Abolition of Serfdom in the Austrian Empire
The Austrian parliament abolished the remaining obligations of serfdom in September 1848, and the measure survived the revolution that produced it. Personal serfdom had already been ended by Joseph II in 1781, which gave peasants the right to marry, to move and to choose a trade. What remained was the manorial system: the robot, meaning unpaid labour owed to the lord, often two or three days a week; dues in kind; and the lord's exercise of local justice and administration over his own tenants. That was the substance of rural life for the majority of the empire's population, and Joseph's attempt to commute it in 1789 had been repealed after his death. The revolutions of March 1848 put the peasantry in play. The court knew that the towns were in rebellion and calculated that a countryside with its grievance answered would not join them. The proposal came from Hans Kudlich, a young deputy from Silesia and the son of a peasant, and it passed on 7 September with compensation to the landlords — a third from the peasant, a third from the state, a third written off. The revolution was crushed within months in Vienna, Prague and Hungary, and this one law was left standing because the regime saw the same use in it. Galician and Hungarian peasants had already stayed out of the risings, and the emancipation is a large part of why. What it created was a class of smallholders with debts and without the common woodland and pasture rights the manor had carried, and rural emigration from Galicia and Slovakia to America followed within a generation. Kudlich himself fled to the United States and practised medicine in Hoboken for fifty years.
- Year: 1848 CE
- Category: Political
