expressed his dismay that this official newspaper would use an unidentified author to stir up old national antagonism. In contrast to Karel Havlíček, who wrote an indignant and emotional reply, Palacký adopted a measured, professorial tone. Bakunin had impressed Palacký at the Slav Congress as a humane and open-minded individual, but after reading the Appeal Palacký could only assume that Bakunin had not been candid or that his views had recently changed. In June, 1848, Bakunin had stood for liberty and human happiness; now he spoke only of revolution. Palacký carefully noted the illogic in Bakunin’s work and his misconception of the Slav Congress, which Palacký insisted contributed significantly to instilling in the Slavs the determination to preserve Austria.41
Palacký was faced not only with official criticism but was also the target of recriminations directed against his person by several embittered and disappointed forty-eighters. When in March, 1849, reports reached Bakunin that Russian forces had crossed onto Austrian soil to aid the imperial troops, who were supported by the Austro-Slavs, against the Magyar separatists, Bakunin drafted a second Appeal to the Slavs. This time he urged the Slavs to get rid of their treacherous leaders-the Croatian ban Jelačić, the Serbian primate Rajačić, and Palacký—who have “sold you out to the Austrian dynasty and Nicholas.”42
Whereas conservatives like Leo Thun chided Palacký and the Czech national leadership for yielding the congress into the hands of the radical Poles,43 the Poles denounced Palacký as a tool of the “Germanized nobility” and an enemy of Poland. For Jedrzej Moraczewski, “there was neither patriotism nor a burning commitment to liberty in Palacký; his habits and way of thinking were more German than Slav.”44
In no one was the disappointment with the Slavs’ failure in 1848–49 more tragically reflected than in Ľudovít Štúr, who had labored untiringly in the spring of 1848 to spread the congress idea and promote a closer understanding among the Slavs. The intervening time led Štúr to reexamine his activities in 1848–49 and to renounce the Austro-Slav program which he had earlier supported. In his political testament, the posthumously published Das Slawenthum und die Welt der Zukunft, he accused the Czechs of seeking to establish hegemony over the Austrian Slavs under the apparent leadership of the “knowledgeable and sedate but unimaginative and shortsighted Bohemian historiographer Palacký,” but actually guided by “Bohemian aristocrats, Catholic priests, and their venal servants.” In Štúr’s judgment, the experience of 1848 had shown the utter bankruptcy of the idea of a Slav federation German-ruled Austria. The sole viable course of action for the oppressed West and South Slavs was to entrust themselves to a union with tsarist Russia.45
