# The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 2/Austria and the Czechs

Austria and the Czechs.
By Dr. Jan Herben.
I wish to recapitulate briefly the relations between the Hapsburg monarchy and the Czech nation since the national re-awakening of the Czechs.
Emperor Joseph I. died knowing that the State reforms contemplted by him would not come to pass, and a few days before he died he confessed his errors. A month after his death, in March, 1790, everybody in Austria was working to destroy all he built. They were destroying everything, not only that which was hasty and apparently harmful, but also that which was liberal and good for the welfare of the people. At the March Diet of Prague the Bohemian Estates submitted three voluminous books of complaints. It is necessary to recall the fact that the Estates (the nobles, the knights and the towns) then really represented the nation and that their demands and their grievances were the demands and grievances of the whole Bohemian nation, of all the inhabitants of the kingdom. So that at the March diet the nation, through its states, for the first time spoke its mind.
Among the grievances against the government of the dead Emperor there was one concerning the spread of the German language. The demand was made that the new government of Leopold II. should favor the Czech language as much as the German. The Bohemian nobles raised this demand only out of opposition to the government of Joseph I., for otherwise they themselves did not know the Czech tongue nor held it in very high esteem.
The Bohemian Estates were apparently preparing for a strong attack; the city of Prague was full of rumors and expectations. But when it came to acts, the linguistic questions were pushed into the back ground and included in the third volume containing the complaints and demands of the clergy; and the clergy asked that the education of prosptctive clergymen in the high schools and universities be conducted in Latin and that the pupils in the three gymnasia of Prague be taught in Bohemian:
With this demand, meekly and moderately as it was worded, the Bohemian “gubernium” (“Statthalterei” of to-day) which was to submit its opinion to the government, did short work. The German language, it said, can not be an obstacle to the education of the clergy, as the Czech grammar schools were few and every year their number was decreasing. As far as the university was concerned it admitted the necessity of a chair of Bohemian. The Vienna Commission declared the chair of Bohemian at the Prague University as superfluous, but nevertheless Emperor Leopold gave his consent to its establishment. F. M. Pecl was appointed professor of Bohemian and in March, 1793, delivered his first lecture.
A great number of complaints and demands were submitted to the Diet during the reign of Francis I. Again the subject of Bohemian schools and Czech language came to the forefront. A memorandum was submitted by thirty-three Czech citizens (who in the records are called “Original böhmen”) which was in effect a protest against the forcible germanization of the Czechs. It threatened a revolt of the oppressed and described “how all evil in the land comes from the Germans and how Bohemia attained power, greatness and prosperity only in those times when the King and Estates spoke Bohemian.”
In the meantime the Napoleonic Wars broke out and the Czechs showed great loyalty to the Emperor and to the empire, as well as great readiness for sacrifice.
As an acknowledgement of their loyalty the Imperial Commission on Studies issued, in August, 1816, a decree which ordered the teaching of Bohemian in the gymnasia in the case of those pupils who brought with them a knowledge of the language. In the appointment to political offices in the Bohemian lands preference was to be given to applicants knowing the Czech language. A little later another decree ordered that all the applicants for the position of city and county physicians in the Bohemian lands should possess a knowledge of the Czech language. The decree was not clear, however, in that it did not state whether Bohemian lessons were to be included in the regular curriculum or whether they were to be taught outside of the regular school hours. Bohemian teachers who were trying to introduce the language as a part of the curriculum were in constant conflict with their superiors; the uncertainty, however, did not last long. In February 1821, a supplement to the decree was issued which changed it in such a manner as to leave none of the privileges of the original decree.
In the year 1818 the National Museum of Prague was founded. Bohemian patriots congratulated themselves that it was not forbidden by the government. The museum committee on publication submitted in 1832 a memorandum on the neglect of the Czech language in schools; but the answer did not come until from the successor of Francis I.
Emperor Ferdinand V. was called the benevolent, but in his dealings with the Czechs he was no more generous than his father. The memorandum submitted to the government by “The Society for the Development of the Czech Language and Literature” was written very carefully and in the most moderate terms. It indicated that for more than sixty years Czech pupils in Bohemia had been taught in German, but without success, and that it was a pity, for the children were only forgetting their own language while not acquiring the command of any other. In such a manner the general culture of the population suffered. In the years 1816 to 1818 you could still find the ​Czech language forming a part of the curriculum of the gymnasia, but later it was forced out by the enemies of the Czech people on the ground that it was taking up too much time that could be used for other subjects. If the professors voluntarily gave two Czech lessons in a week, they were denounced as Panslavists, Russian agents, modernists, abusers of religion and contaminators of morals. The memorandum backs up its demands with a quotation from Herder: “Civilization cannot be forced upon a nation in a foreign tongue. It can only thrive on its own national soil, in the language inherited by the people. The heart of a nation can be reached only through its own language.”
The noble task of the Austrian rulers, according to the memorandum, is to lead the nations entrusted into their care to a true civilization, each of them in its own peculiar way. These were the arguments supporting the Czech demands in the “Denschrift über den gegenwärt Zustand des böhmischen Sprachunterrichtes an den Lehranstalten Böhmens.”
The answer came in October, 1835. It summarily rejected the Czech demands. On the whole it amounted to saying that the grammar schools must be German to prepare the pupils for the high schools and the high schools must remain German because the pupils from the grammar schools already know German. From this answer of 1835 down to 1848 nothing was done for the Czech language in schools or in the public offices. There was both an opportunity and a demand for it. When in 1844 Professor Exner of the Prague University was called to the Imperial Commission of Studies, he proposed that in the gymnasia also the Italian and the Slavonic languages be taught, wherever the Italians and the Slavs form a part of the population of Austria. In the year 1846 the Emperor gave his consent to the founding, at the Prague Polytechnic, of a chair of Italian.
Bohemian patriots were at first not opposed to the introduction, by Joseph II., of the German language into Bohemian schools. On the contrary, some of them, like Dobrovský, Kramerius and others, favored such a reform. They understood that the introduction of a living tongue, German, in the place of a dead language, Latin, meant a final renouncement of the medieval in education. But soon they were disappointed. “In Vienna,” Dobrovský wrote, “I know it from diplomatic sources, there was hatched the fiendish principle of germanization”; and this knowledge was inherited by all Czech national leaders after Dobrovský.
There was an equality, beofre the law, of the German and the Czech languages even under Ferdinand; but that was only on paper. Czech complaints were suppressed by the censor. Bohemian and Moravian Estates relaxed in all their demands, especially the so-called State-Rights and Educational demands. There ewre afraid of education.
But the Czech nation grew in spite of all these obstacles. It took recourse to self-help. Considering the poor conditions of the times we cannot but admire the fact that the society for the publication of Czech books, “Matice Česká,” in the thirties and forties published two Museum Journals, Šafařík’s Slavic Antiquities, Jungman’s History of the Czech Literature, his voluminous Dictionary of the Czech Language and Chrestomathy and Prosody, Palacký’s History of the Czech Nation, Erben’s Czech Chrestomathy, not to speak of smaller works, like Všehrd’s Nine Law Books, Čelakovský’s Political Works, Komenský’s (Comenius) Didactics, The History of the Prague University, Smetana’s Physics, and General History, Marek’s Philosophy, Logic, and Metaphysics, Hyna’s Psychology, etc., etc.
The Bohemian patriots considered it a great success that the government did not interfere with their private activities. They were grateful to the Imperial Commission when in 1846 it allowed Dr. Dudik to lecture on the Czech language and Literature in the Brno (Brunn) Philosophical Institute; which he did without pay, out of mere zeal. They were grateful to the Estates in Prague when they allowed Czech dramas to be given in their theatres under the management of Tyl.
In 1846 Havlíček, then in his twenty-fifth year, assumed the editorship of the Prague Daily, Pražské Noviny; in its first issue he introduced himself as an enemy of all vain crying and compaining; already in February in his article “The Slav and the Czech,” he put to his readers this angry question: “Who can forbid us to learn Bohemian? Is anybody commanding the Magyars to learn their language, to love their mother tongue and their nationality?” At this time already Havlíček was beginning to think of a formation of a Czech poltiical party.
Not even for this period of its development does the Czech nation owe anything to Austria.
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