Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (63 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
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Early in January 1848, spring expectations stirred the wintry Prague air. Prominent nobility met in their salons in the Minor Town, and, across the river, young law and medical students, budding philosophers, and a few radical artisans huddled together in the usual pubs to drink beer and to develop plans for great changes, especially at Petr Faster’s inn on what was later called Wenceslas Square. Elsewhere, at the Golden Scale (now 3 Havelská Street), the innkeeper had reserved a small room under the roof for the Repeal Club, whose members sympathized with the Irish opposition to English rule and were fond of new if somewhat confused ideas. In an age of close police surveillance, precise information from restless Italy, Hungary, and France was not easy to come by: the telegraph served the authorities, the new railroad line from Prague to Vienna made a detour overnight, and the only foreign newspaper available to a few subscribers was the mildly liberal
Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung.
At 10 a.m., when coffeehouses were full of people waiting for the latest issue of this Augsburg newspaper (one per coffeehouse), the owner of the place made a dash to the post office in the Minor Town to pick up his copy and hastened back clutching the paper in his hands. Josef Václav Fri
, later a young radical, usually set up a chair on the billiard table in his favorite café, U Rytí
e (At the Knight), and by 11:30 a.m. read the paper from his elevation to the assembled guests, including informers. News about revolutionary changes in Italy and the demise of the monarchy on
February 24 in France reached Prague on February 29; it quickly spread among fashionable people gathered at a masked ball at the Theater of the Estates and from there all over town. There was suddenly much curiosity and hope; supporters of the
ancien régime
were fearful of how events would affect Vienna, and others felt it was high time to act in some way or other, rather than to talk. Strangely enough, even the opposition of whatever kind looked to Vienna, hoping that the Viennese authorities could be convinced to permit change in an orderly way, and it turned out that in the spring days of 1848 revolutionary Vienna was really far ahead of Prague.
The first initiative was taken by representatives of the Estates, long experienced in watching changes of policy in Vienna, yet by now incapable of pushing innovative demands energetically. A meeting was called by Count Albert Nostitz and Count Friedrich Deym to discuss the possibility of recommending to Vienna that a gathering of the Estates, extended by members of Prague’s patriciate, be called. The petition had to go through channels, of course, never reached the proper people in Vienna, and the Prague citizens did not know for a long time that the nobles had at least tried. It was the hour of the young radicals of the Repeal Club and other discussion groups. On March 8, posters unauthorized by the police appeared all over town admonishing the citizens to shake off their lethargy, to commit themselves to the cause “of a patriotism of intelligence and morality” (a formulation of genius), and to attend, on March 11 at 6 p.m., an open meeting at the St. Wenceslas Bath in the New Town to consider urgent questions of political reform. The organizers of the meeting were mostly young people, but there was also the popular innkeeper Petr Faster, a number of artisans, a tailor and a coppersmith, as well as the gifted writer Karel Sabina, later turned by the police into an informer.
The organizers had diligently worked on a petition of twenty paragraphs to be read at the meeting and then submitted to the emperor. After a long period of political silence, the petition touched on the most urgent and various demands of the moment (freedom of the press and of association, municipal self-rule, an assembly to represent citizens and peasants), with a brave quotation from the French socialist Louis Blanc about the “organization of labor and wages” (the first socialist demand to be heard in Prague). Very little was said about questions of nationality and language, except the rather modest wish that Czech be used in the schools. It was a text noble in spirit yet innocent of legal and administrative sophistication; fully aware of these shortcomings, the young people
asked Dr. František August Brauner, a noted liberal who had defended the Polish revolution, to edit it for another scheduled meeting. It was the first step in surrendering radical intentions to a middle-class intelligentsia concerned, above all, with the history of the Bohemian crown and issues of nationality, and it was not the last.
The experienced lawyer Dr. Brauner changed the unruly and rather pragmatic text of the petition into a formal document of historical, national, and liberal aspirations. His revisions demanded the administrative restoration of the Bohemian crown lands, including Moravia and Silesia, a common diet, and the complete equality of the Czech and German nations in all Bohemian schools and offices. Some problems were under-played; peasants were to be freed from serfdom by paying an indemnity to their landowners, but issues of wages and labor were not mentioned at all; a national guard was to be established to protect law, order, and property. While Brauner was busy working on the text, the authorities and the radicals tiptoed around each other, anxious to avoid violence, and on the rainy evening of March 11, about eight hundred people arrived at the appointed place—Czechs and Germans, many young people, and a few police informers. Members of the nobility were distinctly absent; even Brauner, whose text was to be presented, called in sick, and other Czech notables, including the historian Palacký and the journalist Karel Havlí
ek preferred not to attend; there was not a single woman among the men.
The meeting was presided over by the innkeeper Faster, of the Zlatá Husa (Golden Goose), but actually run by Alois Pravoslav Trojan, a young lawyer with good contacts in Prague industry. The first item on the agenda was a reading of Brauner’s version of the petition, in Czech and then in German: the radicals, to save some of the original demands, suggested changes from the floor, especially about labor and wages. No final vote was taken, but a committee of twenty was appointed to handle the final version of the petition to be voted upon later. This St. Wenceslas Committee, as it was called, was inclusive rather than all radical. There were shopkeepers and artisans, a liberal Jewish banker, and, for the Repeal Club, the Czech Vilém Gau
and the German student Ludwig Ruppert. A prominent lawyer, Dr. Adolf Maria Pinkas, was asked to work on version no. 3. The chair did not want to continue discussions, and by nine o’clock the orderly meeting was over; since it was raining, Prague’s inns and cafés were livelier than ever that evening; police informers handed their reports to the burgomaster, the chief of police, and the governor, Count Rudolf Stadion.
The following days were full of meetings, rumors, and unrest. The
St. Wenceslas Committee went into session the very next day, Sunday, March 12, elected Count Deym as president, and entrusted the writing of the ultimate version of the petition to a subcommittee of three, headed by Dr. Pinkas. Workers demonstrated in front of bakeries against the high price of bread, students prepared to hold their own grand meeting, and the burgomaster, eager to sabotage the committee, gathered forty rich and conservative members of the German Casino to present their own counterpetition. They recognized, however, almost immediately, that they would be totally isolated, and since they could not fight the St. Wenceslas Committee, they asked for permission to join it (all too readily granted). By March 14, the radicals had decided that they were going to present the urtext after all rather than the still more diluted and submissive Pinkas version (no. 3), and while discussions about the text were going back and forth, travelers from Vienna arriving on the evening train brought astonishing news about what happened there.
On March 13, the Estates of Lower Austria had met in central Vienna, a demonstration was held at the Ballhausplatz, grenadiers fired into the crowd, and the demonstration had flared into open revolt. The working people set fire to suburban factories and streamed into the inner city, barricades went up, and when the fighting was over, thirty people were dead in the streets; Mettemich the all-powerful was in flight; and the emperor had declared he was ready to appoint a constitutional government, the first ever in Austrian history. In Prague, Count Stadion officially announced that the emperor had gracefully granted Bohemia a constitution, censorship was immediately abolished, and the citizens were permitted to form national guards. Public celebrations began without delay. It was a gift from the thirty dead Viennese to the Prague revolutionaries, who had not yet gone very far.
Prague celebrated happy days of an easy revolution (for the time being). But in Berlin, after fierce street fighting, one hundred and eightythree dead revolutionaries were buried, drums rolling; and in Milan, the citizens rose for their
cinque giornate,
the famous “five days,” to fight for liberty, to disperse the Austrian regiments, and to establish a revolutionary government. The citizens of Prague illuminated their windows and peacefully marched through their city; fashion merchants and others quickly discovered the market value of patriotism and the constitution, whatever it was to be, for ladies bought parasols in red and white (the Bohemian colors), men sported red-and-white cravats, and there were constitutional dances and balls, hats and croissants; the students (who held a meeting in the afternoon of March 15 to discuss a petition of their
own) began to sport imaginative outfits and paraded through town. More significantly, Czech and German writers published a joint declaration put together by the learned university librarian Pavel Josef Šafa
ík, saying that all Prague writers of the Czech and German languages felt truly elevated by the new feeling of freedom and the new unity of Czech and German wishes, recently so evident. They expressed their hope that the “happy relationship,” based on equality, would not be disturbed but sustained in the future; in matters of state, the writers clearly favored the union of the Bohemian crown lands under a new constitution. The signatories included the most prominent figures in Prague’s intellectual and literary life; on the Czech side Palacký, the playwright Josef Kajetán Tyl, the journalist Karel Havlí
ek, the writer Karel Sabina, the philologist Hanka; and, on the German side, among others Karl Egon Ebert and Moritz Hartmann (who, shortly, shifted his radical allegiance to the German revolutionary parliament). The cautious authorities announced that a few cavalry units had been shifted to the Prague industrial suburbs, especially Karlin and Smíchov, of 1844 memory, simply to check on the excited country people, who were eager to see what was going on.

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