The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 1/F. L. Rieger

F. L. Rieger.

In these days, when the question of Bohemian independence is to the fore, the minds of all true sons of Bohemia often revert to the former fights made for the restoration of ancient Bohemian glory. The most recent of them was the great struggle carried on fifty years ago for the recognition of the historical rights of the Bohemian lands under the leadership of František Ladislav Rieger.

Rieger’s long life spans the days of Czech “resurrection” with the most recent times. When he was born in 1818, Bohemia had the appearance of a thoroughly Germanized country. The government was German, the privileged classes were German, the capital and most of the country towns were, superficially at least, German. When Rieger was a young man, it was rare indeed to hear a well-dressed man speak in Czech on the streets of Prague. What a contrast with the closing years of Rieger’s life! In 1903, the year of his death, Prague was a city of half a million, Czech to the core, center of a brilliant Slav culture, with a great university, a splendid literature and a strong political life.

Rieger was born in northeastern Bohemia in the small town of Semily. His father was a miller, and so had been his ancestors before him since the seventeenth century. In spite of his German name Rieger came of good Czech stock, of that peasant class which saved the whole race and reconquered the cities of Bohemia. It was the custom in those days, and for many years later, to send young children to board with acquaintances in German districts so as to learn German early. Little František was only eight years old, when he was sent by his parents to Schumburg for this purpose, and at the age of ten was admitted into the Jičín gymnasium, in which the instruction was German, as was the case with all the higher schools in Bohemia at that period. Later he went to the academic gymnasium of Prague, the rector of which was Joseph Jungmann, the man who more than any other single man brought about the revival of Bohemian literature. At the early age of seventeen Rieger composed patriotic poems for the “Květy”, and coming into contact with the enthusiastic men who were full of devotion to the despised Czech race and language he determined to put all his strength into the service of his people and to do some notable deed to bring the Czech nation into something more like equality with the great nations of the west.

It was the father’s intention to give his son a sound liberal education and then have him take up the family trade of miller. But young Rieger persuaded his parents to allow him to take up the study of law. That profession was indicated for him by his extraordinary oratorical ability. He had a splendid, resonant baritone voice, a complete command of the choice, pure, undefiled Czech language, and a poetic temper, which, based upon a solid foundation of culture and wide reading made his speeches brilliant, fiery and convincing. He was a true tribune of the people, but he never became a demagogue. It is noteworthy also that he possessed the command of more than half a dozen languages. He was as mighty an orator in German as in Bohemian, and he spoke fluently French, Italian, Polish and Russian, in addition to a fair knowledge of English and Serbian.

Before the year 1848 the talents of Rieger found little expression. There was no political life in Austria under Metternich. In 1847 Rieger received the degree of doctor of law and took a lengthy trip into the south Slav lands and Italy. He was in Rome, when the French revolution of February 1848 sent him post-haste back into his own country. When he got to Vienna, he found there a delegation of the St. Václav committee of Prague, the first political organ of the Bohemian people in more than two centuries. They came to Vienna to negotiate with the new cabinet for the recognition of the historical rights of the Bohemian crown and the granting of constitutional government. Right here began the great task to which Rieger dedicated all the remaining years of his life, the task of obtaining such concessions from the emperor as would make of Bohemia a national state under the constitutional rule of the Hapsburgs. Rieger failed, but not because he was not a leader big enough; he failed, because the word of the Hapsburgs could not be trusted, and because the problem could be solved only by a general European reconstruction in which the Austrian empire would disappear.

 

Fr. Lad. Rieger.

Fr. Lad. Rieger.

 

In those great days of 1848, when all things seemed possible, and when the hitherto little-noticed literary revival of Bohemia burst out suddenly into a full national and political life, Rieger joined Palacký, the historian of Bohemia, in opposing the Frankfurt parliament. The German Bund, the loose federation of the princes, had gone to pieces, and a parliamentary government was to be created for all the German territories, including the possessions of Prussia and Austria. In the German lands of the Hapsburgs elections were actually carried out for representatives to the Frankfurt parliament, but when the emissaries from Frankfurt came to Bohemia, as one of the German lands, they received the answer that Bohemia would have nothing to do with the affairs of Germany. In the meantime great concessions were secured from Emperor Ferdinand. There was to be a separate Bohemian executive and a Bohemian parliament. But riots broke out in Prague, and Prince Windischgraetz, the military commander, took advantage of them to bombard the city and hold up the execution of the imperial concessions. The scene of the political fight moved from Prague to Vienna to the new Austrian parliament, and later to Kroměříž in Moravia, where the parliament had to flee before the violence of the Vienna mobs. Rieger was elected by seven districts to the imperial parliament. There his remarkable gift of oratory and debate made him at once a prominent figure. The most famous of his speeches was the one pronounced on January 8, 1849, in justification of Section One of the proposed fundamental laws: “All power proceeds from the people.” But while the deputies were debating, the armies of the new emperor Francis Joseph gained first a great victory in Italy, then with the help of Czar Nicholas I. crushed the Hungarian rebellion, and the first Austrian parliament was sent home. Again for more than ten years the old absolutist regime returned, and Rieger became a political suspect who was not allowed to lecture at the university or publish a newspaper.

During these days of political reaction Rieger married. His wife Marie was the daughter of that still greater figure in modern Bohemia, František Palacký, who had taught the people to love their history, and to be proud of the name Czech. Palacký is the only man to whom the Bohemians give the title of “father of his nation”, while his son-in-law Rieger bears the proud title, also alone of all the Czech statesmen, of “leader of his nation.” During the days of 1848 Rieger was only one of the leaders, Palacký and Havlíček taking precedence of him. But in the new constitutional era which opened with the defeat of Austria in 1859 he was for thirty years the one great leader of his people in their political fight for selfdetermination.

In October 1860 Francis Joseph published a so-called “diploma” by which he bound himself irrevocably to share the government with the representatives of the people. The principal legislative power was to be vested in the diets of the several kingdoms and lands subject to his sceptre, while certain specified affairs common to the empire were to be handled in an imperial council (Reichsrat) to which the diets sent their representatives. This was a constitutional program which coincided to a large extent with the desires of the Czech people. But one of the many somersaults for which the politics of Francis Joseph came to be famous, occurred only a few months afterward. In the following February the emperor issued a patent which was declared to be supplementary to the constitutional principles of the diploma, but which in reality changed the whole foundation of the Austrian constitutional structure. There was to be a twofold imperial parliament, wider and narrower, one to legislate in affairs common to all of the monarchy, including Hungary, the other to legislate for the non-Hungarin lands of the emperor. At the same time the competence of the diets was summarily abbreviated and the Vienna parliament was made the real legislative body in all matters of importance. In other words, while the October diploma contemplated a federalistic Austria, the February patent decreed a centralized Austria with many indications of the coming dualism, the division of power between the Germans and the Magyars at the expense of the Slavs.

Rieger was elected to the Bohemian diet, and the diet sent him to the Vienna parliament. There he became the leader of the right, a party aiming at the federalization of Austria and the recognition of the separate place of the lands of the Bohemian crown within the Hapsburg monarchy. He had reached an agreement with the Bohemian nobiity, and as long as he remained the leader of the Czech people, he adhered to this alliance with the great landholders who according to he conservative election laws held the balance of power in the Bohemian diet and occasionally in the parliament.

The first Austrian parliament under the present constitution had a centralistic majority. What was more important, the emperor listened to the advice of Schmerling, a German liberal whose ideal was to make Austria a German state ruled by commercial and industrial magnates of the cities. The Bohemian deputies could accomplish nothing under those conditions, and by remaining in the parliament would have recognized its legality. In March 1863 Czech deputies left the Reichsrat not to return for 16 years. The attention of Rieger during the first year of the famous passive opposition was directed to educational work at home. The National Theatre of Prague around which has grown up so much of the literary and musical art of Bohemia is primarily the result of the work of Rieger. Even before the revolutionary days of 1848, when the Czechs were ignored in their own capital, Rieger was the moving spirit in organizing a society for the building of a Czech National Theatre. In the sixties, when the Czechs and their allies, the historical Bohemian nobility, controlled the diet, Rieger secured an appropriation of 300,000 gulden for the building of a theatre worthy of the nation. His plans were not fully carried out until in 1881, and the noble theatre now standing on the banks of the Vltava dates from 1883, after the first great theatre had been burned down. But a provisional building was erected by Rieger in November 1862, and since then drama and opera have been offered in Bohemian guise to the inhabitants of Prague without an interruption.

In 1865 a change occurred in Vienna. The centralizing ministry of Schmerling was dismissed, and the new premier, Count Richard Belcredi, was more favorable to the aspirations of the Czechs. Rieger organized a conference of Bohemian and Moravian leaders and submitted in their name a memorandum to Belcredi, stating the demands of the Bohemian people. In the diet also he supported in a powerful speech an address to the emperor, as a result of which Francis Joseph for the second time promised to come to Prague and in assuming the ancient royal crown confirm the liberties of the kingdom. Then the war came by which Austria was thrust out of Germany, and Prussia definitely took the leading place until then enjoyed by the Hapsburgs in the old German empire. One result of the complete defeat of Austria was the necessity of satisfying the demands of the Magyars who threatened to repeat their rebellion of 1849. Francis Joseph without consulting the representatives of any race, upon the advice of his German ministers conceded the demands of the Magyars and changed fundamentally the whole structure of his empire. In place of the Austrian monarchy arose now the Austro-Hungarian dual empire, in one part of which the Germans were to rule, while the other part was turned over to the Magyar aristocracy. Only after the deed was done, did the emperor consent to submit it to the ratification of the “narrower” parliament, now the only assembly in Vienna, and in order to gain majority there, he dissolved refractory diets, like the diet of Bohemia, and by using every kind of governmental and dynastic pressure brought the big landholders to his side and secured the election of enough Reichsrat representatives to have the Hungarian compromise ratified. In the Bohemian diet the Czech party found itself in a minority, and so in 1867 the Czech deputies led by Rieger turned their backs on the Prague diet, as they had done four years before in the Vienna parliament.

By way of protest against this arbitrary change of the status of the Bohemian lands Palacký and Rieger headed an important Bohemian delegation to Moscow, where in 1867 the first Russian exposition was held. Since that time the eyes of the Czechs were constantly turned toward Russia in the hope that through her great power the condition of the Austrian Slavs would be ameliorated. Two years later he submitted a memorandum to the representative of the French government, outlining such a reconstruction of the Hapsburg empire, as would make of Austria an ally of France. Had the just demands of the Bohemians been granted, Austrian foreign policy would not have come under the tutelage of Germany, and without Austria Germany would never have dared to defy the world.

In 1870 Francis Joseph experienced another change of mind. Count Potocki was called to the head of the government, and as a first sign of the changed regime the Bohemian diet was again dissolved. The new diet had a Czech majority, and Rieger prepared an address to the emperor in which the Czechs agreed to attend the delegations, representing the whole empire, but not the Reichsrat the legality of which they would not recognize. In the meantime the Franco-Prussian war broke out, and it was due to Rieger who like all the Bohemians sympathized deeply with the French that the diet of Bohemia, the only parliamentary body in all Europe, issued a dignified protest against the Prussian robbery of Alsace-Lorraine. Much of the sympathy which France today extends to the Bohemian cause is due to the memory of the Bohemian sympathy for France in her hour of defeat.

The days of 1870–71 witnessed the last Austrian crisis which gave promise of satisfying the demands of the Bohemians for freedom within Austria. Potocki resigned in 1871, but his successor, Count Hohenwart, was ready to make a compromise with the Bohemians similar to the one that had been concluded with the Magyars. The ministry and the Czechs reached an agreement on the main point of the Bohemian program, and on September 12, 1871, Francis Joseph issued a solemn rescript in which he said: “I willingly recognize the rights of this kingdom and will ratify this recognition by the coronation oath.” Rieger was made the general reporter of a committee of thirty to prepare the fundamental articles by which the relations of the rest of monarchy would be regulated, and it seemed that the Czechs had reached their goal. And then the influence of the new united Germany and of the Magyars caused a sudden reversal of policy. The emperor’s solemn promise was withdrawn, and before the end of 1871 it became a crime to circulate his rescript in Bohemia. A German nationalist ministry was appointed and a period of persecution came upon Bohemia. It was not the fault of Rieger, and his people knew it. When he returned to Prague after the failure of his proposals in Vienna, he was welcomed like a triumphant general, and his carriage was drawn by enthusiastic men from the station to his residence.

It was inevitable though that some reaction would arise in the people against the failure of Rieger’s alliance with the nobility to get results. It was at this time that the Young Czech party was formed, but for twenty years more they could make no headway against the popularity and prestige of the “leader of the nation”. The Bohemian politics got into an impasse. To go to the Reichsrat and fight there for the rights of the Czechs seemed to imply the abandonment of the historical state rights program; to stay at home and take no part in public affairs was a policy that brought benefit only to the Germans. So it happened that in 1879 Count Taaffe, a nobleman of Irish origin and a close personal friend of the emperor, persuaded Rieger and his colleagues to re-enter the parliament and become one of the parties of the right, supporting the Taaffe government. In return for this the Czechs obtained important concessions, such as the erection of a Bohemian university in Prague and the recognition of the Czech language as the “external” language of governmental offices in their dealings with the people of Bohemian districts. Upon entering the Reichsrat after an absence of sixteen years the Bohemian delegation made a reservation of their rights, and the emperor in the speech from the throne expressly acknowledged this reservation.

For more than ten years Dr. Rieger fought constantly in the parliament at the head of the Czech deputies from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia for laws which would put his people on an equality with the Germans in their own land. It was a modest program, considering that the Czechs had both valid historical rights, and a majority of the people, in fact more than two thirds. He did obtain valuable concessions and his policy contributed to the consolidation of the influence of the Czech people on governmental measures. But the results unfortunately were far short of the radical feeling of the people. And a sudden turn came about in 1890 which closed the long period of Rieger’s leadership. Rieger, and with him the Old Czech party, as it now became known, comprising a great majority of the Czech deputies, consented at the request of Taaffe to enter into conferences with the German deputies from Bohemia in order to reach a compromise in local Bohemian affairs. The principal concession on the German side was consent to a change in the election laws by which the Bohemians would definitely obtain majority in the Prague diet, without being dependent on the votes of the feudal landholders. In return for that Rieger agreed to measures which would have led to a division of Bohemia into a Czech and German sphere. These so-called “punktace” found no approval with the Czech people, and in the elections of 1891 the Old Czech party was swept away, Rieger himself failing of re-election. That was the end of the long political life of the great Czech tribune of the people.

Rieger was honored in many ways both by his people and by governments. When his seventieth birthday was celebrated in Prague in 1888, the large amount of 113,000 gulden was collected by popular subscription as a birthday present. Rieger refused to use the money either for himself or for his family, and turned it over for the support of Bohemian literature. He was the honorary citizen of almost every city of Bohemia and Moravia, and he was also the first president of that great Bohemian institution, the Central School Fund (Ústřední Matice Školská). He received several Austrian and Rusian decorations, and the last Austrian ministry, friendly to the Slavs, the cabinet of Badeni, made Rieger a baron. He died, full of years and honors, March 3, 1903, and the City of Prague gave him a royal funeral.

The motto of Rieger which has become the battle cry of all Bohemians was the brief “Don’t give up” (Nedejme se).

The memory of the Czech leader of the nation is kept alive in America by the Rieger Club of Chicago. It is the principal social organization of Catholic Bohemians in Chicago and it exerts a wide influence on the life of the big Bohemian settlement in the Metropolis of the West. Its membership includes some of the biggest business and professional men of the South West Side of Chicago. Its monthly organ, the “Rieger”, not only gives news of the happenings at the Club, but wields a great influence over all Bohemian people of Catholic faith in this country. The Rieger Club Octet, under the direction of Joseph Pribyl, enjoys great popularity in a community used to good singing.

As might be expected from an organization bear ing the name of Rieger, the Rieger Club has lent all its weight to the movement for Bohemian independence. Its members are largely men obrn or educated in America and to the enthusiasm of the Bohemian they add American energy and push. An example of their hustling was furnished by the National Fete held in Chicago on Labor Day; out of a total of some fourteen thousand dollars taken in the share of this one club was over three thousands. Both the “father” of the club, John Straka, and the first president of it, Frank G. Hajicek, give freely of their time and money in the cause of Bohemian freedom.

The spirit of Rieger still inspires men of his blood to battle for the liberation of the land of their fathers.

 

Officers of the Rieger Club.

From right to left: Rud Lanka, secretary; Jos. Martinek, vice-president; Jos. J. Janda, president; Jos. Kopecky, treasurer; Chas. Roubik, financial secretary.

From right to left: Rud Lanka, secretary; Jos. Martinek, vice-president; Jos. J. Janda, president; Jos. Kopecky, treasurer; Chas. Roubik, financial secretary.

 

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