POLITICAL AWAKENING
Up to 1848 Austrian subjects enjoyed certain liberties: they could smoke, drink, and play cards without interference from the police. One enjoyment, however, was denied to them—they were not permitted to think. Prince Metternich, the personification of absolutist Austria of those days, observed with alarm how the structure that he had been propping for years was beginning to settle in its foundations, and how ominous cracks appeared in it here and there.
Revolution was in the air. Switzerland, Germany, and Italy were being engulfed by it. “The world is ill,” Metternich complained in a letter to Count Apponyi. “Each day we can observe how the moral infection is spreading, and if you find me unyielding, it is because I am of a nature that will not give in before opposition.”
The news of the fall of Louis Philippe in France reached Prague February 29, 1848. Next day, notwithstanding the strictest censorship, the city was aflame with revolutionary talk. The liberals in neighboring Germany had summoned delegates to meet at Frankfort, March 5th. Italy seethed with political excitement. Kossuth, in Hungary, demanded that a constitution be granted to the people in Austria. Overnight Metternich’s elaborate system of government, maintained by the police and the military, was tumbling down like a house of cards. In Prague, as in other large centres, everybody clamored for a constitution, though the masses, educated as they were to regard the government as something above and apart from them, hardly comprehended what the word “constitution” meant.
In the midst of the turmoil the sickly Emperor Ferdinand V. (1835-1848) abdicated in favor of his nephew, Francis Josef, then a youth of eighteen. The latter had been on the throne but a few weeks, when his advisers, Schwarzenberg, Windischgrätz, Stadion, and others, decided to do away with the constitution of the revolutionists and to substitute it with an octroy constitution, the reason assigned being “the incapacity of parliament.” The choice fell on this particular young man because Prince Schwarzenberg recommended as ruler “one whom he would not have to be ashamed to show to the troops.” Though not relevant, it is interesting to recall how the present emperor acquired his cognomen. “What shall it be, gentlemen,” asked Schwarzenberg in the ministerial council—“Francis Josef, or simply Francis?” A sub-secretary of state thought that plain Francis would sound very well indeed, but the fear having been expressed that the name Francis might remind the Austrian nations too much of the ghost of Metternich, Francis Josef, instead of plain Francis, was chosen for the youthful monarch.
To Windischgrätz constitutions, ministries accountable to the people, and parliaments were abominations. He made no secret of the fact that he was opposed to the rule of lawyers; those alone who carried bayonets and muskets were entitled to be called patriots and saviors of the fatherland.
Under the Premiership of Alexander Bach (1853-1859) the monarchy relapsed to the methods of police rule that obtained prior to 1848. The reactionaries who surrounded the throne encouraged the youthful monarch to rule like an autocrat.
Minister Bach, by the way a highly gifted man, who had in his early days trifled with radicalism, believed that an alliance between the church and the state would strengthen both and that against the unity of the altar and the throne the radicals would be powerless. “The Austrian Monarchy,” he confided to a noted clerical, “considering its peculiar structure, has only two firm bases on which it can rest in safety and unity,—the dynasty and the church.” Accordingly he brought about, in 1855, the adoption of the famous concordat, a convention between the pope and the monarchy, a pact that increased immensely the legal power of the papacy in Austria. The concordat was abolished in 1868 because of the bitter opposition of the liberals. Bohemia, the land of Hus and Havlíček, fought the concordat openly and fearlessly, suspecting in it a hidden menace to its freedom of conscience and to national aspirations.
The uncompromising opposition of the Bohemians to Bach and to his policies visited upon them the wrath of Vienna. Under Bach they were probably subjected to oppression more ruthless and cruel than any they had experienced since the time of Ferdinand II.
Patriots, some of them mere youths, were thrown in prison on the flimsiest accusation of police spies. It was not safe to converse in Bohemian in the streets of Prague. Spies were at the heels of every Bohemian prominent in public life. Police agents tried to connect Francis L. Rieger with a treasonable plot to disrupt the monarchy and he had to flee the state to save himself from prison. Spies followed Palacký even to the sick-bed of his wife. The military authorities at Prague suspended the publication of Havlíček’s famous newspaper, “Národní Noviny,” on the ground that its editor indulged in “immoderate language.” Finding Prague closed to his paper, Havlíček made an attempt to publish it in Vienna. “I am determined not to issue licenses to any newspaper in Vienna; we have enough newspapers as it is,” replied General Welden to Havlíček’s application for the license. “But there is no such newspaper in Vienna as I should like to publish,” pleaded Havlíček. “My paper is intended to be an organ for Slavic matters and it is to be printed in Bohemian.” Welden retorted angrily: “Wir sind hier Deutsche” (Here in Vienna we are Germans), and the General’s decision was irrevocable.
Undaunted, Havlíček made other attempts to procure a newspaper license, and at last he obtained a promise that he might be allowed to publish a paper in Kutná Hora, a provincial town not far from Prague. In time even this paper was suppressed by the police and its editor arrested and interned in the province of Tyrol by Bach’s order. It should, perhaps, be said that Havlíček was the one journalist whom neither threats nor offers of bribery could influence. There, separated from his wife and child, Havlíček gave way to brooding which brought on a fatal brain disease. From Tyrol he was permitted to return home, broken in health and spirit. To the last Havlíček remained steadfast to the cause he had championed—the liberation from bondage of his nation. Havlíček’s colors were red and white (Bohemian national colors), and neither threats nor favors could swerve him from his chosen path:[11] “They banished you from the fatherland,” wrote Pinkas to Havlíček, “but they transformed the fatherland itself into a fortress and a jail. We live here the most unhappy lives conceivable. Not a ray of light enters our intellectual prison to brighten it.”
The mere acquaintanceship with Palacký was enough to expose one to the chicanery of the police. Strobach, at one time Mayor of Prague and a former speaker of the short-lived parliament, was deposed as judge because, when presiding at a trial, he failed to hold a drunkard on a charge of lèse majesté. Count Thun would not allow Rieger to lecture at the university for the reason, as he stated, “that students would see in him a political agitator, not a professor.”
A demand was made on Palacký by the censor to strike out of his “History of the Bohemian Nation” the chapters relating to Hus and the Hussite Wars. Even Prince Metternich, whose bureaucratic leanings were above suspicion, considered the demand, which was equivalent to an order, unreasonable. After a great deal of haggling as to what was permissible and what should be deleted, a compromise was effected between the historian and the censor. However, Palacký’s biographers all agreed that the terms of the compromise were not satisfactory to him. He is said to have expressed a hope that future historians, living in freer times than he, should tell the whole truth about the importance and meaning of the Hussite movement, which he was not allowed to do. The chapters relating to the Hussite times he wrote both in Bohemian and German. But because German critics had impugned his impartiality, he determined, as a protest, to continue with Bohemian as the original and German as a translation. When he announced his decision to the Land Committee, a protest was raised and he was warned not to publish the Bohemian text before the German; nor to do anything from which it might appear that the German text was not the original.
The famous physician, Hamerník, a pupil of the noted Škoda and Rokytanský, was removed from the university because the government suspected his political and religious views.
The publication of every Bohemian newspaper in the land was suspended, except for two or three scientific and literary magazines, and the police would have liked to destroy even those, if decent pretext could have been found for their doing so.
At one time the authorities were planning to dissolve the society of the Bohemian Museum and the Royal Society of Sciences. The discussions of these learned bodies did not seem patriotic enough from the Austrian point of view. The Matice Česká—a society for the publication of standard literature—was threatened in its existence, and only the influence of some of its prominent members saved it from the fury of the almighty police.
Pogodin, the Russian scholar, had recommended the Matice to publish the works of Hus. “God prevent,” answered Šafařík to Pogodin’s letter (1857). “Who would think of publishing books on Hus in Austria?—yes, if they were against Hus—that would be simple.”
Before Krejčí’s work on geology could be published, every page, nay every line, was carefully scanned, and when that was done the manuscript was ordered to be submitted for approval to a learned priest, to make sure that it contained nothing contrary to the teaching of the church. Palacký, who was always dreaming of his pet scheme of the publication of a Bohemian encyclopedia, was told that “under the existing press laws it would be unwise to urge the matter.”
In honor of the emperor’s marriage (1854) the government showed clemency to certain political persons; yet, in general, conditions remained unchanged. Patriots who had been expelled from Prague could return, but city or country, their movements were watched by the police. Sladkovský, a famous journalist whose publications had been ruined by censorship, applied for a license to start a coal yard with which to support his family. The application was promptly disallowed. Young Frič, a literary rebel, planned to issue a volume of poetry with the collaboration of the younger set of writers. This warning was received from Vienna: “Let Frič beware; if he does not desist in his dangerous course, he may again find himself interned in a fortress.” The police directors and press censors suspected the loyalty of everyone who ventured to write in Bohemian. “I fail to comprehend,” remonstrated Police Director Weber with Frič, “why you persist in this ridiculous nonsense; in about six years there will be nothing left of your Bohemian literature, anyway.”
On another occasion Weber gave Frič to understand that Bohemia was a German territory, and that if he wished to live in it he must obey German laws. Yet Frič was incorrigible. For his intractability and because he would not share Weber’s view that his nation was doomed to extinction, he was banished to the hills of Transylvania.
On the battlefields at Magenta and Solferino in Italy in 1859, the absolutist rule of Bach, which derived its chief support from the bureaucracy, the military, and the clerical party, came to an abrupt end. The progressive element clamored for reforms. Bach was dismissed from office and his successor (Goluchowski) announced that in the future the state budget would be subject to the scrutiny of the people and that provincial diets would be invited to legislate on their needs. The last part of the program the federalists interpreted to mean that the principle of local self-government had at last been recognized.
In the Bohemian Diet a prominent member, encouraged by the program of the new premier, moved, amid genuine enthusiasm of the federalists, that a deputation of the diet be appointed to go to Vienna and urge the emperor to have himself crowned king in Prague. When, subsequently, a deputation of the diet secured an audience from the ruler, he declared (1861): “I will be crowned in Prague as King of Bohemia, and I am convinced that this ceremony will cement anew the indissoluble tie of confidence and loyalty between My throne and My Bohemian Kingdom.”
Bohemians were elated. At last their ideal of autonomous Bohemia seemed at the point of realization.
Here a few words should be said concerning the constitution under which Austrians were to begin a new parliamentary life. The much-heralded and impatiently awaited document was drafted by Minister Schmerling, a staunch centralist, and because it was promulgated in February (1861) it was called the “Constitution of February.” As soon as its text had been made public, the Slavs instantly recognized that the statesmen in Vienna had not profited in the slightest from the lessons of 1848. Minister Schmerling, was, like all Germans, obsessed with the notion that German hegemony was indispensable to the safety and greatness of the state. Accordingly he subordinated every other idea and interest to that one obsession. A most ingenious electoral system was evolved whereby Germans, though in minority, were able to control, not only the central parliament, but the provincial diets as well. The scheme was to favor the cities, wealthy individual taxpayers, and chambers of commerce (which groups then were German in sentiment) to the disadvantage of the agricultural districts inhabited by the Slavs. How the electoral law worked in Bohemia one can perceive from the fact that in 1873 2,500,000 Bohemians were able to elect only 34 deputies, while 1,500,000 Germans contrived to return 56 deputies. The powers of the provincial diets were reduced to a minimum, the controlling idea, of course, being to keep centred in Vienna the entire power of the state. By reason of this juggling the Bohemian element found itself in minority in its own Land Diet.
Although distrustful because of the partisanship evinced in the constitution, the Bohemians nevertheless entered parliament, but they did so upon the express understanding that their participation therein should not be in any manner prejudicial to the historical rights of their kingdom.
Generally speaking, the Austrian nations, from the very first day their representatives were permitted to enter the legislative halls, divided themselves into two political parties, federalists and centralists. The federalists favored granting self-government to the various races; the centralists, who were backed by the German masses, opposed this. Austria, according to the latter, was lost to the German cause the moment the agitation “Away from Vienna” had gained the upper hand. For reasons of self-protection the Slavs, led by the Bohemians, inclined toward federalism, as more likely to satisfy their national aspirations. Instead of a Teutonic Austria, the Slavs desired a United States of Austria that should be just and impartial to all.
For months the Bohemians waited, but to their surprise and dismay the government took no steps to make effective the emperor’s promise. On the contrary, the increasing persecution of their press, the brutal partiality of the speaker of parliament, the hostile attitude of the executive organs of the government were signs, the significance of which could not be doubted. The discouraging truth dawned on them at last that the emperor had no intention of keeping his word and of giving home rule to his Bohemian subjects.
Deceived by their sovereign and realizing that neither reason nor justice would influence Vienna, they decided, in 1863, as a means of protest and to show their deep resentment, to leave the parliament in a body. On June 17th of that year they issued a statement in which the grievances of the nation were set forth at length. For sixteen years after that no Bohemian legislator appeared in the Austrian Parliament. And while this may not have been a sagacious course—indeed, subsequent events have shown that the “policy of abstinence,” as the parliamentary boycott came to be known, almost irreparably prejudiced their position—yet, as a protest of an outraged nation, it was magnificent.