Page:The Bohemian Review, vol1, 1917.djvu/30

 mon imperial committee for foreign affairs, but the army also promoted unification, and the common finances worked in the same direction.

Bohemia was from the very beginning the economic backbone of this strange confederation; almost the whole of Hungary fell under Turkish dominion, and thus remained economically weak and undeveloped. Austria proper was barely self-supporting, while Trieste and the Adriatic at that time were hardly utilised at all.

The centralising absolutism of the Habsburgs and their Counter-Reformation caused the Revolution of 1618, which ended two years later in the disastrous battle of the White Mountain. Ferdinand II. avenged himself by ordering the execution of the leaders, whose heads for years frowned upon the population of Prague from the tower of the famous bridge of Charles IV. Ferdinand, acting on Jesuit advice, made use of the occasion to persecute the Protestants, and especially the Bohemian Union of Brethren; about 30,000 families had to leave the country, amongst them Comenius! Not only were the Bohemian countries depopulated, but the Habsburgs carried through one of the greatest, economic revolutions in history. Four-fifths of the soil were taken from the legitimate owners to fill the treasury of the greedy Emperor and his tools, drawn from the dregs of every aristocracy in Europe. The country was brought back to Catholicism by fire and sword—her best men were exiled, her literature burned, her lands plundered.

In 1627, Ferdinand II. curtailed the legislative and administrative rights of the aristocracy—at that time the only representatives of the nation—but he did not dare to deprive Bohemia of her independence. In the same year he issued a new charter confirming the privileges of Bohemia, and expressedly rejecting the theory, preached by his advisers and upheld in modern times by Austrian and German historians, that the Bohemian nation had forfeited its rights to independence. Ferdinand himself and his successors were only too glad to remain kings of Bohemia.

The power of the Habsburgs was strengthened by their success in reimposing Catholicism. The Reformation, while destroying the mediæval theocracy, strengthened the State, and, in Catholic countries, the State gained by its alliance with the Counter-Reformation.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Habsburgs continued the unification and centralisation of Austria proper, Bohemia and Hungary, and this aim seemed to have been attained under Maria Theresa and Joseph II: But the latter’s radical and Germanising methods provoked opposition alike in Bohemia, Hungary and all the non-German provinces, and since his days history tells of the revival of the Austrian nations.

4. The opposition of the Bohemian aristocracy to Joseph II. was only the political side of a national revival. The whole of Europe awakened in the eighteenth century; it was the period of humanitarianism in philosophy and literature, the age of reason and freethought, the age of Rousseau, Kant and Paine. Absolutism could not oppose such a movement indefinitely, and even the absolutist monarchs of Austria, Prussia and Russia—Joseph, Frederick and Catherine II.—paid their tribute to the age, and became “enlightened” despots. It was this European movement which worked for the revival of the Bohemian nation; for the principles of humanitarian philosophy and of the French Revolution, the principles of “Liberté—Egalité—Fraternité” were the natural outcome and continuation of the Bohemian Reformation and Chelčicky’s religion of Fraternity. The suppression of the Jesuits sanctioned by the Pope himself, clearly showed the character of the general upheaval of thinking Europe.

Joseph II.’s Toleration Edict (1781) did not extend to the Hussites and the Brethren, who, therefore, had to join either the Lutheran or Calvinist Churches; but even this restricted freedom strengthened Hussite memories and promoted the national revival. Everywhere the masses were acquiring political rights, the courts and aristocracies were no longer able to keep the peoples in political and spiritual serfdom; democracy was born, and with it nationality became a political factor. It was the great humanitarian Herder who proclaimed the nations, in opposition to the artificial State, as the natural organs of humanity.

The French Revolution put an end to “enlightened” despotism, and in every country an unenlightened reaction set in. In Austria Francis I. was led by Metternich, whose system is, for Western Europe, the very embodiment of reaction—the continuation of the Habsburg and Jesuit Counter-Reformation with all its spiritual horrors. “Spirit