cultural and economic goals.3 Beginning in 1848, Palacký served for a quarter century as the principal Czech spokesman in dealings with the Habsburgs or with political allies and opponents. He either authored or co-authored all important declarations of Czech political aims, from those of 1848 and 1849 to the rescript of 1871. These he further clarified by publishing timely political essays and by delivering policy speeches to imperial assemblies in 1848 and 1849 and after 1860 to the Bohemian diet or the upper house of the Reichsrat.4
Czechs have honored Palacký for political as well as intellectual and moral leadership, not only by word and deed but by large public festivals often designed to demonstrate national solidarity as well as to commemorate Palacký’s achievements. This occurred at the celebration of his seventieth birthday in June, 1868, that coincided with the laying of the cornerstone of the Czech National Theatre to be built by popular subscription and with the holding of tábory (mass open air assemblies) that demonstrated for Bohemian state-rights and greater civil liberties. Political overtones also appeared at the international convocation of June, 1898, in Prague to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of Palacký’s birth. At the same time, twenty-two years after his death, the Czechs commemorated the fiftieth anniversaries of the Prague Slav Congress, the revolutions of 1848, and the abolition of serfdom and the manorial system. In 1898, the Czechs also were beginning to recover from a serious political defeat sustained when German riots prompted imperial withdrawal of the 1897 Badeni language ordinance requiring all civil servants in the Czechs lands to be able to read and write Czech as well as German. In 1898, the Czechs not only honored Palacký’s many positive contributions to knowledge, national welfare, and Slavic solidarity, but also noted how far they had to go to accomplish those objectives he had helped delineate thirty to fifty years before.5 In commemorating in 1926 the 50th anniversary of Palacký’s death, many Czechs regarded the recently established Czechoslovak Republic as the logical culmination of Palacký’s scholastic and political endeavors.6
Palacký, like most Czechs of his and later generations, by no means regarded political success as the measure of all things. After all, the Czech national revival initially encouraged economic growth and achievements in scholarship, the arts, and letters. During the Vormärz and again during the fifties, two periods when the Habsburgs curtailed civil liberties and popular participation in public affairs, Palacký by example and exhortation urged Czechs to advance individual achievement and public welfare through intellectual, artistic, and commercial endeavor.7 He also supported those
