"The Galician Slaughter" also "The Peasant Uprising of 1846"[1] or Szela uprising[2] (German: Galizisches Gemetzel; Polish: Rzeź galicyjska or Polish: Rabacja galicyjska) was a two month uprising of Polish peasants resulting inter alia in suppression of other - szlachta uprising (Kraków Uprising) and massacre of szlachta in Galicia in the Austrian partition in early 1846. The peasant uprising lasted from February to March.[3] It was a rising against serfdom, directed against manorial property (for example, the manorial prisons) but with many victims;[4] Galician, mainly Polish,[5] peasants killed about 1,000 noblemen and destroyed about 500 manors.[3][6] The Austrian government used the uprising to decimate nationalist Polish nobles, who were considering an uprising against Austria.[3] It was the largest peasant uprising on the Polish lands in the 19th century.[3]
The massacre, led by Jakub Szela, is also known as the Galician Massacre, and began on 18 February 1846. This led to the "Galician Slaughter," in which many nobles and their families were murdered by peasants. Szela units surrounded and attacked manor houses and settlements located in three counties - Sanok, Jasło and Tarnów.
In the Free City of Kraków (Republic of Cracow), a few democratic nobles tried to rouse the peasants to rise up against Austria. They began the insurrection in February 1846, gathering support from the more enlightened peasants of the Cracow region (the Kraków Uprising). However, most of the peasants of Austrian Poland (Galicia) were undernourished because of bad harvests and hated their lords. Peasants, incited by the partitioning power, attacked the nobility, looted their estates and killed the landlords who were leaders of the independence movement. The peasants accused them of subjecting everyone to repressions by the “legal” partitioning authorities, who paid peasants who presented members of Tarnów’s city council with the corpses of members of the nobility. Furthermore, the Austrians offered money for the heads of Polish nobles.
A similar uprising of nobility (szlachta) was planned in Posen, but the police quickly caught the ringleaders. By contrast, Tarnow's district officer panicked and asked for peasant help.
Some Habsburg officials sponsored a counter-appeal to the peasantry of the province, urging loyalty to the emperor and resistance to the insurrectionary Polish szlachta, the gentry; the unexpectedly ferocious response was a peasant uprising against the gentry, culminating in the massacre of more than a thousand people in the region around the town of Tarnów. The lesson that the gentry learned was that the Polish peasants were not susceptible to the insurrectionary cause of Polish nationalism and actually preferred to cast their lot with the Habsburg dynasty; many nobles in Galicia came to the conclusion that they should do likewise. The Republic of Cracow was abolished and incorporated into Galicia.
The massacre of the gentry in 1846 was the historical memory that haunted Stanisław Wyspiański's play The Wedding of fin-de-siècle Cracow's excursion in the country. An old beggar in the cast of characters can still remember the massacre after half a century—"I saw, I watched with my own eyes"—and it is he who later finds himself face to face with the ghost of Jakub Szela, the peasant who took the lead in the violence of 1846.
Serfdom existed in Galicia until 22 April, 1848.