PALACKÝ AND HAVLÍČEK
participation in Reichstag debates, both in Vienna and Kroměříž (Kremsier), earned him some enemies. But most of his associates, friend and foe, respected him. Particularly attractive was his willingness to compromise, when purely ideological solutions to problems were impossible and when the need to be realistic did not require abandonment of principle. Thus in the wake of the Whitsuntide events he supported Leo Thun, governor of Bohemia, against the hated General Windischgrätz.46 Thun was no champion of the Czech cause, but as a guardian of Habsburg interests he was preferable to the man who had crushed the uprising with great force and imposed martial law on Prague.
Havlíček’s acerbic temperament, as noted earlier, involved him in numerous disputes. It affected, too, his journalistic prose, which was alternately blunt and simple, colorful and vulgar, designed as much to infuriate as to persuade his adversaries. Like Palacký, he served in the Reichstag, but made few speeches; and finding the haggling in the imperial assembly tiresome, he eventually resigned his seat (December, 1848).47
As for tactics, Havlíček could and did change them, at times dramatically. In April, 1848, during a meeting of the Národní výbor, he told poet Moritz Hartmann that, were the Czechs to be faced with certain domination by either Germans or Russians, he would prefer “the Russian whip to German ‘freedom’.”48 And after 1848 he wrote to Palacký that the Czechs had acted too timidly by trusting the imperial government, while separatist Magyars and grossdeutsch liberals openly defied it.49 Such statements resulted perhaps from the stresses of the revolution and did not necessarily reflect permanent changes of attitude. But they did contradict Havlíček’s and Palacký’s insistence on other occasions that political oppression transcends nationality and that opposition to absolutism requires moderation.
In the end, such dissimilarities were never so great as to disrupt the essential cordial relationship between Palacký and Havlíček. Even with the return of absolutism they maintained political contacts and strengthened their personal ties. In March, 1849, Palacký supported his colleague when Havlíček attacked Stadion’s Oktroi constitution and was brought to trial in the first anti-press litigation of the Schwarzenberg era.50 He did so again in January, 1850, when Havlíček was forced to halt publication of Národní noviny, in part for publicizing Palacký’s own criticism of the government’s centralization program (December, 1849).51 Later, when Havlíček moved to Kutná Hora and established Slovan (The Slav), Palacký urged his friend not to close the newspaper
