Bohumil Smeral and the Czech Question 1904-14

Abstract

with special bitterness by his former colleagues. One common charge against him was that during the first world war he had been austrophile, an adherent of the Monarchy and an opponent of Czechoslovak independence. Accusations of this kind were used in the first years of independence to discredit political opponents. As a matter of fact almost the whole Czech political class had undergone a relatively late conversion to the idea of an independent Czechoslovakia, in the years 1917 to 1918; and the difference between most politicians was a question of months. Smeral was far more vulnerable to attack because he had resisted longer and more consistently the idea of political independence.1 His conduct during the war forms a complicated chapter of its own. His attitude to the Monarchy and the Czech question had been formed well before 1914; his first formulation of the Czech problem was published ten years before the outbreak of war. The position he adopted during the war can best be understood against the background of his career in the social democratic party in the pre-war period. Smeral was born in 1880 in the small Moravian town of Trebic; his father was a schoolmaster. In 1898 he went to Prague to study law and soon became converted to socialism. Prague was the headquarters of the Czech social democratic party. From 1901 onwards he worked on