A Victory in the Dark: The Greater Poland Uprising of 1848

In the spring of 1848, as revolution swept from Paris to Berlin and the conservative order of the Congress of Vienna cracked under the weight of popular fury, the Polish community of the Grand Duchy of Posen saw its moment. Armed with petitions, political programmes, and the converted scythes of peasant volunteers — the kosynierzy, the scythemen whose image would become the uprising's enduring icon — they launched an insurrection against Prussian rule that would produce some of the most remarkable military engagements fought on European soil in the revolutionary year. At Miłosław and Sokołowo, against professional soldiers with artillery and cavalry, they won.

They could not win the campaign. Against forty thousand Prussian regulars, without ammunition, without cavalry, without the great-power support that no European government was prepared to provide, the uprising that had assembled twenty thousand men in six weeks ended in formal capitulation at a farmhouse near Września nine weeks after it began.

Casey Norgrove's account of the Greater Poland Uprising of 1848 follows the full arc of this extraordinary episode: the partitioned kingdom and the Congress settlement that replaced it, the decades of administrative suppression, the Romantic literature of martyrdom that made the uprising imaginable, the battle of Jarosławiec that turned diplomacy into a trap, and the strategic transformation that defeat ultimately produced. What followed failure was not surrender but construction — the Organic Work movement that built the institutions a restored Poland would eventually need.

The uprising of 1848 lost. The work it began did not.