The Czech Case: From the Bohemian Slavophone Populus to Czech Nationalism and the Czechoslovak Nation

Abstract

Bohemia emerged as a separate polity after the Magyar conquest of Greater Moravia. The Frankish protection that extended to Bohemia attached this country to the empire, while Moravia became a province permanently linked to the Principality of Bohemia in the late 1020s. In 1079, Moravia was organized as a margraviate. Usually sons or younger brothers of the Bohemian princes reigned as margraves of Moravia, which emphasized the separateness of Moravia vis-à-vis Bohemia. A similar arrangement developed in Poland-Lithuania where sons or younger brothers of the King of Poland ruled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Třeštík 1999: 140).

[W]e share the same noble Slavic idiom, and the sublimity of the same noble language.

Emperor Charles IV (King Charles I of the Crown of theCzech Lands) in his 1355 letter to Emperor (Tsar)Stephen Dušan of Serbia.¹ (in Stankiewicz 1984: ix)

The first and best of all the Slavic dialects is the Czech language, which is [not spoken only by the Bohemians] but also by the Moravians and, partly, by the Silesians.

Jan Blahoslav (Blažek) (1523–1571), a bishop of the Czech Brethren, translator of the New Testament (1564), he also authored aCzech-language grammar of the Czech language (1571, publishedonly in 1857), from which the above quotation was taken (Orłoś1993: 28; Siatkowska 1992: 118–119).

Wherever your language and your nationhood are disregarded you are oppressed, no matter how liberal the country may be. […] [W]here your language is excluded from schools and offices, freedom is taken away from you, from your nation, more than by police or by censorship. […] [W]here your national language is excluded from offices and schools, the mouth of the people is tightly locked.

Karel Havlíček Borovský in Národní noviny, 1848 (In Fishman

1997: 202)

IfAustria did not exist she would have to be invented in the interest ofEurope and then Humankind.²

František Palacký, 1848 (In Monarchie 2007)