La majorité silencieuse : attitudes des citoyens ordinaires au début de la Grande Guerre sur le territoire de l’actuelle Slovaquie

Abstract

During the last decade, research on WWI in Slovakia examined, among others, the issues of everyday life of the civilian population and the process of loyalty changes in this time period. Conclusions of this research disrupted the conventional idea of German and Hungarian war enthusiasm on one side, and resistance towards the war among Slovaks and Czechs on the other. The paper examines these new conclusions on the basis of unused sources of personal character (correspondence, memoirs) as well as official documents about the population’s attitudes. Social position and the level of existential threat during the war had a significantly larger impact on general population attitudes and on the process of changing loyalties than ethnicity. However, the evaluation of loyalty levels based on ethnicity was a core concept in tracking loyalty of soldiers and civilians in the Habsburg Monarchy. Social stratification and the phenomenon of “silent majority”, i.e. why the majority was passive and which factors disrupted this status, show to be more significant and productive for research of changing loyalties during war.