The concept of ‘nation’ in Bohemia and Moravia at the turn of the 19th century

Abstract

In 1791, the Bohemian estates assembled at the Great Diet drew up a memorandum for the Habsburg Emperor and King of Bohemia, Leopold II, summarising their wishes with respect to the future constitution of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Their main request was for the conclusion of an indissoluble treaty between the sovereign and the ‘nation’ to be altered only by agreement between both parties. Essentially, they sought to re-establish the constitution as it had existed before the great reforms of Maria Theresa and before the drastic constitutional change of 1627, imposed upon the Bohemian estates by the Emperor Ferdinand II as a punishment for their 1618 revolt. The Emperor should thus contract with the Bohemian nation itself, i.e. the Bohemian estates assembled at the Diet, who alone were in possession of political rights in the country. However the same document also characterised the estates as the ‘voice of the people’ or the ‘voice of the whole country’-a legal concept which gradually came to be accepted all over Europe following the French Revolution. In fact, the nation in this case comprised only the four estates of the Kingdom of Bohemia. At the meeting of another diet, the Moravian estates submitted their own particular demands to the King’ A very similar, but earlier, concept of nation is to be found in an anonymous memorandum in the Niederiisterreichisches Landesarchiv (Regional Archive of Lower Austria), believed to date from 1720. It contains proposals for future administrative centralisation of all Habsburg provinces and notes, for example, that in legal appeal cases of the Bohemian provinces, the right to passjudgement had for a long time been entrusted solely to members of the Imperial Council (Reichshofrat) or the councillors of the Government of Lower Austria in Vienna, i.e. to foreign judges. This changed when Charles VI, in the course of expanding the Bohemian Court Chancellery (B6hmische Hofkanzlei), decreed that in the future ‘judgement shall no longer be passed upon the Bohemian nation by foreign judges’. Reference was thus made to the senate of justice, founded at the Bohemian Court Chancellery the year before, and which from then on became the highest court of appeal for all members of the nobility in the Kingdom of Bohemia.2 Once again, however, the concept of nation does not include the whole population but only members of the nobility, disregarding the language group to which they belonged. Obviously this concept of ‘nation’ has nothing in common with the concept predominant in the 19th and 20th centuries, which designates the whole population, and which is characterised by language.