives in the
Hungarian parliament belonged to the gentry. Janos identifies 27 percent
o f the representatives as public employees and another 22 percent as at­
torneys (ibid., n o -11, 138).
The joint Austro-Hungarian army offered another possibility for pre­
serving elite positions. According to Karl Kandeelsdorfer’s calculations
in 1896, nearly 29 percent o f the officer corps belonged to the nobility.
István Deák’s innovativ e calculations —based on a random sample o f 64
officers —show that 20 percent o f the officers were noblemen in 1870. O f
them, 45 percent belonged to the old and 55 percent to the new service
nobility, that is, families o f newly ennobled officers and state bureaucrats.
Although more than three-quarters o f the officer corps o f nearly 18,000
career officers were o f German nationality, approximately 10 percent were
Hungarian, 5 percent Czech, 2.5 percent Polish, and 2.4 percent Croat.
The Hungárián National Guard offered a better opportunity for the gen­
try than the joint armv: in 1869-70, when the Honvéd army was created,
60 percent o f the newly appointed officers were from gentry families, and
another 14 percent were aristocrats.
It is true, how ever, that the heavy overrepresentation of the gentry and
the nobility at large gradually declined. Roughlv 90 percent o f the high-
190 SOCI AL C H A N G E S

ranking generals o f the joint Austro-Hungarian armv were noblemen in

1859. Their number decreased to 41 percent bv 1908 and to 25 percent bv
1918. The gentry contingent o f the officer corps o f the Hungarian Hon-
véd army also declined from 60 to 39 percent between ¡870 and 1881 (Deak
19 9 2,16 1—63,183).
The genuine political “ home” o f the gentry, however, was countv ad­
ministration. In Som ogv County, for example, between 1867 and 1910,
nearly two-thirds o f the 79 top administrative officials were recruited from
the gentry, while only 2 percent o f them belonged to the aristocracy and
well-to-do landed gentry. The case o f Som ogy County was not unique:
nationwide, two-thirds o f the leading county bureaucracy was from the
gentry (Berend and Szuhav 19 78,141-42).
The parliament, the state and countv bureaucracy, and the armv could
not, however, absorb the entire déclassé gentry class. Twice as many im­
poverished gentry sought to occupy state offices as were actually employed
during the last third o f the century. O f 400 gentry families in Som ogv
County and 600 in Saros County, only 50 and 49, respectively, found pres­
tigious positions in these institutions. A great mam’ became managers on
big estates or went into professional fields and became judges, attorneys,
journalists, and even teachers.
The Romanian déclassé gentry also found a safe refuge in the public
offices o f the central administration and in thcjudefe. At the beginning
o f the twentieth century, more than 100,000 people —2 percent o f the
population—were employed thus. H alf o f them occupied lower positions,
with incomes hardly better than that o f a salaried worker. Only 1 percent
o f them, the higher echelons, earned a middle-class income, but social
status, power, respect, and the possibility o f earning substantial additional
income came with the office.
Throughout, even the lowest layer, the pettv nobility, struggled to
maintain at least the decorum o f noble status. Both the Hungarian bocs-
koros nemes (“ bemoccasined noble,” squireen) and the similar Polish
szlachta zasciankowa (“ nobles behind the walls,” because o f their habit o f
living together in exclusive communities) were in real terms peasant-
nobles who cultivated their own small pieces o f land and whose children
served landowners on manorial estates. Pettv noblewomen (“ household
misses” ) served in manor houses. The pcasant-szlacbta, the “ middle
brothers,” as aristocratic mentors called them, were addressed as pan and
pani (lord and lady), they shook hands and were asked to sit down. In
the pettv noble villages, symbolic etiquette and outfits were preserved to
demonstrate noble status: families used pompous language and aristo­
 SOCIAL C H A N G E S 191

cratic manners. Their houses had porches and, if possible, a piano inside.
Women wore gloves and short mantles lined with white fur and carried
parasols. “ In dress and manners, the landowners’ patterns were obliga­
tory for the petty nobility” (Chamerska 1996, 78).
Wladyslaw Reymont’s Nobel prize-winning The Peasants, an encyclo­
pedic novel about Polish peasant life, describes the “ nobilitv o f Rzepki,”
the people o f a noble-peasant village, as very poor but pretentious people,
who had “ only a bag and a bundle, one cow for five and one cap for three.”
When these noble peasants arrived at a district peasant meeting, “they
came all in one band, taciturn, looking down and askance at everyone they
met. Their womenfolk, dressed like manor-people, very much pranced
out, walked in their midst, and were treated bv them with die utmost cour-
tesv” (Reymont 1925, 2: 89-90).
In Central Europe, the elite o f the noble establishment thus hung onto
their permanently weakened positions. The gentry remained the foun­
dation o f the “ historic middle class” and influenced the manners, attitude,
and national self-consciousness o f virtually the entire society. Their habits
were considered “ national characteristics.” The newly ennobled bureau­
cratic-military elite, and even part o f the intellectual elite, totally assimi­
lated into the gentry and enthusiastically adopted their lifestyle and man­
ners. Old and new nobility thus amalgamated.
The preservation o f the old noble elite was only partly the consequence
o f the semisuccessful modernization o f the economy and society. The
old elite imposed themselves on the society by clinging to their landed
estates and military-bureaucratic positions. Their role was legitimized for
the society by the process of failed, incomplete nation-building. The lack
o f independent statehood, combined with conflicting claims by mixed
nationalities within and without state borders, led to a strong, aggressive,
and traditional representation o f national identity. Military virtue and ex­
perienced leadership acquired special significance. People wanted a lead­
ing elite that represented national continuity, an asset when statehood and
nationhood were lacking and required verification.
The uncertain future o f independent nationhood and the troubled
relations among all the neighboring nations and minorities created “ po­
litical hysteria” in the region (Bibo 1986). In this environment, where his­
torical and ethnic-linguistic borders did not meet, the old elite could rein­
carnate and reestablish their legitimate power as the national leadership.
In Istvan Bibo’s assessment, the noble elite were totally out o f step with
realities. Thev were accustomed to making unreasonable demands and to
formulating policy based on what thev wanted, rather than on what could
192 SOCIAL CHANGES

be accomplished, thus disengaging policy from a rationale o f causc and

effect. In this deformed political culture, the irrational inclination o f the
noble elite to propagate historical and national myths became a source o f
strength and charisma. The people o f the region sought to live in these
myths and wanted to believe that national independence and the unifica­
tion o f the entire nation would automatically resolve all the country’s un­
solved and painful political, economic, and social problems.
The prevalence o f myths actually prepared the way for the rise o f a na­
tional intelligentsia, partly emerging from the déclassé gentry, but also
from commoners. The national intelligentsia consisted o f prophet-poets,
writers, historians, linguists, ethnographers, teachers, and priests, those
who cultivated the distinctive national culture and were able to substitute
the missing national continuity and strengthen national self-confidence.
They represented, or even produced, evidence o f deep national roots and
historical rights against the existing multinational state formations and
rival nations. Culture acquired eminent political importance, although this
did not lead to its flourishing but rather to its overpolitization (Bibo 1986,
215-26). The old elite found a crucial new function to legitimize their
power. A great part o f this elite, however, the historical gentry middle class,
became totally anachronistic and collided head-on with the new require­
ments o f the modern age o f capitalism and democracy.
Late nineteenth-century realist writers o f the region often wrote about
the declining, parasitic, passé, but still dominating gentry. Chekhov fo­
cused on the twilight o f die old nobility. His heroes loiter in manor houses
and mansions in the countryside and are unable to change their lives and
start working. A vain nostalgia for action substitutes for deeds. Real hu­
man dialogues are supplanted bv the “ nihilism” o f empty monologues,
real human relations by empty illusions. That was also the world o f Stanis-
law Wyspianski, a Polish contemporary o f Chekhov’s, who sought to
destroy the Polish myth. In his Wesele (Wedding, 1900), the historic mis­
sion o f the noble intelligentsia, die typical embodiment o f the declining
gentry, is a wedding with the “ people,” a symbolic mission to create na­
tional unity. Deed, here too, is only a pseudo-action. The impossibility
o f a dialogue between the two social layers is even linguistically expressed:
the peasants speak a mountain (¿¡oral) dialect, the noble intelligentsia, the
literary language. Their declamations are empty, pathetic words. The Poet
meets his hero, an armored knight—the natural personification o f the
nobility—and finds the armor empty. The “ Wedding” symbolizes the re­
placement o f deeds bv daydreaming. The spirits who appear have con­
sciousness but are unable to act (Spin) 1986).
 SOCIAL C H A N G E S 193

The Hungarian Kálmán Mikszáth also said a nostalgic-critical farewell

to the Hungarian gentry. In his The Gentry (1897), he presents the world
o f Sáros County, a place o f “ hallucinations,” where “ small men are great
lords.” The event, here too, is a wedding at which once-illustrious fami­
lies create the illusion o f their lost wealth. The best food and wine are
served; the guests arrive in elegant carriages, wearing diamonds. They
gamble with nonexistent fortunes at the card table. When the celebra­
tion ends, the jewels and carriages are taken back to their real owners.
Everything was pretense, and everyone returns to a simple office the next
morning.
In one o f Mikszáth’s last novels, A Nosztyfiú esete a Tóth M arival ([ 1908]
1912) (The Young Noszty’s Affaire with M ary Tóth), a poor gentry fam­
ily, the Nosztys, plot for young Feri Nosztv to seduce the daughter o f a
millionaire businessman, Mihály Tóth, to make their marriage unavoid­
able. The conspiracy is assisted by Baron Kopercczky, squire o f the ficti­
tious Bontó Countv. “ Well, you have to see the power o f the family [as
being] like a fortress withstanding the decay o f centuries,” Kopercczky s
brother-in-law, old Noszty, explains. “ It has walls, bastions, towers, [but]
alas, it also has cracks in the walls. . . . This fortress needs attention all the
time, its weaknesses have to be supported, the cracks have to be repaired,
sometime a strap o f iron is needed to hold it.” The Tóths represent mod­
ern middle-class virtues in contrast to the corrupt gentry world o f the
Nosztys. The plot comes to grief because o f the resistance o f Mihály Tóth.
The voung Feri Nosztv shrugs its failure off, saving: “ The world is quite
large. There are many more girls. . . . The main thing is, aimvay, health
and a little luck at the card-table” (quoted in Czigánv 1984, 237, 240-41)-
The noble elite preserved their old manners and value system, a kind
o f a “ feudal anticapitalism,” although, like the Nosztys, they often sought
to find “ a strap o f iron” in mesalliances, marriages with rich commoners,
to hold together their ruined “ fortresses.” At the same time, however, thev7
rejected modern values and looked down on business as ungentlcmanly.
This rigid antibusiness attitude emerged mostly during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries and evolved into a “ national characteristic” dur­
ing the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries.
Maria Bogucka sheds light on the Polish gentry’s attitudes from the
seventeenth century to the early twentieth. In 1623, a representative o f
the gentry, one Stanislavv Xaremba, accused the merchants (“ keen blood­
hounds” ) o f “ demoralizing society by importing luxury goods” and by
their “ tricks and intolerable profits.” He characterized townsmen as ene­
mies who “ are destroying and impoverishing Poland and robbing her
 194 SOCI AL C H A N G E S

wealth while enriching foreign countries and themselves.” Jan Jurkowski,

a teacher in Pilzno in the early seventeenth century, versified:

Let yeomen till land, grow wheat for the daily bread
Ixt women count profit from spinning a fine thread
Let merchants have gold, let the Jew count his treasure
You stick til [a] soldier’s prize, vour onlv measure.

An early twentieth-century writer echoed this attitude: “ Genuine no­

bility is a peculiar power and a genuine nest o f virtue, fame, dignity and
integrity. . . . N obility soars up high with the eagles.” Bogucka concludes
that according to these views, “ engaging in urban occupations was shame­
ful and dishonest by their very nature” (Bogucka 1993, 9 9 -110).
The gentry rejected the idea o f trade or even o f marketing their own
products. When, in a pamphlet published anonymously in 1880, Jósef Ig ­
nacy Kraszewski recommended modern commerce as the road to nation-
building, Ghs szlachcica polskiego (“ The Voice o f a Polish Gentleman” ) re­
sponded in vitriolic tones, calling Kraszewski a “ grave digger o f his own
class,” who “ lived according to the customs o f their forebears, and not
the customs of shopkeepers.” The gentry rejected “ the worship o f the
golden calf and utilitarianism” since they were “ the exclusive heir to the
entire historic national past . . . Religion, Motherland, Family and Tra­
dition.” Jan Ludwik Poplawski went even further in his Gios (1887) when
he stated: “ Today, we have already begun descending to the level o f the
Jews . . . we will soon turn completely into a nation o f profiteers and
traders” (quoted in Jcdlicki 1999, 218 -19, 280).
Strikingly similar attitudes emerged in Hungary. The mid-nineteenth-
centurv Hungarian historian Mihály Horváth said that in previous cen­
turies, “ the common opinion . . . at least that o f the noble classes . . .
biased by prejudice . . . cherished the most absurd ideas concerning com ­
merce.” Zsigm ond Pál Pach has masterfully analyzed the changed men­
tality o f the Hungarian nobility, which engaged in trade (like their E n ­
glish counterparts) in the sixteenth century, but turned against it during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Baron Lőrinc Orczy expressed
this view in a poem in 1780:

Heated debates rage among us,

Does shameless trade befit the Magyars?
For it may indeed corrupt our morals.
Say, where do you think it might lead us?
In counties Zemplén, Szabolcs, Ling and Beret;
Much money, food and wine fill all the cellars.
 SOCIAL C H A N G E S 195

Need we more? Should our lives be disconcerted?

So that more monev might stuff all our purses?

All this influenced the entire society, including die peasantry, and led
to the emergence o f an anticapitalist national character (Pach 1994,150-51,
155-56). Gvula Szekfii, a leading Hungarian historian o f the first half o f the
twentieth century, hailed the “ anti-commercial and anti-capitalist talents
o f the Hungarian race” ; according to him, history proved that “ the prin­
ciple o f trading and production for profit disagreed with the Hungarian
nature. . . . [BJourgeois characteristics were quite far from die mental habit
o f Hungarians, nobilitv and peasantry alike. . . . Undoubtedly, the H un­
garians may be listed among those peoples that have the least inclination
to develop in a capitalist direction” (Szekfii 1920, 291; 1922, 81-82).
The same “ anti-capitalist character” was “ diagnosed” for the Rom a­
nians by the mid-nineteenth-century Romanian economist-statistician
D. P. Martian, who criticized his countrymen for lacking the entrepre­
neurial spirit needed for economic modernization (Michelson 1987,30).
“ [EJducated Romanians have shown a tendency to avoid following a
commercial career, leaving this field o f activity to alien elem ents. . . the
countrv . . . is thus deprived o f the opportunity o f building up an inde­
pendent middle class,” the English author G. C. Logio noted a century
later. This attitude also had a toxic impact on business morale. Logio de­
scribes the Romanian view that “ elusion o f obligations is a mundane af­
faire and a fashionable art which should be cultivated assiduously” (L o­
gio 1932, 115, 118).
The aristocratic establishment thus survived, not only by virtue of the
preservation o f the old noble elite, the principal role o f the big estate, and
the determinant position o f the gentry as the backbone of the “ historic”
or “ gentleman middle class” (történelmi or úri középosztály), but also be­
cause o f the elite’s conservative “ feudal anticapitalist” values and attitudes,
which penetrated the society and figured as Polish and Hungarian “ na­
tional characteristics.”
The most visible feature o f the gentry’s attitude was a “ gentlemanly”
lifestyle, maintaining the pretense of old noble wealth by spending much
more than the never-enough income earned at an often-mediocre office
job. “All, if I could onlv afford to live the way I live” was a typical H un­
garian remark, reported bv John Lukacs’s mother (Lukacs 1988, 91). This
irresponsible lifestyle led to heav y indebtedness and invited corruption as
a means to fill the huge gaps in family budgets. Connections to relatives
o f the upper nobilitv; the advantage o f having a “ historic” name, and offices
196 SOCI AL C H A N G E S

with access to lucrative “ gifts” became an inseparable part o f the gcntrv’s

way o f life. Business activity, entrepreneurship, and thrift were thought
ungentlemanlv and even shameful. The moral outlook o f the gentry was
thus die antidiesis o f Max Weber’s Protestant ethic. This “ anticapitalist”
character was regarded as an “ elegant” national pattern to follow.

DUAL SOCIETIES: THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW ELITE

In parallel with partial economic modernization, especially from the mid

to late nineteenth century on, a new entrepreneurial, bourgeois elite and
a modern middle class slowly and gradually began to develop. Coexis­
tence o f the old and new elites under die unquestioned political and so­
cial leadership o f the old elite was a hallmark o f the dual society.
The modern new business, service, and intellectual elites formed a
rather thin layer in Central European societies. Cis-Leithania, the rapidly
industrializing Lower Austria, and Bohemia-Moravia-Silesia were ex­
ceptions. In contrast to the situation in other countries o f the region, the
majority o f the population there left agriculture and relocated in indus­
try, commerce, and services. In Lower Austria and Bohemia-Moravia-
Silesia, 60 and 52 percent o f the population, respectively, worked in the
new nonagrarian sectors. In the strong industrial and service branches o f
the economy, a nearly Western type o f bourgeoisie and middle class
emerged. The self-conscious Czech-speaking merchants, industrialists, and
intellectuals o f Prague envisaged their own club, the Mestanská Beseda,
as early as 1844, and the institution was inaugurated in January 1846 (Saver
1998, 82-83). Vienna and even Prague became important financial centers.
The Wiener Bankverein, the Creditanstalt, the headquarters o f the Vienna
Rothschilds, and the Zivnostenská Banka o f Prague and their affiliates de­
veloped strong positions in the Balkans. The Austro-Czeeh textile, sugar,
iron, and engineering industries supplied the entire empire and several
neighboring countries besides. A strong financial and industrial upper
middle class, an army o f clerks and employees in the business sector, and
white-collar workers in services and professional fields made up between
one-fourth and one-third o f Vienna and Prague society, respectively.
During the nineteenth century, more than 1,000 prominent Austrian
and Bohemian bankers, industrialists, and merchants were ennobled
(Mayer 1981,111). This was a clear sign both o f the strength o f the modem
business elite and o f its assimilation into the aristocratic establishment.
Characteristically, the numerous Austrian-Bohemian bourgeoisie and
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S I9 7

middle class still remained politically w eak compared to the old elite and
did not even seek to gain direct political power. The Austrian and B o ­
hemian societies, although nearest to their Western counterparts, still ex­
hibited the characteristics o f the dual society.
The eastern half o f the empire did not see a similar rise o f a modern
middle class. Bv 1869, in Hungary, shortly after the Ausgleich, indepen­
dent entrepreneurs in banking, industry, trade, and transportation, in­
cluding the so-called petit bourgeois shopkeepers and artisans, wiiite-
collar w'orkers, and intellectuals, numbered roughly 600,000 people. In
other W'ords, the emerging upper and lower middle class represented only
about 8-9 percent o f the country’s workforce. Bv 1910, their number had
almost doubled, to nearly 1,10 0 ,00 0 , which embodied nearly 15 percent
o f the workforce.
The wealth and importance o f these newly emerging social layers, how-
ever, surpassed their number. Although Hungary’s Gross Domestic Prod­
uct increased more than threefold during the half century before World
War I, the contribution o f agriculture declined from nearly 80 percent to
just over 60 percent. Modern industrial and service branches produced
nearly 40 percent o f domestic product before the war (Bercnd and Ránki
1979, 65, 77). The top 150-200 bourgeois families, who owned and ran
much o f Hungarian banking, industry, transportation, and trade, accu­
mulated vast w ealth, comparable to that o f the landowning aristocracy.
The leading financial groups centered around the Pesti Magyar Kere­
skedelmi Bank (Commercial Bank) and the Magvar Általános Hitelbank
(Credit Bank). Leó Lánczy, Fiilöp Weiss, Ferenc Chorin, A d olf Ullmann,
and the Kornfeld, Manfred Weiss Herzog, and Deutsch families w'ere fa­
miliar names among the “ about fifty people at the top of Hungarian bank­
ing and industry,” Jenő Varga observed; they “ controlled about 20 per­
cent o f the capital and nearly half o f the net income” of these sectors (Varga
1912,10). Bv providing mortgage credits for landowners, a highly indebted
class, they also acquired their share o f the income from the landed estates.
Moreover, the financial-merchant elite bought up one-fifth o f the landed
estates over 200 cadastre yokes (114 hectares).
The growing number o f medical doctors, teachers, journalists, enter­
tainers, and corporate clerks made up only a small fraction o f the soci­
ety. They became very important in the rising cities, most of all in the
capital citv, however, where they formed a large and influential urban mid­
dle class. The largest segment o f the business middle class consisted ol
hundreds o f thousands o f shopkeepers, a great man)’ of w hom ran vil­
lage general stores and pubs, fens o f thousands w ere tailors (20 percent
1 98 SOCI AL C H AN G ES

o f them self-employed), shoemakers (9 percent), and butchers and bak­

ers (23-24 percent). M ost o f them were small-business people, partly from
premodern times.
An extremely fragile middle class emerged in Romania, where, even
before World War I, three-quarters o f the population still worked in agri­
culture. In 1900, 78 percent o f the people were still illiterate. Even so, a
small but rich and influential bourgeoisie and merchant class emerged.
The big taxpayers consisted o f more than 10,000 entrepreneurs, 1,300
lawyers, 150 engineers, and 42 bankers in 1903-4. They were concentrated
in Bucharest, the rapidly growing capital city, where their main strength
lay in banking. The Banca Agricola, Banca Româneascâ, and the Banca
Marmorosch Blank were their strongholds. Romania’s significant role in
world grain exports generated the largest incomes for the bourgeoisie en­
gaged in trade (Zeletin 1991). They were, however, totally excluded from
public life and political power. Moreover, because o f their Jewish origins,
a great number o f them were also unable to gain citizenship. Neverthe­
less, their wealth, combined with the widespread corruption that became
an organic part o f the social and political life o f the country, opened a
path into high politics for them. A large part o f the Romanian lower m id­
dle class remained traditional artisans. Around the turn o f the century,
166.000 families made a living in this way.
Another part o f the old-fashioned, early-modern tvpe o f petite bour­
geoisie, lower-middle-class merchants in Romania’s quiet, dusty little
cities, originally small shopkeepers, innkeepers, and moneylenders in vil­
lages, became rather well-to-do by selling the products o f the big estates.
As their most lucrative role, thev became arenda§i, leaseholders, or m id­
dlemen between the absentee boyars and the peasant renters. Bv 1900,
more than half o f the land o f the big estates (above 500 hectares), and
three-quarters o f the largest estates (over 3,000 hectares), was leased. On
average, an arendaç leased 700 hectares, but, mostly in Moldavia, gigan­
tic estates were leased: the Fischer Trust, founded in 1890, leased nearly
238.000 hectares.
The economic power o f the thin but strong modern bourgeoisie and
their command o f communication, education, culture, and also o f busi­
ness bureaucracy made the rising middle class bountiful partners for the
old elite. Nevertheless, thev could not compete with the political and ad­
ministrative power and social prestige o f the landed nobilitv and gentry.
Thev looked for political representation and connections among the old
elite and sought to put themselves on an equal footing with the nobilitv1
bv buying noble ranks. About three hundred business people acquired
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 199

patents o f nobility, roughly one-tenth o f them even attaining baronial

rank in Hungary. The nouveaux riches rushed to buy estates—not so much
for economic advantage as for status —and built mansions in the country­
side. The effort to assimilate, however, could not change their social status.
Thev remained second-class citizens or even noncitizens, outside the body
of the nation. The old noble elite looked down on them and rarelv toler­
ated their company.

THE “JEWISH QUESTION"

One o f the most important factors leading to exclusion, aside from the
persistence o f the aristocratic establishment and its values, was the non-
indigenous origin o f the new business and middle-class elite. In the rigid
framework o f noble society, social mobility was extremely slow or nonexi­
stent. The déclassé gentry could preserve their role in the sociopolitical
elite bv holding bureaucratic positions in the state and county apparatus
and in the arm\'. Even if they became intellectuals, a transformation that
began in the first half o f the nineteenth century, the landless gentry oc­
cupied state-related positions. Lawyers, the majority o f gentry intellec-
uials, did not engage in private practice or business law' but became judges
and prosecutors, part o f the bureaucracy. Downward mobility hardly ex­
isted. The same was true o f upward mobility, since the newly liberated
serfs, although free peasants, were still excluded from the body o f the na­
tion. Uneducated and alien to the urban environment, the vast majority
o f them could not merge into the rank and file o f the middle class.
As a consequence, a gap characterized the middle lavers o f the former
noble societies. This gap was filled by nonindigenous elements: Greeks,
Germans, and, most o f all, in the second half o f the nineteenth century,
Jew's. They were strongly urban and traditionally business- and education-
oriented. When the need arose and possibilities opened up for business
and intellectual positions, thev appeared without competition, yearning
to occupy these fields.
Greeks plaved an important role in Romania, w'herc the century o f Pha-
nariot rule up to 1821 had established their pivotal power. By represent­
ing the Ottoman Porte, the “ closed caste” o f the Phanariots, as the histo­
rian Nicolae Iorga (1933) characterizes them, formed the leading group
o f the political and business elite, although their significance declined
steeply after Romania gained independence. The Greeks’ role was also im­
portant in Hungary, especially in the early stage o f capitalist transforma-
200 SOCI AL C H A N G E S

tion, but it decreased, especially after Greece became independent in 1830,

when a great manv Greek businessmen repatriated.
The traditional German-speaking patrician laver, the founders o f a great
number o f Hungarian cities and townships, who plaved a pioneering role
in early capitalist business activity, mostly turned toward intellectual and
professional positions and rapidlv assimilated, becoming Hungarian na­
tionalists during the nineteenth centurv and an organic part o f the rising
middle class (Szelenyi 1998).
Partitioned Poland faced a different destinv. Germans became the back­
bone o f the entrepreneurial and middle class in Prussian Poland, where
these groups became very strong. Although two-thirds o f the population
o f Russian Poland and Galicia engaged in agriculture up until World War I,
in Poznania, this share was onlv +2 percent. Nearly 60 percent o f the pop­
ulation o f Prussian Poland worked in industry and services. A deliber­
ate germanization, however, strengthened the German elements in big
business and in various middle-class positions. “ There were hardly anv
Poles among [the] greater industrialists, bankers, or traders,” Piotr
Wandvcz says. Onlv 28 percent o f traders were Polish. Polish participa­
tion was stronger in small-scale industry. Nearly half o f the entrepreneurs
were Polish in Prussian Poland, but only a few employed more than 200
workers in the 1880s (Wandvcz 197+, 230).
In Prussian Poland, where the total number o f the Jews had dropped
to 2.5 percent o f the population bv 1900, thev did not piav a leading part
in the middle class, but in Russian Poland and Galicia, where nearly one
in ten inhabitants was Jewish, their role was pivotal. In the big, modern
cities Warsaw and Lodz, the industrial and administrative centers o f the
country, where the entrepreneurial middle class was most concentrated,
33 and 30 percent o f the population was Jewish, respectively (Sliwa 1997).
Together with Germans, they were strongly overrepresented among the
big banking and industrial bourgeoisie. Several families established their
wealth through armv contracting at the end o f the eighteenth century and
the beginning o f the nineteenth. The majority o f the registered 156 war
contractors in Warsaw were Jewish merchants (Kosim 1986,105,130). One
o f them, Szvmon Rosen, who settled in Warsaw in 1-95, began business
as a moneylender and continued as an armv contractor. During the 1830s,
he ran a leading commercial firm. His son Mathias graduated from the
Warsaw Lvzeum, and became one o f the pillars o f the modern entrepre­
neurial class in Poland. Leopold Kronenberg became the richest financier
and industrialist. M ost of the business magnates, the Kronenbergs,
Rosens, Kpsteins, Natansons, Rotwands, Lilpops, and Wavvelbcrgs, were
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 201

cither Jews or Germans. A xenophobic attitude emerged, characteristi­

cally expressed in 1880 in The Jen>s, the Germans, and Us, a popular pam­
phlet bv Jan Jelenski, a right-wing radical (Jcdlicki 1999, 279)- The Ger­
mans, however, soon assimilated. “ These Szlenkers, Temlers, Szweds,
Pfeifers . . . Lilpops, Strassburgers are already blood from our blood,” a
contemporary Polish baroness wrote one o f her friends (Kolodziejczvk
1986, 244).
The Jews, on the other hand, remained in many respects outside Pol­
ish society and were considered alien, and sometimes inimical. The posi­
tivists. represented bv Boleslaw Pais, recognized assimilated Jews as Poles,
since “ Jewishness does not so much refer to descent and religion, but rather
to darkness, pride, separatism, laziness, and exploitation.” A few years later,
however, Roman Dmowski and Jan Poplawski rejected assimilation as an
“ intrusion o f Jewishness into the midst o f the nation,” saving that Jews
remained foreign to Polish society because they could not “ understand
or feel its aspirations and interests” (quoted in Porter 2000,163,228). Jews,
nevertheless, occupied more and more middle-class positions in the coun­
try. Among the merchants, especially small retailers, Jews became an abso­
lute majority: 65 percent o f shopkeepers in Warsaw were Jewish at the end
o f the nineteenth century. They also played an important role in the grow ­
ing, but still small, intellectual stratum (Wrobel 1991).
The majority o f the Romanian entrepreneurial and middle class was Jew­
ish. Modern commerce was naturally concentrated in cities and towns,
which, unlike the Romanian peasant countryside, were strongly Jewish.
In 1900, 40 percent o f the urban population —some 280,000 people —
were Jews engaged in commerce and handicrafts (Rosen 1995). “ They
gained control over much o f the trade, industry, and finance. In time thcv
even acquired a foothold in agriculture bv leasing the large estates o f ab­
sentee landlords” (Stavrianos [1958 1 1963, 484).
The Jews were also the most important nonindigenous element in
Hungary, where their number rapidly increased tenfold and reached 5 per­
cent o f the population in the nineteenth century. One-third of them were
beggars, peddlers, and workers until 1848 (Hanak 1992). The other two-
thirds, legally excluded from various activities and landownership, were
innkeepers, small merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans. Thev easily ad­
justed to the economic booms that followed after 1848 and in 186“ . True,
in 1910, 30 percent o f the Polish Jews and more than 32 percent of the
Hungarian Jews were lumberjacks, skilled workers in printing and other
industries, day laborers, and domestic servants. However, roughly 80 per­
cent o f the industrial magnates were Jewish around World War I.
202 SOCIAL C H AN GE S

In this environment, the ideal o f a native “ gentleman” entrepreneur

emerged. In 1791, Jó zef Wybicki published his didactic novel Mysli poli­
tyczne 0 wolnosci cvwilnej (The Gentleman Turned Citizen), portraving im­
poverished Polish gentry who move to the city to open a factory. “ [IJn
our recent romances, engineers were idealized as heroes; they made for­
tunes, thev were loved, they [had] noble characters,” the enlightened Pol­
ish modernizer and writer Boleslaw Prus remarked a few decades later
(quoted in Jedlicki 1999, 57, >9+). Prus himself introduced tradesmen he­
roes, however, in his Lalka (The Doll), in 1890. Wokulski, although a suc­
cessful businessmen, is also a philanthropist. M oney for him is always a
means, not a goal. The idealized déclassé gentleman, a freedom fighter o f
the 1863 uprising turned capitalist, offered a model for a new Polish atti­
tude (Holmgren 1998). In 1870, M ór Jókai, the most popular writer o f
nineteenth-century Hungary, similarlv idealized the hero o f his Fekete
gyémántok (Black Diamonds), a late romantic daydream about a model
entrepreneur, a veteran o f the 1848 war o f independence, who is socially
sensitive, wants to raise up his workers to be small businessmen and co­
owners, and struggles against bad foreign investors and their local agents
(in this case, the Church). Jókai’s larger-than-life hero, Ivan Berend, a pa­
triot, inventor, and sportsman, embodied the nonexistent type o f m od­
ern Hungarian gentleman-turned-businessman.
In fact, 54 percent o f self-emploved people were Jewish in Hungary
in 1910, and more than 36 percent o f the Jew's became self-employed in
industrv, trade, and transportation. M ore than 20 percent o f the Jews
worked as clerks and employees in banking, industry, and other fields,
or in the free professions. Their share among clerks and employees in
banking and trade W'as more than 53 percent, and in industry, 43 percent.
Nearly half o f the medical doctors, 45 percent o f lawyers, 42 percent o f
journalists, 38 percent o f private engineers, and 23 percent o f actors were
Jewish in 1910 (Katus 1992, 97-98, T01-3). This highly urbanized popu­
lation played hardly any part in agriculture. More than 73 percent o f the
Jews worked in industry, handicrafts, commerce, and banking, and an­
other 11 percent in communications and the free professions. An in­
digenous, patriotic gentleman-entrepreneur was lacking in Central and
Eastern Europe.
The “ Jewish question” arose in Austria and to some extent in Bohemia
as well. In the Czech lands, unlike in Poland, Romania, and Hungary, the
Jewish minority was relatively unimportant. In 1850, only slightly more
than 75,000 Jew's lived in Bohemia, a number that increased to nearly
86,000 bv 1910. These numbers represented only i.~ and 1.3 percent o f
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 203

the contemporary population o f Bohemia, respectiv ely. True, the eman­

cipation o f Jews occurred relatively earlv there; they gained the right to
own landed property in 1841. Marriage and residence restrictions were
lifted in 1848. Full legal emancipation was granted in 1867. A strong Jew ­
ish assimilationist movement was established in the very same year to
“ spread love o f the homeland and o f the mother tongue among Czech
Jew's.” In 1900,54 percent o f the Bohemian Jews used Czech as an every­
day language. In Moravia, where the number o f Jews was higher and some
autonomy was granted them, the Czech-speaking layer constituted onlv
17 percent o f the Jews.
Regardless o f the relatively small number o f Jews, anti-Semitism fol­
lowed a familiar pattern. Two years after the legal emancipation o f Jews,
Jan Neruda, the leading writer in the country, wrote in his pamphlet Pro
starch zidovsy (On the Jewish Fear): “ The question is not the emancipa­
tion o f the Jews, but rather emancipation from the Jew's, so that we might
be able to free ourselves from the exploitation o f one’s fellow man.” Rudolf
Vrba accused the Jews o f dominating industry, banking, and the press, and
demanded state control o f banks and the stock market. He also urged ban­
ning Jewish immigration and removing Jewish students from public
schools. Czech nationalism looked upon the mostly German-speaking
Jewish minority as a reserve o f German nationalism, a gcrmanizing ele­
ment, the enemv o f the Czech nation. In 1892, the Svuj k svemu (Each to
His Own) movement launched a boycott campaign against Jewish shops.
During the 189" anti-German riots in Prague, besides attacking and de­
stroying German stores, coffee shops, and the German Theater and Schul-
vcrein, the mob also smashed the windows o f synagogues in Kralovske
Vinohradv and in Zizkov. The “ December storm” was a major trauma for
the Jews: “ The carefully constructed plans and cherished hopes . . . lav
strewn along the sidewalks o f Prague and tens o f smaller communities
together with the shards o f glass and broken furniture o f Jewish homes
and shops” (Kieval 1988, 21, 69, 72-73).
Although an indigenous bourgeoisie was much stronger there than in
Hungary, Poland, and Romania, Jews still played a profound role in Cis-
Leithanian business and among the ranks o f the emerging middle class.
According to William M cCagg’s pioneering calculations, Jewish partici­
pation in Viennese public institutions, including the National Bank, the
Chamber o f Commerce, and the Stock Exchange, grew from 25 percent
in 1858 to 60 percent in 1913. Their real foothold, however, was in bank­
ing, where their participation reached 37 percent in 1858 and had increased
to nearly >0 percent bv 1913. In Austria, Bohemia-Moravia, Galicia, and
204 SOCI AL C H A N G E S

other non-Hungarian parts o f the monarchy, as o f 1917, Jew's accounted

for 30 percent o f the directors o f industrial stock companies and 41 per­
cent o f industrial magnates, defined as directors o f seven or more com­
panies (M cCagg 1992,73,78). In 1910, Jews were well represented in bank­
ing ( 15 percent). Am ong the Jews paying the highest taxes, 32 percent were
in trade and 33 percent in industry. Prominent Jewish manufacturers such
as Leopold Pollack von Parnegg, Max Mandl, Isidor Mauthner, and the
Brunner family played key roles in the leading Austro-Bohemian textile
industry (ibid., 85-86).
Ethnic-religious divisions thus deepened the symbiosis and conflict lie-
tween the surviving aristocratic establishment and the emerging modern
society. The influence o f the rising modern elite was profoundly weak­
ened bv its strong nonindigenous contingent.

INCOMPLETE SOCIETIES

“ Incomplete” societies were strikingly different from dual societies. The

societies of the newiv independent Balkan nations emerged without a tra­
ditional elite because their own elites had been physically eliminated or
driven from these countries centuries earlier bv the occupying Ottoman
power. Instead, an alien elite, the Greek Phanariots in the Romanian Prin­
cipalities, and pashas, agas, spahis, avails, and derebevis in the other Balkan
areas, ruled the countries. Due to the peculiar Ottoman system, where
instead o f private landownership, the state’s (i.e., the Sultan’s) land and
income w'cre managed by an appointed bureaucratic-military elite, the lat­
ter constituted the Balkans’ political-economic and military “ nobility.”
This alien bureaucratic class was joined bv domestic Serbian, Bulgar­
ian, Bosnian, and Albanian pseudo-elites. The subordinated native elite
consisted, first of all, o f the village and knezina chiefs who served as mid­
dlemen between the Ottoman authorities and the local population. Maria
Todorova speaks o f a “ lack o f continuity o f political elites in the Balkans
(Todorova i99~ i^i ). Balkan towns comprised an Ottoman nucleus, the
carsija, with a small group o f assimilated merchants, artisans, and m on­
eylenders. “ Those few Serbs who do live in towns as tradesmen dress as
Turks and live according to Turkish customs . . . during revolts and w ars
they either shut themselves up with the' lurks in cities or run away to G er­
many,” Yuk Karadzic said in the early nineteenth century (quoted in
Halpern and Halpern iy - 2, 12).
After gaining independence, the new states rushed to build huge bu­
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 205

reaucracies and armies. “ The new political class which carried out the rev­
olution in Serbia was made up o f manv bajduks, o f some intellectuals, and
o f the "better people, who were able to feed and arm two, ten, or twentv
serving companions’ . . . the-.jjazdas,” Traian Stoianovich says (Stoianovich
1963, 311). The hajduks, bold popular fighters and outlaw heroes, now
became important elements o f the new “governing class.” The extremely
small educated class also gained important ground in the mostly illiterate
countries. In countries o f mass illiteracy (70-80 percent), the few educated
men w'cre badlv needed in state administration and business.
The formerly subordinated native elite and the new military, adminis­
trative, and educated leaders followed the Ottoman tradition o f exploit­
ing bureaucratic offices to get rich in a few years. The leading writers o f
die age in Bulgaria targeted this phenomenon. Ivan Vazov, in his Tojemlad,
zdrav, intelijjenten (He Is Young, Healthy, Cultured), satirized the rush
for bureaucratic sinecures. His antihero, a young man with every advan­
tage, refuses to consider any employment outside the bureaucracy. An­
ton Strasimirovs drama Kasta (1908) bitterly attacked the corruption o f
government officials (Moser 1972, 103, r i ) . The new national elite cen­
tered on the city. Their number was limited. Including all the settlements
with more than 2,000 inhabitants, that is, cities and large villages together,
only 9 percent o f Montenegro’s, 10 percent o f Serbia’s, 13 percent o f Bosnia-
Herzegovina’s, and roughly 20 percent o f Bulgaria’s population lived in
towns. Serbian figures for 1910 illustrate the overwhelming predominance
o f the peasantry in these countries. At that time, 5 percent o f the popu­
lation was employed in public offices and professions and 4 percent in
trade. Some 7 percent o f the country’s inhabitants worked in industry,
mostly in handicrafts. Even in Bosnia-Hcrzegovina, which reached a
higher degree o f industrial dev elopment than Serbia and Bulgaria to­
gether, more than 25,000 out o f 29,000 industrial establishments “ used
only the labour o f their proprietors” (Palairet 1997, 229). In the Balkan
countries overall, only 1 percent o f the active population was employed
in large-scale industry.
During the last two or three decades before World War I, an impor­
tant new social group emerged as part o f the new national elite, the well-
to-do peasantry. These decades were characterized by an increased frag­
mentation o f peasant landed estates. Big estates did not exist in most of
these countries, and at the turn o f the century, 97 percent o f Serbian peas­
ants had only small properties, insufficient for marketing produce. Nearly
60 percent o f the peasants owned few er than five hectares o f land, and
less than 4 percent owned more than twentv hectares (Tomasevich 1955,
206 SOCIAL C H A N G E S

206). This thin layer o f successful rich peasants became v illage merchants
and moneylenders. They sent their children to school and became an in­
tegral part o f the new elite. In his social drama Panntc (1 9 0 7 ), Petko
Todorov bitterly attacked this village elite who wielded economic and po­
litical power. In a symbolic gesture o f social justice and unification, Milka,
the daughter o f the rich corbadzi o f the village, leaves her family to join
Dimitar, the teacher and leader o f popular forces (Moser 19 7 2 , 1 7 7 ).
The Balkan societies, which had lacked their own elites and been “ in­
complete” during Ottoman times, thus began establishing native bu-
reaucratic-militarv-merchant elites.

THE LOWER LAYERS OF DUAL AND INCOMPLETE SOCIETIES:

PEASANTS AND WORKERS

The duality o f traditional and modern characterized both the upper and
lower lavers o f the Central European dual societies. N ot onlv did the po­
sition and status o f the old elite remain in place, but the overwhelming
majority o f the peasantry also endured. Their “ disappearance” distin­
guished the West, although onlv in Britain did this actually occur. In con­
tinental Western Europe, the peasantry remained a significant minority,
and its upper lavers merged into the ranks o f an ever-growing middle class.
In Central and Eastern Europe, the reduction o f the peasantry in the
active population had hardly begun. Well-industrialized Austria-Bohemia
was an exception. Peasants constituted onlv 34-35 percent o f the popula­
tion o f Upper and Lower Austria and Bohemia-Moravia-Silesia in 1910.
Although illiteracy had not disappeared, it was no longer perpetuated: as
early as 1880, 95-99 percent o f school-age children attended schools. The
western provinces o f Austria-Hungarv approached the Western European
standard.
The peasantry, however, constituted between two-thirds and three-
quarters o f the population in the other countries o f Central and Eastern
Europe, including the eastern part o f Austria-Hungarv. In Poland and
Hungary, where the percentage o f peasants in the population decreased
from 70-80 percent to 62-64 percent between the 1860s and 1910s, mod­
ern social transformation had at least begun. In Galicia and Bukovina, -3
percent o f the active population still worked in agriculture in 1910; in Dal­
matia, 83 percent; and in Croatia, -9 percent. In Romania, this propor­
tion was 81 percent in i860 and 75 pcrccnr in 1910. These figures were typ­
ical of the Balkans in general: the peasantry constituted 82 and “ 5 percent
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 207

o f the Bulgarian population in i860 and 1910, respectively, and 89 percent

and 82 percent in Serbia in the same years. Traditional peasant societies
continued to predominate.
They suffered from the overwhelming presence o f the big estates. “ We
village folk are pressed together as fish caught in a net: the manor-lands,
stretching out 011 all sides, squeeze the life out o f us,” Reymont’s hero
complains. “ Ye cannot throw a stone but it falls on the manor-lands . . .
and ye are taken to the court—sentenced—fined—imprisoned.” In win­
ter, “famine was looking in at the bvres. . . warm meals were served only
once a day; and people went to the miller in ever-increasing numbers to
borrow a few bushels o f Hour that they were to pay for [with] later
work. . . . Others went to Yankel, begging him to lend a screw' o f salt, or
a quart o f groats, or a loaf o f bread” (Reymont 1925, 2: 269, 252-53).
Peasant life did not change much during the century: there was solid
continuity in everything from working methods to eating habits and en­
tertainment, lifestyle, and all the superstitions o f the peasantry. In a story
by Ivan Vazov from the 1870s, an old Bulgarian peasant woman takes her
sick grandson to a monastery in search o f a cure. “ ‘ The devil take vou!
What businesses have vou here, Iliitsa?’ The monk asked impatiently ‘M y
grandson is ill. . . . Where is the old abbot? . . . I want him to read over
my grandchild.’ . . . ‘What can I do for him if he’s ill!’ The monk angrily
muttered. ‘ You can do nothing but God can do everything’ ” (Balkan
Range 1976, 109).
Although emancipated, peasant majorities still remained excluded
from political society in their nations. With one insignificant exception,
peasants did not have voting rights and could not influence politics on
their own behalf. In Poland under tsarist rule, this possibility did not ex­
ist at all; in Hungary, only 6 percent o f the people had voting privileges.
In Romania, out o f 5 million inhabitants, only 20,000 people gained di­
rect voting rights.
This exclusion was connected to the educational level o f the peasants.
At the end o f the nineteenth century, 70 percent o f the population o f
Poland remained illiterate. The figure for unskilled workers and day la­
borers from villages rose to 75-80 percent. Although from the 1880s on,
secret teaching societies, sometimes called “ flying universities,” were or­
ganized bv patriotic educational activists to cultivate Polish language,
history, and religion, thev rarely reached the countryside. According to
Anna Zarnowska’s striking figures, only 20 percent o f school-age children
in Warsaw—the “ city o f illiterates,” as it w as called —attended primary
schools in 1880. The percentage had increased to only 25 percent bv the
208 SOCI AL C H AN G ES

start o f World War I (Zarnowska 19 96,139,1+2, 144). “ In Vola,” says one

o f Revmont’s peasants, “ there is a school, which mv children attended for
three winters running. What is the result? Thev cannot even read in a
prayer book. Devil take such teaching!” (Reymont 1925, 1: 220).
The Hungarian educational situation was much better. MariaThcrcsa
had taken the first important steps toward modern mass education in
1774. Her Ratio Educationis made compulsorv the establishment o f
schools in every village and parish. However, in 1868, the vear Jozscf
Eotvos’s modern school act introduced free, compulsorv' clementarv ed­
ucation, 68 percent o f the population was still illiterate. Before World
War I, this figure decreased to 33 percent—that is, everv third adult did
not know' how to read or write. The implementation o f the law' was also
incomplete. Around the turn o f the centurv, onlv 82 percent o f school-
age children attended primarv schools. Bv the start o f the war, nearly 90
percent were enrolled.
The schooling situation was much worse in the eastern and southern
provinces o f Austria-Hungarv: o f 6 million inhabitants o f Galicia in 1886,
more than 4.8 million were illiterate. In 1910, 59 percent o f the popula­
tion remained illiterate, and nearly 70 percent of school-age children did
not attend schools (Himka 1988,59-60, 64). In Dalmatia, Bukovina, and
Bosnia-Herzegovina, respectively, only 67, 36, and 15 percent o f school-
age children attended school. The great majority o f the population in the
countryside lacked basic reading and writing skills. The conditions in the
latter provinces approached those o f the Balkans as a whole. Until the mid
nineteenth century, virtually the entire population, roughly 90-95 per­
cent, w'as illiterate. During the last quarter o f a century before World War I,
schooling made impressive progress in Romania. At the time o f unifica­
tion, Moldavia had no public primary schools at all, and Wallachia had
1,635 rural primarv schools. The law ofi8 64 introduced compulsory four-
vear elementary education, but was not effectively enforced. Twenty years
later, only 2^ percent o f school-age children were enrolled in the coun­
tryside. N ew school laws at the turn o f the century resulted in important
improvements: in 1900, only 40 percent o f school-age children were en­
rolled in schools, but by 1909, the number had reached 61 percent. The
reality, however, remained stark because o f poverty and ignorance: fewer
than two-thirds o f the officially enrolled students attended school. At the
turn o f the century, only 11 percent o f the rural Romanian population was
literate, compared to the 40 percent in urban areas (Ronnas 1984, 22~-32).
The literacy rate o f the rural population over eight years o f age had in­
creased to 33 percent bv 1912 (Hitchins 1994, i~i).
 SOCI AL C H AN G ES 20 9

When two British women traveled from Pristina to Vuehitern in Ser­

bia in the 1860s, thev visited a school that was, as thev described it, “ a lit­
tle low den, with earthen unsmoothed floor, and a few broken benches."
When thev learned from their guide that none o f the Albanian girls thev
met who “ studied” at the school could read or write, thev asked: “ ‘ [T]hcn
what is it that vou do learn there?' "To sav our pravers.’ . . . ‘Can vou un­
derstand these prayers?' 'X o .'” In another place, thev visited a school
where Serbian girls studied to “ read Serbian and Old-Slavonic, and write
a little. "That is all that we can teach them,’ explained Katerina, the teacher,
fo r it is all we know ourselves’ ” (Mackenzie and Irbv f i8ft~] 1 8 " , 2— ,
279, 4 0 4 ) . Around the turn o f the ccnturv, the illiteracy rate decreased to
79 percent in Serbia, but education was still in its infancy.
In Bulgaria, the first schoolbook in modern Bulgarian appeared in 1824,
the first secular school was established in 1835 in Gabrovo, and girls’ schools
were opened in 1857 and 1862 in Stara-Zagora and Gabrovo, respectively.
By World War I, however, only half o f the school-age generation was en­
rolled in schools (Peeters and Zlatanoff 1909, 2 2 ,3 3 , 35, 2 1 1 - r ) . The illit­
eracy rate stood at 72 percent o f the population. Even a little elementary
education made people “ learned” and respected. Hadji Gcncho, protag­
onist o f a story by Luben Karavclov, one o f the founders o f modern Bul­
garian fiction, tvpicallv justifies postponing a decision bv saving: “ I must
ask Naidcn, too, because Naiden, vou know, is a learned and clever m a n -
seven years he has studied” (Balkan Range i9"6, 69). Even bv the early
twentieth century, in the best cases, only one-third o f the population was
literate (Berend and Rdnki 1982,56-58).
Persisting patterns o f rural life in the Balkans were clearlv signaled by
the slowlv disintegrating village communities. In Romania in 1864,
roughly one-third o f the peasantry was concentrated in free v illages
(razqi) and so-called mixed villages. The land o f these free v illages, and
o f some o f the mixed villages, was owned bv the entire community and
administered bv the obstia, an assembly o f all the adult members o f the
community, men and women alike. Ownership was granted on a first-
come basis. I f somebody cleared the woods, the land belonged to him.
In the most archaic cases, such as the town o f Cimpulung in 1846, when
a ruling was published, peasants did not have unequal and hereditary
shares o f the communal land. The entire property and its revenue belonged
to the community. In other cases, there was unequal and hereditary dis­
tribution o f land within the community Local policing and jurisdiction
were also the assembly's responsibility, as was the collection o f taxes, ex­
acted from the village as a lump sum, which the obstia then divided among
210 SOCIAL C H A N G E S

the households. These village communities practiced an ancient type o f

pastoral and agricultural combined economy. The life o f the village was
largelv tied to the forests. Thev raised animals and from time to time
cleared sections o f the woods and cultivated small pieces o f land. Ac­
cording to Henri Stal'd, it was a kind o f “ itinerant agriculture” —a vast
pastureland, sprinkled with enclosed islets for cereal crops among the pas­
toral enclosures, both periodically moved. Even the plains remained ba­
sically pastureland. The community did not cultiv ate more than from one-
fortieth to one-third o f the arable land and did not even use plows until
the second half o f the nineteenth century. Such communities survived into
the early decades o f the twentieth century, especially in the hilly and moun­
tainous regions (Stahl 1980,37-54, 77, 211).
In South Slav rural areas, traditional large families o f three generations
and relatives, sometimes as many as from sixty to eighty or more people,
worked together in household units called kuca or zadruga. The leading
intellectual o f Serbian national revival, Vuk Karadzic, gave an excellent
description o f this institution: “ The Serbs live mainly in zadrugas. In some
houses there are four or five married men. There arc as many mjats [sleep­
ing quarters] as there are married men, and the house itself is only for
communal eating and the place in which the old women and men
sleep. . . . Every household has a staresina [headman] who governs and
guides the household and all its property” (quoted in Halpern and Hal-
pern 19 72 ,16 ). From this report, we know o f zadrugas with thirteen mar­
ried couples, but in 1863, in Orasac, the largest household had twenty-
three members. In later decades, however, successive divisions o f the
zadruga took place. A great number o f married couples established their
own households. Mutual help, nevertheless, continued: moba, or collec­
tive cultivation o f corn; pozajmica, mutual help with harvesting and other
forms o f labor exchange; and sprajn, reciprocal loans of livestock, equip­
ment, and even cash (Halpern and Halpern 1972, 4 3,52 -5 3).
H alf o f the Romanian landed peasant families owned fewer than 5
hectares o f land, and a further 14 percent owned 5 to 10 hectares. Thus
nearly a million families lived in very poor conditions. The vast majority
o f such Balkan poverty plots o f less than 10 hectares were able to sell only
a marginal portion (in the best case, 20 percent) of their products. Some
8y percent o f Serbian and 86 percent o f Bulgarian peasant economies in
the early twentieth century practiced what was essentially subsistence fann­
ing. The deep poverty, lack o f political rights, and immobility of the il­
literate peasant masses did not change much.
N ot only were the peasantry’s numbers unquestionably dwindling,
 SOCIAL C H A N G ES 21 1

especially in Austria-Hungarv and Poland, but many o f die liberated peas­

ants were beginning to be transformed into urban workers. M ost o f these
peasants in transition came from the landless peasantry—39 percent, for
example, in Hungary, where those with too little land to make a living
(1-3 hectares) made up roughly 30 percent o f the peasantry. Their rank
and file was supplemented bv new generations o f landed peasant families
who either could not inherit land or, because o f the large number o f chil­
dren, inherited only small fractions.
A great many o f these peasants became wage laborers, who at a mini­
mum sought seasonal work. In Ludmila Podjavorinska’s novel The
Woman, the Slovak peasant Stephan Zatko works “ until Christmas load­
ing beets into the railroad wagons. After Christmas he took various jobs,
ice-quarrying or wood-cutting, o r . . . "propping the wall1 in the city while
waiting for one merchant or another to hire someone to carry a sack o f
flour or sugar. . . . At dawn he had to take the one-hour walk into the city
in bone-biting cold. At dusk he came home, happy if he had earned some
forty or sixty farthings.” A large part o f the peasantry had to leave the vil­
lages and look for work as harvesters on big estates. The female heroine
o f the same novel, Iva, “ had gone to the harvest three years ago. . . . The
farm agent transported the hired men and women out somewhere to
the Hungarian Lowland” (Podjavorinska [1909] 1976, 158, 148). Others
looked for jobs in railroad construction, water regulation, and building
work in the growing cities. During the second half o f the nineteenth cen­
tury, grandiose earthworks, waterworks, and railroad construction offered
job opportunities for unskilled peasants all over the region. Some o f them
were employed by industrial firms as seasonal workers in flour mills, sugar
refineries, and breweries, which needed a relatively large number o f sea­
sonal workers during the peak period o f three or four months around fall.
Roughly 14 percent o f the Romanian peasantry, about 2 0 0 ,0 0 0 fam­
ilies, were landless and became wage laborers. The number o f poor small­
holders, however, was much larger: in 19 0 0 ,4 7 2 ,0 0 0 peasant households,
4 0 percent o f the total, had no draft animals at all (Hitchins 1994- i~o).
The number o f Romanian peasants who left the land to make their liv­
ings as wage earners remained much lower than in Poland and Hungary
because o f the obligatory contractual w ork introduced by the 1866 law.
According to the law, which the police and armv enforced, peasants had
to contract with a landlord or arendas, leasing a piece of land for payment
in kind and labor service. This system was highly exploitative and bound
peasants to the land, blocking their mobility'.
Nearly half o f the peasants in Poland and Hungary during much of
212 SOCI AL C H A N GE S

the time period under discussion left their homes and gradually adjusted
to the new workers’ lifestyle. Some o f them moved to cities and became
unskilled industrial workers. This kind o f mobility was also characteristic
in the western provinces o f Austria-Hungary In 1900, 30 percent o f the
peasant population o f Austria and 36 percent o f that o f Bohemia became
agricultural wageworkers.
Altogether only about one-third o f the peasants had enough property
to remain independent farmers. In Hungary, only 10 percent o f the peas­
ants became well-to-do and acquired quasi-middle-class status. Their num­
ber was less than 3 percent in Romania, where 36,000 peasant families
owned farms o f 10 to 50 hectares, altogether nearly 700,000 hectares, or
18 percent o f all peasant lands.
The native peasantry, in many cases, was confronted with landowners
and employers of different ethnic groups. In Poland and Hungary, peas­
ants often worked for Jewish entrepreneurs. Various minority groups,
such as Ukrainians in Russian Poland and Galicia, worked on Polish big
estates. Slovak peasants in northern Hungary and Romanian peasants in
Transylvania worked for Hungarian landlords. Romanian peasants in the
Romanian kingdom had to make contracts with the mostly Jewish aren-
da$i. The role o f the nonindigenous bourgeoisie and middle class gener­
ated class-based ethnic conflicts in most o f the countries in Central and
Eastern Europe. The social conflicts and sharp polarization o f nineteenth-
centurv societies that in the West led to the formation o f Marxist work­
ers’ parties, mass trade unions, and class confrontation surfaced as eth­
nic-religious confrontation and hostility in Central and Eastern Europe.
The most dramatic embodiments o f this social conflict were a mid-
nineteenth-ccnturv jacquerie in Galicia and an early twentieth-century one
in Romania. In western Galicia, in 1846, peasants slaughtered "28 land­
lords and destroyed 4^4 manors (Himka 1988, 24). The Romanian peasant
uprising was a consequence o f the exploitative agricultural system, a special
mixture o f serfdom and capitalism, unique in modern Europe. As David
Mitranv puts it, the landlords and renters enjoyed all the advantages, while
the peasants suffered all the disadvantages o f both systems (Mitranv 1930,
80). The Romanian peasants, who had long tolerated subhuman living
conditions, erupted in a bloody revolt in March 190". Thousands o f peas­
ants turned against their bovar landlords, but most o f the absentee estate
owners were invisible to them. Their real anger and brutal hostility were
directed against the well-known middlemen, the Jewish renters, and often
against Jewish shopkeepers and moneylenders. The uprising developed
into an anti-Jewish pogrom, beginning in Botosani and expanding to in-
 SOCIAL C H A N G E S 213

elude all o f Moldavia, and then Wallachia. A peasant armv attacked

Gala^i, and four thousand peasants marched on Bucharest. Thev burned
Jewish houses and killed thousands o f Jew's, frightening the entire regime.
At last, in April, 120,000 troops suppressed the uprising and killed about
10,000 peasants (Seton-Watson [1934] 1963,386-8-). Ethnic-religious hos­
tility was widespread, however, and fueled extreme nationalist, right-wing
populist movements and ideas all over the area.
The duality o f the society in its upper layers was also clearly visible
in the lower strata. While the traditional, slowly disintegrating peasant
m ajority was preserved but excluded from political society, a modern
industrial and service working class also appeared. Its numbers surpassed
those o f the peasants only in Austria-Bohcmia: 52 percent o f the Bohcmian-
Moravian-Silesian and 46 percent o f the Upper and Lower Austrian work­
ing population were employed in industry, trade, and transportation.
Small wonder that late nineteenth-centurv Czech realist literature pro­
duced the first working-class writings in the literature o f the region. Jan
Neruda, the “ Czech Dickens,” reported the atmosphere o f the first M ay
Day celebration in Prague: “ With a peaceful vet iron step there marched
on the First of May, 1890, endless and boundless legions o f workers’ bat­
talions. . . . It was a mighty march, irresistible, as when the waves o f the
ocean rush forward. . . . Red badges, red neckties . . . [the | color o f the
world socialist m ovem ent. . . the colors fly today over the heads o f those
who fight for full social equality” (Neruda 1983, 211-12). Petr Bczruc’s self-
conscious proletarian voice in his Silesian Songs (“ I am a hideous pitman
just sprung from the mine” ) is equally unique:

Ye lords of the mines below;

The mines flare and reek, and there comes a day,
A day when w e’ll take what we own.
( H c/ .r u c [ l y o y | 1 9 2 9 , t8 6 , 18 8)

The proportion o f industrial workers did not surpass 23-25 percent in

Poland and Hungary, 19 percent in Galicia and Bukovina, 13 percent in
Croatia, and 9 percent o f the active population in Dalmatia. In Romania,
only 28,000 workers were employed bv industrial firms, mostly small-
scale, in i860. The number increased to 200,000, or 10 percent ot the ac­
tive population, bv 1913, and roughly half o f them worked in big indus­
trial firms with at least 100 workers (Constantinescu i960). The emerging
modern industrial working class remained connected to the villages. Keith
Hitchins rightly stresses that unskilled Romanian urban workers “ usually
preserved their links to the v illage and continued to obtain a part of their
2F-4- SOCIAL C H A N G E S

income from agriculture'’ (Hitchins ¡99+, 163). The same was true all over
Central and Eastern Europe.
Illiteracy among workers, male and female alike, was high: 54 percent
and 56 percent o f male and female workers, respectively, were illiterate in
Poland around the turn o f the century. The proportion o f illiterates among
unskilled workers and day laborers reached percent among men and
80 percent among women (Zarnowska 1996, 139).
Roughly half o f the industrial workforce o f Central and Eastern E u ­
rope worked in small-scale industries before World War I. These workers —
half members o f the family, half servants —more closely resembled work­
ers prior to the Industrial Revolution than modern factory workers, who
hardlv existed at all in these incomplete societies, which preserved their
peasant character. Of the ~ to 10 percent o f the industrial population o f
the Balkan countries, only 1 percent worked in modern big factories, while
the others were traditional artisans. This extremely small group o f w ork­
ers was essentially all male. Women were scarcely permitted to leave the
household.
Like the upper layers, the traditional and modern lower strata o f soci­
ety in Central and Eastern Europe differed ethnically. The traditional layer
o f the upper stratum was indigenous, but the modern layer was strongly
recruited from nonindigenous members o f the society. Here, too, the lack
o f mobility and proto-industrialization in the previous period caused a
shortage of trained, skilled urban workers. As documented earlier, a great
part o f the skilled workers were German, Bohemian, and Jewish. In 1910,
43 percent o f the foremen and 44 percent o f the workers in Hungarian
industry did not speak Hungarian. Roughly 30 to 35 percent o f the Jew ­
ish population o f Poland and Hungary became workers around the turn
o f the century. “ Nearly half o f the organized masses o f the workers who
moved to industrial centers were recruited from non-Hungarian ethnic­
ities,” the early twentieth-century Hungarian historian Gvula Szckfii ob­
serves (Szckfii 1920, 324).
The distinction between indigenous and nonindigenous was both
feeble and overpoliticized. The so-called nativ e or national groups were
in realitv mixtures o f various ethnicities themselves. Thev had moved to
and settled in these countries during the previous centuries, assimilating
into the dominant ethnic groups. Slav's and Germans, for example, min­
gled with Hungarians and Romanians all over the Austro-Hungarian em­
pire. Various kinds o f Slavic peoples —Poles and Ukrainians, Serbs and
Croats —also intermixed. Irrespective o f whether thev had lived in the
country lor several generations or were relatively freshly settled new 1111-
 SOCI AL C H A N GE S 215

migrants, unassimilated groupings o f Jews, Germans, and other nation­

alities were considered nonnative and treated accordingly. When the Jew ­
ish innkeeper sides with the Poles in an argument between Polish and Ger­
man peasants in a pub, one o f Wladvstaw Reym ont’s peasants shouts:
“ ‘What, a Jew to side with our folk! W ho ever heard o f such a thing!’ . . .
‘Yea, I am a Jew,’ said the innkeeper, ‘but . . . born here as you were, as
mv father and grandfather were too! . . . Am I not, then, one o f you?’ ”
(Revmont 1925,3: 283). H e was, indeed, no doubt, not considered to be
one o f them.

THE DEMOGRAPHIC REVOLUTION

During the nineteenth century, Europe’s modern social transformation

from a traditional agricultural society into an industrial one was insepa­
rable from the population explosion. The population began to grow rap­
idly in the eighteenth century, and its growth rate increased from 0.5 to
2 percent annually during the nineteenth. Birthrates in Western Europe
decreased from 36-38 births per 1,000 inhabitants in the 1780s to 25-30
births by 1910, as a consequence o f rapid urbanization, increased educa­
tional level, and drastic changes in lifestyle and environment. Death rates
declined even more dramatically. A better food supply and advances in
medical practice, including the elimination o f medieval diseases such as
cholera, plague, and smallpox, sharply reduced mortality after the 1740s.
The death rate declined from 34-35 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants to 14-20
during the century. Life expectancy at birth jumped from twenty-five to
fifty years in Western Europe.
The “demographic revolution," as the French demographer Adolphe
Landrv called it (Landrv 1934), led to a population growth unparalleled
in history. During a single century, population increased fourfold in
Britain and nearly doubled in France. Western Europe altogether saw a
population increase o f 360 percent. Did this impressive demographic
change generate the Industrial Revolution because traditional agricultural
economies could not feed the radically increased population? Or, con­
versely, did the revolutions in industry and agriculture lead to the demo­
graphic changes? This “ chicken or egg” type o f question has been answered
in contrasting wavs, and the demographic revolution has been interpreted
either as the cause or a consequence o f the Industrial Revolution.
In Central and Eastern Europe, the causal connection between the two
phenomena is much less ambiguous than in Western Europe. In that part
216 SOCI AL C HA NG ES

o f the continent, the demographic revolution clearlv preceded the process

o f industrialization. Revolutionary changes did not transform the econ­
omy until the last third o f the nineteenth century Internal economic fac­
tors thus did not induce or reinforce any radical change in demographic
trends. However, while the population o f the European core increased
three and a half times, the population also trebled on the peripheries o f
the continent between 1800 and 191+- Furthermore, the intracore and in­
traperipheral v ariation o f population growth rates was also comparable:
Britain’s fourfold, Holland’s threefold, and France’s less than twofold pop­
ulation growth was mirrored bv Russia’s more than fourfold, Poland’s
more than threefold, the Balkans’ and H ungary’s twofold, and Mediter­
ranean Europe’s less than twofold population increases (sec tabic 3).
Population growth had a slower start in Central and Eastern Europe
during the first decades o f the century. The population o f the Habsburg
empire, for example, increased by 5.3 percent between 1800 and 1820, but
by 9.1 and 9.6 percent between 1880 and 1890 and 1890 and 1900, respec­
tively. Between 1830 and 1910, annual population growth in most o f the
countries o f Central and Eastern Europe surpassed both that in Britain
(0.80 percent) and Europe as a whole (0.82 percent). Russia grew at 1.13
percent per year, Romania at 1.02, Serbia at 1.08, and Bulgaria at 1.87
(Bairoch 1976b, 283).
Despite the absence o f an industrial revolution in Central and Eastern
Europe, a demographic revolution did occur there. However, the factors
generating rapid population growth were radically different from those
in the West. Marriage customs, for instance, changed significantly in West­
ern Europe. Based on a comparative demographic analysis, John Hajnal
has differentiated Western European and Eastern European marriage
patterns, separated along a dividing line from Trieste to St. Petersburg.
In Western Europe, as a consequence o f rapid urbanization, industri­
alization, and changing lifestyles, more people remained unmarried and
people married at a later age than previously. In contrast, marriage cus­
toms remained almost unchanged in Eastern Europe, which was charac­
terized bv earlier marriage and a higher marriage rate (Hajnal 1965). Be­
tween 1—8 and 1895, only 3.5 percent o f the women in Hungary who died
at the age of 50 and over were single. Only 10 percent o f the young women
between the age o f 25 and 30 were unmarried in Hungary, while this num­
ber was 35 to >0 percent in Western Europe. Marriage rates in 1910 were
much lower in Western Europe —fifteen to sixteen marriages per 1,000
inhabitants - - than in Hungary (eighteen marriages) or in Serbia (twenty
marriages). Furthermore, people married five or six years earlier in East­
ern FAirope. In Hungary 111 the second half o f the nineteenth century.
 SOCIAL C H A N G E S 217

TABLE 3 European Populations, iSoo-iqio (in millions)

1 9 1 0 as %
1800 1850 1880 1910 of 1800

Kuropean C o r e 45.1 1 00.4 124.7 1 62.4 360.1

Scandinavia 5.0 7.9 10.7 ¡3 .7 2 7 4 .0
M ed ite rra n ea n Regio n 30.5 43.6 4 9.3 59.5 195.1
Russia 35.5 6 8.5 97 .7 160.7 4 5 2 .7
Poland 9.0 — 16.9 2 9.0 322.2
H u n g ar y 9.3 13.8 15.7 2 0.9 224.7
Rom ania (2 .0 ) 3.7 4.6 7.0 189.2
Serbia (0.2) 0.9 1.8 2.9 322.2
Bulgaria — — 2.8 4.3 1 53.6

s o u r c e : C a rlo C ip o lla, éd., The F.mcrjinice o f Industrial Sucictics (L o n d o n : C ollins/

Fon tan a B o o k s, i g - ;) , - + - - 4 8 .

women’s modal age at marriage was eighteen, and that o f men was twentv-
rhree (Andorka 1994, 318). In Serbia, from the 1880s up to the mid twen­
tieth century, the overwhelming majority o f men and women married be­
tween the ages o f sixteen and twenty-seven (Halpern and Halpcrn
1972, 26).
Birthrates and death rates exhibited major dissimilarities as well. The
most visible difference was the almost unchanged birthrate in Eastern Eu­
rope. While birthrates sharply declined from 36-38 to 25-30 per 1,000 in
Western Europe, in Eastern Europe, they at most decreased only from
35-40 to 36-37 per 1,000 inhabitants, and they remained at the previous
level in the Balkans throughout the nineteenth century. In Hungary, the
birthrate declined slightly, to 36 per 1,000 inhabitants. In Romania, the
figure was 43; in Bulgaria, 4 1; in Serbia, 38; and in Russia, 46 (Armen-
gaud 1973,56). This situation can be interpreted as a consequence o f the
preserved rural-agricultural society and lower level o f education.
Imported improvements in health care, especially v accination and the
progressive elimination o f medieval diseases such as smallpox, plague, and
cholera, were the real reason for the population explosion in the hardlv
changed economic environment o f Central and Eastern Europe. Wide­
spread water regulations also halted malaria.
In the Habsburg empire, Maria Theresa followed the modern West­
ern European model bv introducing her Normatimm Sanitntis, the ba­
sics o f a modern health system. The Hungarian Public Health Act of i8~6
followed the Western European pattern o f registration o f deaths and in­
vestigation o f cause of'dcath. Sanitary norms were established for lions-
21 8 social changes

ing, schools, shops, and institutions. Prevention became the duty o f pub­
lic authorities. Medical practice was regulated, and childbirth became
much safer. Cities and settlements with more than 6,000 inhabitants were
required to employ medical doctors; small villages jointly employed a
kororvos (district physician) w ho treated the poor free o f charge. State
food inspection, first aid, and ambulances were also introduced (Matle-
kovits 1898).
Some form o f public health regulation was established all over the re­
gion. Health services reached from one-quarter to one-half die Western
level in terms o f number o f medical doctors and hospital beds by the end
o f the nineteenth century. There were 34 and 39 medical doctors per
100.000 inhabitants in Germany and France, respectively. The Austrian-
Bohemian level matched this standard (35 doctors), while the Hungarian
level remained somewhat below it (23 doctors). The number o f hospital
beds in Hungary stood at half the Austrian-Bohemian level. Transylvania
had 15 doctors per 100,000 people; Bukovina and Galicia, 12; and Croa­
tia and Russia, 9 (Katus 1979, 1129)-
The results o f the imported agricultural revolution were equally im­
portant. Better food supply, improved nutrition, and a halt to famine had
a significant impact on population growth. In Kiskunhalas, Hungary, de­
mographic crises in 1679, 1709, and 1739 reversed the entire population
increase every thirty years (Melegh 2000, 278). Famines and epidemics
also caused a dramatic increase o f death rates in Bohemia—from 30 to
nearly 40 per 1,000 —during the last two decades o f the eighteenth cen­
tury. Calculations based on the 1777 census show' death rates above 40
per 1,000 in Hungary, which climbed to 49 per 1,000 in 1784 (Gyula
Benda 2000,131). The famines o f 1788-89 and 1816-17 in Hungary caused
100.000 deaths, and cholera killed a quarter o f a million people in 1831
and 1873. In Romania, severe drought and famine in the countryside in
1873-74 and smallpox and cholera epidemics in urban areas in the same
decade were probably the last “ medieval” scourges. In Poland, great epi­
demics dissipated from the late eighteenth century onward.
As a result, death rates began to decline, although they remained at
higher levels than in Western Europe: the death rate decreased to about
25 per 1,000 inhabitants in Hungary, 26 in Romania, and 30 in Russia, as
compared to 14-18 deaths per 1,000 in Western Europe. This more mod­
erate decline, and an even more moderate decline in the birthrate, was
enough to generate high population growth.
Declining death rates led to higher life expectancy. During the last
decade o f the eighteenth century in Kcszthelv, Hungary, 62 percent o f
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 2ig

the population died bv the age o f 19, while 20 percent lived at least to the
age o f 50. In the mid nineteenth century, these percentages changed: 55
percent and 25 percent, respectively, died before the age o f 19 and lived
after 50. Those who reached adulthood could expect to live at least until
the age o f 40 to 50 (G. Benda 2000,133,143). A more impressive improve­
ment followed. Although the average lifespan remained 10 to 20 years
shorter than the Western European average o f 50, it increased substan­
tially: at the beginning o f the twentieth century, the average lifespan o f
Hungarians was 39 years; that o f Russians, 31; and that in the region as a
whole, 30 to 40. These figures represented a 10- to-20-vear increase com ­
pared to the beginning o f the century. In the early nineteenth century,
life expectancy in the north Hungarian township o f Eger was 20.7 years,
and in Csongrad County, only 16.6 years, mostly because o f the extremely
high rate o f infant mortality. Between the mid eighteenth and mid nine­
teenth centuries, every fourth or fifth newborn died before the age o f one
(A. B. Lukács 1977; G. Benda 2000). Average life expectancy hardly sur­
passed 20 years am'where in early nineteenth-century Central and East­
ern Europe.
The demographic revolution not only preceded economic modern­
ization in the region but served as a major stimulus to it. Instead o f 25-30
million inhabitants at the beginning o f the nineteenth century, the region
had to feed 70-75 million people in the early twentieth century, with
proportionate!}' more adults than before. The traditional economy was
unable to accomplish this task. Higher productivity in both agriculture
and industrv was badly needed. The “ imported” demographic rev olution
forced economic modernization.
The situation resulted in the emigration o f a part o f the increased pop­
ulation to the New World. During the century after 1820, about fifty m il­
lion Europeans emigrated, three-fifths o f them to the United States (H at­
ton and Williamson 1998, 533). First o f all, there were those who were
landless and could not find employment elsewhere. M ore than two-thirds
o f the emigrants from Austria-Hungary were peasants. When the great
wave o f European emigration began, from the first decades o f the nine­
teenth century to 1850, more than three-quarters o f European emigrants
to the United States were from Britain, and another 17 percent from G er­
many. Between 1850 and 1880, 82 percent o f the emigrants were still British
and German. By then, however, emigration had started from Central and
Eastern Europe, and 2.5 percent o f the European emigrants were from
Austria-Hungary From 1880 on, the peripheral regions o f the continent
became the main source o f European emigration: in 1880, 45 percent o f
220 SOCI AL C H A N G E S

the emigrants were Scandinavian, Italian, and Central and Eastern E u­

ropean. By 1890, this percentage had increased to 72 percent, and by the
early twentieth centurv, to 80 percent. During a third o f a century, be­
tween 1880 and 1914, 24 percent o f European emigrants left from Italy,
n percent from the Iberian Peninsula, and 6 percent from Scandinavia.
Roughlv one-quarter o f the emigrants originated from Central and Eastern
Europe, including Russia. The share o f the latter was relatively low, onlv
9 percent o f the total (Fercnczi and Wilcox 1929-31).
The massive emigration absorbed one-fifth to one-quarter o f the pop­
ulation increase in the Central European region. At the end o f the centurv,
the migrants were mostly young male adults. Between 1868 and 1910,
three-quarters o f die immigrants entering the United States were between
the ages o f 15 and 40. Two-thirds were male (Hatton and Williamson 1998,
536). The bulk o f the population o f the region, however, remained im­
mobile: in Croatia, 75 percent and 71 percent still lived in the place o f their
birth in 1880 and 1910, respectively. The corresponding figures for H un­
gary were 75 percent and 69 percent (Danyi 2000, 31). Emigration from
the Balkans remained insignificant. Deep poverty, lack o f mobility and
information, and the surviving communal society blocked the road to
mass emigration. However, political turmoil and the foundation o f in­
dependent nation-states led to mass emigration o f Muslims to Istanbul,
Anatolia, and other Ottoman territories: during the last three decades o f
the nineteenth century, more than a million Muslims departed from the
independent states. This wave o f emigration continued during and after
the Balkan wars (Todorova 1997, 175). Even from Russia, more than 90
percent o f the emigrants belonged to various minority groups —Jews,
Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, and Germans —who left the empire mostly be­
cause they had been persecuted and oppressed.
Immigration did not play a significant role in European population
movements. The overwhelming majority o f emigrants sought a new life
overseas. Russia, a frontier country with huge empty lands in the east,
attracted 4.2 million immigrants, two-thirds o f them European, but the
other Central and Eastern European countries did not experience mass
immigration during the nineteenth centurv. The onlv massive inflow o f
population was the immigration o f hundreds o f thousands o f Eastern
European —Russian and Polish—Jews into Romania and Hungary. Ac­
cording to Robert Seton-Watson, at the beginning o f the nineteenth cen­
turv, onlv about 2,000 Jewish families lived in the Romanian Principal­
ities. Bv 1859, the number o f Jews had increased to more than 12",000,
and bv 1900, to between 300,000 and 400,000 (Seton-Watson |i934|
 SOCIAL C H A N G E S 221

1963, 3 4 7-4 9 ). At the time o f Joseph IP s Edict o f Toleration, issued for

Hungarian Jcwrv in 1783, Hungary’s Jewish population was about 80,000.
Bv 1825, following the partition o f Poland and the annexation o f Galicia
by the Habsburg empire, this number had increased to nearly 250,000.
In 1910, nearly 1,0 0 0 ,0 0 0 Jews lived in Hungary (Silber 1992, 3, to).
Tens o f thousands o f skilled workers from Germany, Austria, and B o­
hemia also settled all over Central and Eastern Europe. A few thousand
engineers, managers, and entrepreneurs found new' homes in these coun­
tries too. The number o f immigrants was limited, but their role in these
societies became crucially important.

FAMILY AND GENDER RELATIONS

As described in Frédéric Le Plav’s classic six-volume study. Les Ouvriers

européens, preindustrial familial relations changed drastically in nine­
teenth-century Western Europe. The continuity o f age-old relationships
was undermined bv industrialization, factory work, and urbanization.
M ore and more women started working outside the family. More people
remained unmarried, married much later, or moved from the traditional
v illage familv home to cities and small urban dwellings. The old-style
famille souche, or stem familv, o f three generations —the parents, their
married eldest son and his wife and children, and his unmarried siblings,
living under the same roof—gradually disappeared. The nenv family struc­
ture became the nuclear family, two generations, parents and children, liv­
ing together. Birth control, although still confined to coitus interruptus,
significantly limited the number o f children. Traditional village families
o f from twelve to thirty people were rapidly replaced by small families of
from five to six (Le Play 187^-79)-
New' research has, how'cver, strongly challenged this view. Michael
Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder speak o f the “ myth of the large pre-
industrial family” and prove their statement mostly using English family
statistics: the mean household in Britain consisted of around five people
throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. In
preindustrial Amsterdam (in 1755), the average family size was roughly
three people; in Vienna in 1890, about five (Mitterauer and Sieder 1982,
27-28). “ The mean size o f co-resident groups remained remarkably con­
stant at about 4.75 persons per household across 'Sorthwestcrn Europe
from the seventeenth to the carlv twentieth century,” Walk' Scccombc ob­
serves (Scccombe 1992, 236). The Central and Eastern European family
222 SOCIAL C HAN GE S

structure differed markedly from that o f Northwestern Europe. John Haj­

nal speaks o f “two kinds o f pre-industrial household formation system,”
the Northwest European type being characterized by late marriage, rel­
atively few married couples, and a high proportion o f servants in the fam­
ily, whereas in Eastern Europe (and elsewhere), large joint households
dominated (Hajnal 1983). The difference between Western and Eastern
European demographic patterns, with a Trieste-St. Petersburg dividing
line, was thus undoubtedly reflected in family structures.
Russian “ family communes,” consisting o f from thirty to forty people
“ under the rule o f a stern patriarch,” have been broadly studied (Czap
1983,106). Mitterauer and Sieder present the figures for Rjazan province,
Russia, in 1814: nuclear families were only one-third o f the total, while
nearly 60 percent were three-generation families, and a further 7 percent
comprised as many as four generations. In Lithuania, at the end o f the
eighteenth century, 64 percent o f families were grouped around two or
more married couples. In Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, and Bulgaria,
ninetcenth-century extended families often comprised from twenty to
thirty and in some cases as many as eighty people (Mitterauer and Sieder
1982,29-30). In Orasac, Serbia, single-couple families made up only 2 per­
cent o f the population in 1863 (Halpern and Halpern 1972, 28).
On the western rim o f Central and Eastern Europe, the situation in­
dicates a kind o f transitory situation, with strong regional differences
within Bohemia and Hungary. In various parts o f these countries, two-
generation nuclear families dominated. However, in the agrarian parts o f
Bohemia during the second half o f the nineteenth century, extended fam­
ilies continued to function where the married voting couple had to ac­
cept the unmarried adult brothers and sisters o f the head o f the house­
hold to keep the land together. In early twentieth-century Slovakia, there
was “ a pronounced tendency toward a common family household econ­
omy involving several marital couples —the parental couple with married
sons and married brothers and sisters” (Horská 1994,104-5).
“ Patriarchal life is dom inant. . . the villagers usually still live together;
in some v illages, there are families with thirty or forty members under
one roof,” a mid-ninetecnth-ccnturv ethnographer wrote o f north H un­
garian villages (Pap 1865). According to the newest research, in thirteen
villages in the same area and period, hardly more than one-fifth o f the
families w ere nuclear two-generation families. Nearly three-quarters o f
the families consisted o f grandparents, their married son and his wife and
children, and married brothers and sisters, on average twelve, but in some
cases as many as twenty-nine people. Ethnographic monographs also
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 223

record families o f from forty to sixty people (Danvi 1994,394,398). H ow ­

ever, in the northern Slovak areas, as reflected by the mid-nineteenth-
ccnturv census o f the small village Szolosardo, 40 to 50 percent o f the
families were nuclear two-generation families, with an average o f three
children (H eilig 2000, 241).
The traditional large, three-generation family was preserved in most
o f Central and Eastern Europe, albeit with striking regional differences
and with a gradual change in later decades. Patriarchal relations also sur­
vived and changcd only slightly. The master, the paterfamilias, no longer
governed all the relatives o f the large family, including his wife, adult chil­
dren, and their spouses. However, male domination was preserved, and
women were not vet liberated in either society or the family. All over E u ­
rope, women were second-class citizens who had to obey their husbands.
Thev remained less educated, highly subordinated, and dependent within
the family.
Although women were paid less (thev earned only half what men did,
according to Anna Zarnowska [1996, 139)), female labor nevertheless
gradually led to the erosion o f the old patriarchal relations. “ Marriage lost
its character as a property transaction. . . . Parental and community
influence . . . declined” (Seccombe 1992, 235). Women became more in­
dependent. The\' also became better educated, and female intellectuals be­
gan to plav a role. The struggle for women’s political rights flooded turn-
of-the-centurv Western Europe, and, although European women gained
voting rights only in Finland and Norway before World War I, women’s
suffrage became widespread after the war. Only the beginnings o f these
changes appeared in the peasant societies o f Central and Eastern Europe,
which remained bound to the old functions of the family.
In Western European societies, the preindustrial family was above all
the basic context o f the organization o f work, but its classic functions also
included the protection o f its members, the socialization o f children, and
the management o f leisure. In ninetcenth-centurv Europe, all these func­
tions o f the family eroded. The “ functionless family” gradually led from
domination within the “ rigidly hierarchical institution to a partnership
o f individuals. Members o f the family . . . gained greater independence
and the right to live their own lives” (Mitterauer and Sieder 1982, 88).
Am ong peasants in rural Central and Eastern Europe, the family re­
mained an important —and in some cases, the dominant —form o f the or­
ganization o f work throughout the nineteenth century. Socialization and
acculturation o f children remained mostly a family responsibility. In some
backward areas o f the Balkans, among Albanian and Montenegrin fami­
22+ SOCI AL C H AN G ES

lies, even the archaic “judicial” function o f the family, the duty o f blood
revenge, survived. As a consequence, the hierarchical structure o f the fam­
ily was not strongly challenged either. The head o f a large rural family was
its unchallenged master, and his wife, children, and even married sons and
their wives and children, as well as the unmarried members o f the fam­
ily, worked together. A marriage did not mean the establishment o f a new
household. The division o f labor within the family was strict and tradi­
tional. The “ manager,” in many cases, the “ dictator,” o f the household
was the patriarch, who ordered and controlled all the activities and work.
The male adults worked in the fields, repaired and sometimes even made
the tools, did construction work, and transported goods. The female folk
did all the household work, including spinning, weaving, and making
clothing, especially in the winter. They also had a major role in tending
and milking the animals and assisting in the fields. Small children also had
a role and had to work in the family household. The traditional patriar­
chal family remained nearly unchanged in rural areas.
The first signs o f transformation appeared during the second half o f
the nineteenth century: birth control led to a decline in the number o f
children born to a family to four or five. In some areas, a “ one-child sys­
tem” was practiced, mostly to keep the small parcel o f family land intact
(Vasary 1989). “ We do not make beggars,” peasants in Ormánság said in
justification o f early birth control, explaining: “ One parcel, one child” (A11-
dorka 1978, 94-95). Families thus began to shrink.
An even more important factor was the beginning o f urbanization and
the emergence o f an urban lifestyle and family characteristics more sim­
ilar to the Western European pattern. These new' phenomena remained
marginal and influenced the lives o f only 10 to 25 percent o f the popula­
tion in the various countries o f the region. Moreover, the industrial work­
ing class, like the traditional peasantry, remained a male-dominated so­
ciety. The foremen and the vast majority o f skilled workers were male, as
were the unskilled workers who did most o f the jobs requiring physical
strength. A good worker did not allow his wife to take a job. The life o f
a miner’s wife was, in fact, extremely similar to a peasant woman’s life in
the household, including keeping some animals in the backyard.
However, the partial success o f industrialization in some Central Eu­
ropean countries produced the first modern female workforce. In Poland,
24 percent o f die industrial workers were female. Up to 33 percent o f un­
skilled workers and day laborers, and 78 percent o f service workers, were
women. As many as +6 percent o f all textile workers were female, and
three-quarters o f all women industrial workers worked in textiles before
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S

the war (Zarnowska 1995,123-24.). In Hungary, food processing employed

28 percent o f female workers, and textiles and clothing another 33 per­
cent. Women were mostly employed in unskilled jobs and in all made up
25 percent o f the industrial labor force in Hungary in [910 (Üzemi cs munkás
statisztika 1910).
“ We like to sav that employment has freed millions o f women, but this
freedom is only ostensible; the reality is different. . . [because women work
for wages that] are insufficient to properly support them11 the Yugoslav-
Czech Milan Fric wrote in his O zenskej otáz.ke (On the Woman Question)
(Fric [190-] 1991, 161). That was definitely true. Wage differences con­
served gender hierarchy, especially because statistics did not count unpaid
domestic work done bv women as a contribution to GDP. “ The new ma­
terial basis o f patriarchal authority became the male control o f the pri­
mary wage. . . . Industrial capitalism brought limited gains to vounger
single women and setbacks to married women o f the working class11 (Sec-
combe 1992,244-45). The appearance o f women working independently
o f the family in cities and towns, and o f two-generation families with from
four to five children, signaled the first changes in patriarchal dominance
in Central and Eastern Europe.
Hierarchical, male-dominated family life nonetheless remained a kind
o f “ natural law.11 Very few had the courage to question or attack this so­
cial injustice. Moreover, male domination was often brutal, and physi­
cal abuse o f women and children was an cvervdav phenomenon. “ Who
eats her husband’s bread must do her husband’s will,11 peasant women
said. In Revm ont’s Borvna family, although Yagna “ defended herself
tooth and nail . . . daily the yoke grew heavier. . . . M any times she had
wanted to return to her mother, but the latter . . . threatened to send her
back . . . by force. . . . She lived in continual terror, oppressed by such
a sense o f injustice . . . that she often wept for the whole night11 (Rev-
mont 1925, 2: 260).
Budapest was perhaps the most Western European city in Central and
Eastern Europe, but there too, as John Lukacs notes, “ around 1900 mas­
culinity and virility were still very dominant; the supremacy o f the male
was unquestioned and unquestionable, sometimes to the detriment o f fem­
inine sensitivities.” Inequality was also giv en linguistic expression. Rather
than saying a fc'rjan, “ mv husband,” a Hungarian woman generally called
her husband az uram, “ mv master,” or “ mv lord” (Lukacs 1989, 106).
Wavne Vucinich describes the Balkan situation for women in much
darker tones. Women were “ generally treated as inferior beings.” M us­
lim and Christian women alike
226 SOCIAL C HA NG ES

lived in social isolati on [a n d ] d e f e r re d t o m e n w i th blind s u b s e r v ie n c e . . . th e

m a n rules w i t h ab s o l u te a u t h o r i t y , a n d th e wi fe o b e v s h i m slavishly . . . [ w o m e n ]
e a ti n g se parate ly w i th th e c h il d r en a n d , w h e n o n a tr ip , w a l k in g laden w i t h freig h t
several steps b e h in d th e ir h u s b a n d s . . . . T h e t r e a t m e n t o t c h il d r e n (espe cially fe ­
m ale ) w i th in dif fer en ce an d i n h u m a n i t y is also tr a c e a b le t o O t t o m a n influe nce.
T h e c h il d r e n w e r e br ut ally e x p l o i t e d f o r th e la b o r p o w e r , p ar ti cu la r ly gi rl s[, ] w h o
m a r r i e d y o u n g an d b e c a m e “ s o m e o n e else’s f o r t u n e . ” T h e c h il d r e n w e r e t a u g h t
t o serv e th e ir pa r en ts. . . . T h e y w e r e p u t t o w o r k in t h e ir te e n s an d s u b je c te d t o
ir on di sciplin e. (V u c i n i c h 1 9 6 3 , 9 2 )

The woman’s situation was considered to be “ natural” and did not

generate complaints for a long time. The gentry's “ benign patriarchal-
ism” in Poland gave the highest respect and esteem to women. During
the 1820s, in her Pnmiqtka po dobrej matcc (Legacy o f a Mother to Her
Daughter), Poland’s first recognized woman writer, KlementvnaTanska-
Hoffmanowa, although demanding equal recognition for women, who
plav an equal role in the social division o f labor, denounced women’s ed­
ucation: “ Women certainly have less need to possess knowledge . . . study
should not be an aim. . . . l b know how to make her husband happy, to
make his life pleasurable, to bring up their children properly, to find
new . . . wavs o f pleasing everyone: that is the svstem o f education for a
woman” (quoted in Phillips 1 9 9 9 , 2 0 7 ).
“ [B|y existing human rights and standards [a woman is] . . .n o t even
a human being but just a thing,” Eliza Qrzeszkowa asserts, however, in
her novel M ann. In the early twentieth centurv, Polish women's rights
advocates, such as Iza Moszczenska, flatly rejected the concept o f “ benign
patriarchalism,” arguing that in spite o f obligator}' aristocratic codes o f
distinctive politeness to them, women were still the “ slaves o f their men
folks” (quoted in Pietrow-Ennker 1992, i-"7, 21).
The education o f women, a main [actor o f equality, languished dur­
ing the entire centurv. Illiteracy, as was noted earlier, remained high
throughout the region. Girls in many cases were not even considered to
be worth educating. I11 late nineteenth-century Romania, only 2^ percent
o f school-age children in the countryside were enrolled. Girls, in a telling
illustration o f male domination and the general mentality, were almost
entirely neglected: onlv 13 percent o f enrolled students were girls. When
official enrollment increased in subsequent decades, the same general men­
tality kept girls out o f school: two-thirds o f all eligible students attended
schools, but onlv slightly more than half ot the eligible girls attended. Fe­
male illiteracy, even at the turn o f the centurv, remained nearly absolute:
onlv 3 percent o f rural and ~ percent o f the total female population could
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 22-

read and write (Ronnas 1984, 227-32). In Poland around the turn o f the
centurv, illiteracy remained very high even among female industrial work­
ers: 56 percent o f them could not read or write. Illiteracy reached 80 per­
cent among female unskilled workers. Am ong scrvice workers, only one-
third o f the male workforce was illiterate, but nearly 70 percent of female
service workers could not read or write (Zarnowska 1996,139)- The situ­
ation was not altered bv the admittance o f the first few women to uni­
versities in 1900 (Homola-Skapska 1992, 82).
Toward 1900, however, a vanguard group o f women, especially w rit­
ers and other intellectuals, raised their v oices for women’s education and
equality, and Polish women in particular expressed ambitious educational
aspirations' (Szwarc 1993). Early feminist voices were also heard in the
Czech lands. A series o f female realist writers illustrates this new trend.
Bozena Nemcova demanded “ public acknowledgement o f a woman’s
right o f self-determination” as early as in the mid nineteenth century. Her
follower Karolina Svetla, the daughter o f a Prague merchant and wife o f
a professor, “ insisted on the right o f education, the free choice o f occu­
pation, and the social usefulness o f women” (Novak 19-6, 164, 183). Fe­
male writers denounced the lack o f equal education and rights for women
(Rudinskv 1991). In the backward Slovakian part o f Hungary, Elena
Marothv Soltesova’s Potreba vzdclanostiprc zenn (The Need for Women’s
Education) took aim at middle-class men:

[T J h e m a j o r i t y o n l y w a n t th eir wi fe t o be be au ti ful, c h a r m i n g . . . and de\_o t e d

t o t h e m b o d y a n d sou l. . . . T h e y req u ire h e r t o have o n ly social skills . . . th e y
f o llo w t h e ir o w n p le asu re an d see a w o m a n as o n l y an o b j e c t f o r th e m s e lv e s. . . .
T h e o t h e r [ lo w e r- cl a ss |g r o u p o f m e n . . . believe t h a t a w o m a n exists . . . f o r h e r
m ate rial use. T h e y w a n t first o f all a h o u s e k e e p e r a n d . . . helpful l a b o r . . . so t h a t
t o t h e l o w e r classes a wi fe is really a b e a s t o f b u r d e n o r d e r e d t o w o r k w i t h o u t
rest. . . . A n y s o r t o f e d u c a t i o n . . . is a d i s a d v a n t a g e , n o r a b e n e f i t . . . a h u s b a n d
is t h e r e a d y - m a d e e n e m y o f his w i fe ’s e d u c a t i o n t h r o u g h his c o n v i c t i o n t h a t it
leads h e r a w a y f r o m h e r du ty . ( S o l t e s o v a [1898 \ iyyi, 154- 5 6 )

Milan Erie, the male feminist quoted above, demanded “ giving women
rights equal to men’s in everv respect, and emancipating women’s moral­
ity from slav ery to men's passion” (Fric [ 190") 1991, r>9). Feminist revolt
went beyond the demand for education and even equal rights. Under a
characteristic title, Vzponra (Rebellion, 1901), Bozena Vikova-Kuncticka,
later the first female member o f Czechoslovakia’s parliament, expressed
aggressive feminism, attacked monogamy, and launched a “ dark and noisy
revolt. . . not onlv against rigid social conventions, blit also against em o­
228 SOCIAL C H A N G E S

tional and moral components within the author’s own personality”

(Novak 1976, 244-45).
These were rare voices. The “ Women Question” had scarcely been ad­
dressed. The liberation o f women was bv and large tabled for a future
agenda. H alf o f society, the female population, was totally dependent on
the other, male half. This subordination was even more brutal and naked
among the lower strata o f the society.

THE GROWTH OF TOWNS AND CITIES

The separation o f the traditional and the modern, and the beginning o f
real social change, occurred first in the newlv emerging, rapidly growing
cities. Citv and countryside w ere two different worlds all over nineteenth-
centurv Europe. The antagonism o f these two worlds, however, was in­
comparably sharper and more hostile 111 Central and Eastern Europe than
in Western Europe, where the majority o f the population became urban
at the beginning o f the twentieth century. Rising modern metropolises
increased in population: London, for example, went from 1.1 million in­
habitants in 1800 to 2.7 million by 1850, and then to 7.2 million by 1910.
Paris had 0.5, 1.1, and 2.9 million inhabitants in 1800, 1850, and 1910, re­
spectively. This miraculous growth o f the capitals was accompanied bv
the development o f several other large cities: Manchester, Glasgow, and
Liverpool increased in population roughly tenfold between 1800 and 1910,
and each had more than o .- million inhabitants at the beginning o f the
twentieth century. Besides Paris, Marseille and Lvon grew fivefold and
each had roughly 0.5 million inhabitants in 1910. Besides Berlin, with its
more than 2 million inhabitants in 1910, Hamburg, Cologne, Leipzig, and
Munich also became large cities, with from 0.5 to 1.0 million inhabitants.
Central and Eastern Europe could not follow the breathtaking pace o f
Western Europe’s urbanization. The growth o f some towns and cities
there was nevertheless quite rapid. In Hungary, 1.1 million people lived
in towns with more than 20,000 inhabitants in i8~o. Their number in­
creased bv nearly three times during the four decades ending in 1910, when
it reached 3.1 million. The total population in Serbian towns with more
than 2,000 inhabitants was 28,000 in 1834 and 310,000 in iyio. L’ nlikc
Western Europe, where the absolute majority o f the population already
liv ed in cities before World War I, Central and Eastern Europe remained
highly rural. The ( 'zeeh lands were the only exception: 16 percent of their
population lived in towns with more than 2,000 inhabitants in 1843, but
 SOCI AL C H A N G E S 229

this increased to 43 percent bv 1900, and became more than half o f the
entire population before World War I.
The share o f the real urban population (in cities with more than 20,000
inhabitants) in Hungarv increased from - percent to i~ percent between
18-0 and 1910. Counting the entire population o f settlements with more
than 2,000 inhabitants, Poland had an urban population o f 15 percent at
the end o f the eighteenth century, which increased to 33 percent bv 1910.
Serbia’s “ urban” population was 4 percent in 1834 and 11 percent in 1910.
Romania, Bulgaria, and Bosnia-Herzegovina had urban populations o f
17,18, and 13 percent, respectively, in the early 1910s. Thus, a small segment
o f the population in the region —one or two people out o f ten —lived in
towns even before the war.
The typical industrial city was rather rare in the region. Lodz, the “ Pol­
ish Manchester,” and Plzen, Brno, and Moravskd-Ostrava in the Czech
lands were exceptions. Ostrava, the coal and iron center o f northern
Moravia, grew nearly sevenfold, to 150,000 inhabitants, during the last
three decades before the w ar. The population o f Plzen jumped fourfold,
to 100,000, bv World War I. Brno grew to 180,000 inhabitants.
The capital cities, Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, and in some respects,
Bucharest, became both modern industrial centers and the administra­
tive, transportation, and cultural nuclei o f their countries. Prague had only
150,000 inhabitants in 1851, but the number had increased to 225,000 bv
1910. Around the old city, however, new, modern suburbs sprang up. Kar­
lin, Smichov, Zizkov, and Vinohradv concentrated more people than in
Prague proper. Altogether, when Greater Prague was administratively con­
stituted after the war, the citv had nearly 6—,000 inhabitants (Saver 1998,
85, 1—). Warsaw had 100,000 inhabitants both in 1800 and in 1850, but
the stagnant citv flourished during the second half o f the century: its pop­
ulation increased to 252,000 bv 1880, and to 856,000 bv 1910, when it be­
came the eighth-largest citv in Europe.
Budapest's development was exceptional, comparable only to the
American miracle: in 1800, three small cities, Buda, Pest, and Óbuda, on
both sides o f the Danube Ris er, had altogether 54,000 inhabitants. Bv
1850, the three cities had 140,000 inhabitants. Population took o ff after
the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich o f 186" and the administrative unification
o f the three cities in 18—3: Budapest's population doubled, then doubled
again during the next two decades. Bv 1880, Budapest had 3-0,000 in­
habitants, and bv 1910, 880,000. From iS~o 011, a .series ofindusrria! sub­
urbs began to encircle the capital citv: Újpest, Pesterzsébet, Kispest, Pest-
s/.entlőrinc, Csepel, and other small adjacent settlements grew from
2,0 SOCIAL C H AN G ES

100,000 inhabitants in 1900 to nearly 200,000 by 1910. Although ad­

ministratively thev remained independent until 1949, in practice thev
merged with and became part o f Greater Budapest, with 1.1 million in­
habitants, the seventh-largest citv o f Europe.
Bucharest emerged as a small settlement but grew rapidly from the late
nineteenth century on. Though its growth was much less spectacular than
that o f Prague, Warsaw, or Budapest, by the turn o f the century, the R o ­
manian capital had 276,000 inhabitants. By 19 10-12, the population was
more than 341,000.
Modern Wcstern-stvlc metropolises thus developed but remained iso­
lated islands in rural Central and Eastern Europe. Moreover, urban set­
tlements remained estranged from peasant societies. A great proportion
o f the urban population was German and Jewish. Nearly half o f Prague's
population was German-speaking in the mid nineteenth centurv. Eduard
Hanslick described this situation: ‘Aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the
whole cultivated middle class in Prague, spoke onlv German, and knew
only as much Bohemian as enabled them to make themselves understood
by domestic servants.” H e also mentioned Czech-language performances
at the Prague Theater (Standetheater) “ at around 4 :0 0 in the afternoon,
three hours before the German performance was due to begin. . . . One
sent one’s domestic servants to these Bohemian performances; none o f our
circle ever went to them” (quoted in Payzant 1991,39). German-speaking
inhabitants assimilated rapidly, however, so that bv 1880, onlv 22 percent
o f the population spoke onlv German. Bv World War I, the figure had
dropped to 7 percent. Budapest's case was similar: in 1850, 80 percent o f
the population spoke only German. The Buda citv authorities ended
their contract with the German Theater in the citv in i8~o, and the Pest
authorities did so in 1880. The Budapest stage was thus “ de-Germanized”
(Freifeld 1999,168). The German-speaking population o f the citv dropped
to 54 percent bv 18-3, and to a marginal 4 percent bv 1900. Germans made
up 51 percent of the population o f Temesvar (Timisoara), 30 percent o f
the inhabitants o f Brasso (Brasov), and altogether 21 percent o f the pop­
ulation o f the Transylvanian Hungarian cities in 1900 (Ronnas 1984, 100,
341). In the Moldavian part o f the Romanian kingdom, 39 percent of the
urban population was Jewish. In Bucharest, and in Romania in general,
35 percent and 32 percent o f the urban population, respectively, were Jew ­
ish and German at the turn o f the centurv (ibid., 96). In Budapest, which
the anti-Semitic mayor o f Vienna, Karl I.ueger, called Jiirtcipcst, one o f four
inhabitants was Jewish, in contrast to the country as a whole, where one
out o f twenty was Jewish. Unlike Warsaw, Budapest, and Bucharest, which
had massive Jewish minority populations, Prague remained an exception.
 SOCI AL CH AN GES

Although 22 percent and 33 percent o f Bohemian Jews lived in Greater

Prague in 1880 and 1910, respectively, the share o f the Jewish minority in
the citv remained rather low: 6.3 percent in both 1869 and 1910 (Kieval
1988, 13).
The social structure o f the capital cities reflected a different worlci from
the agricultural peasant countryside. Budapest was home to 5+ percent
o f the industrial workforce o f the entire country. H alf o f the city’s pop­
ulation consisted o f industrial workers. In 1890,40,000 workers marched
and celebrated M ay Day, responding to the call o f the Social Democratic
International. In 1912, the first confrontation between the industrial w ork­
ers and the police force, “ Bloody Thursday,” illustrated the strength o f
the labor movement. Two-thirds o f the intellectual and white-collar work­
ers o f the country were also concentrated in the capital citv. Literacy was
substantial: only 9 percent o f Budapest’s population remained illiterate,
mostly old people and young peasant housemaids serving middle-class
families. In the country at large, more than one-third o f the population
was illiterate. Bucharest also reflected this contrast: around the turn o f
the century, only is percent o f the country’s population was literate, while
63 percent o f Bucharest’s population could read and write.
The new metropolises mimicked their Western European counterparts.
The spectacular reconstruction o f Paris under Napoleon III offered an at­
tractive example. Similar grandiose construction works were initiated in
Vienna, Prague, and Budapest. The famous Ringstrasse and the spectac­
ular new public buildings at the end o f the century, and the first shock­
ing modern apartment houses and villas erected in the early twentieth cen­
tury, transformed Vienna into a modern European capital citv.
During the reconstruction o f Prague between 1885 and 1903, whole areas,
including the old Josefov district and the Jewish ghetto, were destroyed
in the name o f slum clearance. Most o f the seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century baroque buildings, symbols o f the Counter-Reformation, were
demolished. Various neogothic and neorenaissance public buildings
formed the modern “ Golden Prague.” The new' National Theater, the “ lit­
tle golden chapel on the Vltava,” was opened in 1881, then, after a fire, re­
opened in 1883. The former Horse Market, renamed Wenceslas Square,
was crowned by the new neorenaissance National Museum in 1890. The
major squares were decorated with important national statues: the foun­
dation o f the Jan Hus monument was laid in 1903; the statue o f the patron
o f Bohemia, Saint Vaclav, was completed in 1913 (Saver 1998, 99,100-102).
A vivid, flourishing fin de siecle Prague emerged (Wittlich 1992).
Budapest gained the status o f a European metropolis during the three
decades before World War I . The Nagvkoriit and Kiskoriit, the tw< >Ring-
 SOCi AL C HA NG ES

strassen, and the erossing main boulevards, the Sugár út (later Andrássv
út), ending in the monumental Hősök tere, and Rákóczv út, created a
new citv structure. N ew public buildings, most o f all, the enormous
neogothic parliament building on the bank of the Danube, the Opera
House, and the headquarters o f the Customs Office, the spectacular new
Danube bridges, the Margit hid, Ferenc József hid, and Erzsébet hid, dec­
orated a real European capital. At the millennium celebration in 1896 of
the arriv al o f the Hungarian tribes in the Danube valley, Budapest inau­
gurated the Continent’s first subway line, two kilometers long, and a net­
work o f electric streetcar lines. The citv became a railroad center, with or­
nate railway stations: Gustave Eiffel built the West station. Large parks,
the Városliget, Népliget, and Margitsziget, and the Dunakorzó, created
elegant, popular public spaces in the rapidly grow ing citv. The Hungar­
ian capital became one o f Europe’s most beautiful and representative
metropolises.
In the proud, impressive cities, full of the symbols o f national revival
and grandeur, a strongly Western European, cosmopolitan lifestyle de­
veloped. Like Paris and Vienna, Budapest in 1900, with its 600 coffee­
houses, some o f them open twenty-four hours a dav, also became a cap­
ital o f coffeehouse culture. In 189+, Alajos Hauszman, the architect who
rebuilt the royal castle, built one o f the most elegant coffeehouses, whose
cosmopolitan name, New' York, was symbolic. Writers and journalists had
their favorite coffee shops and Stammtisch (the same table reserved for the
same group o f people), where they read the newspapers. The coffeehouse
became their study and its tables their desks. Some o f them even received
their guests there (Lukacs 1988, 148-51).
The capital cities had vivid cultural lives. When the British statesman
Richard Cobden visited Vienna in the mid nineteenth century, his pro­
gram self-evidentiv included visits with Prince Metternich, Count Moritz
Esterházy, and Baron Rothschild, as well as to the opera for a perfor­
mance ofR ossin i’s Guillaume Tell (Cobden 1994, 152—55). L’pper-middle-
class families kept boxes at the opera in Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.
The inhabitants o f Warsaw in 1830 already had their choice of seven news­
papers. During the second half o f the century, a “ theater mania” flooded
the citv. To see even-single performance became chic (Wapinski 1994,154)-
The emerging big cities differed not only from the traditional peasant
countryside but from sleepy, second-rate little towns o f the kind condemned
by late nineteenth-century realist Czech w riters for narrow-mindedness
and prejudice, whose very air, said Svatopluk Cech, w as “ poisoned with
hate, envv and jcalousv-gossip . . . lured assassins o f old women wait
 SOCIAL C HAN GE S

behind every corner” (quoted in Novak 1976, 241). Some towns, how ­
ever, preserved their traditional agricultural life. In 1910, Debrecen, on
the Hungarian plain, with its 90,000 inhabitants, was, for example, still
bv and large just a “ big village.”
The Balkan towns, including the capital cities, although home to most
o f the thin modern social strata, consisting o f the new bureaucratic and
merchant elite o f these countries, also remained tvpical quiet small towns.
Before World War I, the largest o f them, Sofia, had a population o f
100,000; Belgrade had 90,000 inhabitants; Sarajevo, 52,000. In the
i8~os, in the most “ urbanized” Balkan country, Bulgaria, onlv seven towns
had more than 15,000 inhabitants. The Balkan cities, which had a long
tradition dating from antiquity, had been incorporated into the Ottoman
system and subordinated to the state. Guilds were restricted, but state
sanctions and protection offered certain advantages for the producers.
Cities, however, never gained an autonomous role in the Ottoman em­
pire (Todorova 199", i'7^). Unlike the modern Central European me­
tropolises, the Balkan cities preserved their oriental townscapes. Raina
Gavrilova presents a brilliant description o f this world. The narrow, mostly
unpaved, interwoven streets do not serve for lively traffic but “ discour­
age the entrance o f outsiders” and “ control the access to different [reli­
gious] zones with[in ] the town.” The quiet, green residential areas with
gardens and orchards were totally separated from the modest town cen­
ter. The card, the main street, a continuation o f the intercity road, served
as a business street, in some cases enlarged to a district by a few neigh­
boring streets or blocks, mostly roofed. All the merchants and artisans
had their shops here, the owner sitting in front. The barbershop, tavern,
coffeehouses, the “ clubs o f the Orient,” and the public buildings —inns or
caravansaries (Imulav), public baths, and courthouses —were all located on
the gar§i. Taverns and coffee shops (kahvehanelar), patronized onlv bv well-
to-do adult men, were the center o f an otherwise nonexistent social life,
where all the important problems were discussed and decided. In the small
township o f Strumitsa, Bulgaria, with 10,000 inhabitants, there were
thirtv-one coffeehouses. When postal service was introduced, the mail was
also delivered to the coffeehouse. At the end o f the century, a new insti­
tution, the cbitalisbtn (reading rooms) were added to these central insti­
tutions. Women and girls gathered at the sbndravan, the large public foun­
tain in the middle o f the citv, to chat, gossip, and meet bovs.
The small, slow Balkan cities preserved their oriental characteristics for
most o f the nineteenth century. Onlv the capital cities and bigger towns
around the turn o f the century became somewhat “ European.” That was
234 SO CIAL CHANGES

the time when European suits and hats, alafranga (d la française), began
replacing folk costumes and Turkish dress. H igh tables and chairs also
started to supplant the sofra, or low, round table, surrounded by cushions
on the floor. The first courageous men and women started walking side
by side on the street. The “ Europeanization” o f the previously Ottoman
Balkans gradually changed the costumes, attitudes, and lifestyles in the
slowly growing cities (Gavrilova 1999)-
Sofia, Belgrade, and some o f the smaller, “ second-ranked” cities grad­
ually became middle-sized, still slow and quiet, but visibly European cities.
Unlike the Central European capitals, however, they did not become home
to modern workers. In Belgrade, only 3,800 industrial workers were em­
ployed in 1908 (Halpern and Halpern 1972, 48). As a rather visible and
symbolic factor o f Europeanization, all the Continent’s main architectural
trends appeared. In Belgrade, the classic architecture o f the 1830s and 1840s
was followed, especially between 1850 and 1880, by neoromanesque,
neogothic, and neorenaissance structures, and around the turn o f the cen­
tury, by an eclecticism drawing on local color—Serbian traditions—and
Serbian-Byzantine architecture. A series o f major public buildings were
erected in these styles: the neorenaissance National Theater and the Old
Court by Emiljan Joksimovic; the monumental neorenaissance National
Bank by Konstantin Jovanovic; and the Belgrade Cooperative and the Ser­
bian Academy o f Arts and Sciences building by Andra Stefanovic (with
Nestorovic, then with Djordjevic). All o f the leading Serbian architects
studied in Budapest, Vienna, or Munich. In addition, more than fifty
Western architects worked in the city during the second half o f the nine­
teenth century. The most characteristic public buildings and the entire city
landscape imitated the style o f the world’s capitals (Mladenovic 1995,
2 2 2 - 2 3 , 233). The Balkan capitals and several other smaller cities lost their
oriental character and became more European.
Budapest, Warsaw and Prague, and, to a lesser extent, Bucharest, together
with their industrial suburbs, became modern working- and middle-class
cities with highly literate populations. Ethnically, socially, and culturally,
these big cities portrayed a transformed, modern, cosmopolitan world.
They signaled the future. The present, however, was the traditional coun­
tryside, with its overwhelming peasant society. Central and Eastern E u ­
rope might have begun social modernization but, even at the end o f the
period under discussion, on the eve o f World War I, they stood at the be­
ginning o f a long, rough historical road toward Western European
modernity.
 II

FIGURE 68. Preziosi Amedeo, Bucharest Fish Market (1869). Watercolors and
pencil on paper. Courtesy Muzeul National de Arta al Romaniei, Bucharest.

FIGURE 6 9 . Market in a Slovak township. Courtesy Hungarian National

Museum, Budapest.