An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

Policy of the Italian republicans.

The Italian republicans, who had imputed to Charles Albert merely personal motives in his efforts to free Italy, now attempted to carry out their own programme. Florence, as well as Venice, proclaimed itself a republic. At Rome the liberal and enlightened Rossi, whom the pope had put at the head of affairs, was assassinated in November just as he was ready to promulgate his reforms. The pope fled from the city and put himself under the protection of the king of Naples. A constitutional assembly was then convoked by the revolutionists, and under the influence of Mazzini, in February, 1849, it declared the temporal power of the pope abolished and proclaimed the Roman republic.

Hostility between the Germans and Czechs in Bohemia.

266. Meanwhile the conditions in Austria began to be favorable to a reëstablishment of the emperor's former influence. Race rivalry proved his friend in his Austrian domains just as republicanism tended to his ultimate advantage in Italy. The Czechs[449] in Bohemia hated the Germans in 1848, much as they had hated them in the time of Huss. The German part of the population naturally opposed the plan of making Bohemia practically independent of the government at Vienna, for it was to German Vienna that they were wont to look for protection against the enterprises of their Czechish fellow-countrymen. The Germans wanted to send delegates to the Frankfurt convention, and to maintain the union between Bohemia and the German states.

The Pan-Slavic Congress of 1848.

Beginnings of revolt in Bohemia suppressed.

The Czechs determined to offset the movement toward German consolidation by a Pan-Slavic Congress, which should bring together the various Slavic peoples comprised in the Austrian empire. To this assembly, which met in Prague in June, 1848, came delegates from the Czechs, Moravians, Ruthenians, and Poles in the north, and the Servians and Croatians in the south. Its deliberations were interrupted by an insurrection that broke out among the people of Prague and gave the commander of the Austrian forces a sufficient excuse for intervening. He established a military government, and the prospect of independence for Bohemia vanished. This was Austria's first real victory.

The Slavic peoples revolt against Hungary.

The eastern and southern portion of the Hapsburg domains were not more homogeneous than the west and north. When a constitution was granted to Hungary it was inevitable that the races which the Hungarians (Magyars) had long dominated should begin to consider how they might gain the right to govern themselves. The Slavs inhabiting Carniola, Carinthia, Istria, Croatia, Slavonia, Bosnia, and Servia had long meditated upon the possibility of a united Slavic kingdom in the south. Both the Servians and Croatians now revolted against Hungary. Like the Germans in Bohemia, the Servians and Croatians were on the whole friendly to the Vienna government, from which they had less to fear than from the establishment of Hungarian independence, which would put them at the mercy of the Magyars. It was, therefore, with the support of the Austrian ministry that an army of Servians and Croatians crossed into Hungary in September.