The work of resuscitating a dying race was a gigantic task, and but for the perseverance of the first apostles, the most promising branch of the Slavic linden tree would have withered. It was necessary to build theatres, to found learned societies, to establish museums and libraries, to collect and edit rare books and manuscripts scattered in foreign countries, whither they had been carried by soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War. The Austrian Government, instead of assisting in this work which had for its object the uplifting of a down-trodden people from ignorance, superstition, and bigotry, hindered it at every step. As an example of self-sacrificing patriotism, the case of a law student by the name of Řehoř should be mentioned. This man took a vow that he would distribute as many Bohemian books as were said to have been burnt by the Jesuit Koniáš during the anti-reformation, that is, 60,000 volumes. Řehoř died some time in the late fifties of the nineteenth century, and he is said to have accomplished the greater part of his self-imposed task. When Jungmann, one of the greatest of the revivalists, died in 1847, the patriots had an opportunity to review their growing ranks and they were astonished how the national movement had spread. “When we were returning home from the funeral,” noted J. V. Frič in his memoirs, “I walked arm in arm with my father; we both felt proud like victors who were marching to further decisive battles. When father in the evening sat down for a chat with the family, he exclaimed, breathing freely as if a stone had rolled off his chest, ‘Children, I think we shall win; there are too many of us; they can no longer trample us down.’”
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.