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 ?eská (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.

See alsoAustria-Hungary; Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia; Nationalism; Prague Slav Congress; Revolutions of 1848; Young Czechs and Old Czechs.

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

Ko?alka, Ji?í. 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