PALACKÝ AT THE SLAV CONGRESS OF 1848
When the Czecho-Slovaks and South Slavs lent active support to the Habsburgs against radical Vienna and Pest, Marx and Engels, who earlier had applauded the “democratic” Prague uprising, turned their full anger against the “Slavonian dilettanti,” whose “anti-historical movement . . . intended nothing less than to subjugate the civilized West under the barbarian East, the town under the country, trade, manufactures, intelligence under the primitive agriculture of Slavonian serfs.” Their “chief champion, . . . Professor Palacký, [was] himself nothing but a learned German run mad, who even now [could not] speak the Tschechian language correctly and without foreign accent.” Engels accused the Czech and Croatian “Pan-Slavists [of] betraying the revolutionary cause for the shadow of nationality,” which played directly into Russian hands. The Slav Congress, he concluded, “would have proved a decided failure even without the interference of the Austrian military.”46
To the end of his life, František Palacký remained convinced that the Slavs’ enemies had provoked the June uprising to disrupt the Slav Congress and compromise the newly formed Bohemian provincial government. In his Political Testament (Politisches Vermächtniss), he wrote: “I know of no event of our times which has had more fateful and damaging consequences for the nation than this Whitsuntide uprising.”47
To be sure, the Slav Congress was only a brief episode in Palacký’s long and varied political career. Its importance, nonetheless, was manifold: it was the first test of his political leadership of the Czechs and Austro-Slavs, and it served as a seedbed for the development of his views on the federal restructuring of the Danubian monarchy that he later presented at Kroměřiž. Even after the late 1860’s, when he came to doubt the chances for meaningful national reform in a German-dominated Austria, Palacký continued to prize the Slav Congress as a milestone on the road of the Slavs political maturation.
NOTES
1. On the Slav Congress, see esp. the collection of documents edited by the Czech historian Václav Žáček, Slovanský sjezd v Praze roku 1848: Sbírka dokumentů (Prague, 1958). Among older studies reflecting the national points of view of the major participating Slav nations toward the congress, see: (in Czech) Zdeněk V. Tobolka Slovanský sjezd v Praze roku 1848 (Prague, 1901); (in Serbo-Croatian) Milan Prelog, Slavenska renesansa 1780–1848 (Zagreb, 1924); (in Polish) Władysław T. Wisłocki, Kongres Stowiański w r. 1848 i sprawa polska (Lvov, 1927); (in Ukrainian) Ivan Bryk, “Slavians ’kyi zizd u Prazi 1848 r. i ukrains ’ka sprava,” Zapysky Naukovoho Tovarystva imeny Shevchenka, CXXIX (1920), pp. 141–217.
2. Jan Petr Jordan, Aktenmässiger Bericht über die Verhandlungen des ersten Slavenkongresses in Prag (Prague, 1848), pp. 10–11. The origins and preparations