Prague Pentecost Rising
The Whitsun uprising in Prague from June 12th to 17th, 1848 was a high point of the revolution of 1848 in the then Austrian crown land of Bohemia . It was an uprising by Czech nationalists against the Austrian Empire and was called "Pražské červnové povstání".
The Pentecost uprising was part of the unrest that had spread in large parts of Central Europe in the course of the revolutions of 1848 from February of that year (cf. February Revolution 1848 ) and reached the states of the German Confederation in March . At the time, Bohemia with its capital Prague was a province under Austrian central authority and - even if only about a third of the population was German-speaking - also part of the German Confederation.
The previous Slavic Congress , which was chaired by František Palacký from June 2nd to 12th in Prague and was attended by representatives of various Slavic population groups of the multiethnic state along with guests from non-Austrian ethnic groups, including Poles from the Prussian province of Posen and the only Russian As a result, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin only called for a federal transformation of Austria into a union of peoples with equal rights. The rebels went on with their demands and demanded the independence of the Slavic crown lands from the Austrian monarchy - similar to how this had already been articulated by Hungarian revolutionaries for their own national interests.
The uprising was suppressed after just a few days by Austrian troops under the command of Alfred Fürst von Windischgrätz with military force.
Development in a historical context
prehistory
In the middle of the 1840s there were around 4 million Czechs and around 2.6 million German-speaking residents in the Austrian crown lands of Bohemia , Moravia and Silesia . With the March Revolution , national Czech politicians recognized a possibility to unite these three regions and to push ahead with the separation of the Slavic-dominated regions from the German Confederation in a Bohemian-Moravian state parliament that was still to be formed.
The events of the March Revolution took place in Prague on March 11, 1848. Startled by the news of the bourgeois-liberal February Revolution in France, on the one hand a commission of noble representatives was formed, whose members referred to the late medieval tradition of the Wenceslas crown of the Kingdom of Bohemia and demanded recognition of a Bohemian constitutional law; on the other hand, after a call from the secret " Repeal Club " named after an Irish liberation organization , a people's assembly in Prague's Wenceslas Bath was held in which bourgeois democratic intellectuals held a clear majority. At this meeting, which was attended by around 3,000 participants, revolutionary demands were called for in a 14-point program, such as the relief of peasant property without compensation for the large landowners and regulations for the remuneration of workers; it became a citizens' committee selected which to draw up a petition to Austria's Emperor Ferdinand I was commissioned. In the list of demands, weakened by the liberal-conservative committee members, the social revolutionary concerns were relativized and instead the national Czech goals such as an administrative union of the three crown lands Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian Silesia emphasized.
After the overthrow of the former State Chancellor Metternich in the course of the revolution in Vienna, the moderately liberal government under Franz Anton von Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky initially reacted evasively. A new petition was then addressed to the additional title “King of Bohemia” instead of the “Austrian Emperor”. This second petition was successful in that an independent Bohemian state parliament was approved. However, this concession - initially hailed as the “Bohemian Charter” by the Czech nationalists - quickly met with opposition: the representations of Moravia and Silesia sent protest notes against an appropriation by Bohemia, and representatives of the German-speaking minority in all three crown lands founded an “Association of Germans Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia to maintain their nationality ”. This association in turn demanded, for example, that the Egerland should be ceded to Bavaria and that a large part of the Ore Mountains should be joined with the Kingdom of Saxony .
The conflict between Germans and Czechs became increasingly evident after Palacký had rejected his mandate for the Fifties Committee , which was supposed to prepare an all-German national assembly in Frankfurt am Main . He demanded a status for the countries of the former Wenceslas Crown outside of the Confederation, but still within the Austrian Empire, such as Hungary had. In spite of all of this, the Vienna state government continued to show no willingness to spin off the Bohemian states from the German Confederation.
Meanwhile, the preparations for a state election in Bohemia, initially with the participation of the German-speaking minority, were pushed forward by a national committee. A separate Bohemian National Guard was also set up under the name “Svornost” (concord).
After Palacký's rejection of the Fifties Committee, the German members of the Bohemian National Committee left this committee. In the subsequent election to the Frankfurt National Assembly, only the 47 constituencies of the predominantly German-speaking regions of Bohemia took part, from which 61 members were elected to the first democratically elected all-German parliament.
After the date for the convening of a Bohemian state parliament was fixed, Archduke Franz Josef, who succeeded Emperor Franz-Josef I in December of the same year , was to come to Prague as governor. The Bohemian gubernial president Count Leo von Thun-Hohenstein formed a provisional government for Bohemia, and thus opposed both the Vienna Revolutionary Cabinet and the moderately acting National Committee in Prague.
Slavic Congress and Pentecost Uprising
In this acute situation, a Slavic Congress was opened on June 2, 1848, chaired by František Palacký. The renewed demands of this congress for the detachment of the Slavic (including the Slovenian) crown lands from the German Confederation were now openly rejected by the imperial court, who had fled to Innsbruck before the revolutionary events in Vienna. The Prague military commander in the service of the monarchy, Prince Windischgrätz, threatened the use of military force. The mood in the Bohemian capital then radicalized. A national Czech student assembly convened immediately after the end of the Slavic Congress called for Windischgrätz to be removed.
When on the following day, Whit Monday, June 12th, from an open-air fair on the Rossmarkt in Prague, a demonstration against Austrian domination formed, most of the members of the National Guard ( Svornost ), which should initially have ensured "peace and order", ran. to the protesters over. Among them were a large number of workers, especially angry unemployed textile craftsmen who had previously been fired by their employers on the grounds of foreign competition. Social revolutionary slogans were chanted out of this crowd and the revolutionary mood was fueled. The aim of the demonstration was the official seat of Windischgrätz. When the protesters opposed the Austrian military and an officer was knocked down, the soldiers opened fire. This was the trigger that escalated in the ensuing uprising.
Barricades were erected in various parts of the city . In the struggles, which were repeatedly interrupted by negotiations, the revolutionaries were initially able to gain the upper hand. They managed to briefly arrest Count von Thun. After Prince Windischgrätz's wife - fatally wounded by a ricochet - was killed, the commander in chief, as a representative of the monarchy, had cannons used against the rebels and announced the siege of the city. Given the overwhelming power of Austria, after five days of eventful street and barricade fighting, the revolutionaries had no choice but to surrender unconditionally on June 17, 1848 .
Follow-up development
In an overview of the revolutionary events in the states of the German Confederation, the Prague insurgents of Whitsun in 1848 were rather isolated. Cut off from the surveys in the other principalities of the German Confederation - including Austria - their goals were viewed by the revolutionary movement of 1848/49 as guided by special separatist interests and were rejected by the majority. In the situation of the time, however, it was not recognized that the end of this uprising - a week before the suppression of the June uprising of the workers in Paris - had also ushered in the triumphal march of the reactionary counter-revolution, which a year later wiped out the initial successes of the revolution in the entire German Confederation should.
The moderate Czech nationalists, who now had to give up their idea of a separate Bohemian state parliament, condemned the uprising. Representing them, František Palacký, who subsequently became a member of the Austrian Reichstag - referring to the influence of Bakunin - referred to him as “the work of foreign agents provocateurs and local stupidity ”.
It was not until 70 years later - shortly before the end of World War I - that the Czech national movement achieved the goal of statehood for the areas of Bohemia, Moravia and Austria that it claimed as part of the process of disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy with the establishment of the Czechoslovak Republic , including the Slovakian- populated Upper Hungary -Silesia. The declaration of independence of October 28, 1918 was confirmed under international law by the treaties of Saint-Germain (September 10, 1919) and Trianon (June 4, 1920) .
literature
- Emil Niederhauser: 1848 - Storm in the Habsburg Empire , (translated from the Hungarian by Hans Kolbe). Kremayr and Scheriau, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-218-00514-0 .
- Andreas Moritsch (ed.): The Prague Slavic Congress 1848 . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-205-99288-1 (= book series of the Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe , Volume 7).
- Ralph Melville: Nobility and Revolution in Bohemia. Structural change in rule and society in Austria around the middle of the 19th century. von Zabern, Mainz 1998, 368 pages, ISBN 3-8053-1176-1 (= publications of the Institute for European History , Volume 95).
- Joseph Rudl: The barricades of Prague in the fateful week of Pentecost 1848. Landau, Prague 1848 ( online ).
- Tobias Weger : A Brief History of Prague. Pustet, Regensburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-7917-2329-7 , p. 87.
Web links
- 1848: Whitsun Uprising in Prague Article of October 5, 2001 from the online edition of the Austrian news magazine Der Standard
- Summary of the Whitsun Uprising in Prague in a historical context
Single receipts
- ↑ " The Irish in Prague " ; Contribution by Katrin Bock to Radio Praha (www.radio.cz/de/) from January 5, 2002 on the development of the historical connection between Czech and Irish history up to the 20th century (accessed on March 14, 2013).
- ↑ Review on historicum.net
- ↑ Review for H-Soz-u-Kult by Rene Schiller