stated, “that students would see in him a political agitator, not a professor.”
A demand was made on Palacký by the censor to strike out of his “History of the Bohemian Nation” the chapters relating to Hus and the Hussite Wars. Even Prince Metternich, whose bureaucratic leanings were above suspicion, considered the demand, which was equivalent to an order, unreasonable. After a great deal of haggling as to what was permissible and what should be deleted, a compromise was effected between the historian and the censor. However, Palacký’s biographers all agreed that the terms of the compromise were not satisfactory to him. He is said to have expressed a hope that future historians, living in freer times than he, should tell the whole truth about the importance and meaning of the Hussite movement, which he was not allowed to do. The chapters relating to the Hussite times he wrote both in Bohemian and German. But because German critics had impugned his impartiality, he determined, as a protest, to continue with Bohemian as the original and German as a translation. When he announced his decision to the Land Committee, a protest was raised and he was warned not to publish the Bohemian text before the German; nor to do anything from which it might appear that the German text was not the original.
