generation of Czech patriots toward the nobility at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They regarded the people as the core of the nation and as the basic Czech national element. This notion was categorically proclaimedby the literary historian, Josef Jungmann, in his essay “Two Meditations on the Czech Language” (1806): “The Czech people exist. The nobility may speak Frankish or Chaldean (wiser aristocrats love the language of their people). The lords regard themselves as foreigners and the people hold them as such. The less they are loved by the nation, the less the aristocracy loves the nation”’ During the turbulence of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Jungmann’s generation found a secure base in the national history and in a notion emphasising the coherence between the Czech nation and the great Slavic whole. Already a generation before, the historian Mikuláš Adaukt Voigt had expressed the notion that history forms the spine of national consciousness and provides the proof of an uninterrupted national existence. (See the preface to his Abbildungen böhmischer und mährischer Gelehrten und Künstler, Vol. I, 1773. (Clearly, the strong anti-German orientation of Voigt’s patriotism became a part of the Estates’ opposition to Viennese absolutism and an ardent political expression of Czech nationalism.
The transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century marks a significant period in the development of Czech patriotism and nationalism. They reached a higher socio-political, cultural, and ideological form. Many new components of modern national thinking and feeling had accumulated, but a firm structural whole was still missing, and an integral program embracing the entire economic, political, and cultural activity of the nation remained to be formulated. The generation of the historian and politician František Palacký (1798–1876) was to accomplish these goals, basing itself on the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Realistically analyzing the international and domestic situations, this generation began a political struggle for the realization of national, political, and cultural ideals during the decline of feudal absolutism and the beginnings of the constitutional regime. Only a personality of deep moral certainty and responsibility and immense conceptual power, with a deep understanding of the past and the present, could learn, comprehend, revise, and complete the legacy of the past and bring Czech thinking to a world-level. Indisputably, Palacký was such a personality. As a representative of Czech national thought during the last period of the Czech national revival, he concluded the epoch and opened another era by formulating a purposeful national program. After more than two hundred years, he reintroduced the “Czech question” into the forum of European science and politics. The problem of Czech national existence was transformed into an international issue.
