After the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Polish lands became part of states that, despite their huge differences, had the same type of state structure - they were centralized monarchies with a class system. And although in each of these states various intra-social structures and class boundaries were formed, everywhere the nobility was a legally privileged class. The absolute power of the monarch limited his political role, and the anti-Polish policy strengthened these restrictions on the szlachta.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the constitutions granted to the Duchy of Warsaw by Napoleon (together with the Civil Code) and the Kingdom of Poland by Alexander I created the legal basis for the formation of a new society in which all its members were legally equal, despite the preservation of the advantages of the szlachta in parliamentary representation. The central Polish lands were thus covered by a new type of State organization and law, different from those that functioned in neighboring States.

In the middle of the century, the situation changed. The structure of the Kingdom of Poland was close to the relations that prevailed in Russia, and the difference between the Kingdom of Poland and the Polish lands, which were divided into Prussia and Austria, was expressed primarily in the difference in their agrarian structure. Reforms to abolish serfdom have already made peasants in Lesser Poland and Greater Poland, Silesia and Pomerania owners of farms. At the same time, in the central Polish lands, the farmer, deprived of the right to land, continued to work out corvee on folvarochny fields. At the same time, the estate division found new support in the decrees issued by Nicholas I. However, this does not mean that the first 60 years of the nineteenth century were exclusively a period of stagnation or even regression. Despite various obstacles, the elements of capitalist production relations became increasingly important, and the emerging classes played an increasingly important role in social life.

Research in recent years has focused primarily on these processes of transformation of the estate society into a class society; the main subject of the analysis was the Kingdom of Poland. However, the degree of understanding of these processes is still limited by a weak knowledge of the economic processes of that time. The problems of accumulation, the possibilities and nature of capital investment, net income from agricultural and industrial production, the degree of marketability of peasant and folvarochny farming, as well as the level and movement of wages - all these phenomena, the scale and dynamics of which we are still not able to fully disclose. But even at the current stage of research, you-

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The lack of unity of the economic organism covered by the new state organization, which was formed by the Kingdom of Poland, is proved.

The genesis of this lack of unity is not limited to changes in the political situation and state borders at the turn of the XVIII-XIX centuries. Rather, the explanation must be sought by analyzing the development leading from feudalism to capitalism1 . The opinion often found in the literature about the preservation of feudal remnants in the Kingdom of Poland alongside the emerging capitalist economy does not seem to us completely correct in relation to the period preceding the abolition of serfdom. The class structures were still too strong at that time to be seen as mere remnants; moreover, many new phenomena unknown to the economy and society of the nineteenth century adapted under the pressure of the feudal system to the existing conditions in the Kingdom of Poland, instead of rebuilding them.

The weakness of the process of capital accumulation by the propertied strata of society led to the fact that the development of capitalist industry was based mainly on state and foreign capital. The capital of the landlords and philistines will stimulate the growth of production on a large scale only from the 50s of the XIX century. The protectionist government policies leading to the industrialization of the country (investment activity, industrial expansion, customs policy) made it possible to spread capitalist-type production without eliminating feudalism in the countryside, but-and this is very significant-in conditions of strong demographic growth. This dualism of the country's economic structure in the first half of the last century was therefore expressed not in the balance of the traditional and the new in the relations of production and in the economy of the country, but in the predominance of the feudal system over the zigzag development of the capitalist system. Despite the mutual exchange of values, capital and people between these structures, they function as if not together, but in parallel.

This division is reflected in the social structure of the country - almost the entire population of the Kingdom of Poland was placed within the feudal partitions: nobles, peasants, philistines and Jews legally separated from them. At the same time, a new social order was being formed, expressed in the classes of workers and the bourgeoisie. Their existence did not yet destroy the feudal hierarchy of power (if we can speak of it in a politically enslaved country) and the hierarchy of respect. Both in the economy and in society, the dualism of structures was clearly visible.

The estate society of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth consisted of three estates, belonging to the gentry, bourgeoisie and peasantry was hereditary, the change of class affiliation was possible only for a few, both illegally and legally, established by legal norms; the specifics of the rights and obligations that characterize each estate decided the question of its social status. If we take these criteria of class status as a starting point, then when analyzing the society of the Kingdom of Poland 2, the differences between the classes will be clearly visible.

1 W. Kula. Sektory i regiony zacofane w gospodarce wczesnego kapitalizmu. "Kultura i Spoleczenstwo", ;1961, nr. 3, str. 43; J. Jedlicki. W sprawie automatycznego krachu feudalizmu (w) "Migdzy feudalizmem a kapitalizmem. Studia z dziejow gospodarczych i spolecznych". Wroclaw. 1976; см. также: A. Jezierski. Handel zagraniczny Krolestwa Polskiego 1815 - 1914. Warszawa. 1967.

2 This article presents very briefly the problems and research results contained in the following works: "Spoleczenstwo Krolestwa Polskiego. Studia o ruchliwosci spolecznej". Tt. I-III. Warszawa. 1965 - 1968, 1971; "Spoleczenstwo Polskie

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The basic principle of inheritance of class affiliation had the most persistent application in relation to the mass of peasants, and it was easier to find oneself among them by degradation, it was more difficult to break with their environment by social promotion. The outflow of the rural poor ("luzny"), young people from among the peasant owners, who went mainly to small urban centers, had a secondary significance for rural society.

The hereditary succession of the Gentry estate, coat of arms, family name and much less often the family nest was preserved (in comparison with a small number of awards to the nobility for services in the field of intellectual, political or economic activities) inviolably until 1830. The decree on gentry issued by Nicholas I at that time was supposed to legally restore and actually strengthen the gentry class. But at the same time, it should have been a completely different gentry. The right to a noble title was granted only to those who were able to submit the relevant documents to the department specially created for this purpose-the Herald of the Kingdom of Poland. According to legislative intentions and in practice, this meant depriving a huge number of former nobles, especially impoverished ones, of the rights of the nobility and at the same time granting them to those who had served the throne in civil or military service. As a result, out of almost 300 thousand nobles, the Herald, after 25 years of its work, recognized only about 80 thousand Documented rights; the influx of new people awarded for service in the highest ranks was insignificant. The law on gentry thus failed to achieve its goal, and did not create a new gentry class associated with tsarism. Although they were not issued, as they intended to do in St. Petersburg, subsequent laws that were supposed to regulate the entire class structure and strengthen the class partitions, the policy of the autocracy played a role, however, which consolidated the traditional disunity and made it difficult for people to move between different classes.

Among the philistines, the inheritance of paternal status was of the least importance. In this area, the most noticeable processes of social displacement took place. Those who were lucky in the city, even if they arrived there from outside, received city rights. The poorer part of the new settlers had to be content with the status of an urban resident without civil rights. The philistinism of that time was characterized by the disparity of the situation of residents of royal and private cities, large industrial centers and small atrarized settlements, as well as the dispersion of the urban population. Only Warsaw was distinguished by its large accumulation. It was the core of the estate and could be proud of its philistinism, which was largely engaged in crafts and trade. In 1827, Warsaw had 130 thousand inhabitants, while other large cities, such as Lublin, -13 thousand, Kalisz -12 thousand, Plock-9 thousand. But the increase in the population of cities from about 600,000 (19% of the total population) in 1816 to 1,400,000 (27% of the total population) in 1865 shows that it was based on an influx of population from outside. Consequently, the class isolation of the bourgeoisie was poorly manifested, and its presence in society seemed to be invisible. At that time, much was said in the press and in official statements about the need to create a "third party" in Poland.-

XVIIl i XIX w.". Tt. IV-VI.Warszawa. 1972-1974; "Przemiatty spoleczne w Krolestwie Polskim", as well as in monographs: H. Chamerska. Drobna szlachta w Krolestwie Polskim. Warszawa. 1974; R. Czepulls. "Kjasa umyslowa". Ifiteligeficja Krolestwa Polskiego 1832 - 11862. Warszawa. 1973; A. Eisenbach. Ludno§c zydowska w Kfolestwie Polskim 1815 - 1864. Warszawa. 1973; J. Jedliсki. KJejnot i bafiery spoleczne. Warszawa. il968; S. Kowalska- Glikman. Ruchliwosc spoleczna i zawodowa mieszkaficow Warszawy w latach 1845 - 1861. Warszawa. 1971.

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its estates" even when its size reached about 1/4 of the total population.

Thus, the isolation of the rights and privileges of individual estates in the Kingdom of Poland in comparison with the times of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was poorly manifested. In the era of the Kingdom's autonomy (1815-1830), despite the preservation of the old concepts of gentry and the isolation of the szlachta sejmiks, the old szlachta privileges were no longer enough: the monopoly of land ownership, freedom from taxes, separate legal proceedings, and the exclusive right to hold office. This was hard for our contemporaries. The observation of Stanislaw Wengzhetsky, a nobleman but a liberal, speaks eloquently about this: "The nobleman is afraid of the code, as if he might gradually lose his power over the peasants; he is saddened that he is facing the same court as the bourgeois and peasant, that there is one code of inheritance for him and for the bourgeois, that he is accepted on an equal footing with the bourgeois for church, civil and military service." 3
The prerogatives associated with the new gentry under the law of 1836 were not broad: easier access to education, higher than primary, benefits in the field of military service, exclusivity of access to officer ranks in the tsarist army, a milder punishment procedure. However, these were not questions that could be ignored.

The isolation of the social status of the bourgeoisie was eliminated in connection with the abolition of personal dependence of the peasants and the far-reaching restriction of the privileges of the gentry. The feudal type of service of the population of private cities (wages, working hours, etc.) in favor of their owners was eliminated by decree of 1839. The new division of urban residents into permanent and non-permanent populations was mainly of formal and administrative significance. Introduced in 1847, the new criminal code provided for a different type of punishment for people of the caraway estate, that is, both the poor bourgeoisie and the peasants.

The estate character of the peasantry was most clearly manifested, although this was determined not so much by law as by administrative practice and the realities of economic life. The preservation of corvee and dependence on the lord of the countryside, who served as voit, meant that, despite the abolition of personal dependence, the definition of peasants by the term "subjects" was not yet an anachronism. This dependence burdened primarily the Propertied peasants. Chinch reforms that weakened this dependence became widespread only at the beginning of the second half of the century.

Internally, the unified social structure, subject to effective internal control, which was the estate society, strengthened by centuries of existence, was not easily amenable to change. The relationship " people - material goods "was understood mainly, in the language of the epoch, as a" way of being", and not as a struggle for the accumulation of capital and its social distribution. These relations may have yielded less to slow changes than to changes involving a very small stratum of society, and innovations were introduced more under the influence of the economic intervention of the state coming from above and the cultural progress of the educated strata than by the expansion of the internal market and production.

Relationships between people underwent more noticeable changes. But sources still rarely directly reflect the changes that were taking place; the terminology used in everyday life and in the official language of that time was still firmly rooted in the previous one

3 Cit. by: S. Askenazy. Lukasinski. T. I. Warszawa. 1929. str. 34.

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the epoch. Therefore, the latest research in the field of social history pays special attention not only to the strength of the feudal system, but also to the processes leading to the formation of new classes and strata. The search was conducted for the ground on which the phenomena of social amalgamation, factors that stimulated the movement of individuals, groups and strata, appeared. Such an expanded range of research problems required access to new types of documentation. Mass sources were increasingly used, and at the same time individual, primary materials were carefully searched for, recording the facts of public life, albeit isolated, but amenable to schematization, classification and generalization. These are acts of civil status, personal files (mainly so-called service records that reflect the course of labor activity), service reports of peasants, mortgage books, notarial acts, as well as consolidated sources that supplement this material, such as lists of officials, teachers, clergy, landowners, etc. These sources contributed, in particular, to the study of social mobility, the manifestations of the process of maturation of the capitalist formation.

The basis of social mobility was territorial mobility. The abolition of personal dependence, the development of industry, the slow but still progressive urbanization of the country-what opportunities did all this create for changing places of residence? Who has been affected by these processes? The gentry elite, its elite, or, conversely, the lower strata of the population: landless peasants, residents of agrarian towns? The genesis, directions and effectiveness of this spatial mobility, sometimes voluntary, but more often, perhaps, forced, can serve as a sensitive indicator of the changes that have taken place in various areas.

A study of the territorial origin of Warsaw immigrants (based on parish registers of marriage records) has shed additional light on this issue. In the middle of the century, barely 30% of Warsaw's newlyweds were born in Warsaw. The remaining 70% come from large cities (11%). small towns (22%) and villages (37%). Among the immigrants, the rural population was decidedly predominant; it came primarily from the provinces where the greatest progress had been made in agriculture, where ochinshevanie deepened the stratification of the countryside and at the same time weakened serfdom on the landowner. Immigrants were recruited not only from the landless population, as previous literature suggested. Among them were the sons of landlords and rural artisans who were looking for a better life in the city. Only the city gave them a chance. In the new environment, it was not easy for them to overcome the competition of urban residents and newcomers from smaller cities and towns in the struggle for work and earnings. Warsaw was also visited by the run-down and small-scale gentry, who did not have enough bread in their overpopulated native village, bankrupt landowners and sons of landlords who sought independence in the city. Educational opportunities (although limited in the period between the uprisings) also attracted a large number of Szlachta youth to Warsaw. However, a particularly mobile element seems to be the population of small towns, which fed the ranks of the Plebs, and eventually the proletariat of Warsaw, as well as other developing industrial centers.

The fact that this migration towards Warsaw, breaking feudal ties, brought success only (on a comparative scale of two generations) to the sons of manual laborers, and representatives of the higher social strata were threatened with degradation rather than career prospects, eloquently testifies to the economic, political and social situation in the country. It is clear that migration movements were not associated only with the processes of urbanization.

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The period of the Duchy of Warsaw, and later the 50s of the XIX century. were characterized by great mobility of peasants. In the first period, the newly acquired personal freedom and military destruction led them to search for sources of livelihood outside their native village, and in the subsequent period, the regulation of estates, the removal from the land, the need caused by poor harvest years, the lack of traditionally provided assistance from the yard in the past led the peasants to search for "empty" farms, day or farm labor. These movements, most often leading nowhere, did not change the living conditions, became more widespread as the number of landless people grew. Before the beginning of the 60s, there were more than 1300 thousand of them.

Immigration from outside (colonists, artisans, manufacturers, whose social status went beyond the class division) was also important for changing the social structure of the country. Forced political emigration and deportation weakened mainly the gentry class.

Spatial mobility is just one aspect of social mobility. The key issue here is changes in the social status of individuals and professional groups, and above all the conditionality of these changes. What determined success: social background, education, stock of knowledge obtained through many years of hard work? The answers to this question are provided by the personal files of people employed in various types of organizations. The conducted probing studies seem to suggest that the gentry (even documented ones) played a rather indirect role (through family kinship, friendly support from the highest "stamp" representatives, the level of education). In the new type of enterprises, such as the railway, the quality of labor was clearly considered not with the gentry origin, but with the quality of labor.

In the process of social transformation, the most important institutions were those that affected a significant part of the population, such as the army and the education system. But the army of the Kingdom of Poland existed for too short a time (less than 16 years) to play a serious role in the process of democratization of the nation. It created opportunities to make a fortune for senior officers, young people from the declassed gentry and educated petty bourgeoisie, provided a source of livelihood, and improved the financial situation of peasant soldiers. In the course of military service, class distinctions weakened, which could not but affect the social consciousness of the enlightened strata of the population.

First of all, the system of education played a decisive role. Access to education in a poor country with a still underdeveloped industry protected against social degradation and opened up prospects for the future. Therefore, the class character of the school in the period between the uprisings strengthened the feudal structure. Despite all the obstacles and setbacks at the end of the period we are talking about here, the workers, bourgeoisie and intelligentsia occupied increasingly prominent positions in the society of the Kingdom of Poland - new classes were born.

With the passage of time, the peasant was more and more definitely freed from the power of the master, and although the population of hundreds of small agricultural towns continued to exist, the feudal restrictions of the middle class disappeared. The mutual affection of the gentry was disintegrating, and the significance of the noble coat of arms was fading. But the great magnate fortunes of the Potocki, Radziwill, and Krasinski families did not disappear. Czartoryski, Zamoyski., Velepolski - these are still big names in the country's politics, even when the princely title was not supported by extensive latifundia. At the same time in the society slowly but clearly grew-

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whether new forces. Millions of landless peasants were blowing up the serf system. Day labourers and labourers, although the latter still numbered only in the tens of thousands, settled the newly formed or pre-existing villages, and their labor was the basis of a new phenomenon on this scale-the accumulation of capital in production.

In the economic life of that time, we increasingly meet with the names of new people who have capital or only access to the disposal of state funds, increasing their wealth on state supplies or monopolies, in small "enterprises". In the conditions of the still rudimentary development of capitalist production and exchange, in the political situation of that time, these "nouveau riches" more often became bankrupt than the founders of the Polish or Polonized "bourgeoisie".

In the course of social movements, a layer of hired knowledge workers was formed. It fought not for wealth or power, but for access to education, science, and culture, and not only passive, consumerist, but also creative. The intelligent elite also sought a higher social position.

The landlords, for the most part descendants of the gentry - owners of estates, gradually began to adopt the capitalist way of thinking. From the former privileged estates, the clergy almost completely lost their property, the gentry, despite bankruptcy and confiscation, was able to save it to a large extent. However, she lost power, giving it to a foreign state apparatus, and had to share her positions and prestige in society with new people whose surnames were previously unknown and meaningless (Vysotsky, Zalivsky, Frankovsky, Khmelensky, Bobrovsky), and sometimes foreign (Jurgens, Hauke-Bosaki, Cronenberg).

The young generation, romantically rebellious, which has thrown off the yoke of the old parental authority, also appears in the arena of events: coroners, students, and students. As history has shown, they could not be ignored.

In everyday life, through the government's policy of industrializing the country, through speculation and fraud, the process of capital accumulation and class differentiation of society slowly made its way.

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