Page:East European Quarterly, vol15, no1.pdf/7

 supremacy could not be published until more than a century after its origin.

Both of these educated representatives of Czech national and political thinking of the seventeenth century acknowledged the social values of the privileged nobility and clergy. However, Czech writers living at the beginning of the eighteenth century among the common people saw the social base of a nation in the gentry and peasantry. They recognized the serfs not only as the population source of a nation but also as the guarantor and the preserver of its language. A baroque booklet, Obroviště mariánského atlanta (1704), written in Czech by a country priest, Antonín Frozín, expressed this encouraging notion and conviction. Though devoted to the cult of Mary, the essay also manifested a firm hope in the future of the Czech nation and provided a description of the national situation in the country. The striking and numerous preponderance of Czechs over Germans and the fact that the nucleus of the population of Bohemia was formed by Czech farmers and laborers with a rising birthrate seemed to prove the assumption about the vitality of the Czech nation.

The economic, social, political, and cultural situation of the Czech nation deteriorated until the fifties of the eighteenth century. The Czech language was gradually suppressed in schools, in the administration of estates, towns, and the governing organs, and in the diet. The purity of the language also declined. While the narrow circle of intellectuals was diminishing, the usage of Czech became associated more and more with the town-poor and the serfs in the villages. The developing popular culture of these lower social groups of the population shows that Czech national thinking had faded out but did not vanish. In the Catholic milieu, national consciousness was nourished by a supernatural belief in divine help and in the divine origin of the “elected” Czech nation. Even the Enlightenment, at least in the beginning of its development, did not deny this notion, but added a rational explanation to strengthen it. During the second half of the eighteenth century, this cultural and ideological world of the serfs and of the poor became the source and the object of the Czech Enlightenment and the national revival.

This relatively quiet level of Czech national thinking was favorably disturbed by developments in international politics. The first external attacks were the three Silesian wars over the Habsburg legacy during the rule of Maria Theresa. A wave of moral indignation and social criticism of the estranged nobility arose when the Czechs, represented by townsmen, serfts, teachers, and priests, became aware of the catastrophic consequences of the wars. The nobility was blamed for neglecting the serfs and