East European Quarterly, Vol. XV, No. 1
PALACKÝ AND CZECH POLITICS AFTER 1876
Bruce M. Garver
University of Nebraska at Omaha
František Palacký has exercised an enormous influence on Czech political as well as scholarly and intellectual development. This paper aims to delineate and evaluate his enduring political influence in at least four respects. He directly influenced his own and succeeding generations by his statesmanlike personal example and by origniating and advocating specific political programs and policies. Immediately and in the long run he indirectly conditioned Czech politics through the laws and self-governmental institutions that he helped establish in the 1860s and most importantly through his political ideals and interpretations of Czech history.
For most Czechs, Palacký set a positive example as a patriotic and intellectual statesman, whose character, aspirations, and peasant origins very much typified those of the liberal Czech intelligentsia and upper middle class. Born in 1798 to a literate and fairly prosperous family of Protestant Moravian peasants, he had by 1848 won recognition abroad and at home as a distinguished scholar and as the principal political spokesman of his people. In doing so, he set an example to which many upwardly mobile Czechs could aspire. Moreover, Czechs from all walks of life could identify with, if not emulate his achievements and also appreciate his having resurrected the national past and helped acquire international recognition for the nation.1
Palacký’s continuing political influence also owes much to the fact that he was the first Czech to define a comprehensive national political program as well as the first to be acknowledged internationally as a political leader. That program, based on historic Bohemian state-rights (České státní právo), sought autonomy for the three Czech lands–Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia–within the framework of a reformed and federated Habsburg Monarchy.2 Palacký’s efforts to advance civil liberties and national autonomy during the tumultous years from 1848 through 1851 and during the eleven years of constitutional crisis after 1860 may be seen as the logical continuation of his scholarly contributions to the Czech national revival during the Vormärz. More than any other Czech, he and Karel Havlíček directed that national revival toward political as well as
