Language Conflict in Bohemia, 1880s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 244-245:

In the elections in June 1879, the German liberals (themselves divided over Bosnia) lost seats, and Taaffe cobbled together a government without them, consisting of conservatives, clericals and Slavs—including the Czechs! The combination wobbled but proved the longest-lasting government in Cisleithania: Taaffe said he maintained power by keeping the nationalities in a balanced state of mild dissatisfaction. The Taaffe years were a nightmare for German liberals, who had “fought” for representative government for decades, only to be excluded by their enemies, some of whom had opposed the constitution as such.

Though hardly conservative and even less clerical, the Czechs now abandoned their boycott of government in return for promised concessions on the national question. Their representatives old and young operated as a disciplined club in Vienna’s parliament and scored victories, above all the 1880 “Stremayr ordinance,” which introduced Czech as an external language of administration in Bohemia (that is, as a language that had to be used with those who spoke Czech). A further achievement was the division of Prague’s Karl-Ferdinand University into Czech and German halves in 1882, meaning that Czechs could be educated from the humblest to most advanced stages in their own language. They also got more high schools. But to achieve all this, the Czechs accepted conservative “reforms” that strengthened the church’s role in education and marriage, moves at odds with their own liberal convictions, and not surprisingly, German liberals accused them of hypocrisy.

After that, concessions had to be dragged out of Taaffe, about whom one Czech leader said he threw the Czechs “little crumbs, as if to poultry.” Any progress for the Czech cause took place outside parliament through energies generated from below. As we have seen, when the Czech National Theater was damaged by fire just after opening in 1881, almost half the inhabitants of Prague contributed so that it could reopen two years later. In 1890 the Czechs founded and paid for their own Academy of Sciences and Arts, because the government had refused to support it.

But Minister President Taaffe himself operated under pressure. German liberals were out of government, and Austria’s ally in Berlin scrutinized what he did, protesting if anything seemed “pro-Slavic.” Taaffe forbade a gymnastics festival called by the nationalist Sokol movement in Prague in 1887 because guests were expected from other Slavic lands. This move in turn alienated the restive Young Czechs, the radical and growing wing of the Czech National Party, who formed a bloc within the Czech Club after 1888, calling for universal suffrage, local self-government, and getting the church out of schools. In accord with the ideology of Bohemian State’s Rights, they insisted that the entire Bohemian kingdom was Czech property. In 1882 Taaffe had expanded the franchise by lowering the tax requirements for voting, and the number of Czech voters shot up in the parliamentary elections of 1885, while German liberals lost almost twenty seats.

But if Taaffe left Czech politicians dissatisfied, he produced trauma among Germans. The division of the university in Prague, considered by Germans to be Germany’s oldest, only aggravated fears that they were on a downward slope toward cultural obscurity. From then on, German professors treated Prague’s university as a temporary way station, hoping for a call to a university outside Bohemia. But much worse, Germans in Austria had to stand back and watch a modern state taking shape in Cisleithania [the Austrian part of Austria-Hungary] without their input, a state that seemed increasingly Slavic.