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their heads on Charles Bridge for 10 years. Some 150,000 Czechs, including a quarter of the nobility, fled the country, and three quarters of the country’s land was redistributed among loyal Czech and foreign Catholic nobles. The Czech Diet was neutered, Protestant churches were suppressed, and German was made the dominant language in the realm.
Even during the Czech National
Revival in the 19th century, when
the Bohemian lands had become the most industrialised part of the empire, Emperor Franz Joseph refused to raise the kingdom’s status level with that of rural Hungary and never bothered to have himself crowned King of Bohemia. Despite this, in the First World War,
one million Czechs still fought on the Austrian side (and 150,000 were killed) amid great mistrust of their loyalty by the incompetent Habsburg military.
After independence, Tomas Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s first president, followed a “de-Austrianisation” policy that helped to alienate the country’s large ethnic German minority. Much
of the land and property owned by Austrian aristocrats and the Catholic Church was expropriated, and noble titles were abolished. A state-backed Protestant Hussite church was also established, inspired by the 15th century Czech theologian Jan Hus who had been martyred by the Catholic Church.
During the First Republic, the old empire was ridiculed for being absurd, reactionary, stifling, repressive, corrupt and incompetent, most famously in Jaroslav Hasek’s “The Good Soldier Svejk”, where the eponymous hero outwits the Austrian authorities and evades combat in the First World War through dumb insolence.
This stance continued after the Communist takeover in 1948, and merged with wider hostility towards Germans in general because of the Nazi wartime occupation of Bohemia. Some two and a half million ethnic Germans were expelled from the country after the war, each taking only one suitcase with them, and their property was
nationalised or handed to Czechs. Following the coup, the Catholic Church was persecuted, while the Hussite Church was tolerated, and beautiful Habsburg buildings were allowed to fall into disrepair or deliberately vandalised.
Nostalgia for the empire
After the collapse of Communism in 1989, the First Republic – the only interwar democracy in Central Europe – was depicted as a golden age, but
the Czech view of their Habsburg past also shifted markedly. Partly this was simply an allergic reaction to all
things Communist but it also reflects
a continuing reappraisal of the Habsburg Empire and the Czech role in it.
Some historians now see the multinational Habsburg Empire as a kind of precursor of the European Union and sympathise with its struggles to balance the competing demands of its various nationalities. Austria is also now a close ally of the Czech Republic, and
is seen as very separate from Germany (towards which Communists and the far right still try to whip up resentment).
For many, the empire’s stability and glitter now also looks much more attractive, given the horrors that the 20th century were to rain down on the small, weak countries that rose from its ashes. To some Czechs, the humiliating
nations of Central Europe blew apart their empire in 1918 without realising that, in spite of its inadequacies, it was irreplaceable.”
The Czech role in the empire has also come more into focus. The Habsburgs were also kings of Bohemia, and Rudolph II, patron of art and occult sciences, even made Prague his capital in the 16th century, bequeathing to the city glorious Baroque palaces and churches that have made it the biggest draw for tourists in Central Europe. Czechs such as Radetzky rose to high positions in the empire,
and the economy and culture flourished, with world famous composers such as Bedrich Smetana and Antonin Dvorak.
“The Habsburgs are no longer seen as occupiers, the empire is more and more seen as an entity that helped the Czechs culturally and economically,” says political analyst Jiri Pehe.
For some, this nostalgia includes affection for the former nobility, many of whom have won their castles back in restitution, and who add some glamour to the country’s otherwise classless commonality. Czech architect and monarchist Jan Barta, who is one of the backers to re-erect the Radetzky statue, believes that Czechs should be proud of their Habsburg history. “Simply put, my colleagues and I want it remembered
“Some historians now see the multinational Habsburg Empire as a kind of precursor
of the European Union”
capitulation of the First Republic to Hitler in 1938, the following 50 years of Nazi and Soviet occupation, and then the inglorious 30 years since the Velvet Revolution have made the Habsburg period look like another golden era.
In a famous 1984 essay in the New York Review, self-exiled Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote: “They [the Austrian Empire] did not succeed in building
a federation of equal nations and their failure has been the misfortune of the whole of Europe. Dissatisfied, the other
that we were part of some larger state entity – because Czech history does not begin with independence in 1918 or after the liberation in 1945 – and certainly not in 1948 [after the Communist coup],” he told Prague International Radio.
And yet it is still jarring that the triumphalist Habsburg Marian Column was placed facing the monument to the proto-Protestant Czech martyr Jan Hus in Old Town Square, in the very place where the cream of the Bohemian nobility was
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