Palacký, František

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PALACKÝ, FRANTIŠEK

PALACKÝ, FRANTIŠEK (1798–1876), Czech historian and statesman, and the dominant figure in the Czech national movement of the nineteenth century.

Born to a Protestant family in northeastern Moravia in 1798, František Palacký attended the famous Evangelical Lyceum in Pressburg, Hungary (now Bratislava, Slovakia), where he discovered the exciting new trends of liberalism and nationalism that were sweeping Europe. In 1823 he went to Prague to work on the Czech national revival. Launched in the late eighteenth century by enlightened scholars who undertook to "defend" the Czech language and culture, which had been in decline for over a century, the revival was entering its second phase. Led by a new generation of scholars and writers, who were inspired by romantic notions of national destiny, the revival was moving beyond language reform to a broad-based program of cultural renewal. Securing employment as an archivist for the patriotic nobleman Count Francis Sternberg, Palacký became acquainted with the leading lights of the revival and worked in the organizations they had created to promote Czech life. He helped transform the Society for the Patriotic Museum of Bohemia, which had been founded in 1818 as a bilingual Czech-German institution, into a vehicle for Czech nationalism, using it to set up projects such as the Matice česká (Czech literary foundation), an association for publishing books in Czech.

His scholarly work and social connections brought Palacký to the attention of the Bohemian Diet, which commissioned him in 1827 to write a history of the province. The result was his monumental History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia (in German, 1836–1867; in Czech, 1848–1876), a multivolume work chronicling Czech history from the arrival of the Slavs in the area until 1526, when the Habsburgs assumed rulership of the kingdom. Palacký's History articulated several themes that became fundamental to Czech nationalism, such as the notion that German overlords had destroyed the democratic and egalitarian structure of early Slavic society when they imposed feudalism on the area. He put special emphasis on the Hussite period, a Protestant interlude of some two hundred years that ended in 1620, when Habsburg forces reconquered the area for Catholicism. The Hussites had been condemned by the Counter-Reformation as dangerous heretics, but Palacký presented them as fighters for truth and freedom whose struggle was part of the age-old conflict between Germans and Czechs in the region.

The revolution of 1848 was a turning point in Palacký's career, when he emerged as the spokesperson for the Czech national program. His letter to the preparatory committee of the Frankfurt National Assembly rejecting their invitation to represent Bohemia at the gathering won him international renown. Claiming that as a "Czech of Slav descent" (my translation) he could not participate in the creation of a German national state, he defended the multinational Austrian Empire as a bulwark protecting the small nations of central Europe, arguing (my translation), "If the State of Austria had not already been in existence for centuries, we should be forced, in the interests of Europe and even of humanity, to create it" ("Psaní do Frankfurta" [Letter to Frankfurt], p. 20). In addition, he was a leading figure in the short-lived Pan-Slav Congress in Prague in 1848, which sought to unify the scattered Slavic populations of the empire behind a common program, an approach called "Austro-Slavism," and he also served as a delegate to the new imperial parliament (the Reichsrat), where he helped draft a constitution to reorganize the empire along ethnic lines.

After the revolution failed, Palacký retreated to scholarly work but returned to public life in 1860, when a new constitution revived political activity in the empire. As the leader of the Czech National Party, he fought for the autonomy of the Bohemian crown lands on the basis of historic state rights, and supported a tactical alliance with the conservative great landowners to achieve this goal. The aristocratic alliance, along with his support for Czech abstention from governmental bodies such as the imperial parliament, eventually caused the party to split between "Old Czechs," who supported his program, and "Young Czechs," who favored a more progressive program and activist stance. The promulgation of the 1867 Ausgleich (compromise), which created the new state of Austria-Hungary out of the old empire, dealt a crushing blow to Palacký's efforts, and he warned as the negotiations for it got under way (my translation), "We were here before Austria and we will be here after it is gone" ("Idea státu Rakouského" [The meaning of the Austrian state], p. 266). Disillusioned by the repeated failure of Czech political efforts, he urged his countrymen to cultivate moral and cultural superiority over their enemies. He died in 1876, his reputation as the "father of the Czech nation" firmly established.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Palacký, František. "Idea státu Rakouského." In Spisy drobné, edited by Bohuš Rieger. Prague [1898]. Vol. 1, 209–267.

——. "Psaní do Frankfurta dne 11. dubna 1848." In Spisy drobné, edited by Bohuš Rieger. Prague [1898]. Vol. 1, 16–22.

Secondary Sources

Kořalka, Jiří. František Palacký, 1798–1876: Životopis. Prague, 1998.

Morava, Georg J. Franz Palacký: Eine frühe Vision von Mitteleuropa. Vienna, 1990.

Pech, Stanley Z. The Czech Revolution of 1848. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969.

Zacek, Joseph Frederick. Palacký: The Historian as Scholar and Nationalist. The Hague, Netherlands, 1970.

Claire E. Nolte

Encyclopedia of Modern Europe: Europe 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire

František Palacký

views updated Jun 11 2018

František Palacký

The Czech historian and statesman František Palacký (1798-1876) was the father of 19th-century Czech nationalism. He is known for his monumental History of Bohemia and his federalistic concept of Austro-Slavism.

František Palacký was born at Hodslavice, Moravia, on June 14, 1798, into a petit bourgeois Protestant family with strong Hussite traditions—a fact of considerable influence on his future outlook. After he attended school in nearby Kunewald (where he learned German), his father, a schoolmaster, sent him to Hungary to study at the Evangelical schools of Trencsén (now Trençin in Slovakia) and Pozsony (Pressburg, Bratislava). Particularly important was his stay at Pozsony (1812-1820)—then Hungary's administrative center—for there he came into contact with the already powerful Magyar national movement and with the nascent and rising Slavic (Slovak, Czech, pan-Slav) national consciousness, as represented by the works of such intellectuals as J. Palkoviç, J. Benedicti, J. Kollár, and P. Šfařik. From Pozsony he moved to Vienna, where he spent 3 years familiarizing himself with Immanuel Kant's philosophy of history and publishing a few studies on esthetics and literature. Then he decided to turn to the study of history, driven by the realization that only a clear and scholarly unfolding of the great moments of Czech history could awaken Czech national consciousness and save the nation from total extinction.

In 1823 Palacký moved to Prague, where he was received with great expectations, both by the older Czech scholars (for example, J. Jungmann and J. Dobrovský) and by the patriotic members of the Czech aristocracy, whose patronage (particularly of counts F. and K. Sternberg) permitted him to devote himself fully to scholarly and patriotic activities. After becoming editor of the journal of the Bohemian Museum Society (1827) and completing the publication of medieval Czech annals (1829), Palacký was named Bohemia's official historian. In this capacity he undertook the task of writing the first great synthesis of Czech history.

The first volume of this work (Geschichte von Böhmen; History of Bohemia) was printed in German in 1836. Subsequent volumes appeared irregularly in both Czech and German and carried Bohemia's history up to the extinction of its real independence in 1526. Its impact was immediate and phenomenal. It shook Czech national consciousness, particularly by depicting the nation's past as an unceasing struggle against German imperialism and violence. Palacký contrasted this with Czech (Slav) attachment to individual freedom and democracy, and he interpreted the Hussite movement (the central episode of his work) as his nation's effort to liberate the soul from the spiritual bondage of the Romano-Germanic Middle Ages.

Although working for the regeneration of his nation, Palacký did not call for Czech political independence. A nation to him was a kinship group that need not be organized into a state. He felt that small states (such as an independent Bohemia would be) are too much at the mercy of their stronger neighbors. He looked favorably upon the unity of the Austrian Empire and regarded its existence as a European necessity. At the same time, however, he was working for its federative reorganization.

Palacký elaborated his concept of federalism in Austria ("Austro-Slavism") in a plan presented to the Diet of Kromeřiz (Kremsier) in 1848. This plan—calling for the creation of seven autonomous national units in the empire—was in part unrealistic, but with a little goodwill it could have served as a point of departure toward a "new Austria."

Following the failure of the revolutions of 1848, Palacký retired from active political life. Becoming more and more discouraged during the 1860s, he slowly turned to Russia and pan-Slavism. In his Idea of the Austrian State (Czech 1865, German 1866), he again offered federalism—now based on the historical provinces—as a solution. Palacký died in Prague on May 26, 1876.