When Bismarck declared his
The original Prussian analysis had been that once the Polish nobility and clergy had been emasculated, the peasant masses would turn into loyal Germans. In fact, while the parish clergy and the smaller landowners were nationalist, the Church hierarchy and the aristocracy had on the whole accommodated themselves to the reality of Prussian rule and were only obliged to change their stance under German pressure. The Archbishop of Poznań and Gniezno, Mieczysław Ledóchowski, was fairly typical in his pro-German attitude, which made him unpopular with the Polish patriots and most parish priests. He did not protest too vigorously when, in 1872, Bismarck placed Catholic schools under German state supervision. But when priests who would not bow to all the new prescriptions were persecuted, he found himself obliged to make a stand. He was imprisoned as a result, in 1874, and turned into a national hero overnight. After this, Polish nationalists and the Catholic Church made a common front. Efforts by the authorities to arrest recalcitrant priests were thwarted by gangs of angry peasants. It was a formidable alliance, and it managed to blunt the main thrust of German colonial policy, which was aimed at the Polish language.
At the beginning of Prussian rule, Polish remained the language of instruction in the Polish schools of Poznania. In the 1870s it was gradually displaced by German, and in 1874 the use of Polish textbooks was forbidden. In 1876 German became the exclusive administrative language, and no other was countenanced in anything from a law court to a post office. In 1887 the study of Polish as a second language was abolished throughout the educational system. In 1900, the law that Polish be replaced by German even in religious education produced widespread school strikes. Instances of German police marching into churches to prevent children from praying in Polish, which were widely reported abroad, were counter-productive in more ways than one. Parish priests played a crucial role in the preservation of the language by holding clandestine classes, and this in turn endowed it with a degree of sanctity.
The clergy also helped the peasants in other ways, giving advice and information on everything from agriculture to taxation, and it was they who introduced the cooperative movement into Poznania in 1871. In 1886 Bismarck made a speech announcing a campaign to buy out Polish landowners, in which he suggested that they would be happier spending the cash at the roulette tables of Monte Carlo than farming their estates. A Colonisation Commission was set up with a capital of 100 million marks to finance this operation. The Polish landowners fought back by establishing their own Land Bank to bail out those in difficulty. In Pomerania the Prussian Junkers outpaced Poles in the battle for possession of land, but in Poznania the Poles held their own and even gained ground.
This was no mean achievement, as these provinces supported an intensive and competitive agricultural industry: by 1895 over 40 per cent of all farms had some machinery. This competitiveness created redundancy among the rural population (still 60 per cent of the whole), which led to large-scale emigration, particularly to the United States. Early emigrants set off in groups, often led by a priest, and established discrete settlements such as that founded in 1854 at Panna Maria in Texas, and later ones at Częstochowa, Polonia and Kościuszko in Texas, New Pozen in Nebraska, and others in Virginia and Wisconsin. This form of emigration merely relieved the pressure on land at home. But from the 1870s onwards new waves of emigration brought greater benefits. The later emigrants went primarily in search of work, and they found this in the industrial and mining centres of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan and Illinois. As well as setting aside part of their salary to support Polish priests and build their own churches, they also regularly sent money back to their families at home. Alternatively, a landless peasant could return home after twenty years in the Chicago canneries with enough capital in his pocket to buy a comfortable smallholding.