Prussia and Russia—Joseph, Frederick and Catherine II.—paid their tribute to the age, and became “enlightened” despots. It was this European movement which worked for the revival of the Bohemian nation; for the principles of humanitarian philosophy and of the French Revolution, the principles of “Liberté—Egalité—Fraternité” were the natural outcome and continuation of the Bohemian Reformation and Chelčicky’s religion of Fraternity. The suppression of the Jesuits sanctioned by the Pope himself, clearly showed the character of the general upheaval of thinking Europe.
Joseph II.’s Toleration Edict (1781) did not extend to the Hussites and the Brethren, who, therefore, had to join either the Lutheran or Calvinist Churches; but even this restricted freedom strengthened Hussite memories and promoted the national revival. Everywhere the masses were acquiring political rights, the courts and aristocracies were no longer able to keep the peoples in political and spiritual serfdom; democracy was born, and with it nationality became a political factor. It was the great humanitarian Herder who proclaimed the nations, in opposition to the artificial State, as the natural organs of humanity.
The French Revolution put an end to “enlightened” despotism, and in every country an unenlightened reaction set in. In Austria Francis I. was led by Metternich, whose system is, for Western Europe, the very embodiment of reaction—the continuation of the Habsburg and Jesuit Counter-Reformation with all its spiritual horrors. “Spirit murderer” it has been called by the greatest German poet of Austria.
The Emperor Francis, absolutist and legitimist to the core, was convinced that the time was ripe for transforming Austria, Bohemia and Hungary into a united and centralised State. In 1804 the Austrian Empire was proclaimed; in 1806 the new Austrian Emperor resigned the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet this resignation was only formal, and when, at the Vienna Congress, the German Confederation was created, the Emperor of Austria was proclaimed its head. Indeed, the Pope and England urged him to resume the abandoned dignity.
5. The Metternich régime was not able to suppress that literary revival of the Bohemian nation which was the forerunner of the political revival of 1848. Dobrovsky, the founder of Slavistic studies—the science and philosophy of the Slavs—threw a bridge from the Golden Age of the Re-
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