Hwory of European Ideas, Vol. 15, No. l-3, pp. 305-31 I, 1992 0191-6599/92$5.W+ 0.

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Printed I” Great Britain cb 1992 Pergamon Press Ltd

THE CONCEPT OF ‘NATION’ IN BOHEMIA AND MORAVIA

AT THE TURN OF THE 19TH CENTURY

ANNAM. DRABEK*

In 1791, the Bohemian estates assembled at the Great Diet drew up a

memorandum for the Habsburg Emperor and King of Bohemia, Leopold II,
summarising their wishes with respect to the future constitution of the Kingdom
of Bohemia. Their main request was for the conclusion of an indissoluble treaty
between the sovereign and the ‘nation’ to be altered only by agreement between
both parties. Essentially, they sought to re-establish the constitution as it had
existed before the great reforms of Maria Theresa and before the drastic
constitutional change of 1627, imposed upon the Bohemian estates by the
Emperor Ferdinand II as a punishment for their 1618 revolt. The Emperor
should thus contract with the Bohemian nation itself, i.e. the Bohemian estates
assembled at the Diet, who alone were in possession of political rights in the
country. However the same document also characterised the estates as the ‘voice
of the people’ or the ‘voice of the whole country’-a legal concept which
gradually came to be accepted all over Europe following the French Revolution.
In fact, the nation in this case comprised only the four estates of the Kingdom of
Bohemia. At the meeting of another diet, the Moravian estates submitted their
own particular demands to the King’
A very similar, but earlier, concept of nation is to be found in an anonymous
memorandum in the Niederiisterreichisches Landesarchiv (Regional Archive of
Lower Austria), believed to date from 1720. It contains proposals for future
administrative centralisation of all Habsburg provinces and notes, for example,
that in legal appeal cases of the Bohemian provinces, the right to passjudgement
had for a long time been entrusted solely to members of the Imperial Council
(Reichshofrat) or the councillors of the Government of Lower Austria in Vienna,
i.e. to foreign judges. This changed when Charles VI, in the course of expanding
the Bohemian Court Chancellery (B6hmische Hofkanzlei), decreed that in the
future ‘judgement shall no longer be passed upon the Bohemian nation by
foreign judges’. Reference was thus made to the senate of justice, founded at the
Bohemian Court Chancellery the year before, and which from then on became
the highest court of appeal for all members of the nobility in the Kingdom of
Bohemia.2 Once again, however, the concept of nation does not include the
whole population but only members of the nobility, disregarding the language
group to which they belonged.
Obviously this concept of ‘nation’ has nothing in common with the concept
predominant in the 19th and 20th centuries, which designates the whole
population, and which is characterised by language.

*oesterr. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Kommission fiir Geschichte bterreichs,

1010 Wien, Fleischmarkt 22, Austria.
305
306 Anna M. Drabek

The same is true of a third variant of the concept of nation. Later in her reign,
Maria Theresa spoke about the situation in the Bohemian provinces before her
administrative reforms. According to her, the ministers and court authorities had
merely acted as advocates and protectors of their provinces, neglecting the
common welfare of the Imperial State as a whole. The Supreme Chancellor of the
Bohemian court, Count Kinsky, for example, was said to have made every effort
‘to favour his own nation’ (‘seine Nation zu favorisieren’) and to have concerned
himself only with those provinces entrusted to him.j
The first mentioned example of a ‘Bohemian nation’ designates the four estates
of the province, and the second only two estates, the peers and gentry (Herren-
und Ritterstand), from all over the kingdom, these two estates being
subordinated to the mentioned senate of justice. The third case of the concept
designates in theory the whole population of Bohemia and Moravia, yet this was
at a time when the majority of the population was still composed of unfree
peasants and ‘Little People’, so that once again the reference is really only to the
estates, as the sole possessors of political rights and privileges. This concept of
nation, widespread in Europe during the early modern period, is here called the
political concept, because the decisive factor is not ethnic descent and language
but the exercise of political rights4
However, another concept of nation became widespread in the Kingdom of
Bohemia.
In 1774, FrantiSek Martin Pelzel (Pelcl), who held the University of Prague’s
first chair of Czech language and literature, created in 1792, published ‘A Short
History of the Czechs’ (‘Kurz gefasste Geschichte der Bbhmen’), in German
because, at the time, Czech was rarely used as an academic language. By
‘Bohemian Nation’ (‘bohmische Nation’) Pelzel nearly always meant the Czech-
speaking inhabitants of the country. (In German, it is possible to differentiate
between ‘bdhmisch’ and ‘die Biihmen’ on the one hand, and ‘tschechisch’ and
‘die Tschechen’ on the other. While the first pair involves no reference to the
language, the second pair refers only to the Czech-speaking part of the
population. In Czech, this differentiation is impossible: ‘c’esky’ means both
Czech in the sense of Czech-speaking, as well as Bohemian in a geographical
sense which does not involve any reference to the language at all. As a parallel,
the substantive ‘Ces’i’ may designate the great majority of the Czech inhabitants
of the country, but also the whole population, including the German-speaking
minority. Pelzel called the Czechs of his time ‘the new Bohemians’, thus making a
distinction between the Czechs, his contemporaries in this period of so-called
‘narodni obrozeni’ (National Revival), and the Czechs of medieval and early
modern times, before the battle of the White Mountain (1620). For Pelzel, these
‘Czechs, or new Bohemians’ descended as did the Moravians, from the ‘famous
Slavic nation’: they were the inhabitants par excellence of contemporary
Bohemia. However, in some passages of his book, Pelzel differentiated more
precisely, recalling the German-speaking Bohemians as well. In one place he
expressly stated: ‘Thus Czechs and Bohemians are synonymous names, though
the former cannot be applied to the German-speaking Bohemians of today.’
(‘Czechen also und Bdhmen sind gleichbedeutende Namen, ob zwar der erste den
heutigen Deutschbohmen nicht kann beygeleget werden’.)5
One of Pelzel’s contemporaries, the well-known linguist and Slavist Josef
‘Nation’ in Bohemia and Moravia 307

Dobrovsky, also used the term ‘Bohemian nation’ to refer exclusively to the
Czechs. For him this Bohemian nation belonged to the ‘Slavic people’ (‘slawische
Vlilkerschaft’) as did, for instance, the Southern Slavic ‘Illyrian nation’ in the
Balkans or the Poles. According to Dobrovsky, the Russians were the
embodiment of the Slavic people. As a synonym for ‘nation’ he used the word
‘tribe’ (‘Stamm’).6
A rather more complicated attitude towards the national affiliation of the
inhabitants of the Kingdom of Bohemia was that of the rationalist Count Franz
Josef Kinsky, a general in the service of the Austrian Imperial House. In a
handbook for the education of sons of the aristocracy {written in German and
published in 1773’), Kinsky made a distinction between ‘Bohemian’ and
‘German’ ‘native inhabitants’ (‘b~hmische und deutsche Landsleute’), desig-
nating the Czech and the German-speaking part of the population. He referred to
himself as a ‘good descendant of the Slavs’ (‘guter Abkommling der Slawen’)
and-in a period when the language in the schools, public life, literature and
science of Bohemia was still almost exclusively German-argued that ‘the
Bohemian’-meaning the Czech-ought to have ‘Bohemian’-Czech-as his
mother-tongue.8 Kinsky expressly described Czech as the ‘native language’
(“Landessprache’) and as the ‘national language’ (‘Nationalsprache’). However,
he considered German as a second native language in the Kingdom of Bohemia,
and tried to defend it against French as the dominant literary language of those
days. In the same way, he defended the use of the Czech language by the Czechs in
view of Bohemian society’s preference for German, at that time considered to be
more elegant9 While Count Kinsky regarded himself as both Czech and
German-and in addition as Austrian-he had a definite preference for the
Czech language. For him it was more harmonious and musical than German, it
bore a special grammatical relationship to Greek, and therefore offered an
excellent basis for learning modern foreign languages’.”
A notion quite similar to this lingual concept of the Czech nation-or, as it was
then called, ‘Bohemian nation’- of the above mentioned Bohemian intellectuals
may be found in the writings of most of the literary men, scientists and journalists
of this early period of the national revival. Nevertheless, all of them still oscillated
between the notion of a ‘Bohemian (= Czech) nation’ and that of a ‘Slavic
nation’, often using the two terms synonymously.”
It is interesting to note that a parallel concept-together with most of the
elements of the ideas expounded by the writers of the national revival during the
late 18th and early 19th centuries-is to be found in the work of a 17th century
scholar, the patriotic Jesuit Bohuslav Balbin. I2 In 1669-70, he composed in Latin
a defence of the Czech language (‘Dissertatio apologetica pro lingua slavonica
praecipue Bohemica’) which could not be published at that time, but was edited
anonymously in 1775 by Pelzel. Obviously, it was also known to Count Kinskjr
when he wrote the handbook mentioned above. In this book, Balbin used the
term ‘natio Bohemica’ alternately with and often synonymously for ‘slavica
natio’ or ‘slavica gens’, and talked of ‘bohemica seu slavica lingua’. However, in
contrast to Count Kinsky, the ‘lingua Patriae’, or language of the fatherland,
could only be Czech for Balbin, and the ‘gens Bohemica’ were always the Czechs.
Balbin compared the Czech language to Greek and Latin, and Bohemia to the
Roman Empire: like the latter, Bohemia had shown hospitality to many
308 Anna M. Drabeh-

foreigners but they in their turn had repaid good with evil, forcing the Czechs into
the background in their own country. Balbin’s central notion was that of
fatherland, ‘Patria’. Service to one’s fatherland had to come first of all. The
Bohemian fatherland was not only the mother of the Czech people, the ‘gens
humanitatis’ as Balbin calls her, but also the common mother-‘mater
communis’-of both the Czechs and those inhabitants with a different mother-
tongue, such as the Germans. Like Pelzel, Dobrovskjl and the rationalist Kinsky,
Balbin had a predilection for the history of his own people, of the old Bohemian
aristocracy and the fatherland. What distinguished the 17th century Bohemian
Jesuit from the writers of the National Revival around 1800 is the appeal, at the
end of his work, to St Wenceslas, the patron saint of both Bohemia and the Czech
language.i3
The development of the lingual concept of nation by the generation of
intellectuals working in Bohemia and Moravia at the turn of the 18th century
culminated in the writings of Josef Jungmann. For him, language was the
essential characteristic not only of a nation but also of a fatherland,i4 in contrast
to other thinkers, more strongly attached to the enlightenment tradition, who
define ‘fatherland’ as the country with the best polity, the best laws, which one
accepted not so much on account of one’s birth as by one’s own free wi11.15
Toward the end of his life, Jungmann, propagator of the Czech language and
nation, seemed ready to abandon the idea of an independent Czech nation in
favour of the larger entity of a Pan-Slavic nation comprising all Slavs of his time.
He was also prepared to accept Czech as a mere dialect of a hypothetical Pan-
Slavic Ianguage. However, one should not forget that for Jungmann, the
relationship between the Czech language and nation and a Pan-Slavic language
and nation was quite different from the way the mentioned writers of the
National Revival envisaged the question or even Balbin did. Their concept of a
Czech nation was so closely associated with that of a Slavic nation that often the
two concepts were confused. Jungmann however was fully aware of the
difference between the two concepts of nation, and knew that they excluded each
other. In 1847 he wrote in his ‘Zapisky’: ‘I am a sincere Czech who loves our
nationality, but I am ready to sacrifice even Czech for the sake of the Pan-Slavic
language, in the knowledge that we remain Slavs whatever the dialect may be in
which we write.“”
While the political concept of nation mentioned above presupposes the
existence of a nation, defined not by lingual-ethnic but by political criteria, this is
not the case with any of those thinkers just discussed-from Balbin to
Jungmann. For them, nation was determined by ethnic origin, customs, religion
and above all by language, and they always differentiated two nations living in
Bohemia and Moravia: the Czechs and the Germans. In the course of the 19th
century, this second, lingual-ethnic concept qfnation came to gain the upper hand;
somewhere around the 1860s it became the dominant concept, and has remained
so until today.”
Furthermore, the idea of a single Bohemian nation as the bearer of political
rights existed well into the 19th century. In an era when demands for democracy
were receiving increasing acceptance, this idea included not simply the
priviliged estates as in the old political concept of nation, but the people as a
whole. Logically, this way of thinking meant that-at a time when lingual
‘Nation’ in Bohemia and Moravia 309

nationalism was at its most assertive-one had to accept that the nation was
bilingual. This in 1868, the great Czech historian and politician FrantiSek
Palackjr announced in a speech: ‘The Bohemian nation-and this, gentlemen, is a
fact that we cannot, and do not wish to disguise-has been a bilingual nation for
many years now’.18
Yet even in the period here envisaged, namely the years around the turn of the
19th century, a rather similar concept was developed in the work of the
German-Bohemian theologian and philosopher Bernhard Bolzano, who
influenced generations of students with his lectures and sermons. He spoke of
two ‘ethnic groups’ (‘Volksstamme’) in Bohemia, the Bohemian and the
German, having to be fused into a homogeneous ‘Bohemian nation’. As a means
to this end, he saw the bringing about of equal educational chances for both
Czechs and Germans by reforming the exclusively German-language secondary
school system so unfavourable to Czech youth, and establishing an equal status
for both languages of the country.”
Thus in the Kingdom of Bohemia, three different concepts of nation appear
during the period here considered:

(1) The political concept, typical for the earlier modern period, and
characterising the estates as the bearers of the country’s political rights,
without taking into account language groups.
(2) The lingual concept of nation, completely different from the above.
(3) A homogeneous concept of the Bohemian nation, connected with the first
mentioned concept in so far as it is not defined by language, but is based on
population, regardless of large groups. In the first case, the nation was
represented by the estates of the country; in the last case, the nation was
conceived as the totality of citizens composing the state.

To conclude, the intellectual situation in Bohemia during the years around

1800 proved to be a period of transition, both for the development of the lingual
concept of the nation, which was to dominate the future, and for the concept of
the bilingual Bohemian nation, which accompanied the former until well into the
second half of the 19th century.

Anna M. Drabek
osterreichische Akademie der
Wissenschaften, Wien

NOTES

1. Cf. Anna M. Drubek: Die Desiderien der Bohmischen Stande von 1791.
iiberlegungen zu ihrem ideellen Gehalt. In: Die bohmischen Lander zwischen Ost
und West. Festschrift fur Karl Bosl zum 75. Geburtstag, Ferdinand Seibt (ed.)
(Munchen-Wien, 1983) pp. 132-142.
2. Cf. Anna M. Drubek: Der Nationsbegriff in Biihmen an der Grenze von Aufklarung
und “nationaler Wiedergeburt”. In: Vaterlandsliebe und Gesamtstaatsidee im
esterreichischen 18. Jahrhundert. Moritz Csaky und Reinhard Hagelkrys (eds.)
(Beihefte zum Jahrbuch der hsterreichischen Gessellschaft zur Erforschung des 18.
Jahrhunderts 1, Wien, 1989), p. 43.
310 Anna M. Drabek

3. Drabek, Nationsbegriff, l.c. p. 43.

4. Cf. Drabek, Nationsbegriff, l.c. p. 43. On the content of the term ‘nation’in Hungary
at the turn of the 19th century cf. Moritz Cshky, Von der Aufklarung zum
Liberalismus. Studien zum Fruhliberalismus in Ungarn (Veroffentlichungen der
Kommission fur die Geschichte Osterreichs 10, Wien 1981) especially p. 157.
However, it was customary to apply such a concept of nation also to the whole of the
area ruled by the Habsburg Monarchy. Cf. e.g. a memorandum by Prince Metternich
dated 1817 (Die osterreichische Zentralverwaltung II, Vol. 5: Die Zeit Franz II. und
Ferdinands I., Friedrich Walter (ed.) Veriiffentlichungen der Kommission fur neuere
Geschichte ijsterreichs 43, Wien 1956, No. 66 p. 327). The political concept of nation
was particularly common in France, cf. Elisabeth Fehrenbach. Nation, in: Handbuch
politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680-1820, Rolf Reichhardt und
Edberhard Schmitt (ed.) (Munchen, 1986) pp. 75-78.
5. Drabek, Nationsbegriff, l.c. 52 ff. On Pelzel cf. Josef Johnides, FrantiSek Martin
Pelcl (Praha, 1981).
6. Cf. Josef Dobrovsky, Ueber die Ergebenheit und Anhanglichkeit der Slawischen
Viilker an das Erzhaus Oestreich (Prag, 1791).
7. Franz Josef Kinsky, Erinnerungen uber einen wichtigen Gegenstand von einem
Bohmen (Prag, 1773). I have used the edition in Franz Josef Kinsky, Gesammelte
Schriften 3 (Wiener Neustadt, 1806).
8. ‘Ich gestehe, da13 ich als ein guter Abkommling der Slaven des Vorurtheil mitegeerbt
habe, es mtisse, wenn die Muttersprache eines Franzosen die franzosische, und eines
Deutschen die deutsche ist, solches fur einen Bohmen such die bohmische seyn.’
Erinnerungen iiber einen wichtigen Gegenstand p, 59.
9. Ibid., 59 ff. and 114 ff. cf. Drabek, Nationsbegriff, l.c. p.51.
10. Drabek, Nationsbegriff, l.c., 50 ff.
11. For instance the linguists Vaclav Fortunatus Durich and Josef Vratislav Ritter von
Monse, Jan Rulik and AleS Paiizek, the editor of the first newspaper in Czech Vaclav
Matgj Kramerius, the Premonstratensian Norbert Korber and many others.
However, patriotic thinkers of the National Revival who came from the lower classes,
such as the village judge FrantiJek Vavak, also have to be mentioned here. Cf.
Drabek, Nationsbegriff, l.c., p. 51 ff. and Anna M. Drabek, Der allslawische Gedanke
im tschechischen Nationsbegriff und die russischen Truppen in den bohmischeneen
Landern zur Zeit der Napoleonischen Kriege, in: Rugland und ijsterreich zur Zeit der
Napoleonischen Kriege, Anna M. Drabek, Walter Leitsch and Richard G.
Plaschka (eds), (Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fur die Geschichte Osterreichs
14, Wien 1989) pp. 71-74, 76 f.
12. Cf. Drabek, Nationsbegriff, l.c., pp. 46-48.
13. In the second half of the 17th century, there gathered around Balbin a group offriends
and pupils, the majority of them Catholic priests like Balbin, with a similar body of
ideas and an analogous concept of nation. As the foremost %mong them must be
mentioned TomaS PeSina, with his self-chosen noble title ‘z Cechorodu’ (= of the
Czech race, of Czech birth), who lived until 1680. He placed the ‘Bohemian’ nation
and language side by side with a ‘Moravian’ nation and language, which, he
explained, only differed very slightly from the Bohemian one. Cf. Drabek,
Nationsbegriff, l.c., pp. 48 ff.
14. Cf. Josef Jungmann, 0 gazyku Eeskem. Josefa Jungmanna sebrane spisy (Novoi-eska
biblioteka 1, Praha 1841) pp. 133-137 and 137-157. Cf. also Anna M. Drabek,
Grenzganger zwischen Aufklarung und Frtihnationalismus. In press,
15. Thus the thinkers of the Enlightenment, e.g. Thomas Abbt, Vom Tode fur das
Vaterland, Paul Menge (ed.), (Leipzig, 1915) p. 21. Cf. also Drabek, Grenzganger
zwischen Aufklarung und Frtihnationalismus.
16. Cf. Drabek, Der allslawische Gedanke, l.c., p. 83 ff.
17. In the political concept, as well as in the lingual-ethnic one, a specifically Moravian
variant was sometimes still discerned: in the first case it designated the Moravian
estates and in the second case started from the assumption of a separate Moravian
 language. However, as references to an individual Moravian nation are comparative-
ly rare, we have not entered into them in this article.
18. Drabek, Nationsbegriff, l.c., p. 54.
19. SC!, p. 55. About Bolzano cf. Jaroslav Louiil, Bernard BoIzano (Praha, 1978).