PALACKÝ AT THE SLAV CONGRESS OF 1848
the creation of a “great Slavic Empire.” Turansky was sure that in Prague the organization was headed by “a certain Palacký.” He knew of letters Palacký had written to the ringleaders in Prešov, although he had not read them. The plans called for simultaneous revolts in 1850 in several Slav centers, including Prague, but when revolution erupted in Paris in February, 1848, the conspirators decided to advance the timetables.35
Windischgrätz’s report on the June events, released on August 2, 1848, when the investigation was turned over to the civilian court authorities, gave full credence to Turánsky’s unsubstantiated testimony. Though the names of the chief conspirators were known to the authorities, Windischgrätz conveniently refrained from citing them, allegedly so as not to prejudice the subsequent investigation.36 From Vienna, where he was a deputy to the Imperial Parliament, Palacký, together with Prince Lubomirski, issued a categorical denial of the general’s allegations and challenged him to make public the supposedly incriminating evidence.37 In fact, Palacký did not learn that he was cited as a main conspirator by Turansky until the following March, when Austrian Justice Minister Bach, in response to an interpellation by the Czech deputies at Kroměříž for release of the Investigatory Committee’s files, merely read into the record a summary of Turánsky’s testimony.38 Bach’s action incensed the Czechs, but their protests were ignored by Vienna when the Reichstag was dissolved on March 6.
The second incident that prompted Palacký to take a public stand on the congress followed the publication by a Czech newspaper in early January, 1849, of Mikhail Bakunin’s inflammatory, anti-Austrian Appeal to the Slavs.39 More precisely, it was a semi-official reply in the governmental Prager Zeitung to the publication in Bohemia of the Appeal that forced Palacký to speak out. The anonymous article in the Prager Zeitung was not so much directed against the Appeal itself as against the Czech liberals, apparently for failing to denounce the editors of the Noviny Lípy slovanské who had published the Appeal in Czech: “Will then no Czech raise his voice against such doings? Where are you, educators of the Slavs in Bohemia?” Seizing on Bakunin’s proud identification as a “member of the Slav Congress,” the author challenged by name the Czechs who had guided the congress—Palacký, Neuberg, Dejm, and Havlíček—to explain Bakunin’s version of the congress and his role in it.”40 This attempt to compromise the Czech liberals by holding them responsible for their fellow congress member, Bakunin, was reminiscent of the charges leveled at the congress leadership by Windischgrätz in August, 1848.
In a public letter of January 22, 1849, from Kroměříž, Palacký, although refusing to be drawn into a direct polemic with the Prager Zeitung,
