Hungarian Historical Review 12, no.

1 (2023): 37–65

Rural Reactions to Modernization: Anti-Modernist

Features of the 1883 Anti-Hungarian Peasant Uprising
in Croatia
Veronika Eszik
Research Centre for the Humanities
[email protected]

In the post-Compromise Croatia–Slavonia (1868–1914) several peasant uprisings

indicated a deep crisis in the rural world. Previous literature abundantly discussed the
economic and social motives of these protests and interpreted the tensions as signs
of the peasantry’s national awakening. In the present article, through a rereading of
archival documents related to the 1883 protests, I draw attention to the perplexity of
peasants when they should have identified national symbols. I argue, that the attitude
of the peasants towards symbols turned against every kind of power symbol regardless
of its link to a given nation. Adding a layer of nuance to the canonical explanations
of peasant unrest allows us to draw attention to popular sensibilities to the ever-
expanding state’s intrusion into rural areas and to the state’s modernizing interventions
perceived as coercion. The ways in which the peasantry responded with hostility and
violence to spaces, symbols, and figures associated with modernization make it very
clear that modernization was seen by the peasantry as a potential danger (hence the
anti-modernist epithet of the 1883 events). Thus, we should abandon the assumption
that elite imaginations of modernity and modernization simply trickled down to the
peasantry or that peasants accepted the teleology of modernization without criticism
or anxiety. This article is also an attempt to read peasant rumors as historical sources
independently of their truthfulness at the factual level, concentrating rather on what
they tell us about the peasants’ fears and motivations and the strategies they used to
cope with rapid changes in their lifeworld.

Keywords: Croatia–Slavonia, Hungarian Kingdom, peasant movements, rural history,

anti-modernism, rumor theory

Austria–Hungary’s autonomous kingdom, the post-Compromise Croatia–

Slavonia experienced peasants’ protests, a clear indicator of a deeply troubled
agrarian society,1 roughly once every decade (namely in 1871, 1883, 1895/97,

1 The transformation of the rural world of late nineteenth-century Croatia included the dissolution
of the so-called zadrugas, farming cooperatives on estates owned commonly by extended families, as well
as the abolition of the Military Frontier and the privileged status of soldier-farmers with it in 1881, the
introduction of more capitalistic practices in agriculture, and new cadastral surveys along with a new tax
system. As the list suggests, an extreme level of adaptation was required to make rural life endurable.

http://www.hunghist.org DOI 10.38145/2023.1.37

Hungarian Historical Review 12, no. 1 (2023): 37–65

and in 1903). Given its broadness and supposedly nationalist undertones, the
1883 uprising, which has been characterized as both anti-Hungarian and anti-
modernist,2 stands out in terms of historiographical discussion. The seminal
monograph by Dragutin Pavličević3 and two exhaustive articles by László Katus4
have meticulously reconstructed the social insecurities and the political loyalties
that motivated the uprising, but none of the discussions in the secondary literature
attempted to analyze the so-called anti-modern origins of what happened or, in
a broader sense, peasant perceptions of change. In the present article, I intend
to complement the abovementioned aspects and identify rural reactions to
modernization5 through a rereading of archival documents related to the 1883
protests.6 With modernization, a greater emphasis is put on the state’s presence
in the rural context.7 It is also an attempt to read peasant rumors as historical
sources independently of their truthfulness at the factual level, concentrating
rather on what they tell us about the peasants’ fears and motivations and the
strategies they used to cope with rapid changes in their lifeworld. As Irina Marin
put it in relation to protesting Romanian peasants in 1907, “Many peasants may
have misunderstood rumors/news, but that is not the point. The point is how
they used this information to serve their own purposes.” Peasant mythologies,
Marin argues, facilitated coping and control and helped members of the peasantry

2 This term is used but not explained in the secondary literature in Hungarian about the 1883 events. See
Sokcsevits, Horvátország, 392–94.
3 Pavličević, Narodni pokret.
4 Katus, “A mezőgazdaság,” and Katus, A Tisza-kormány.
5 One cannot shirk the task of providing some sort of definition of the polysemous and overused term
“modernization.” As my research interest concerns the experiences and emotional responses of peasants
to the new, however, I do not need precise conceptualizations. I argue, rather, as Shulamit Volkov did
in her seminal The Rise of Popular Antimodernism in Germany. Volkov claims that “popular antimodernism
emerged as a reaction to the process of modernization, not to one or another of its manifestations,” and
that it was a profound and “generalized hostility towards all forces that seemed to weaken the traditional
economy and society and threaten old life styles and values.” I will argue that the ideas of modernization,
first and foremost the salutary nature of progress, had an analyzable reception among members of the
peasantry. However, to narrow the scope of the investigation in order to ensure that it remained feasible, I
concentrated on reactions to urban modernization (urban–rural controversies) and reactions to spectacular
technical modernity. Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism, 10.
6 HR-HDA-78-6 Zemaljska vlada. Predsjedništvo. 1881–1883: Boxes 181–84. In the following: HR-
HDA-Pr.Zv.
7 I borrow in this essay an idea found in a volume of the series Rural History in Europe, according to which
the state’s attitude towards the agrarian world can be described as “integration through subordination,” given
that subordination “to the values and production logic of manufacturing industry is a major consequence
for the farming population and agriculture of the state’s modernising efforts.” Moser and Varley, “The state
and agricultural modernisation,” 26.

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reclaim at least a sense of agency in a situation of extreme vulnerability.8 Reports

about allegedly irrational peasant behavior fueled by rumors, alcohol, and the
psychosis of mass violence have long been considered unusable for historians,
which gives us a chance to make a contribution about bottom-up perceptions of
and fears related to modernity, as well as resistance to it.

The 1883 Anti-Hungarian and Anti-modernist Peasant Uprisings

The 1883 uprisings started in Zagreb following the violation of the language
use terms of the Hungarian–Croatian Compromise of 18689 by Antal Dávid,
head of the Zagreb Finance Directorate, who changed the coats of arms on the
fronts of the buildings under his authority from an exclusively Croatian version
to a bilingual Hungarian–Croatian one. He also organized quasi mandatory
Hungarian language training courses for officers, and in the meantime, the
Hungarian State Railways introduced Hungarian as an official language on its
lines on Croatian soil, claiming that it was, although owned by the Hungarian
State, a private company, and as such, it could decide freely about issues of
language use.10 The conflict around language brought to the surface various
political grievances and social tensions. The protests soon spread to rural areas,
where several suppressed tensions came to the fore. The rural population
was also able to use the issue of the coats of arms as a pretext for expressing
profound dissatisfaction and despair. The protests took months and eventually
were put down by military forces.
In 1883, peasant violence was aimed mainly at big, modern national networks
(railway, telegraph, and post and finance offices), symbols of urban lifestyle and
culture (urban clothing, books, new measures and meter sticks, and members
of the local intelligentsia, who were regarded as alien to the village), or other
symbols of state control (coats of arms, flags, civil registers, and other official
documents). In spite of the clear complexity of the phenomena, historians
often saw these acts of aggression exclusively as signs of the national awakening

8 Marin, Peasant Violence, 42.

9 Like the Austro-Hungarian Settlement of 1867, the Hungarian–Croatian Compromise was also
concluded to redefine the legal statuses of nations within the Empire. Although the document recognized
Croatia–Slavonia as an autonomous political nation with its own territory, it granted limited home rule to
Croatia mainly by the fact that the country’s finances were controlled by Budapest. Internal affairs were
autonomously managed, while foreign and military policy were integrated into the dualist system of post-
Settlement Austria–Hungary.
10 Sokcsevits, Horvátország, 392–94.

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Hungarian Historical Review 12, no. 1 (2023): 37–65

among the peasantry,11 and they assumed that the peasantry’s former, spatially
narrower but in its content broader set of identities was gradually replaced by
a dominant attachment to the nation. This vision of the nationalization of the
peasantry has since been nuanced and criticized in many ways,12 though the
Croatian and Hungarian secondary literature has yet to consider the relevance
of historiography concerning doubts about popular nationalism in relation to
peasant uprisings in Croatia. This consideration would have two major benefits:
first, we could reintroduce aspects that have been excluded by the nationalist
explanation, such as, in this case, the popular sensibilities to modernization,
and second, we could use the vast range of methodological findings and ideas
offered by the highly productive “history from below” approach.
If we cannot be sure about the level of the peasantry’s allegedly rising
national consciousness, it is safer to declare that by 1883 modern mass politics
started to reach the villages. First, the so-called Party of Right (Hrvatska stranka
prava), the main opposition party in the Zagreb parliament by the 1880s, and
twenty years later the Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska seljačka stranka) gradually
engaged non-voting masses in political activities. In a future broadening of
this research to subsequent events, the latter is of particular importance, since
the Croatian Peasant Party’s ideologues, Stjepan and Antun Radić, built up a
worldview that was based on the sharp separation of urban and rural societies,
and this vision deeply influenced the Croatian public and political discourse in
the first quarter of the twentieth century. According to Marc Biondich, Stjepan
Radić’s biographer, the most striking feature of late nineteenth-century Croatian
society was the popular assumption that political or economic oppression was
always a form of aggression by the city against rural communities, with the
underlying belief that this happened because the city was alien to the people.
This anti-urban agenda was of course intrinsically a part of a nationalist one,
as the tax collector, the recruiter, the officer, or the railway official were seen as
embodiments of both the cruel economic exploitation and the main obstacle to
Croatian national unfolding: the Hungarians.13 My intention, again, is to highlight
the anti-urban traits of these intertwining factors, without questioning however
the relevance of the national agenda.
Although the perception of the city as alien to the “authentic” national
culture of rural communities was a common phenomenon in the multinational
11 As described in Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen.
12 See most importantly: Van Ginderachter and Beyen, Nationhood from Below.
13 Biondich, Stjepan Radić, 21–25.

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Habsburg Lands, one rarely finds discussion, in the secondary literature, of the
fact that uneven urbanization among the nations of the empire meant uneven
access to modern achievements, and this inequality led to the crystallization
of the idea that modernization is not only a privilege but also an instrument
of power. Because of this spectacular nature of modernization’s political
implications, we can assume that popular critics of the ideas of progress and
the teleology of modernization were more frequently and clearly formulated in
contrast to the general view that modernization is such a complex phenomenon
that it could be grasped exclusively by high intellectuals, if ever. Our task is to
distinguish between overlapping anti-urban, anti-Hungarian, and anti-modern
feelings in order to become better acquainted with popular perceptions of
modernity.
Although the real electoral success did not come for the Croatian Peasant
Party until after World War I, this was due to the fact that, before the introduction
of universal suffrage, it was simply not possible to see or gauge the extraordinary
popularity of the party. The party program, however, was formulated in 1903,
hence the two-pole vision of society was built on experiences of the Settlement
period. Rural hostility to urban modernization is thus a factor that has a real
significance in political and intellectual history, a significance comparable even
to the significance of nationalism.
The available sources pose a common problem of rural history: the reports
about the peasants’ dissatisfaction do not offer the peasants’ voices directly.
Rather, these voices are mediated by government and military officials who
were appointed to visit the rebellious villages and gather information about the
details, actors, and motivations behind the events. The act of recording accounts
(allegedly) given by peasants means filtering, reorganizing, and thus distorting
the information. I would contend, however, that these sources still offer some
insights into the prevailing mindset among the peasantry, even if with some
inaccuracy and bias. In order to provide some balance and compensate for the
fact that the reports were authored by representatives of power, I gave credit to
statements allegedly made by peasants and described in the reports as irrational,
and I attempted to draw clear distinctions between the information provided
by the reporter on the one hand and speculation on the other. By focusing on
pieces of information considered insignificant and irrational by the authors of
these reports, I was able to distance the narrative somewhat from the interpretive
schemes provided by the contemporary bureaucracy.

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Also, some outstanding figures among the officials in charge seem to have
made a palpable effort to understand villagers instead of simply judging or
lecturing them, and they thus probably gained more trust in the community.
(As will be detailed below, it was rare for villagers to show much trust in an
urban and/or power figure, particularly after the protests were suppressed by
the military.) One agent who managed to win some trust among the villagers
was Ognjeslav Utješenović Ostrožinski (1875–1885), count of Varaždin
county and government commissioner delegated to investigate the origins of
the unrest. Due to his long conversations with peasants, in which he showed
honest interest, Utješenović’s reports which reconstruct these conversations
are of a particular importance to this investigation. He was convinced that
if the administration had turned “to the poor peasantry of Zagorje [region
surrounding Zagreb] with an open heart and gentle soul,” further violence
could have been avoided.14 He insisted on informing insecure villagers about
delicate questions which were central to the conflicts, such as taxation, coats
of arms, and laws and decrees, in order to dissipate unfounded concerns about
them. According to a document in which he requested the reimbursement
of his travel costs, Utješenović visited 21 villages and spent time among the
inhabitants of each.15
Utješenović’s sensitivity to the worries of the peasant world is also proven
by the books he had previously consecrated to rural phenomena, such as the
dissolution of the zadrugas16 and the special status of the peasant soldiers
living in the so-called Military Frontier (see footnote 1).17 In her monograph
on the beginnings of the processes of modernization in Croatia, Mirjana Gross
describes Utješenović’s favorable judgment18 of zadrugas as a manifestation of a
traditionalist mindset, and she is perplexed by the fact that this “great modernizer”
could have held such a view. She explains this contradiction as a consequence
14 Report of Ognjeslav Utješenović to the government from the village of Zlatar. September 2, 1883.
HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 182. 3653/1883.
15 HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 182. 4580/1883.
16 Utješenović, Die Hauskommunionen.
17 Utješenović, Die Militärgränze.
18 Utješenović considered the zadrugas beneficial, and he regarded the introduction of capitalist
practices into the world of agriculture rather dangerous, given that—he argued—it had led to extreme
polarization and pauperization in Western Europe. The lack of Croatian industrial sites alarmed him less
than the way in which Western industrialization had taken place. All in all, private property in his eyes was
not a guarantee of greater productivity. On the contrary, he believed that zadrugas could provide shelter
against pauperization and thus lead to better economic performance. According to him, Western civilizers
threatened traditional community bonds and morals and were toxic to South Slavs in general.

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of inner dilemmas, and she describes these alleged dilemmas in a dramatic way,
offering a portrait of Utješenović as an intellectual and practicing politician who
was “crucified” between modernity and traditions. Gross’s perspective, however,
magnifies this contradiction, as she considers the belated spread of capitalism the
main reason why Croatia was “backward,” and the only salutary way out of this
backwardness, in her assessment, would have been to adopt Western patterns of
modernization. According to her model, land ownership in these communities
was a striking example of the periphery’s backwardness.19 Utješenović, however,
wasn’t convinced that catching up to Western standards was a must, and thus he
was free to choose which features of modernization were desirable and which
were better avoided. This explains why he was tireless in his struggle for railway
and highway connections for his county, on the one hand, but was against the
unrestrained modernization of agricultural production on the other. Although
his reports about peasant turmoil cannot reflect his vision of the changing world
in the same depth as his books, it is interesting that he could be on the same
platform with peasants when they resisted the efforts of the modernizing elites
and wished to find their own ways between conserving the old and adopting the
new. Utješenović, who seems to have had something of an idealistic view of the
peasantry, can be seen as the opposite extreme from the mighty bureaucrats. His
often biased and paternalistic comments still help balance the images offered in
the other sources.
On the basis of the aforementioned sources and keeping in mind their
different authorships, I defined three overlapping domains that give us the
opportunity to reconsider the events from the perspectives outlined above. First, I
consider rural uncertainties with regard to national symbols.20 This disorientation
in the use of symbols sheds light on the general (that is, independent of national
bonds) despair against political power. In the two following sections, I investigate
two sub-cases of this general animosity towards the prevailing power relations,
namely anti-urban feelings based on the perception of the city as a space of
dominance and fear generated by big national networks, which were increasingly
intruding into the rural sphere.

19 Gross, Počeci Moderne Hrvatske, 216–19.

20 In this, an article by Stefano Petrungaro provided the model for me: Petrungaro, “Popular protest.”

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“The peasants shout themselves/their selves […] in the diatribes against Hun-
gary.”21 The Symbols and the Rhetoric of the 1883 Uprising

At first glance, 1883 was the year when Croatian peasants started to use political
and national symbols (mainly flags and coats of arms) as clear signs of their
engagement with the national paradigm. This vision was reinforced by the fact
that the spark that inflamed the smoldering tensions was the placement of
bilingual coats of arms on the facades of public buildings. As a reaction to this
(according to the secondary literature), first city dwellers and later the peasantry
also attacked visual symbols of Hungarian rule, destroyed bilingual inscriptions,
tore apart Hungarian flags, and shouted anti-Hungarian rhymes.
As Stefano Petrungaro stresses, archival documents give a very different
picture about the visual coding and decoding of symbols among peasants.22 The
most striking feature of the reports is indeed the highly ambivalent behavior
and perplexity of peasants when they should have found the right targets of
their anger. In the vast majority of villages, not a single Hungarian coat of
arms, inscription, or flag could be found, and when peasants invaded cities, they
had difficulty identifying ideal or typical national symbols which would have
represented a national “other.” In the overwhelming majority of the cases,
what protesters found was the so-called common coat of arms, a state symbol
that contained both Hungarian and Croatian iconographical elements (most
strikingly, the Croatian “chessboard” and the crown of Saint Stephen), but in
several cases, the coat of arms that was destroyed was exclusively Croatian.
Considering that the official Croatian coat of arms contained the crown of
Saint Stephen and the Hungarian coat of arms contained Croatian–Slavonian
heraldic elements, it wasn’t all that easy to differentiate between the two. As
far as flags are concerned, it seems clear that the Croatian national colors were
not yet identifiable for many in 1883. Even a decade and a half later, in 1897,
orthodox ecclesiastical flags were sometimes torn to shreds, even though these
flags had the same colors as the Croatian tricolor. In 1883, we see no trace of
the common practice of 1903, when peasants wore ribbons and cockades with
the Croatian national colors and carried around red, white, and blue flags.23 In

21 “Távirat Zágrábból” [Telegraph from Zagreb], Nemzet, September 3, 1883.

22 Petrungaro, “Popular protest.”
23 Petrungaro, “Popular protest,” 509–10. Contemporaries emphasized mainly the nationalistic hatreds,
but the disorientation of peasants was also clear to them. See the below the citations from Frigyes Pesty.
Pesty, Száz politikai, 33.

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a rather confusing manner, peasants frequently vandalized flags that they had
found in churches and sometimes (though less often) also icons and sculptures
that they also identified as symbols of power and dominance.
In Hrastovica, the mob broke into the church because they assumed that
the priest was hiding Hungarian flags inside, but when they didn’t find any, they
broke a statue of Saint Florian because they thought it was holding “some kind
of coat of arms.”24 The report from Gornja Stubica suggests that the peasants
tried to destroy any and all objects that had possible symbolic meanings. A group
of approximately sixty peasants pulled down the common coat of arms from the
municipality’s facade with bars and then demanded that the official turn over the
Hungarian blazon, which they claimed he had hidden. In other words, they were
perfectly aware of the fact that the coat of arms they had destroyed was not the
Hungarian one. They then tore the signboards down from two local shops and
the tobacconist’s store, smashed them, and claimed that they were also blazons
(“grb,” in Croatian). This vandalization of symbols of power was topped by
the fact that the protesters confiscated not only the shopkeeper’s money and
cigarettes but also a portrait of Emperor Franz Joseph.25 Common coats of
arms were damaged in Dubrave, Gomirje, and several other villages. One of
the reports written by Utješenović constitutes a particularly telling source about
a peasant community that had reached the limits of its tolerance for change.
Utješenović claims in his account to have calmed the dwellers of Sveti Križ who
had gathered around him on the church square only by assuring them that there
would be nothing new regarding the blazon-issue and that “no one intends to
place any other coat of arms than those that have already existed here.”26
In Marija Bistrica on August 26, 1883, peasants from the region tore down
the official Croatian-language signs and the blazon after the Sunday mass
because they were, the peasants insisted, “practically the same as the Hungarian
coat of arms.”27 This reflection suggests that the attack was more than some
irrational act of the illiterate masses and that the logic behind it was not strictly
or exclusively of a “national” nature. The remark indicates, rather, that peasants
identified every state symbol as Hungarian, and by “Hungarian,” they meant

24 A press report is cited in Pavličević, Narodni pokret, 265.

25 Report of the Stubica prefecture to the sub-county of Zlatar. August 29, 1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78.
6. Box 182. 3454/1883.
26 Report of Ognjeslav Utješenović from Zlatar relating to the events of several villages. September 2,
1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 182. 3653/1883.
27 Pavličević, Narodni pokret, 265.

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a distant, hostile center of power, drawing upon a significant distortion and

broadening of the original term to express a wide range of phenomena that
were troubling to them.
The high number of attacks against local Croatian officials and members of
the rural intelligentsia also indicates that any member of the state bureaucracy
could be targeted, regardless of the person’s nationality. This is all the more
striking when hostility was aimed at people who in no way could have been
linked to Budapest, such as local teachers, priests, and popes. In the case of
these members of the rural communities, it is not always easy to understand
the logic according to which they were on occasion called Magyar or magyarón
(a pejorative term referring to politicians and people who were seen as being
friendly to Hungarians or Hungarian interest) or how it would have been possible
for Hungarians to bribe or corrupt them.
In this context, the term “Magyar” or “Hungarian” became so widely used
that it almost lost any real meaning. It becomes impossible to say if it actually
referred to a specific national affiliation—in which case its use to denominate
local Croatian elites or the Croatian coat of arms would have been absurd—
or was simply a general label applied to comparatively unfamiliar people who
exercised some authority over the peasantry. For the latter, an extra term was
available, the expression “magyarón,” which a priori made it possible to use it for
people of any kind of nationality. As the two terms were used in very different
contexts, we can also assume that state symbols, such as coats of arms, were not
always simply misinterpreted by accident, but rather were deliberately labeled
Hungarian to place a clear emphasis on the perceived widening gap between the
rural world and the ruling circles.
The term “Magyar” was turned upside down in the most ironic way in Senj,
a little town on the Croatian littoral. The town had no Hungarian inhabitants
and was renowned for its struggle to remain an economic equal of Fiume
(Rijeka, Croatia), the only seaport that belonged directly to Hungary in the era.
For this reason, Senj was a notorious hub of political opposition.28 According
to a report by Major Izidor Vuich, an adherent of the Party of Right, Josip
Gržanić “inflamed people against every bureaucrat, and he did so by revealing
the addresses of all those who respected or agreed with the laws of the great
government, and said that they are all Hungarians, and he denigrated with this

28 Eszik, “A Small Town’s Quest.”

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name every peace-loving and honest citizen who did not desire any turmoil.”29
The insinuation that people who had a history of fighting Hungarian rule
were somehow “Hungarian” themselves shows once again that the term was
malleable. The report then declares that the main motivation for the uprising
was “hatred of the laws.” In other words, there seems to have been a general
hostility towards the governing circles.
This widening and distortion of a term is not a unique phenomenon.
According to the research of Irina Marin, early twentieth-century peasants in
North Romania called themselves “students” due to a similar distortion of the
expression. The participants in the 1907 jacquerie, many of whom were illiterate,
defined students as urban rebel elements and identified themselves with them
in turn, which led them to recite chants like “we are the students.”30 Similarly,
workers on strike in Lower Austria in 1905 called the workers transported from
today’s Hungary and Slovakia to break the strike “Krowoten” (that is, Croats).
In the given context, Krowoten was definitely a derogatory term to designate
transitional dwellers in the city who spoke a Slavic language.31 This latter example
clearly shows the nationalist logic of the scapegoating process, but it also reveals
how unelaborated these terms were at that stage. The same can be said about the
peasants protesting in Croatia–Slavonia: nationalism’s vocabulary came to them
via the press or agitation led by the Party of Right, but they also used this new
vocabulary to narrate social collisions.
To the extent that one can venture conjectures concerning peasant
experiences, while the state was increasingly becoming visible (and threatening)
in rural life through tax collection and cadastral surveys, the government’s
Magyarizing policies (which started becoming stronger in 1879) couldn’t really be
perceived in rural areas. Local representatives of the state were not Hungarians,
in large part because tax collection was made a municipal duty, and the financial
authorities also employed locals. Therefore, when people identified state power
with Hungarians, there was a missing link in the chain, replaced sometimes with
the use of the term “magyarón,” but more often, the equation was completed
with the help of rumor and insinuation.
There were plenty of rumors that spread wildly throughout the weeks of the
protests. These rumors were in general a specific mixture of pieces of accurate

29 Izidor Vuich’s report about the conditions in Senj. August 29, 1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 182.
3442/1883. My emphasis.
30 Marin, Peasant Violence, 39.
31 Morelon, “Social Conflict,” 661.

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information, elements of popular imaginary, wishful thinking, and, in contrast,

the greatest fears of the peasantry. Independently of their content, we can see
these rumors as collective interpretive frameworks which gave a rationalizing
opportunity in a situation of uncertainty and crisis. As sources, they reveal how
peasants interpreted their reality, and thus their level of “truthfulness” matters
little. Given that one of the functions of rumors was to inflame peasants and
legitimize violence, it is not surprising that many of the rumors concerned the
new, unbearable taxes.32
In 1883, the most common rumor besides concerns over taxes33 was that
local bureaucrats and intelligentsia would sell the village to Hungarians and sell
the church, the belltower, the lands, or even the villagers. This fear is such a
recurrent element in reports that Stefano Petrungaro called it the silver thread
of the movements.34 This rumor created a direct—however imaginary—link
between local representatives of the power structure and the distant center in
the Hungarian Kingdom, and it made it possible for the peasantry to organize its
hostile feelings towards symbols and persons in a logical arrangement. According
to the rumor, the sign that an alleged sale was going to take place would be a flag
hung out during the night on a public building, from which Hungarians would
recognize that they were free to seize the village. Destroying flags thus seemed a
preventive act of self-defense.
This rumor not only thematizes the dependent status of the Croatian (and
Serbian) nation, it also links betrayal to cash flow and reduces it to an act of
sale, ignoring the various real ways in which Magyarization could have been
taking place around them.35 The agrarian society, which was being forced to
adopt capitalist practices, experienced a rise in its costs since they were counted
in cash. This rise in costs had various reasons, including excessive taxation,
economic crisis since 1873, and a lack of financial infrastructure, which thus
32 On the role of rumors in peasant movements see Marin, Peasant Violence, 39–41.
33 Sometimes even fears concerning taxes fears also suggest anxieties concerning the state’s intrusion
into the countryside. Especially after 1897, when the news about the law of civil marriage spread in the
villages, rumors about taxing marriage, birth, and other family events circulated in great numbers. Clearly,
the fear was about the state invading the private sphere. Petrungaro, Kamenje i puške, 46–50; 68.
34 Petrungaro, “Popular protest,” 506.
35 We can assume that if the real reason for fear had been Magyarization, the subject would have been
education and language use. I have not found a single sign of this kind of fear in the archival documents.
Admittedly, this may be a consequence, at least in part, of widespread illiteracy. Around 1880 in Croatia–
Slavonia, ca. three quarters of the population was illiterate. Under such circumstances, everything
unknown coming from urban centers or any kind of (state) power could be understood as some form of
Magyarization. Župan, “Kulturni i intelektualni razvoj u Hrvatskoj,” 273.

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 Anti-Modernist Features of the 1883 Anti-Hungarian Peasant Uprising in Croatia

made the peasantry vulnerable to usury. A specific factor among these causes
was the introduction of a new system of measurement and new scales. The
peasantry saw the literate upper class, to which it most frequently referred as
Hungarian (and sometimes Jew—see the discussion below), as responsible for
these changes.
In conclusion, the attitude of the peasants towards symbols either turned
against every kind of power symbol regardless of its link to a given nation or
was simply anti-Hungarian, if with a very broad understanding of “Hungarian”
as a term that applied to every kind of power perceived as hostile. Nationalist
motivations were still a relevant factor, but they were less relevant than the
secondary literature has tended to claim.
Finally, the wave of protests gave the peasants an opportunity to express
their frustrations with specific acute problems. In these cases, the act of pulling
down the coats of arms served as a well-known choreography to express
dissatisfaction. In Nova Gradiška for instance, the turmoil was stirred by a fire
that destroyed the beech forest which had been set side to be cut down for the
benefit of the villagers. In his report, the municipal officer shared his view that
the otherwise peaceful people, who were loyal to the dynasty, became agitated by
the news arriving from Zagreb and then were further distressed by the disastrous
fire. Thus, when they pulled down blazons and flags, they imitated the events in
Zagreb, about which they had read in newspapers, but the true reason for their
despair was the very real financial consequences for them of the fire.36
Adding a layer of nuance to the canonical explanations of peasant
unrest, which have tended to see this unrest as a symptom and proof of national
awakening, is not my ultimate end in this inquiry. In the discussion below, I
examine how political measures regarded as novelties and political actors
regarded as alien to the village gave an anti-modernist and anti-urban tinge to
the protests.

Anti-urban Peasant Violence

In the summer of 1883, several people were insulted or even attacked because
of their clothing. The prefect in a village of the former Military Frontier named
Gora was said to have embezzled money collected as taxes and used it to

36 Report of the municipal officer from Nova Gradiška. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 182. 3072/1883.

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Hungarian Historical Review 12, no. 1 (2023): 37–65

purchase boots.37 Boots were considered a privilege enjoyed by urban people,

and the reports frequently mention that wearing boots might well make one
a potential target of violence. In the neighboring village, Maja, a person was
killed because he was wearing a specific urban coat, the so-called kaput. Kaputaš,
the term derived from the name of the coat, became a derogatory term with
which to refer to city dwellers, and the kaputaši were often simply identified as
tax collectors. According to one report about the new tax burdens, “All of this
feeds upon the wretched peasant, and he, therefore, sees every civilized person
as his enemy and torturing demon. That is why one heard the slogan during the
disorders that all kaputaši should be killed.”38
The opposition of the “wretched peasant” and the “civilized person” shows
that the traditional divide between the rural and the urban population took on a
new meaning with the acceleration of urban modernization and the increasing
social value of cultural habits associated with “civilization” towards the end of
the nineteenth century. This divide was defined not only by the stark difference
between urban and rural lifestyles and values, the differences between a close
community in rural settings and a looser urban society, or the disparities in the
occupational sector, but increasingly by uneven access to innovation and by the
resulting economic inequalities and differences in mentality. For this reason, in
this section, I consider attacks against members of the village intelligentsia as
expressions of anti-urban resentment. Partly because they had been educated
in urban environments, all educated people were treated as alien to the village
community, and they were also seen as personifying the city’s dominance over
rural communities because they were able, thanks to the new social capital and
technical skills they had acquired in the city, to assert a significant measure of
control over villagers. Furthermore, they represented the intention or need to
change the traditional lifeworld of the peasantry, or in other words, they were
seen as embodiments and tools of a process of modernization, threatening to
many members of the rural communities.
In addition to violent acts committed against people dressed in urban attire,
the reports also mention urban figures who allegedly appeared in villages as
instigators and occasions when peasant masses intruded into the city. In each
case, these figures—the urban gentleman on the one hand and the enraged
peasant on the other—serve to shift responsibility. When peasants claimed to
37 Report from the villages of Gora, Kraberčan, Klasnić, Maligradac, and Maja. September 9, 1883. HR-
HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 183. 3821/1883.
38 The report is cited in Biondich, Stjepan Radić, 25.

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 Anti-Modernist Features of the 1883 Anti-Hungarian Peasant Uprising in Croatia

have seen “gentlemen” who manipulated them, their allegations also served to
assert their innocence and legitimize acts of violence, much as allegations by the
burghers of the city concerning angry peasant mobs served essentially the same
functions.39 What is important here is not whether there was any truth in these
allegations so much as the logic behind them: the actors found the other party
deserving of blame according to the rural-urban opposition.
Peasants who went to fairs in cities around August 20 broke things in urban
space and sometimes used violence to intimidate or rob citizens. According to
one report, “The disturbance, which at first was against the coats of arms, has
begun to have a dangerous communist-like character. Instigators, who are said to
be from Hungary, agitate people to commit crimes against property.”40 In such
cases, the urban-rural opposition was also aggravated by the cooperation of the
burghers with the authorities, for instance in Krapina, where “a couple hundred
peasants wished to pillage, […] but the citizens [of the city] stood up against
them, supporting the gendarmerie. One of the gendarmerie patrols clashed with
the mob, and the rebels ran away as a result.”41 The gunfire of the gendarmerie
killed a peasant, and the city dwellers feared vengeance as the news spread that
“the rest of them escaped to the mountains, as it is said, to gather and attack
Krapina when there are several thousands of them.”42 The story illustrates that
rumors had a role in urban contexts as well. An essential element of any rumor
is an exaggeration, such as the vision of thousands of angry peasants, as well
as unfoundedness: the peasants did not return to Krapina. The atmosphere of
mutual fear between the rural and the urban population, however, is palpable.
In the villages, elegantly dressed, literate, educated people were seen as
hostile strangers who because of their professions had contacts with the city,
such as the teacher,43 the priest, the pope, the bureaucrat, and the merchant.

39 Two examples from Nova Gradiška and from Zlatar: The prefect’s report from Nova Gradiška. HR-
HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 182. 3072/1883; Ognjeslav Utješenović’s report from Zlatar. September 2, 1883.
HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 182. 3653/1883.
40 One should not miss the irony of the fact that, according to the author of the report, anti-Hungarian
riots were provoked by Hungarian instigators. “Zágrábból jelentik” [Reported from Zagreb], Nemzet,
September 2, 1883. A
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 The foreignness of teachers in rural communities is illustrated by a Croatian text in which only the
word “teacher” is written in German: “Da sam ja vlada, ja bi objesio i Lehrera i popa i sve činovnike […]!” That is:
“If it were up to me, I would hang the teacher, and the pope, and all the bureaucrats […]!” The source cites
a peasant from the small village of Brđani, a certain Filip Pavlović. The district prefect’s report to Ramberg,
Petrinja. September 22, 1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 183. 3983/1883.

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Hungarian Historical Review 12, no. 1 (2023): 37–65

These people were accused of being traitors who shared sympathies with the
Hungarians, they were searched through when protesters were searching for
objects that were symbolic representations of power. The latter included the
aforementioned coats of arms and flags, any kind of written documents (often
decrees and orders), maps, and the newly introduced scales and tools used to
measure things (new weights and measuring sticks).
The destruction of the new measuring instruments seemed the most
barbarian and irrational act in the eyes of the elites, who believed unconditionally
in progress. One senses the tone of indignant incomprehension in the words
of Frigyes Pesty, a contemporary historian, politician, and public intellectual.
His comments are worth citing because they reflect the force of the dominant
discourse about modernization and progress:
It is truly great naivety to presume that the Croatian people’s spirit
was disturbed by the sight of the Hungarian state coat of arms and
Hungarian inscriptions. These people pulled down Croatian coats of
arms, and those without any inscription. […]—this is a sign of the
fact that the capability of reading has not yet spread enough among
these people, and also a sign that they have long been manipulated by
instigators. These people even revolted against the metric system and
want to return to the old measures. I’m wondering if these people even
know what they want.44

The opinion detailed by Pesty was far from unique. In a travelogue, one finds
a similar judgment about Bosnians who were not impressed by the civilizing
Austro-Hungarian administration: “They don’t need culture forced onto them,
they are averse to the inventive efforts of progress.”45 The belittling of the
peasants as people who were allegedly unable to recognize their own interests
in progress and thus unable to show self-determination is a gesture that can be
linked to the modernizing elites in general.46
Hatred of the metric system posed a problem for historians as well.47
Even those who approached the subject with empathy assumed that ignorance
played a role in the rejection of the new system of measurement. This kind of
44 Pesty, Száz politikai, 33.
45 Solymossy, “Úti rajzok,” 309.
46 This attitude is also present in the multitude of sources in which instigators (students from Zagreb,
activists of the Party of Right, foreigner socialists, etc.) have the leading part. The underlying idea of these
texts is that the peasantry was not able to make its own decisions. See also Marin, Peasant Violence, 50.
47 An outstanding exception—although in a very different, West European context—is Alder, The
Measure of All Things.

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 Anti-Modernist Features of the 1883 Anti-Hungarian Peasant Uprising in Croatia

interpretation developed by Rudolf Bićanić in 1937 was reiterated in Dragutin

Pavličević’s aforementioned monograph. According to the explanations offered
by Bićanić and Pavličević, the rejection of the metric system was motivated
mainly by fears of an economic nature, as peasants were convinced that taxes
would further rise with the introduction of the new system of measurement.
As the “Hungarian” system of measurement was introduced at a time when
taxes were already going up, the erroneous conclusion was that the new system
was itself the cause of this financial burden. Also, the agrarian crisis resulted
decreasing crop prices, which were also mistaken for a consequence of the use
of a new system.48 The illiterate peasants, furthermore, couldn’t doublecheck or
monitor the process of conversion, and as they lacked trust in the authorities,
they assumed that they were being constantly duped.
However, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the act of breaking
of measuring sticks and scales wasn’t isolated from other acts, including the
destruction of maps and documents of the cadastral surveys and attacks on
surveyors and engineers if they happened to be present in the village. The stakes
of destroying measures were higher than the mere tension release, as indicates
a telegraph from Zlatar that urged reinforcements. The document reveals that
when protesters clashed with the police, four peasants were killed, but the
peasant mass stayed together and remained determined to search for and destroy
every measuring stick in Zlatar and its surroundings.49
As a matter of fact, measuring things was a peasant experience way more
complex than the impression of being deluded by the conversion or damaged
by the change. The ongoing cadastral surveys resulted, mainly in the territories
where these surveys were completed by 1883, in a new kind of tax and ever
greater financial burdens. The basis of tax assessment was defined by surveyors
who frequently abused of their influence over vital issues (namely, they could be
bribed to rank lands into lower categories of tax assessment).50 In the process
of dissolving zadrugas and administering land titles, these officials had the same
role and the same opportunities to use corrupt methods in order to fill their
own pockets. According to Antun Radić, who would have preferred to conserve
common property, peasants couldn’t benefit from the dissolution of zadrugas,

48 Pavličević, Narodni pokret, 14.

49 Telegraph from Zlatar to ask for reinforcements. August 26, 1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 181.
3306/1883.
50 Pavličević, Narodni pokret, 60.

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only “the engineers, the merchants, the creditors, and the bureaucrats.”51
Obviously, engineers are on this list not as technical professionals, but as
potential exploiters.
The peasantry thus saw for themselves that cadastral surveys were not merely
technical or scientific processes. On the contrary, they were tools with which the
centralizing state extended its control over rural areas. Given the lack of suitable
sources, it is not easy to study the history of emotions related to measuring
things in general and cadastral surveys in particular. However, the vehemence of
reactions to land surveys suggests that the very process of measuring land was
seen as an infringement on an intimate attachment to this land. A report from
Ogulin written by an especially emphatic official begins with more emotion than
usual official records. “I came among them, and I have to say that I was deeply
moved by the sorrow of these people, how they admit their mistakes and beg
for pardon.” The author of the report then gives an account of the burdens,
unbearable difficulties, and fears of the peasants. The fears primarily concerned
the new taxes, and the report emphasizes one such concern in particular: the
peasants claimed that a new kind of tax would be introduced. “Taxes will come,”
they claimed, “that no one has ever heard of before, they will measure our dead,
and we will have to pay according to the weight of the body.”52 The anxiety
expressed through this rumor is not only of a financial nature. It is a symptom
of the pervasive fear that the state, through its rationalizing and measuring
practices, was going to intrude violently into the private sphere of families,
including the intimate process of grieving. This rumor clearly indicates that,
even if exaggeration is an inherent characteristic of rumors, the ever expanding
state’s modernizing campaigns provoked fearful and hostile reactions.
The peasant reception of the idea that the engineer is an iconic figure
of modernization also has to be taken into account.53 Given that mass media
frequently made progress a theme, it is ironic to assume that propaganda succeeded
in making peasants realize their identities as members of a nation while somehow
failing to affect their knowledge of technical and scientific developments and
ideas of modernization. As it so happens, this was the era in which technical
drawings and engravings were often published in popular newspapers as visual

51 Cited in Pavličević, Narodni pokret, 38.

52 Report of the district authority from Ogulin. August 30, 1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 181.
3457/1883.
53 According to François Jarrige, the engineer, the scientist, and the industrial entrepreneur were the
“heroes of progress.” Fureix and Jarrige, La modernité désenchantée, 57.

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markers of engineering performance. These drawings were accessible to the

illiterate public. Technical innovation was spectacularly managed by a group of
intellectuals of a new type, as much in rural areas as in cities. The tools they
used, which were frequently seen as diabolical wands, became targets of violence
in various localities in Europe.54 At the turn of the century, a newspaper titled
Dom (Fatherland), which was expressly published for a peasant public, lamented
the alleged overuse of the term “progress.” According to an article authored by
Antun Radić and published in Dom, this word was used over and over again in
every book and paper, and people educated and illiterate, intelligent and ignorant
alike were speaking about it, and everything that wasn’t seen as progressive was
instantly judged as wild and backward. Radić described modern man as a figure
“with a telegraphy on his one ear and a telephone on the other,” but that didn’t
mean that he was good in spirit. While Radić considered the ubiquity of ideas
of progress evident in peasant circles, with regard to modern achievements,
he concludes that “we, peasants, readers of Dom, can remain humans without
them.”55 Sloboda (Liberty), a newspaper made partly responsible for the spread
of the ideas of the Party of Right, wrote at length about “soulless engineers”
(bezdušni inžiniri). Unfortunately, the editorial was heavily censored.56
Thus, when Pavličević affirmed several times that the metric system was
rejected because everything that came from the Hungarian Kingdom was
rejected regardless of the progressiveness of the phenomenon,57 he overlooked something
important. Namely, the peasants were not at all indifferent to the question of
whether something was or wasn’t modern or progressive. On the contrary,
the peasantry was at times particularly sensitive to anything new on the one
hand, while it used the symbols of modernity (e.g. new measuring implements
or engineers) for its own purposes on the other. The agrarian society at the
end of the nineteenth century clearly realized that the new things that were
being introduced (whether something as concrete as a new kind of scale or
something abstract, like a new system of measurement) radically transformed
its lifeworld, and the peasantry experienced modernizing intervention as a form
of coercion. The assumption that villagers misunderstood the significance of
the metric system is no more convincing than the assumption that they simply
reinterpreted this system and its uses with respect to their own interests. The

54 As has happened a century earlier in France: Alder, The Measure of All Things.
55 Radić, “Što je ‘napredak’?,” Dom, December 27, 1901, 424–25.
56 Sloboda, September 19, 1883, 1.
57 Pavličević, Narodni pokret, 67, 94.

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reception of the symbols of modernity, like the reception of the symbols of

“national” belonging, was also a negotiation over the benefits and utility of this
“modernity” in rural areas. The destruction of measuring instruments allowed
peasants to express their distrust for the new, which, as Peter Burke suggests, was
not at all irrational or extremely conservative. Rather, it was a strategy based on
the bitter experience that the price of change is often paid by common people.58
While historians have had little access to peasant emotions of the nineteenth
century towards surveys and measurements (acts of aggression against engineers,
for instance, were not considered as expressions of critical attitudes towards
modernity, but rather merely as a sub-case of irrational hostility against the
intelligentsia), contemporary officials and authors of fiction59 may have been
more sensitive to feelings of loss related to modernizing campaigns. The district
official in Nova Gradiška, for instance, openly warned the newly arriving financial
officer to respect local traditions and “not to introduce any innovations, because
there had been already enough of them, and I know well that people have not
been able to get used to the previous ones.”60 Clearly, the tolerance of change of
communities in rural areas had its limits.
A specific sub-case of aggression against a local intelligentsia is the great
number of assaults against Jews. Antisemitic aspects of the 1883 uprising were
often regarded as marginal, and they were explained by the impact of a significant
antisemitic wave in the Hungarian Kingdom,61 namely the notorious Tiszaeszlár
lawsuit, a blood libel which ended with the acquittal of the (Jewish) defendant
but nevertheless fueled hostility towards Jews all over the country and maybe
even beyond. Amongst the archival documents, I have found three pamphlets
that refer to the Tiszaeszlár lawsuit, one of which was printed, so it could have
been spread in large numbers.62 However, it seems unlikely that flowing against
anti-Hungarian (and anti-modernization) sentiments, there was any widespread
58 Burke, Popular Culture, 209.
59 Although I cannot, in this essay, offer anything resembling a thorough discussion of the questions
that arise here as they are treated in works of fiction, it is worth noting how measuring things is a recurrent
subject of writings dealing with conflicts over civilizational processes. In the Austro–Hungarian context,
the best known example is the Nobel-prize winning novel by Ivo Andrić, The Bridge. I would also mention
Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World and Brian Friel’s Translations.
60 Ladislav Mihanović district prefect reports from Nova Gradiška. October 8, 1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv.
78. 6. Box 183. 4320/1883.
61 Pavličević, Narodni pokret, 80.
62 Handwritten pamphlets: HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 182. 3072/1883. The printed one is the attachment
of a county report, which dwells on the fears of Jews in the region, and in addition to the pamphlet, it
contains a local Croatian-language paper that reports the Hungarian legal case. The count proposes the

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sympathy for Hungarians as victims of the supposed crimes committed by

Jews. This implausible interpretation would rest on an overestimation of the
information flow between Hungarian and Croatian rural communities, which
were separated by a serious language barrier, as well as an overestimation of
the solidarity between these two populations. It seems far more likely that the
antisemitic acts of violence, which were not exactly sporadic, were manifestations
of anti-capitalist, economic arguments used to blame and vilify the Jewry.
In addition, as Christhard Hoffmann stated in his study “‘The New’ as a
(Jewish) Threat: Anti-modernism and Antisemitism in Germany,” this was the
very historical moment when the Jew became the symbol of modernity and the
urban type.63 Stereotypes about the Jewry had long been dominated by notions
of backwardness and poverty, but the second half of the nineteenth century
brought change. The threats posed by modernity came to be seen as threats posed
(at least in part) by the Jewry. As Hoffman shows, of the elements of modernity,
three in particular were identified as Jewish in the antimodernist and antisemitic
intellectual discourse in Germany. The Jew became the personification of the
capitalist, the urban archetype, and the intellectual.64 The medieval figure of the
usurer was complemented by the latter not only in intellectual narratives but also
among those who were the losers in the processes of industrialization (artisans,
craftsmen, peasants, retailers) in general.65
Many antisemitic atrocities committed in 1883 were claimed to be acts
against usury, but they also seem to have been fueled by the anger of those
who felt excluded from the benefits of literacy, as writing was in their eyes an
instrument used by the powerful to dominate the powerless and pervert the
truth.66 As Utješenović detailed, the vulnerability of the debtor was further
reinforced by the fact that documents concerning loans were written and
certified by the money lender, often a Jewish person, while the people borrowing

confiscation of the latter. Also attached was an antisemitic comic which arrived from Hungary in a great
number of copies but was confiscated by the authorities. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 184. 4580/1883.
63 Hoffmann, “‘The New’,” 105.
64 Ibid., 101.
65 Jews, of course, could be made scapegoats for practically anything. One finds a telling example in the
village of Slunj, where peasants claimed that the attack on the local post office was the idea of a certain
David Rendeli. Rendeli himself lived in the same building and also kept a shop and a bar in it, but by a
distorted logic, he was said to have invented the attack so that he would be able to call for military help, and
the soldiers arriving to restore order would eat and drink and spend their money in his shops. Report of the
district authority of Slunj to Ramberg. September 21, 1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 183. 3981/1883.
66 Fónagy, “Kollektív erőszak,” 1179.

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money (namely, members of the peasantry) had no control over the process.
In disputed cases, the mere word of a peasant was countered with written and
signed documents, so the peasant could never win.67
It is telling that in a world turned upside down, where peasants could assert
control over the intelligentsia of the village, these peasants seized the power
of the written word in symbolic ways and thus created new power relations
related to literacy. These symbolic acts frequently consisted of imitations of
everyday acts of writing, but under the control of the peasantry. In Stubica, for
instance, angered villagers made the instructor Vjekoslav Satler write and sign
a document in which he declared himself Croatian and promised to serve only
Croatian interests.68 Priest Andro Čižmek was also made to sign the same paper,
as were the officials of the municipal office and the tax collector, who happened
to be there that day. The peasants then went to the bar, where they forced the
barman to give them drinks and sign the document.69 A similar effort was made
to reach all the literate inhabitants in the community of Zlatar, and according
to the same choreography. In the morning, villagers made the notary, the village
doctor, and the prefect sign a document confirming that they were Croatian, and
then the villagers scattered. Peasants gathered again that afternoon and dragged
the teacher from the schoolhouse to make him sign the declaration, and later,
two other clerks from the municipality had to do the same.70
Forms of behavior discussed in this section reveal that modernity’s
distinguished space (the city), distinguished figures (engineers, educated people,
bureaucrats), and distinguished symbols (maps, written documents, measuring
tools) had complex interpretations among the peasantry that offer a perspective
from which we can arrive at a “from below” understanding of shifting attitudes
towards the processes of modernization in the late nineteenth-century rural
sphere in Central Europe.

67 Utiešenović, count of Varaždin reports to the government, Krapina. September 18, 1883. HR-HDA-
Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 182. 3866/1883. In the same report a suggested solution is cited: “The village of Ivanca
humbly asks for the creation of saving banks in villages, where it would be possible to obtain a loan with
moderate interest.”
68 It is worth treating the ethnonym “Croatian” with caution. As in the case of “Hungarian,” it could
mean many different things. One plausible solution is that it meant simple people as opposed to members
of the middle or upper classes.
69 The municipality of Stubica reports to the sub-county of Zlatar. August 29, 1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv.
78. 6. Box 182. 3454/1883.
70 Telegraph from Zlatar. August 29, 1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 181. 3313/1883.

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 Anti-Modernist Features of the 1883 Anti-Hungarian Peasant Uprising in Croatia

Enmeshing the Countryside: The State’s Intrusion into the Rural World

Finally, the state appeared in rural spaces not only through its human agents but
also through its new networks, which were increasingly enmeshing the whole
country. While treated as a different case in this study, as symbols of state power,
networks were in reality part of the context outlined above. A telegraph officer
could have easily been an educated person from the city, was certainly a man
of letters, and wore clothes with strong symbolic meanings (a uniform), and
the railway was obviously also a newly (and rapidly) emerging way of creating
and maintaining direct ties to political and economic centers, i.e., cities. One
finds evidence of anger against state networks in the sources, mixed together
with a number of other sensibilities, resentments, and hostilities. In Ivanca, for
instance, where peasants vandalized the telegraph wire, they also planned to
expel Jews from the village on December 24 and attack anyone who was wearing
black boots.71 Ivanca peasants committed or planned to commit acts of physical
aggression against networks, urban people, Jews, and clerks at the same time.
In this section, I shed light on the irritation felt, in rural communities, at big
state networks. As attacks against the extensive state networks were a far more
significant part of the 1903 uprising, this section confine itself to evoke the
possible roots of the acts of violence committed in 1903.
Three features of the growing state networks seem to have been significant
in relation to the malcontent among the peasantry: the often uniform elements
of these networks were seen as instruments of the homogenizing nation-state;
in networks, the mutual dependence of network nodes reduces autonomy;72
finally, in regions where agrarian mechanization did not even start to unfold,73 the
networks were often the only visible technical innovation. These three features
were, of course, preceded by the practical benefits of damaging networks:
breaking the flow of information to the political centers and also the impeding
troop movement facilitated the maintenance of a state of emergency.
The railway and the telegraph were often targeted even in 1883, as were post
offices. These three networks had a role in the question of language use as well
(Magyarizing tendencies affected these institutions first). Moreover, the railway

71 Report to the Royal Telegraph Directorate. August 29, 1883. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 184.
5582/1883.
72 The sociologist Alain Gras describes these increased dependencies in relation, for instance, to the
electrical grid: Gras, Grandeur et dépendance.
73 Katus, “A mezőgazdaság.”

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policy became a neuralgic point in Hungarian–Croatian relations. Railway lines

built according to the interests of Hungarian foreign trade and the consistent
disregard of Croatian traffic and trade needs made the railway a real emblem of
exploitation. Damaging railway lines thus had practical, economical, and national
motivations, added to which the railway network was a spectacular modern
achievement, and a strong visual marker of the homogenizing state.
Railway buildings were constructed according to a type design, and they
thus became the first public buildings that created uniformity in the countryside
throughout Transleithania. They represented state presence and were not
adjusted to local architectural or spatial arrangement traditions. On the contrary,
they exhibited the superiority of the (modernizing, homogenizing) center.
The contrast was often spectacular between local conditions and the railway
buildings, as expressed by Rezső Havass, president of the Hungarian Association
of Geographers and main theorist of Hungarian imperial ambitions towards
the Balkans. When traveling to Fiume by train, Havass found the countryside
uninteresting: “Dugaresa is […] an insignificant little place. Houses are built
of wood and covered by reed. The next station is Generalszki Sztol. Also an
insignificant place. […] Third station, Touin. Small place. Next station Ogulin,
a town with 2,000 inhabitants.” The unique things that caught his eye were
railway buildings, which, in contrast were all “built with charm, taste, and show
cleanliness and practical arrangement,”74 that is, they reflect the achievements of
the modern state in the fields of culture, hygiene, and engineering. This contrast
was obviously perceived by locals as well, but they presumably had emotional
attachments to the wooden houses (their homes) and certainly some resentment
for the railway stations.
Infrastructural networks not only represented the state in rural areas, they
also re-hierarchized rural space. Distance to smaller or larger centers became a
determining factor in the prosperity of different localities. This dependence on
infrastructure became spectacular with the rearrangement of transport routes
and the decline of certain towns as a result. By damaging railway lines, villagers
could find temporary relief from this increased dependency. The direct link to
the center, however, sometimes gave hope. The aforementioned inhabitants of
fire-damaged Nova Gradiška, for instance, expressed several times their hope
that the emperor Franz Joseph would indemnify them “once the train arrives.”75

74 Havass, “A károlyváros-fiumei vasútvonal,” 156–58.

75 Report of the municipal officer from Nova Gradiška. HR-HDA-Pr.Zv. 78. 6. Box 182. 3072/1883.

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Whether it was threatening or promising, infrastructure that created direct links

to centers made it obvious that innovation was also an instrument of power,
and this may explain, at least in part, why elements of this infrastructure often
became targets of discontent.
When networks recreated relations of dependency and hierarchies, they
required mental adaptation and flexibility. This was just as true on the national
level, as it was related to interurban public transport, which, as András Sipos notes
in his introduction to an almanac of Hungarian urban history, was “not only a
technical and institutional innovation but also a social one. Infrastructure meant
greater comfort, saving time and labor, but it also required manifold learning
processes and adaptation. An attitude had to be formed, […] which accepted
as natural that everyday life depends on centralized supply systems, and this
went hand in hand with unprecedented bureaucratic regulation and control of
individual life.”76 This control of individual life by increasingly influential urban
centers found concrete manifestation in networks and the roles these networks
played in the regulation and homogenization of everyday life were often rejected
in rural areas. In the microcosm where bureaucrats had already been seen as
personifications of a hostile power, new networks with their employees in
uniforms became easily identifiable with the same concepts of the enemy.
In conclusion, networks became irritating factors due to their symbolic role
in making the state present in rural areas, due to their symbolic importance as
embodiments of modernity, and also because they increased ways in which a
given locality was dependent on other communities and, in particular, urban
centers. The spread of these networks did not simply mean the growing
presence of technical innovations in the rural sphere, but also “decisions made
between alternatives in the specific fields of influence,”77 or in other words, the
new hierarchies. In 1883, the construction of these new networks had only just
begun, so the reactions of people in rural areas to their presence were rather
vague. Further research is required to follow the future development of these
feelings and responses.

76 Sipos, “Bevezetés,” 11. On urban spaces and networks in late nineteenth-century Vienna see Meißl,
“Hálózatok és a városi tér.”
77 Sipos, “Bevezetés,” 11.

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Conclusion

The 1883 peasant uprising in Croatia has been described in the secondary literature
by two main attributes: anti-Hungarian and anti-modernist. In this essay, I add
a layer of nuance to the former and complexity to the latter. Stresses affecting
the peasantry were partly caused by modernizing campaigns, and the struggle to
cope with modernization was a social process with a significance comparable to
the significance of processes of national awakening and the transition in rural
communities to capitalist practices. The archival documents suggest that these
three processes were deeply intertwined. This intertwining was reinforced by the
ways in which modernizing elites were regarded as representatives of a national
other, and the separation of the anti-Hungarian and the anti-modernist features
of the uprising served exclusively analytical purposes. Anti-modern gestures
were indeed often dressed up in romantic anti-capitalist or, more frequently,
nationalist costumes, partly because the vocabulary and the symbolism of
nationalism was accessible and made it easier to grasp complex phenomena of
other nature as well.
The archival documents concerning the peasant uprising in Croatia in 1883,
which offer first and foremost insights into the state’s perspective on the events,
can also be read for the glimpses they provide into prevailing perceptions among
the peasantry concerning modernization. Rumors and behaviors mentioned or
described in these documents and characterized, both in the documents and in
the secondary literature, as irrational can be interpreted as reasonable responses
to the very real threats of modernization for rural communities. Specifically, the
ways in which the peasantry responded with hostility and violence to spaces and
figures associated with modernization and various symbols also associated with
this process make it very clear that modernization was seen by the peasantry as a
potential danger. Thus, we should abandon the assumption that elite imaginations
of modernity and modernization simply trickled down to the peasantry or that
peasants accepted the teleology of modernization without criticism or anxiety.

Archival Sources

Hrvatski Državni Arhiv [Croatian National Archives], Zagreb

HR-HDA-78 Zemaljska vlada, Predsjedništvo. 1881–1883 [Documents
of the government’s presidency]

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