Nowhere were the first, confused stirrings of nationalism more numerous than in the Habsburg Monarchy. At the same time the order and intensity of these early nationalisms depended on the different levels of economic and social development of individual peoples. Where some sort of educated elite existed, nationalism could be voiced; where a people remained largely peasant, nationalism is hard to discern. Everywhere the number of people capable of articulating something like nationalist sentiments was, to begin with, tiny.
This is especially true of the front runners, the 'gentry nationalists' among Hungarian and Polish nobles. In Hungary the nobility was effectively the only class to exercise political rights and dominated both the county assemblies and the Diet. When Hungarians referred to the 'Hungarian nation' they meant the nobles; lesser social classes scarcely existed in the constitutional sense. It was thus among the nobility, the only educated class, that the first expressions of nationalism were made. A pioneer in this respect was Gyorgy Bessenyei, one of the first generation of young Hungarian nobles to profit from service in Maria Theresa's Royal Hungarian Bodyguard, stationed in Vienna and exposed to the full force of the Enlightenment. Bessenyei, who published the first anthology of Hungarian poetry in 1777, was also one of the first to advocate the use of Hungarian as a literary language and to promote means of improving it, such as teaching it at the revived University of Buda,
Compiling a dictionary and founding a learned society for the furtherance of good writing.
A much greater stimulus to nationalism was provided by Joseph II's language decree of 1784, ordaining German as the language of administration throughout Hungary, and extended to Galicia in 1785. Some of the most well-known literary works of the late eighteenth century were written as furious diatribes against all foreign influence, or as a celebration of the Magyars' ancient origins. Such works were only a fraction of the pamphlet literature provoked among educated Hungarians generally by Joseph's reign, culminating in the ferment surrounding the Diet of 1790—1. By the late 1780s a second generation of writers was appearing. Ferenc Kazinczy founded the critical periodical Magyar Muzeum (Hungarian Museum) in 1787; this succumbed to government censorship in 1792, but while it lasted it was 'the centre of Hungarian literary activity'.22 Kazinczy devoted himself increasingly to the job of setting standards of expression in Hungarian and raising it to the status of a genuinely national language.
Among the Polish szlachta of Galicia, Old and New, the concept of the nation was a similarly exclusive one. Given the backwardness of the south Polish lands, even nobles who could boast an education were few; the masses of Polish and Ruthene peasants, despite the School Ordinance of 1774, remained untouched by education and hence oblivious to national consciousness. For the szlachta, nevertheless, the consciousness of membership in the 'republic of nobles' was a powerful cause of resentment against Habsburg rule, as was the flooding of Galicia with Czech-speaking officials after 1772 and the language decree of 1784. Even after 1795, when Poland disappeared from the map, the idea of Poland persisted among Polish nobles everywhere, whether clinging to their estates under foreign rule or in the widely scattered Polish diaspora.
Among the other nationalities of the Monarchy nationalism was far more obviously tied to socio-economic development and the emergence of an educated class, because there was no gentry elite to speak for all. In the case of the Czechs it is striking how much the 'national awakening' owed to Germans initially, many of them scholars intent on following up Herder's injunction to trace the historical origins of all peoples and languages, including the Slavs. The Czechs had a long history and a literary language, but following the reconquest of Bohemia in the early seventeenth century they had been relegated to subordinate status, and German had taken over as the dominant culture. It was thus German scholars who first troubled to learn the Czech language and studied the history of their Slav neighbours although, as recent research has shown, by the late eighteenth century a select number of Bohemian Czech aristocrats were also playing a role in forging a sense of national identity.23 The study of Czech had been given a big boost by Joseph II, who in 1784 permitted the formation of a Learned Society, later the Czech Society of Sciences. Most influential was the philologist Josef Dobrovsky, professor of philology in Prague from 1791, author of a History of the Czech
Language and Literature (1792) and teacher of an entire generation of national awakeners.
The Slovaks, though closely related to the Czechs, were slower to manifest signs of nationalism because of the almost entirely peasant nature of their society within the Kingdom of Hungary. Accordingly the foundation by Joseph II of a general seminary at Pressburg, in 1784, made a crucial contribution towards producing a first generation of literate Slovaks. Anton Bernolak, a graduate of the Pressburg seminary, went on to publish his Grammatica Slavica in 1790 and was the first to identify Slovak as a distinct West Slavonic language. For some time after the turn of the century, however, many of the few educated Slovaks continued to write in Czech, a medium with a greater audience.
The case of the Transylvanian Romanians is an example of a national awakening led by clerics, since the Uniate or Greek Catholic priesthood was virtually the only educated class among the Monarchy's Romanians. The overwhelmingly peasant Romanian population remained firmly frozen out of the political picture in Transylvania. First to protest against this situation was the Uniate Bishop, Ion Inochentie Klein, who argued that the Romanians, having embraced the Union, ought to be accorded the same status as the Hungarians, Szeklers and Saxons. This religion-based identification of the Romanians as a people apart was perhaps the beginning of national feeling.
More obviously nationalist was the later activity of the 'Transylvanian School' among the Uniate clergy. This was a group of Vienna-educated, enlightened figures, led by Ion Inochentie's nephew, Samuil Klein, who in the 1770s started investigating the early history of the Romanians, tracing their origins to the ancient Roman colony of Dacia. In 1780, with Gheorghe Sincai, Klein produced the first grammar of the Romanian language and, before his death, a dictionary. In March 1791 Klein, Sincai and two other leading Uniate intellectuals, Petru Maior and Ion Budai-Deleanu, helped frame a petition to Leopold II, the Supplex libellus Valachorum. This unprecedented document made an historic claim for the Romanians to be granted equality with other nations in Transylvania, on the basis of their long-standing presence in the region; it also claimed a natural right to be represented in the province's institutions on the basis of numbers. Even more significant, the Supplex defined the nation as all persons of the same origin and speaking the same language. The petition failed in its object, but disappointment did nothing to dampen a growing sense of identity among educated Romanians and a growing tension between them and the Hungarians.
The South Slavs varied widely in their receptivity to national consciousness. Among the Croatian nobility a class-based national sentiment already existed, similar to that in Hungary itself. There was no denying the novel nature of the dispute which broke out between the Hungarian Diet and Croatian Sabor in 1790—1 over the language of state. During Joseph II's reign both Croats and Hungarians made common cause in defence of Latin, as opposed to German, but after Joseph's death Hungarian motions to substitute Magyar provoked bitter opposition from Croatian deputies. The built-in majority of the Hungarians, however, coupled with a shared conservative interest in cooperating against 'Jacobinism', induced the Croats to accept Hungarian as an optional language in schools in 1791. As yet there was still no agreement as to what form the Croatian language should take, nor as to how much, if anything, Croats had in common with other South Slavs.
The Slovenes, a largely peasant people concentrated in the southern Austrian hereditary lands, had even fewer spokesmen. The first history of the Slovenes, or rather of Carniola and other provinces populated by them, was written in German by Anton Linhart in 1791. Slovene national consciousness, however, also suffered from confusion as to what exactly 'Slovene' meant, not to mention the absence of a literary language.
Finally, the Serbs of the Monarchy, scattered as they were across the southern borderlands of Hungary and Croatia, with a few also in Dalmatia and a long-established community on the Danube north of Buda, were a mixed lot. The majority, like the Croats, were peasants or, in the so-called Military Border extending along the frontier with the Ottoman Empire, border guards. Yet the number of urban Serbs was higher in the Monarchy than in the neighbouring Ottoman Empire. Conscious of their separate if rather ill-defined status as refugees from the Ottoman world, the Serbs' self-consciousness was also preserved by the Orthodox Church, which played a cultural role as educator and publisher. As a consequence there was a small but interesting Serb elite. The most striking representative of this class was Dositej Obradovic, a lapsed monk who served as a sort of one-man Enlightenment. Educated in Germany, Obradovicc travelled extensively and acquired a wide range of languages. From the early 1780s he was an industrious translator of European literature into Serbian and a prolific writer on his own account. The significance of Obradovicc's activity was his choice of the Serbian vernacular as a medium, rather than the antique Church Slavonic favoured by the Orthodox hierarchy. In this way Obradovic struck a powerful blow for a popular language, an essential prerequisite for Serb nationalism in the Monarchy.
Two observations on these 'national awakenings' seem apposite, in view of the tendency of nationalists to treat them as both inevitable and autonomous phenomena. One is the fact that all this ferment of philological, historical and literary endeavour was dependent on the multilingual and international cross-fertilisation of ideas produced by the Enlightenment. 'Nationalism', in Robin Okey's words, 'was an international movement arising from a common grounding in classical and European culture'.24 Czechs studied and wrote about their language and history in German; Serbs and Romanians and Slovaks published some of their first works via the presses of the University of Buda; the first translation in Hungary of the French revolutionary anthem, the 'Marseillaise', was not into Magyar but Latin. Secondly, given that literacy was the essential prerequisite for nationalism, it is clear that the Theresian school legislation of the 1770s was decisive in unwittingly promoting the new concept of the nation. An enlightened reform, introduced to facilitate the conversion of the Habsburg Monarchy into a state, made possible the dissemination of the ideology which was eventually to tear the Monarchy apart.
World History
