In 1867, the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary formed an alliance of "kingdoms and territories represented by the Imperial Diet and the crown of St. Stephen of Hungary", known as the dual Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Bohemia/Czechs became once again a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, much to the displeasure of the Czechs.
Dualist Austro-Hungarian Empire
At that time, Bohemian industry was developing rapidly, and the proletariat began to grow. With the founding of the Czech-Slavic Social Democratic Labour Party on 7 April 1878 and the rise of the workers' movement throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian ruling circles panicked and had to make concessions to the bourgeoisie of all nationalities in the empire in exchange for suppression of the working class movement......
The working class came on
From 1879 to 1894, the Austro-Hungarian Empire formed a new government under the leadership of Prime Minister Count Eduard Taaffe, which was the most reactionary and longest-lasting of all Austrian governments. The Czech bourgeoisie agreed to join this government on the condition that the other side make certain limited concessions.
Count Edward Tafe
After the establishment of the Czech-Slavic Social Democratic Labour Party, the Austrian government began to use high-pressure measures against the workers' movement, so that the meetings and congresses of the Social Democratic Party had to be held in secret. By the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century, the government realized that it was futile to try to suppress the workers' movement, so it relaxed its repression, and from then on the Social Democrats became semi-legal parties.
As the confrontation progressed, some members of the Young Czechs Party also broke with the Czech community in the Reichstag during the eighties of the 19th century and renounced collaboration against imperial policy. At the 1888 National Congress in Hainfeld, Lower Austria, the ideological and programmatic unity of the social democrats of all nationalities in Austria was achieved.
The German bourgeoisie realized that it was no longer able to maintain its power in the Czech Republic. To do this, they tried to save their position in other border strips, preparing to create a special province of German Bohemia on the border. Count Edward Taffe opened negotiations with the Old Czechs and the Germans in 1890.
Edward Tafe
The end result of the negotiations was the de facto division of Bohemia into Czechs and Germanic regions. This reality was unacceptable to all Czech political parties, only the Old Czechs, and in the 1891 elections the Old Czechs were ousted from the political scene. In this way, the plan is completely bankrupt.
In 1897, when the Badney decree placed the Czech language in Bohemia on an equal footing with the German language, the Young Czechs gladly accepted it. Casimir Badeni, who was also appointed chancellor of Austria in 1895, also required officials and hired workers on Czech soil to be bilingual, which meant that the national language of the Czechs was finally officially recognized.
Casimir Badney
On the other hand, Germanic liberals and German nationalists were quite dissatisfied, and they agitated and held demonstrations in the Reichstag. Eventually, widespread opposition ousted Bardney, but the demand for national independence remained high among the Czechs.
Czech political life is diverse
In the decades following the revolution of the mid-19th century, the Czech Republic continued to grow in population and expand its industrial sector. From 6.74 million inhabitants in 1850 to 10.15 million in 1910. Industrialization lasted from 1848 to 1873, followed by a period of depression followed by another period of strong growth from 1880 to 1914.
At the turn of the century, the development of local industries in the Czech Republic entered a new stage, which is often referred to as the "Second Industrial Revolution". The basis of the new phase is the use of electricity and internal combustion machines in industry, the beginning of the use of automated machine tools and the increasing application of chemical methods in production.
During this period, there was a significant growth in the machine industry, making the Czech region one of the most developed countries in Europe in terms of the production sector of the machine industry. Iron and steel, chemicals, textiles, coal and paper, together with engineering, food processing and brewing, are the most productive regions of the Czech economy.
And the typical feature of the whole industrial development is the accumulation of capital and the formation of the first monopolies and cartels: industry is at this time ruled by financial capital. The traditional aristocracy had lost its economic advantage, while the emerging middle class embraced Czech nationalism and sought to expand their political influence.
Czech capital finally gained a dominant position in the Czech region, cities became increasingly Czechized, and tensions between Czech and Germanic communities grew. Then Czech capital began to develop beyond the confines of the empire, and it began to export to the less developed countries, mainly to Eastern and Southeastern Europe.
In addition to the more frequent conflicts with the Germanic peoples, the economic advantage of the Czechs was characterized by a greater sense of national pride and identity: buildings, monuments, festivals, public celebrations and cultural events gradually became the real expression of the Czech national identity.
So by the nineteen-nineties, the working class had become an important force in the Czech Republic, although they did not yet have the right to vote. The mass demonstrations of 1 May 1890 were the first demonstration of the enormous power of the workers' movement, and from that year onwards there were repeated large-scale strikes that forced the coal mines and other industrial sectors to reduce their working hours.
From 1893 onwards, the workers' movement led by the Social Democrats was primarily for universal suffrage. The government was forced to make at least partial electoral reforms in 1897, and workers could also participate in the elections. Even out of 425 seats, workers can only hold a maximum of 72 seats.
In the delegation of high society electors, only fifty-nine votes are required to elect a representative, but in the workers' electoral delegation it takes more than seventy-four thousand votes to elect a representative. This led to the opposition of all bourgeois parties to the demand for universal suffrage.
In 1893, the Social Democratic Party, representing the interests of the working class, was founded on Czech soil. In 1898 the Czech National Socialist Party was founded and began to speak on behalf of workers, artisans and shopkeepers against the national agenda of the Bohemian Germans and the political plans of the Young Czechs and the Social Democratic Party.
In 1899, the Peasants' Party was founded, which offered the Czech rural population a political alternative to the sectarian agenda of socialist or traditionalist Catholic parties. In 1914, František Udžzal, a member of the Peasants' Party in the Bohemian Parliament and the Reichstag, became the leader of the party, and he would later become an influential political figure in the Czechoslovak government after the First World War.
In short, the last decades of the 19th century also underwent a dramatic change in Czech political life: in modern times, political factions began to represent the interests of classes and sects, and there were no more liberal and nationalist movements as in previous decades.
The most important figure in Czech politics at the end of the 19th century was Thomas Garrig Masaryk, who was born in Moravia in 1850 and came from a working-class background, but became a professor of philosophy at the University of Prague in the eighties of the 19th century.
Thomas Garrig Masaryk
Masaryk, who held liberal and democratic political views, initially believed that the Austro-Hungarian Empire could be reformed and reorganized into a democratic federal state, with full rights to all peoples. He also supported women's rights, adopted his wife, Charlotte's surname, as his middle name, and advocated moral and political equality between the sexes.
Masaryk also had a strong and independent religious spirit, and he deviated from his Catholic roots and was a long-standing opponent of clerical influence on political affairs. From 1891 to 1893, Masaryk represented the Young Czechs in the Bohemian Parliament and the Imperial Parliament, after which he resigned during the mandatory martial law following the demonstrations in Prague in 1893.
Masaryk
Unlike other bourgeois politicians, Masaryk saw a deep conflict within capitalism and tried to prevent a social revolution by means of reform. It was mainly through his book The Social Problem that he influenced some of the leaders of the Social Democrats to accept his reformist ideas as an alternative to the social revolution in accordance with the Marxist doctrine. He also fought against Austrian policy against the suppression of the Slavic peoples and against the supremacy of the Church.
In September 1899, a Jewish homeless man named Leopold Hirsner was brought to court for the murder of a young Catholic woman, Anezika Hruzova. The murder convinced many people that Hirsner would be sentenced to death. As nationalist newspapers struggled to stir up anti-Semitic sentiment, Masaryk chose to publish a defense of Hirsner based on his own personal principles.
Masaryk
Emperor Franz Joseph eventually commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, but Masaryk's defense of Hilsner drew a backlash from many nationalists, even though he claimed that the same moral standards applied to nationalism applied to individual behavior.
Emperor Franz Joseph
After growing dissatisfaction with the Old Czechs and Young Czechs, Masaryk teamed up with Karel Kramář and others to form the Czech Realist Party, which merged with some members of the Radical Progressive Party in 1900 to form a party renamed the Czech Progressive Party in 1905, although its members are still widely regarded as realists. From 1907 to 1914 Masaryk returned to the Reichstag as a realist parliamentarian.
Karel Kramage
In the 20th century, the Social Democrats became the leaders of Czech politics, but they underestimated the importance of the national question in the struggle against nationalism, and the Czech bourgeoisie was able to exploit this weakness: the Young Czechs intended to sow the seeds of division in the unity of the workers' movement from a nationalist standpoint, thanks to the creation of the National Socialist Party in 1897.
This organisation has abused the national sentiments of the workers in order to agitate them against other nationalities, and they have drawn some of the workers to their side by resorting to demagogic propaganda and claiming that the internationalism of the Social-Democratic workers has made them traitors to the nation.
Masaryk
Yuko feared the infiltration of social democratic forces into the countryside, and some of the large landowners formed separate peasant parties, with the result that the Young Czechs lost this part of the people. Several church parties emerged at this time, and the Progressive Party, founded by Masaryk in 1900, gained great fame among intellectuals.
Development of Slovakia
Compared with the rapid development of the Czech Republic, the economic, political and cultural development of Slovakia is somewhat "backward". On June 6, 1861, Slovak nationalists gathered in St. Martin-sur-Tulets to describe their demands in the Memorandum národa slovenského, with the goal of presenting these proposals to the Hungarian authorities in Budapest.
Slovak National Memorandum
They argued that although the concept of historic state rights could not be applied to unfounded peoples, the Slovaks still had political autonomy based on their natural rights as a distinct people. The Slovak leader demanded the federalization of Hungary through the creation of an autonomous Slovak region in northern Hungary. But the parliament ignored it.
In reaction to the actions of the Hungarian parliament, Slovak nationalists, led by William Paulini-Toth and others, mobilized to defend the 1861 Memorandum. Paulini Toth is the vice-president of Slovak Origins and co-founder and leader of the New Slovak National Party.
In April 1875, Hungarian Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza ordered the closure of the "Slovak Source" and the confiscation of its property. By 1877, the government closed the remaining state secondary schools open to Slovaks and reduced the number of religious schools that allowed children to teach the Slovak language.
Kalman Tissau
In 1883 Magyars became the prescribed language of education, and in 1907 the authorities imposed an oath of allegiance on teachers and threatened that if teachers could not teach their students at a satisfactory level in Magyar, they would be dismissed.
During the eighties of the 19th century, a new generation of Slovak leaders included the poet Pavol Orsage-Hwizdoslav, the new leader of the Slovak National Party, Pavol Mudlen, and the writer Svetozal Hulban Vajansky, the son of Hulban.
Pavol Orsage-Hwizdoslav
As Magyalization continued on Slovak soil, the Slovak National Party maintained its policy of abstaining from parliament. For Slovak nationalists, however, restrictions on educational institutions and ethnic organizations, as well as the failure of Hungarians to fulfill their promises to expand suffrage, hindered political activity and the awakening of national culture.
After 1890, some interest in "Czechoslovak" cooperation arose among Czech intellectuals, especially in the works of Masaryk. Influenced by Masaryk, Vavro Šrobár and Pavel Brajo founded the monthly Hlas (1898-1904), which advocated cooperation between Czechs and Slovaks.
Vavro Shrobar
Together with the newspaperman Milan Hodža, Shrobar and Braho represent the emerging younger generation of leaders at the dawn of the new century. Khoja's newspaper, Slovenskj tjzdennik, was first published in 1903, reflecting his democratic ideals and belief that education would help farmers create a better life on their own.
In the February 1905 elections, Hoja was also one of only two Slovaks elected to parliament, and Khoja belonged to the Slovak National Party, which had rejoined the electoral process in 1901 and was reorganized into a coalition of Slovak nationalists.
Milan Khoja
In June 1905, after the publication of a workers' newspaper with the support of the Czech Social Democratic Party, the nationalist workers formed the Slovak Social Democratic Party. The elections of May 1906 brought seven Slovaks into parliament, including Khoja and Braho.
After Andrej Hlinka was suspected of his political activities by his bishop in June, he was charged with incitement against Magyar and sentenced in December to two years in prison and a fine. On October 27, 1907, villagers in Chernova, where Helinka was born, asked for Helinka's release so that he could attend an infestation at a local church.
Herlinka
The authorities rejected the request, and when the villagers rebelled against the arrival of the Bishop Spis's representatives, the Hungarian gendarmes opened fire on the crowd, resulting in the death of 15 people, known as the "Chernova Massacre"! As soon as he was released from prison, Hlinka continued his political activities and was elected president of the Slovak People's Party in July 1913.
For the Czechs and Slovaks, after the reconciliation of 1867, their national culture and identity continued to develop. By 1914, however, this dualist system had already been irretrievably corroded from within, and would not have been spared from the world war that had devastated Europe in 1914-1918.
Although the Czechs and Slovaks had their own historical paths, the collapse of Austria-Hungary would bring them into a common state, and the proponents of the "Czechoslovak" settlement had lobbied successfully during the war years to make this proposal a reality in the autumn of 1918......
Towards the Great War
At the turn of the century, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were still struggling for universal suffrage, and this struggle entered its final stage in 1905, when the Russian Revolution of the same year had a strong influence on the struggle of the Czech people and greatly stimulated the Czech workers' movement.
In 1907, after massive demonstrations and strikes, the Austrian government finally issued an order for universal suffrage in Austria-Hungary under the pressure of a general strike. The first parliamentary elections, based on universal suffrage, significantly changed the political power of the Czech and Slovak political parties.
The Social Democrats won a majority of votes in the Czech Republic, while the Young Czechs lost its leadership and lagged behind the Peasants' Party, while several conservative parties were completely defeated. In Slovakia, Glinka's ecclesiastical parties are ahead, while the number of Social Democrats is smaller.
Fearing each other's mass movement of the workers, the Czech and German bourgeoisie were united. While the broad masses of the people were demanding local political independence in the Czech Republic, the Czech bourgeoisie was keen to close itself to Austria-Hungary, which offered a lucrative and vast market.
Thus the Czech bourgeois parties voted in favour of the proposal for the use of foreign troops and the issuance of military bonds in the Reichstag, since it was advantageous for them to expand the existing market through war. Before the war, Masaryk had a foreign policy that was somewhat different from that of the Viennese government, but even he was in favour of a solution to the Czech question within the framework of a federal Austria. The leaders of the Social Democrats were also willing to maintain the Austrian Empire.
Masaryk
Thus, Austria-Hungary moved on to World War I of 1914-1918, and it was at the end of this war that the Czechs and the Slovaks finally united to form their own state, the Czechoslovak Republic......