by Peter Demetz
On March 13, the Estates of Lower Austria had met in central Vienna, a demonstration was held at the Ballhausplatz, grenadiers fired into the crowd, and the demonstration had flared into open revolt. The working people set fire to suburban factories and streamed into the inner city, barricades went up, and when the fighting was over, thirty people were dead in the streets; Mettemich the all-powerful was in flight; and the emperor had declared he was ready to appoint a constitutional government, the first ever in Austrian history. In Prague, Count Stadion officially announced that the emperor had gracefully granted Bohemia a constitution, censorship was immediately abolished, and the citizens were permitted to form national guards. Public celebrations began without delay. It was a gift from the thirty dead Viennese to the Prague revolutionaries, who had not yet gone very far.
Prague celebrated happy days of an easy revolution (for the time being). But in Berlin, after fierce street fighting, one hundred and eightythree dead revolutionaries were buried, drums rolling; and in Milan, the citizens rose for their cinque giornate, the famous “five days,” to fight for liberty, to disperse the Austrian regiments, and to establish a revolutionary government. The citizens of Prague illuminated their windows and peacefully marched through their city; fashion merchants and others quickly discovered the market value of patriotism and the constitution, whatever it was to be, for ladies bought parasols in red and white (the Bohemian colors), men sported red-and-white cravats, and there were constitutional dances and balls, hats and croissants; the students (who held a meeting in the afternoon of March 15 to discuss a petition of their own) began to sport imaginative outfits and paraded through town. More significantly, Czech and German writers published a joint declaration put together by the learned university librarian Pavel Josef Šafaík, saying that all Prague writers of the Czech and German languages felt truly elevated by the new feeling of freedom and the new unity of Czech and German wishes, recently so evident. They expressed their hope that the “happy relationship,” based on equality, would not be disturbed but sustained in the future; in matters of state, the writers clearly favored the union of the Bohemian crown lands under a new constitution. The signatories included the most prominent figures in Prague’s intellectual and literary life; on the Czech side Palacký, the playwright Josef Kajetán Tyl, the journalist Karel Havlíek, the writer Karel Sabina, the philologist Hanka; and, on the German side, among others Karl Egon Ebert and Moritz Hartmann (who, shortly, shifted his radical allegiance to the German revolutionary parliament). The cautious authorities announced that a few cavalry units had been shifted to the Prague industrial suburbs, especially Karlin and Smíchov, of 1844 memory, simply to check on the excited country people, who were eager to see what was going on.
Within a week, armed citizen battalions and political clubs were forming, and when there was not sufficient initiative from below, the imperial authorities, encouraged by the emperor’s proclamation of March 15, busied themselves organizing the national guards. It was of advantage to the conservatives that the authorities incorporated the traditional town militia into the new guards, trained by retired or, later, active army officers. There were about 3,500 Czech and German men in more or less improvised uniforms, usually married and not particularly fond of being shot at by anybody (in contrast, the Vienna national guard joined the popular uprising there). The students had decided as early as March 15 to establish their own Academic Legion, following the example of their brave Viennese colleagues; at least in the beginning, it was a dashing if mixed corps of approximately 3,000 Czechs and Germans, conservative, liberal, and radical, according to faculty and academic interests. Philosophers wore green caps, students of the polytechnic blue (both with red and white stripes), and lawyers red caps with white stripes—the caps and ribbons did not exactly indicate that the lawyers were mostly German and conservative, the philosophers nationally mixed and tending to radical ideas, the medical students German, and future engineers overwhelmingly Czech and, possibly, the most belligerent of the lot. In other organizations, national interests soon emerged; from the three-hundred strong Czech-German corps Concordia, which was formed to protect Prague’s historical monuments and ancient art treasures, a Czech unit, the Svornost (Concord), split off as early as March 18 (many of its founders had also signed the proclamation of supranational happiness three days earlier). It was supported by Slavia, a kind of political and literary club, and Slovanská Lípa (Slavic Linden Tree), founded in late April to defend the constitution, the Czech language, and a few Pan-Slavic mythological ideas. At the moment, the Prague revolution (if it could yet be called that) could count on an armed “force” of approximately 7,000 people, but the real question was how many were able and willing to fight.
On Sunday, March 19, the Prague delegation took the train for Vienna (many students, eager to exercise their new constitutional rights, joined for a free ride), and on Monday they were duly received by the emperor; they submitted their petition to Count Pillersdorf, the new minister of the interior, who had been in office for only about forty-eight hours. It is difficult to say how the members of the delegations spent their days in Vienna: patriotic reports indicated that they discussed questions of mutual interest with representatives of liberal and radical opinions; other reports suggested that considerable drinking and eating were going on while the petition circulated among third-level court counselors, who prepared a rather evasive response signed by the emperor on March 23. The delegation returned, frustrated, to Prague.
Great celebrations had been prepared but they were immediately canceled in anger. People were rightly impatient, an angry protest meeting was held, with a good deal of shouting and screaming, and the St. Wenceslas Committee worked yet again on another version of the petition (no. 4), far less submissive in tone. The delegation’s second departure was delayed because of conflicts within the committee, but when the delegates got to Vienna, the situation had totally changed. Lombardy, Venetia, and Hungary were in open revolt, and Pillersdorf, newly appreciating Prague’s willingness to submit a petition to imperial authorities to seek legal redress, actually suggested submitting it in a way that could form the basis of an imperial response; the emperor signed a compromise text on April 8, and the imperial letter was carried home in triumph.
Some members of the delegation had wanted to return to Prague wearing Bohemian national dress, a painter suggested a few outlandish outfits, but only the innkeeper Faster had the courage to put on one of these ancient theatrical costumes. Vienna’s response pleased the liberals in Prague and, to some degree, the radicals too: a Bohemian diet, not the ancient Estates, was to be elected on a broad basis to deal with all pressing matters, especially that of nations and languages, and the reference to robota (the duty to work for the landowner) being abolished by the decree of March 28 was well received. Though the administrative unity of the ancient Bohemian crown lands had not been approved, there were good reasons to celebrate again, and Prague’s first elected mayor took office on April 9, 1848.
It was important to consolidate constitutional authority in Prague against any attempt by the entrenched bureaucracy to sabotage the new order, and Karel Havlíek shrewdly suggested that the St. Wenceslas Committee, to be a truly national committee, should include sixty more noted citizens, Czechs and Germans, to constitute a representative body. Though the original members of the committee had been mostly younger people and artisans of the Repeal Club, later members included merchants, industrialists, booksellers, and—by the elections of April 10, in the last wave, as it were—many well-known Prague citizens, including the enlightened theologian Bernard Bolzano, the editor Franz Klutschak (who had been the first Prague writer to publish a golem story), František Palacký, the counts Buquoy and Deym, and all German and Czech writers who had signed the March 15 declaration of happy and equal nations. For more than two months, the National Committee bravely tried to function as a kind of local and provincial government, but centrifugal energies, and German and Czech nationalism invariably
feeding upon each other, increasingly threatened Bohemian solidarity and cohesion. German radicals of the left began to look to revolutionary Germany, romantic Czechs to Pan-Slavic unity, and within a week or so of the foundation of the National Committee, Czechs and Germans had to make difficult and, as it happened, long-range decisions.
In restless Germany, a gathering of five hundred notables on March 31, 1848, in Frankfurt, had prepared the grounds for a national parliament, and a subcommittee of fifty discussing election procedures had invited a few Austrians, as well as František Palacký, to join its deliberations. They assumed, rather theoretically, that the Bohemian crown lands, as part of the Hapsburg monarchy, belonged in the German Confederation (Bund) established after the fall of Napoleon and were part of the territories that once were included in the Holy Roman Empire. Articulating the consensus of his Czech compatriots, Palacký politely refused the invitation and, in a famous letter dated April 11, and first read by him personally to the members of the Prague Mšt’anská Beseda before it was published in most of the major newspapers, suggested his personal, historical, and political reasons for considering it totally inappropriate to join the Frankfurt discussions. Playing the national card from the top of his deck, he declared in a now famous phrase, “I am a Czech of Slavic origins” (jsem ech rodu slovanského), and modestly added that he had dedicated himself to serving his nation. The historical questions were more complicated, he said, and though some believed that the Bohemian lands were once bound to the German empire by feudal liens (Czech chroniclers denied this), the feudal relationship had never affected Bohemia’s internal sovereignty and its autonomy of laws (svézákonnost). Palacký firmly believed that the aims and the intentions of the Frankfurt Assembly would endanger the independence, preservation, integrity, and consolidation (upevnní) of the Austrian monarchy and open the door to Russia, which was thirsting to become a universal monarchy ruling over the many nations along the Danube and southeastern Europe. This would be a deplorable “evil and a misfortune,” even if the universal monarchy declared itself Slavic. “If the Austrian state had not already existed for so long, it would have been in the interest of Europe, and of humanity itself, to try to create it as soon as possible—a federal society in which there were neither domineering nor submissive nations.” (Thirty years later the aging Palacký confessed that his hopes for a just and federalized Austria had been a grievous mistake.)
Palacký’s letter to Dr. Alexander von Soiron, chair of the committee of the fifty, was far more than a personal communication. Prague’s Czechs and Germans began to divide along national lines again, the Czechs committed to developing their cultural and political life within a revitalized Austria, and many Germans, particularly those living in northern Bohemia, looking to Frankfurt and newly sporting the black, red, and gold colors of revolutionary Germany. Havlíek’s suggestion in his newspaper that Czech merchants hang out their shingles in Czech did not do much to strengthen Bohemian solidarity (he quickly corrected himself and recommended that the signs be in both languages), and on April 19 an anti-Czech Prague German Constitutioneller Verein (Constitutional Club) was established; it opposed the Czech majority in the National Committee, from which German members began to withdraw.
It was not easy for the radical writers Alfred Meissner and Moritz Hartmann, who in their German poetry had praised the underprivileged and the Czech Hussite heroes, to leave the National Committee in order to support the Frankfurt Assembly. Hartmann especially, who came from a small Jewish community near Prague, long and honestly debated with himself what the choices were; it was his radical commitment, which had once prompted him to write the Hussite poem “Kelch und Schwert” (“Chalice and Sword”), that made him choose the Frankfurt Assembly, where he took his seat on the radical left; it may have occurred to him that the national conflicts in Prague were less important than the more essential, far-reaching social actions possible in Frankfurt.
At the beginning of May, a small Frankfurt delegation, including Ignaz Kuranda, a German nationalist from a Prague Jewish family, arrived in Prague to proselytize among the Germans and to work with the Constitutioneller Verein to prepare elections on the local level. On May 3, a joint meeting of the delegation and the Verein was violently broken up by Czech nationalists, and the date may be symbolic as a signal of the end of the short-lived revolutionary solidarity of the two nations, so promisingly demonstrated in early March. It was a perturbing spring; the working people again went on a rampage against bakeries and Jewish shops, attacking their owners. In the elections for the Frankfurt Assembly, first opposed and then tolerated by the government, on May 23 and 24, after all these many discussions only a handful of citizens cast their votes for Frankfurt; in only nineteen districts, of sixty-eight in Bohemia, did people bother to vote. There was much to fear: Vienna was in open revolt against the emperor, who had escaped the wrath of Viennese radicals, all committed to Frankfurt, and gone to Innsbruck, in the Tyrol. Those who abstained from voting may have believed that Bohemia’s problems were at least their own, and the majority of Prague German nonvoters probably did not want any threatening changes anymore.
By that time, preparations to challenge the Frankfurt Assembly by a representative gathering of Slav people were energetically proceeding in Prague. Many Slav students and politicians in Vienna wanted to come, as well as many of their colleagues and friends in Bohemia, Poland, Slovenia, and Croatia. The first newspaper article to suggest a countermeeting to Frankfurt appeared in a Croatian newspaper in Zagreb and was immediately reprinted in Prague. On April 20 a private meeting of Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles in the Prague apartment of the philologist Jan Erazim Vocel, and later that day another meeting at the Prague Czech Citizens’ Club resulted in the appointment of a preparatory committee, including František Palacký, the lawyer F. L. Rieger (later the commanding figure of Czech parliamentary politics in Vienna), three nobles, and a number of writers and librarians; the chairmanship was offered to the Bohemian patriot Count Josef Matthias (Matyáš) Thun, who accepted the honor only to absent himself quickly from the deliberations (he was later investigated by a counterrevolutionary military commission). Invitations were issued in eight languages, including French and German, and an announcement accompanying the invitations spoke of the dangers of an Anschluss to Germany, which would threaten not only the integrity of Austria but also the “cohesion of the Slavic nations.” All were invited to come to “ancient Slavic Czech” Prague to defend their national aspirations; even Slavs from outside the Austrian orbit would be welcomed as honored guests (this was soon a matter of dispute).
On June 2, the Slav Congress was opened, Palacký chosen to preside, and immediately three working sections were constituted to deal with fundamental questions, a Czech-Slovak group (237 in number), a Polish-Ruthenian one (61 delegates), and one for the South Slavs, including Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Dalmatians (41). Most of the delegates had come via the new railways, and their number fluctuated a little day by day; officially there were at least 340, mostly professors and intellectuals, in analogy to Frankfurt, but also thirty-five nobles, among them a Polish prince, and sixteen clergymen. Delegates of the Russian people were, officially, absent (the roving revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin came on his own), and Montenegrins, Bulgarians, and Lusatians were missing as well. In Germany, Friedrich Engels ridiculed the meeting, and most German newspapers attacked the congress as “Russist”—in spite of the congress’s assurances that it was above all concerned with transforming Austria into a federal state (spolkový stát) to give equal opportunity to all its nationalities. Palacký did not have an easy time keeping all the different Slavic ideas and aims, within and without Austria, under the Austro-Slav hat, or responding to those critics who pointed out that many guests, among them Bakunin and a few Poles from Russian territory, had been appointed to official congress functions.
Palacký’s idea of a Slavic role in a federalized Austria was shared by most of his Czech friends, including Karel Havlíek, who wanted the
Slavs more equal than others by virtue of their numbers. The Slovak L’udovít Štúr was dissatisfied with Palacký’s professional abstractions and his silence about Slovak vicissitudes under Magyar rule; the Ukrainians were angry with the Poles and vice versa; and the Poles insisted on an independent Poland again and had little patience with any solutions keeping the Austrian monarchy intact. Palacký’s real adversary was the Polish philosopher Karol Libelt (a guest from Pozna, yet a member of the Polish-Ruthenian section), who had studied Spinoza and Hegel in Berlin, fought in the Polish uprising against Russia in 1830, served time in Prussian prisons, and, more recently, lived in Paris in exile, and possibly knew more about the intellectual situation in Western Europe than Palacký, who was constrained to learn about the outside world in the pages of the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung. Libelt was a Catholic philosopher and a socialist, arguing that the Slav sense of community came from their old communes of sharing, and publicly insisted on the restored integrity of Poland, against Russia, Austria, and Prussia. The Slav meeting wisely declared that countries in which two or three “nations” were living together should not be broken up according to ethnic norms, yet there was not sufficient time to ponder all the suggestions. At last, Palacký was able to read a “Manifesto to the European Nations,” edited from his own texts and from competing versions by Libelt, Bakunin, and others. Rather than reveal disunity among the delegates, he preferred to be, on that occasion, a dubious historian, going back to Herder’s romantic celebration of the peaceful Slavs who “since time immemorial had been on the side of the law and had rejected and held in contempt every domination by mere force.” On June 12, however, all hell broke loose in the Prague streets, the congress was hastily adjourned, and the more radical among its younger members left the conference hall and went straight to the barricades.
