Hans Kudlich

Hans Kudlich was a twenty-four-year-old student when he proposed the motion that abolished serfdom in the Austrian empire, and he is still called the peasants' liberator in the villages of Silesia and Lower Austria. He was a farmer's son from Lobenstein in Austrian Silesia studying law in Vienna, was wounded on the barricades in March 1848, and was elected to the Reichstag that summer as its youngest member. On 26 July he moved that the hereditary subject relationship and all obligations flowing from it be abolished. The debate turned on whether landlords should be compensated, and the compromise passed on 7 September paid them a third of the assessed value, with the state and the peasants covering the rest. Some four million people in the Austrian lands ceased to owe labour service. It is the one measure of 1848 in central Europe that survived the reaction completely, because the new government had no wish to restore an arrangement the peasants would have fought for. Kudlich himself joined the Baden rising the following year, was condemned to death in absentia, and emigrated to the United States, where he practised medicine in Hoboken for half a century. He was amnestied in 1867 and visited home twice. Villages across Austria and the Czech lands put up Kudlich monuments and memorial towers, most of them after his death, and several survive. The compensation arrangement mattered as much as the abolition: because landlords were paid, the reform was not reversed with the rest of 1848, and because peasants paid a share, many were in debt for a generation. He is buried at Lobenstein, his remains returned in 1925.

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