National Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements

Requests of the Slovak nation

REQUESTS OF THE SLOVAK NATION Title: Žiadosti slovenského národa (Requests of the Slovak Nation) Originally published: As a leaflet in May 1848 in Levoča (Ger. Leutschau, Hun. Lőcse) Language: Slovak Translated from Dušan Čaplovič et al., Dokumenty slovenskej národnej identity a štátnosti (Bratislava: Národné literárne centrum, 1998), pp. 307–310. Context By the mid-1840s, three complex problems crystallized in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Monarchy, namely, the need to dismantle the Metternichian bureaucratic centralism, the inevitable reform of the feudal socioeconomic structures and, finally, the necessity to deal with the nationality question. Hungarian reformers called for modernization and Hungary’s administrative and economic emancipation from Vienna, envisioning a modern Hungary as a unified nation with a standardized language and a unified educational system. The steps towards creating a Hungarian nation-state provoked counter-reactions among many of the other ethnic groups living in Hungary, including the Slovaks. The second half of the 1840s is marked by an increased politicization of the Slovak national movement, previously oriented mainly towards cultural issues. In 1844, a nation-wide cultural society, Tatrín, was founded, followed by the ‘Union of Slovak Youth’ a year later. In subsequent years, many other Slovak organizations, including business companies, popular education societies and cultural associations were established. In August 1845, Ľudovít Štúr founded the first Slovak political newspaper, Slovenskje národnje novini (Slovak national newspaper), and made it a mouthpiece of the Slovak national movement. In this newspaper, written in the new orthography, he and his adherents presented their views on the language and education issues, but 446 NATIONAL HEROISM gradually they also shaped a new Slovak political program. It was based on the precept that the Slovaks were a nation with a right to their own language, culture, schools, and eventually political autonomy within Hungary. The latter point was a natural outcome of the development of the Slovak movement. However, it would have led to an administrative and territorial decentralization of Hungary based on ethno-cultural principles, which was unacceptable to the Magyar political elite, that wavered between the radical vision of modernist centralization and the outlook of traditional gentry liberalism with its focus on the county administration as the main locus of politics. In 1848, Slovak and Hungarian revolutionary claims came to clash in a violent way. In spring, the Slovak leaders started to spread their ideas among the Slovak peasantry and met with a certain popular response, especially in the western and central regions of the area populated by Slovaks. In May 1848, a public meeting gathered in Liptovský Mikuláš (Hun. Liptószentmiklós), where a Slovak national program, put together by the leading personalities of the movement (such as Štúr, Jozef Miloslav Hurban, Michal Miloslav Hodža, Ján Francisci, and Štefan Daxner) and known as the ‘Requests of the Slovak Nation,’ was proclaimed and accepted. In the ‘Requests,’ the Slovak leaders declared their patriotic allegiance to Hungary, but required that it should imply a guarantee of freedom and equality for every nation in Hungary. The Hungarian state ought to be changed to a union of free nations. As a distinct and self-contained national community living in the “Hungarian homeland,” the Slovaks demanded a proportional representation in the Hungarian Assembly, the creation of a Slovak Diet to administer their own region, the introduction of Slovak as the official language on Slovak territory, and the use of Slovak in educational institutions from elementary schools to universities. They also called for universal suffrage and democratic rights, including freedom of the press and of public assembly. Further, the peasants should be released from serfdom and their lands returned to them. The ‘Requests,’ combining as they do a national, a political and a social vision, can be considered the first consistent political program in modern Slovak history. However, the hope of its authors of bringing about at once a fully developed Slovak nation and of passing over the necessary social, economic and political stages in the forming of a modern nation by revolutionary means proved to be unrealistic. The provisional Hungarian revolutionary government formed in April 1848 hoped that its liberal constitutional and administrative reforms, including the abolition of serfdom and the extension of civil rights, would gain favor with the population irrespective of ethnic REQUESTS OF THE SLOVAK NATION 447 provenience. Hence they considered the activists, with their demand for...