Betweenthe Revolutionof 1848 and the outbreak of the Great Warin 1914, imperial Austria experienced an extraordinary expansion of nationalism and of national conflict. German, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, Slovene, and other national movements became major players and rivals, transforming public life in the process. This essay examines that process through a municipal lens. What was particular about the intersection of the national in imperial Austria with the municipal? How did municipal and national politics affect one another, and what can we understand, through their dynamics, about Austrian politics more generally?
“Whosoever understands political life in Austria,” wrote Josef Redlich, a prominent Austrian jurist, in 1910,
knows how the Austrian municipality, … over the course of the last half-century, has not only emerged as the principal actor in all local administration but has also developed into the most important organ, without parallel, of free political activity by the population. All of us in Austria know that the municipality, above all with regard to the strongest political force in Austria, the national movement, has proven itself to be the central bulwark of each of the nations [Nationen] in its settlements. This is because the autonomous municipality in Austria, both in struggles between the nationalities [Nationalitäten] and within the individual nations [Nationen], wherever there has developed a sharp party antagonism of a social or political nature, has become the most important object of struggle, and the most important instrument for the victor of the moment to expand political power.Footnote 2
Concurring with Redlich's assessment, this essay also builds on it, using a top-down, legal approach. In recent years, several historians have studied the municipal-national nexus in late imperial Austria through bottom-up, social approaches. Gary Cohen's case study of German politics in Prague, my own case study of German and Czech politics in Budweis/Budějovice, and additional works have explored political parties, civic associations, the press, and additional aspects of local politics and of everyday life in one city or another.Footnote 3 They have drawn little, however, from the rich tradition of Austrian legal scholarship.Footnote 4
Exceptional and useful about that legal tradition is its focus on the imperial Austrian state. Nonnational and then in its final years multinational, that state has been neglected by many historians of nationalism, because of their national assumptions or social methodologies and because of imperial Austria's destruction in 1918. At a landmark conference in 1966 concerning the “nationality problem” in imperial Austria and in the other half of the Habsburg monarchy, Hungary, one historian made a telling criticism: There were “a dozen or so papers on the Slavic nationalities alone but none at all explaining the government's position.”Footnote 5 Two years later, Jiří Klabouch, a legal historian in the Austrian successor state of Czechoslovakia, published an outstanding study of municipal self-government. National movements, he showed, in Austria's municipalities had captured control over public organs whose constitutional configuration endowed them with an “undercurrent of hostility” toward the very state of which they formed the most local part.Footnote 6
Since then, however, few historians have followed Klabouch's lead in bringing the state into narratives and explanations of local national politics.Footnote 7 Yet, Austrian historiography has gained analytical distance from nationalism that Klabouch's generation (and Redlich's) lacked, most recently by embracing social constructivism, by pulling apart “ethnic” or “racial” groupism and by taking much more seriously questions of national indifference.Footnote 8 Older, top-down, and legal approaches can enrich newer, bottom-up, and social ones, as well as vice versa. Together, these approaches can help us make more sense of the municipal and the national in imperial Austria, by clarifying the reciprocal influence of national and nonnational agents and structures. National leaders had particular success in shaping public life in Austria at the municipal level but, in the process, found their nationalism particularly constrained and molded by nonnational forces.
Trading off breadth for depth, this essay focuses on just one of imperial Austria's regions: the Bohemian Lands. Today making up the Czech Republic, the Bohemian Lands consist of Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia. Ruled by the Habsburg dynasty from 1526, they counted as three historically linked Crownlands in imperial Austria. Highly industrialized, the region was inhabited at the start of the twentieth century by more than nine million inhabitants (6.3 million in Bohemia, 2.4 million in Moravia, and 660,000 in Austrian Silesia). Many of those inhabitants spoke two languages, Czech and German, and almost all the rest spoke one or the other. The higher a person's status, the more likely it was that he or she knew German, because of long-standing but fraying ties between that language and power. The Austrian census—which between 1880 and 1910 included a question about “language of daily use” but did not record bilingualism—showed a ratio between Czech and German of something between 3:2 and 2:1.Footnote 9
Czech nationalism, one of the two principal nationalisms of the Bohemian Lands, was in large measure ethnic. Czech activists, who understood themselves as champions of a downtrodden majority, tended to define potential followers by the Czech language and to seek to “awaken” what they understood as natural sentiments in defense of Czech culture and of a Czech ancestral community. German nationalism in the Bohemian Lands at first favored more civic discourses. To be German did not necessarily mean speaking German as a native or having German-speakers as ancestors. Rather, it meant participating in the supposedly universalist and superior German public culture of Central Europe. At the end of the 1870s, however, German leaders shifted toward discourses like those favored by their Czech rivals, who were gaining ground. Germans took up an ethnic nationalism, characterized by a continuing condescension for Czechs and by a new hostility toward Jews.Footnote 10 Neither Jews nor Protestant Christians, however, made up even 2 percent of the population; something like 96 percent of the population was Catholic. Thus religion did not function as a primary national differentiator in the Bohemian Lands.
Two notes regarding terminology are in order. First, “municipality” serves as a translation from German of Gemeinde and from Czech of obec. In imperial Austria, not only cities and towns were known formally as municipalities; villages were, too. In certain contexts, so were territorial corporations of citizens larger than cities or towns.Footnote 11 But in this essay, “municipality” refers primarily to urban political units, whose scale, demography, and much more rendered them in practice quite different from their smaller and larger namesakes. Second, Selbstverwaltung/samospráva is perhaps best translated into English as “self-government” and is important to distinguish from “autonomy.” Redlich concluded his assessment, quoted at the start of this essay, with the claim that “municipal autonomy [Autonomie], as the term is meant in Austrian political usage, shows itself to be the decisive characteristic of the Austrian municipality.” But another leading Austrian jurist took pains to note in 1905 that genuine autonomy—a subordinated form of lawmaking—characterized Austrian municipalities only to a very limited degree.Footnote 12 What Redlich meant, and Klabouch in fact wrote, was self-government, or the administration of local public affairs by officials elected from amidst the citizenry, rather than appointed by state authorities.
This essay is organized into four sections. First is a discussion of the municipal institutional framework, laid in place between the revolutionary year of 1848 and the liberal constitutionalist victories of the 1860s. Second is an overview of national and nationalizing politics during the golden age of municipalities in imperial Austria, between the 1870s and 1914. The third section pushes into specifics of that age by examining nationalization in municipal daily life. The final section draws conclusions.
The Institutional Framework
Between 1848 and the end of the 1860s, the basic structures of a modern municipal order were laid down in imperial Austria, with stops and starts. This restructuring, part of a larger modernization of the Austrian (and Hungarian) state, resulted from an unstable dynamic pitting liberal centralists against conservative or “feudal” federalists, as well as both against the Habsburg dynasty, or the Crown. Liberal components to the new order were perhaps the most visible, but not necessarily the strongest. Municipalities emerged as more or less uniformly organized local public administrative units, their councils elected by citizens of substance and endowed with considerable powers of self-government—yet triply checked by higher self-governing bodies, by the state administration, and by individuals defending their rights through appeals to the courts. In keeping with the post-absolutist order in Austria, they were constitutional, yet monarchical, and emphasized protection of property, the rule of law, formal equality and liberty of individuals, representative government, and to some degree, separation of powers.Footnote 13
At first, the national movements figured as lesser players in Bohemian and Austrian politics and slid and spread across the main centralist-federalist, liberal-feudal political divide. The Crown, the nobility, the church, commercial circles, and other nonnational factors held clearer, stronger positions. But the German movement soon settled on the liberal side and the Czech movement on the federalist or “state rights” one, whereas politics as a whole became more national—or rather, multinational. German, Czech, and other national leaders grew more powerful, liberals grew more German, federalists grew more Czech and Polish, and so on. The Austrian municipal order, which became law in 1849 and then was renewed in 1862–1864, contained few openly national provisions. It contained many national implications, however, given the ongoing multinationalization of politics, as well as asymmetries between the national movements.
“The foundation of the free state is the free municipality.”Footnote 14 So read the first clause of the Provisional Municipal Law of 17 March 1849, issued as an imperial patent days after Austria's new emperor, Francis Joseph I of Habsburg, had disbanded a revolutionary Constituent Assembly and preempted its proposed constitution by imposing his own, less liberal one. Over the following months and years, as the dynasty regained its balance in the wake of the upheavals of 1848, even the imposed constitution was set aside, and substantial parts of the Provisional Municipal Law were suspended. Yet, the basic ideas and architecture of the legislation, anything but reactionary, either persisted or returned and endured until imperial Austria's dissolution in 1918. Creating a far freer municipality than had existed previously, the Provisional Municipal Law did indeed lay a foundation for a freer Austria.Footnote 15
“The jurisdiction of the free municipality,” the Provisional Municipal Law continued, “is: (a) natural, and (b) delegated. The natural encompasses everything which intimately concerns the interests of the municipality, and may be carried out fully within its boundaries. … The delegated encompasses attendance to certain public affairs delegated to the municipality by the state.” A subsequent section defined natural interests in economic, property-related terms. (Municipalities in Austria received considerable income from real estate and enterprises that they owned. Their powers of taxation are covered briefly below.) Another section delegated certain public affairs to the municipality, including the announcing of laws and decrees, the collection of state taxes, the supervision of weights and measures, policing, and cooperation in conscription and in the quartering of troops. The natural jurisdiction, specified the Provisional Municipal Law, “receives the necessary curtailments only with regard to the common good and by law.” But “all official matters delegated to the mayor by this law or assigned through later decrees, as well as all orders and decrees of the public administration issuing from the district authority, must be executed by him precisely, and in the fashion denoted by the law or by the superior authority.”Footnote 16
Behind this distinction between “delegated” and “natural” jurisdictions lay the intent by the Crown to reorganize Austria's public administration into two tracks, state and self-governing. The first track was appointed, professional, and top-down—in a word, absolutist. The second, which did not yet exist, was to be elected, civic, and bottom-up—liberal. During 1848, the state administration had expanded, at the expense of sovereign lords, and had been rearticulated into nested tiers. Now, in 1849, came the municipalities, “purposefully conceived,” in Klabouch's words, as an “organic complement.”Footnote 17 In fact, the Provisional Municipal Law provided not only for “local municipalities” [Ortsgemeinden/místní obce], but also for superordinated district and county ones [Bezirksgemeinden/okresní obce, Kreisgemeinden/krajské obce]. These higher municipalities, also endowed with natural and delegated jurisdictions, were to stand parallel to the district and county tiers of the state administration. By “municipality,” then, the legislation meant not so much “municipal government” as “self-government,” a term not yet common in Austria in 1849.Footnote 18Obec, the Czech word for “municipality,” serves as the root for občan, or “citizen.” Provided that a self-governing corporation of citizens at any territorial level acted within legal bounds, the Provisional Municipal Law specified, it could be checked or overridden within its natural jurisdiction only by a higher municipality, not by the state administration.Footnote 19 As fate had it, however, the district and county municipalities fell victim to the growing counterrevolutionary backlash before they could be constituted. Local municipalities did not fare much better, at least in the 1850s.
The principal author of the Provisional Municipal Law was Count Franz Stadion, Emperor Francis Joseph's minister of the interior. He devised the two-track system, on the one hand, to consolidate and to centralize the monarchical state and, on the other hand, to encourage citizens to identify with that state by introducing elements of liberal, representative government. In other words, Stadion hoped to repeat the successes of reformers in Prussia after the defeat of that neighboring state by Napoleon's armies in 1806. The state apparatus or “political administration,” as it was called in Austria, was to be counterbalanced and served by self-government, centered on the supposedly apolitical “administration of property.” Klabouch notes that Stadion also sought to accommodate Austria's diverse regions and political traditions without strengthening centripetal forces. This motive accounts for the decision to focus not on reviving long-standing Crownland assemblies or diets, but instead on creating new self-governing bodies.Footnote 20
The Provisional Municipal Law specified that the citizens of the (local) municipality would be represented by its legislature, or municipal council. At the start of its three-year term, that legislature would elect two or more councilors from its midst, as well as the mayor, who would serve as the executive organ of the municipality in its natural jurisdiction.Footnote 21 This much was simple. But who would elect the council members, and how?
The Provisional Municipal Law contained an electoral order rooted in the understanding, to quote Klabouch again, that “the act of voting in the municipality was an act of property administration, and in no way the exercise of a political right.” It was liberal, but not democratic. To quote from Stadion's exposition upon presenting the legislation to the emperor for sanction on 15 March 1849:
Only the majority of interested persons, and not the majority of the mass, can be entitled to the decisive voice in the affairs of the municipality… . In the local municipality, only its burghers, who are tied through material interests to the interests of the municipality, and those among its members who are tied through spiritual interests, are entitled to participation in the election of the representative body. But they are not entitled in completely equal measure. They are entitled rather in proportion to the share that they have in the interest of the municipality, in proportion to the share that they have, through taxes, in defraying the burdens of the municipality.Footnote 22
This unequal weighting of votes was to be achieved in two steps. First, citizens were to be partitioned into voters and nonvoters on the basis of status and wealth. The following individuals were entitled to vote: those paying a specified annual sum in direct state taxes for real estate or for commercial activity within the municipality; those formally recognized by the municipality as privileged members, or burghers; and those nonprivileged members, or individuals with the right of domicile, who counted as notables—priests, ministers, rabbis, state officials, persons with a university degree, and so on. Some women were to qualify for enfranchisement, usually through property; they would vote through a male proxy. Although the minimum direct tax payment was set by decree in April 1850 at what may seem a low level of one gulden, in fact most Austrians paid no direct tax. (Indirect taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and additional goods, however, were hefty.) This, together with the denial of notable and burgher status to women, the limited granting of burgher and domiciled status to newcomers, and the setting of legal majority at the age of 24, left only the wealthier, educated, older, and mostly male part of the population, less than 20 percent, with the vote.Footnote 23
Second, the Provisional Municipal Law partitioned voters into electoral bodies; these were to number three in the case of larger settlements, and two in the case of smaller ones. Voters were to be assigned to an electoral body according to how much they had paid in direct taxes the previous year. Those who had paid the most were to be placed in the first electoral body, and those who had paid the least in the third; each electoral body was to contain individuals who had paid one-third of all direct taxes in the municipality. Also voting in the first electoral body were to be notables. Also voting in the third were to be burghers who had no tax liability. Data concerning individual municipalities in the 1850s are scarce, but in Mährisch Ostrau/Moravská Ostrava, an industrial town in northern Moravia with a population of slightly less than 2,000, the first electoral body, when constituted in 1850, had 42 voters. The second had 39, and the third 204. In every municipality, the electoral bodies, voting separately, were to elect equal numbers of representatives. Thus votes in the third electoral body, the largest and least affluent, were to count for considerably less. Electoral procedures heightened inequalities still further. Voters were to vote for representatives of their electoral body “orally and publicly;” this provision opened the door to the exercise of pressure on less independent individuals. A minority bloc within an electoral body had little hope of seeing any of its candidates elected, because the law did not provide for proportional representation. And once elections were completed, minorities had little say, because both the council and its executive committee made all decisions on the basis of simple majority rule.Footnote 24
“Crownland capitals and county seats,” the Provisional Municipal Law noted, “will receive their own [municipal] orders, through laws.” By the time those orders were issued a year later, in the spring of 1850, the political climate had become considerably less liberal. They took the form not of laws, but of decrees, and reduced the size of the electorate still further, as well as increased the power of the political administration over policing. In the Bohemian Lands, only five cities received “special statutes” and came to be known as “statutory cities:” Prague and Reichenberg/Liberec in Bohemia, Brünn/Brno and Olmütz/Olomouc in Moravia, and Troppau/Opava in Austrian Silesia.Footnote 25
In 1850, the first elections for local municipalities took place under the new system. As it turned out, they were also the last. New municipal governments had barely taken up their work when on 31 December 1851 Francis Joseph suspended his constitution of 1849, including its provisions regarding Crownland diets and a central parliament. He also proclaimed a set of principles for new laws, to be issued on his own authority. Several of the principles concerned municipalities. Chief executives, or mayors, were to require confirmation in their election by the government or were simply to be appointed. They were to make an oath of loyalty and obedience to the monarch, as well as of conscientious fulfillment of their other duties. Even in matters internal to the municipality, certain acts and decisions were to be made subject to review and confirmation by the political administration. In short, the natural jurisdiction of municipalities—self-government—was to be dismantled. And so it was, over the following few years. When new elections became overdue in 1854, council terms were extended by decree. When council members resigned or died, replacements were appointed. Throughout the 1850s, Francis Joseph's neoabsolutist regime expanded the delegated jurisdiction, saddling municipalities with ever more obligations and treating them as little more than extensions of the political administration into Austria's localities.Footnote 26
“Because municipal assets and land are property of the municipality as a moral person, not of the municipal members of the moment,” declared the Provisional Municipal Law, “any alienation of municipal assets and land, and any distribution of the same, is forbidden. Only exceptionally, with proper justification, can approval hereunto be granted by the diet.” But during the 1850s, many municipal leaders exploited their authority, which was shielded from public oversight by counterrevolutionary measures yet subjected to often spotty monitoring by the political administration, to privatize municipal property for personal gain. Revenues from property fell even as the expansion of the delegated jurisdiction made expenditures rise. Because municipalities possessed only limited authority to assess local taxes, as surcharges to state ones, municipal finances deteriorated badly.Footnote 27
At the end of April 1859, a new municipal law was at last issued, in the form of an imperial patent. “The state authorities,” it declared, “oversee municipal government, the administration of municipal matters, and attendance to those public affairs which are assigned to the local municipality.”Footnote 28 Self-government was not to be resuscitated. Before the law could be implemented, however, neoabsolutism suffered a devastating blow. On 24 June at Solferino, not far from Milan, French and Piedmontese-Sardinian forces bested a large Austrian army under the emperor's personal command. Lombardy was lost to Piedmont-Sardinia, which expanded to become the Kingdom of Italy. In Austria, Baron Alexander von Bach, the minister of the interior and the architect of the new municipal law, fell from power amidst a swelling financial and political crisis.
Over the following two years, Francis Joseph was forced to concede, among other things, a new constitution, a new parliament, and the reconvening of the diets. Struggles over the powers of the legislatures, the relationship between the Crownlands and the central government (the federalist-centralist question), and the position of Hungary vis-à-vis the rest of the Habsburg monarchy continued for a decade—and indeed, flared up again repeatedly thereafter. But already at the end of 1860, new municipal elections were ordered, the first since 1850. They were held not on the basis of the 1859 municipal law, but of the more liberal, provisional one of 1849. “The newly elected municipal representative bodies shall assume the jurisdiction legally accorded them,” the relevant decree declared, “and shall continue therein until the entry into force of a new municipal order, created by law.”Footnote 29 An Austrian scholar later commented with only some exaggeration that “[w]hat happened in Prussia in 1808—the rebirth of the state through the rebirth of the municipality—appears half a century later as a problem in Austria.”Footnote 30
On 5 March 1862, Francis Joseph sanctioned a new imperial municipal law, “whereby the fundamental requirements for the regulation of municipal affairs are established.” Only the fourth law of the new constitutional era, and the first not concerned with the workings of the Parliament itself, it began: “With the accord of both houses of My Parliament, I hereby …” Article 1 declared that “All immovable property must form a part of a local municipality. Excepted here from are palaces, chateaux, and other buildings, together with appurtenant gardens and parks, meant for the residence or sojourn of the Emperor and of the Sovereign Court.”Footnote 31 Tension between liberal and monarchical principles, between the legislators who had initiated the law and the ruler who reluctantly agreed to it, carried through the following pages.
In many ways, the law was based on the Provisional Municipal Law of 1849. Two jurisdictions were distinguished, one delegated and the other “independent,” which corresponded closely with the previous “natural.” At the insistence of the House of Deputies, the lower house of the new parliament, the term “local municipality” in the legislative draft by Francis Joseph's minister gave way in many places to “municipality,” so as to allow the broadest possible interpretation. The electoral system again was to favor the propertied, the male, and the educated. Decision making was to occur by majority rule, and special statutes were to be provided for larger cities, whose mayors once more were to require imperial confirmation.Footnote 32
There were also differences and inconsistencies. On the one hand, the 1862 law subjected the independent jurisdiction to oversight by the executive organs of higher self-governing bodies (such as the diet executive committee) and weakened the political administration by stipulating that the delegated jurisdiction could be expanded only by parliamentary or diet legislation, not by decree. On the other hand, the law conceded to the political administration “a supervisory right over the municipalities to the extent of assuring that they do not exceed their jurisdiction, and do not violate existing laws,” and even the power to dissolve municipal councils. Friedrich Tezner, one of imperial Austria's great jurists, commented acidly in 1896 that this attempt at coordinating the political administration with municipal self-government “provides eloquent testimony to the confusion which must result from legislation rendered completely free of juridical considerations, and placed entirely under the rule of a political slogan.” Municipalities verged on becoming “independent republics within the monarchical state,” at the same time that their every act could be challenged.Footnote 33 Both Klabouch and a scholar of Tezner's generation, Carl Brockhausen, ascribe this outcome to ambivalence on some issues by centralist and federalist representatives, to conflict between the House and the Crown, and to compromise.Footnote 34
The Austrian municipal law of 1862 differed from that of 1849 by leaving important matters to be decided at the Crownland level. Legal space was created for district self-governing bodies located between the municipal and Crownland ones, for example, but whether or not such bodies were actually established was left up to each diet and to the emperor. Electoral bodies were not mentioned; the law simply stated that “Crownland law regulates the constitution of the municipal representative body through an electoral order with due attention to securing the interests of higher taxpayers.”Footnote 35 This division of labor between Parliament and the diets allowed the Crown to postpone and to spread out potential confrontation over some of the most difficult municipal issues. It also helped centralist liberals and federalist aristocrats in the Parliament to find common ground in their distrust of state power, even as they continued to disagree on the solution: centralizing authority while checking its monarchical track with a self-governing one, or decentralizing authority by pushing beyond self-government to genuine autonomy.Footnote 36
In 1863 and 1864, the emperor sanctioned Crownland municipal laws passed by the Silesian, Moravian, and Bohemian diets. They were quite similar on most points. As in 1849, enfranchisement depended on wealth and status and was filtered through three electoral bodies in order to dilute the vote of less wealthy or less educated individuals. Now, though, not only physical persons who paid a direct state tax of one gulden had the right to cast a ballot. So did legal persons—corporations, foundations, dioceses, and so on. This innovation was consistent with the understanding of municipal government as first and foremost the administration of property. Brockhausen goes so far as to argue that taxpayers were not the real voters in municipal elections. “Rather, it is the plots of land, the buildings, and the trades themselves, which vote through the hand of their owner… . The owner may be a minor, or otherwise not of legal majority; the owner may be of the female sex. But the interest of the tax object in participating in the rule of the municipality is preserved.”Footnote 37
In Bohemia, the diet created self-governing bodies at the district level, between the municipalities and the Crownland, with both legislative and executive branches. But in Moravia, a similar initiative failed, blocked by German liberals who feared that Czech leaders, strong in rural municipalities that ringed more German urban ones, would exploit district bodies to national advantage. More broadly, liberals fared better than did federalists. The exception was Galicia, to the north and east of the Bohemian Lands, where Polish federalists not only established district bodies akin to those in Bohemia, but also succeeded, in the 1870s, in having them absorb the powers exercised elsewhere in Austria by district offices of the state administration.Footnote 38
In addition to the 1862 municipal law, several other pieces of legislation enacted at the imperial level during the 1860s shaped municipalities over the following decades. At the end of 1863, a law confirmed the right of Austrian citizens to live where they wished, but allowed municipalities to expel those residents who required poor relief to their place of domicile—domicile being an inherited status that individuals could change to a different municipality only with its consent. Rural, poorer municipalities were saddled with a disproportionate share of poor relief, and domicile was all but petrified, just as large numbers of Austrians began to leave their ancestral villages for towns and cities.Footnote 39 In 1867, in connection with Francis Joseph's concession of autonomy to Hungary through the so-called Compromise, modifications were made to the constitutional law of 1861 regarding the powers of the Austrian Parliament. Among other things, legislative jurisdiction over municipal affairs was reallocated from the Parliament to the diets. The following year, a law reorganized the lower levels of the political administration into district captainships and governorships, parallel to the executive organs of district self-governing bodies (in Crownlands where they existed) and of diets.Footnote 40 Municipalities, with their twin jurisdictions, tied together the two-track system at its bottommost rung. Conceived twenty years previously, that system now at last began to function.
Both imperial and Crownland legislation during the late 1860s and early 1870s also laid down rights and responsibilities regarding primary education—a field of growing conflict between the national movements and soon the largest item on municipal budgets. In 1867, Austrian Constitutional Law Nr. 142 concerning the General Rights of Citizens established in its famous Article 19 that “All nationalities [Volksstämme] of the state are equal in their rights, and each nationality has the inviolable right to preserve and to promote its national characteristics [Nationalität] and language. For all languages whose use is customary in the land, the state recognizes equality of rights in schools, government institutions, and public life.” A final sentence, added at the insistence of German liberal representatives from Bohemia, established that “In those Crownlands inhabited by more than one nationality, public institutions of education shall enable each of the nationalities to be educated in its language, without being compelled to learn a second language of the land.”
The intent was to protect Germans from being required to learn Czech. And the effect was to condemn bilingual schools, one possible vehicle for equality between ethnolinguistically defined German and Czech “nationalities” in the Bohemian Lands, to extinction. In 1869, an imperial primary school law made school attendance mandatory between the ages of 6 and 14, established a system of public, secular primary schools, assigned legislative jurisdiction regarding many details to the diets, and placed the bulk of the financial burden on the municipalities. Over the following several years, diets and municipalities used their considerable powers in the field of schooling to meet the preferences of voters, who tended to view secular education with suspicion and to give high priority to keeping their taxes low. The liberals who held sway in Parliament during the 1870s responded by increasing central state control. Teachers ceased to be municipal employees, and municipalities lost control over the school budget to supervisory boards overseen by the political administration but remained responsible for coming up with the money.Footnote 41
After the 1860s, little change occurred in the basic structures of self-government and political administration in the Bohemian Lands, including the municipalities. Between 1867 and 1871, a coalition of federalist aristocrats and Czechs pushed hard to win an autonomous position for the Bohemian Lands, modeled on that implemented in Hungary. Thirty years later, German leaders tried to resist a new policy of greater linguistic equality imposed by the political administration and demanded the partition of Bohemia into German and Czech territories. But both attempts failed. Only minor reforms, involving such matters as the right of domicile and the number of statutory cities, came to fruition. The splitting of jurisdiction regarding political administration and self-government proved unwise. In Klabouch's words, “neither the Parliament nor the individual diets were able on their own to change matters fundamentally in both branches of the internal administration, which were tied one to the other.” Another reason for the deadlock was that propertied elements embraced the new status quo, whose electoral system concentrated power in their hands. The Crown, too, proved determined to defend its prerogatives, if necessary through repeated dissolution of representative bodies, through energetic use of gendarmes, and through the proclamation of states of siege.Footnote 42 Through experiments and reversals, through conflict and compromise, a foundation had been created that proved firm enough to support predictable and fairly effective governance for the following fifty years.
Nationalization in the Golden Age of Municipal Self-Government, 1870–1914
Stability of structure by no means imposes stability of content or function. Municipal government underwent tremendous change between the 1870s and World War I. Four trends connected with the nationalization of municipal politics in the Bohemian Lands are discussed in this section: the dramatic expansion of municipal government; the nationalization of Austrian politics as a whole; the favoring by municipal political structures of national partitioning over national condominium and compromise; and the ossification of municipal electorates, such as to make them the most narrow in Austria. Some nuance is then folded in, through comparison of quickly growing towns and cities with slowly growing ones, of Bohemia with Moravia, and of linguistically homogeneous municipalities with linguistically mixed ones.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, in imperial Austria and elsewhere, urban populations increased enormously. The scope of municipal government increased even more. Town halls, long concerned with policing, trade, communication networks, communal property, and additional such matters, took on many new fields, including sanitation, public health, gas and electricity distribution, public schooling and lighting, firefighting, parks and cultural institutions, social welfare programs, and building codes. Cities developed mass transit systems, public housing programs, and still more. New urban forms were born, together with new forms of expertise and new bureaucracies. In the historiography concerning Central Europe, the era is known as a transitional one, from municipal government as the administration of property to the administration of services.
In imperial Austria, these broad trends hold doubly true for several reasons. First, the municipal ordering of the 1860s gave Austrian municipalities unusually broad latitude in Europe at the time. Some used their powers aggressively. Second, as will be seen shortly, municipalities in much of imperial Austria became a central arena of national politics. As national politics expanded, municipalities expanded with them. And third, the political administration continued to assign ever more tasks to municipalities: the carrying out of the decennial census; the administration not only of municipal elections, but also of district, diet, and parliamentary ones; and additional statistical-administrative matters without number or end. This pattern characterized not only the delegated jurisdiction but also the supposedly independent one. In a further blurring of the two tracks, laws came to mandate many programs to municipalities even in their capacity as self-governing institutions.Footnote 43
More activities and more employees meant more taxes. By the early years of the twentieth century, in many places in the Bohemian Lands, municipal taxes exceeded the state taxes to which they were added as surcharges. Even then, municipalities found themselves ever more strapped for cash. Borrowing mounted, as did attempts to derive new revenues from commercial ventures: not only gas and electric works, slaughterhouses, brick works, and the like, but also savings institutions, fee-collecting middle schools, and barracks purpose-built for rental to the military. In some measure, the municipal fiscal crisis can be blamed on Czech or German leaders attempting to use their control of town hall to overshadow, outbid, and out-educate German or Czech rivals. But this can easily be exaggerated. The huge expansion of mandatory expenditures often rendered municipalities capable of making discretionary ones only on a small scale.Footnote 44 More to blame than nationalists was the Austrian state. Or to view the same matter from another angle, national movements succeeded in seizing control of this town hall or that more against each other than against the state.
Roughly parallel to the shift from the administration of wealth to the administration of services was a shift from a politics of the notables to a politics of parties. To be sure, many individuals had run for election under the banner of supposed parties already in the 1860s. In Budweis/Budějovice, in southern Bohemia, the “Party of Progress” backed one slate of candidates in 1865, and the “True Party of Progress” backed another. Elsewhere, one had the “Mayor's Party,” the “Tradesmen's Party,” etc.—ad hoc, local groupings centered on individuals and specific problems. Soon, though, genuine parties (truly true parties, one could say) took hold of municipal elections. From the 1870s, their formal structures, networks, newspapers, and dues-paying memberships did much to reframe many local concerns in regional and ideological terms and even in state terms, too.Footnote 45
This homogenization and broadening of municipal politics, part of a larger transformation of Austrian politics as a whole, took primarily national forms. In the Bohemian Lands, the parties that came to dominate electoral contests at municipal and other levels, as well as associational life and public discourse more generally, tended to understand themselves as Czech or German. Why was this so? Why did national leaders prove more successful than political entrepreneurs centered on differences of rich versus poor, centralist versus federalist, Christian or Aryan versus Jew, etc.? There are many reasons, including the attention that Austria's nationalists paid to language in an age when the relationship between language and social mobility was undergoing revolutionary change; the pairing off of national movements into rivalries that generated excitement and followers, but at first relatively little concern on the part of the nonnational Crown; the contours of Austria's electoral systems; and the demonstration effect of national successes elsewhere in Europe. Throughout the nineteenth century, much of the population in the Bohemian Lands was nationally indifferent. More and more, though, burghers, Moravians, Catholics, “Budweisers,” and other such individuals found themselves pushed to make a choice between Czech and German.Footnote 46
This process of nationalization in the Bohemian Lands, whether at the municipal level or at any other, was characterized by asymmetries. As has been noted, German nationalists tended at first to favor civic rhetorics, whereas Czechs heavily favored ethnic ones. Germans were strongly overrepresented among the wealthy and among liberals, whereas Czech leaders oriented themselves more toward the lower classes and the federalist or state-rights end of the spectrum. These patterns were linked to another: Czech-speakers outnumbered German-speakers in the Bohemian Lands by a ratio of something between 3:2 and 2:1. Czech nationalism found advantage in a game of ethnic headcounts and egalitarianism, or quantity; German nationalism, in one of differentiation and ranking, or quality.Footnote 47
The electoral order used in Austrian municipalities, with its weighting of votes by wealth and status, turned out to favor the German side—although that had not been the principal intent of its creators, who had been less German than liberal. During the 1850s and 1860s, many towns featured a German majority on the municipal council and a Czech-speaking (but not necessarily Czech) majority in the population as a whole. (The distinction between Czech and Czech-speaking, German and German-speaking, is important, precisely because of ethnically nationalizing discourses implying the contrary.) German factory owners, merchants, attorneys, and their peers held sway in the first and second electoral bodies, whereas Czech leaders often had difficulty capturing even the third body, and the great majority of residents could not vote.
Over time, the socioeconomic profile of the Czech-speaking population began to “catch up” with that of the German-speaking population. Thanks to government policy, court rulings, and civic initiatives, the Czech-language educational system came to rival the German-language one, and formerly firm links between social advancement and command of German grew loose and ever more rusty. The Czech middle classes expanded enormously. More and more, Czech quantity matched or overwhelmed German quality, even within the inegalitarian setting of the municipality. By the turn of the century, the national majority on municipal councils had come to correspond much more closely with the linguistic majority of the local population. Municipal electoral politics had become nationalized in ethnic fashion. In Bohemia, by 1900, only 23 of 7,743 municipalities (21 led by Germans, 2 by Czechs) counted as exceptions.Footnote 48
Also important, in addition to the expansion of municipal government and to the nationalization of politics in Austria, was that municipal structures interacted with demography to make politics more mononational at the municipal level than at others. In Austria as a whole, in its Crownlands, and even at the district level, national mixing was considerable. Often, one national movement could claim only a small ethnic majority, and in Austria as a whole, no national movement could claim one at all. This pattern encouraged national compromise and accommodation—or stalemate and strife. At the local level, though, Austria was not nearly so diverse. In Bohemia, which censuses (polling a single “language of daily use” for each citizen) showed to be approximately 63 percent Czech-speaking and 37 percent German-speaking, fewer than 5 percent of all municipalities had a linguistic minority larger than 10 percent. The linguistic border in Bohemia was, in the words of a prominent demographer at the turn of the century, “quite sharp, and almost without transitions.” German-speakers inhabited the mountainous rim; Czech-speakers, the central plain. To be sure, in Moravia, where Czech-speakers made up closer to 70 percent, local mixing was not nearly as rare: Of the 44 largest municipalities, 12 had a linguistic minority larger than 20 percent, and an additional 5 a minority larger than 10 percent.Footnote 49 But even in Moravia, town hall most often was held by just one national movement and was understood increasingly by its leaders as vested national patrimony.Footnote 50
The Austrian municipal order contributed significantly to this exclusion of minorities. As has been mentioned, the tiered electoral system placed Czech-speaking minorities at a disadvantage, especially in the early decades. In municipal governments, the simple majoritarian fashion in which representatives and executives were elected reduced the presence of minorities—Czech or German, linguistic or national, and otherwise. So did the simple majoritarian fashion in which those municipal governments made decisions. Jiří Malíř notes that this powerlessness led to low electoral participation within minority populations.Footnote 51 That reduced their influence still more.
Municipalities, as it turned out, led a trend in Austria toward national separation or partition. “National equality of rights,” an approach to Austria's national conflicts that had first received serious attention in 1848, emerged as a central and dynamic principle of Austrian constitutional law and of administrative practice from the 1860s onward. But it was implemented more and more through evenhanded institutional segregation, or what might be called a genuine policy of “separate but equal”—as opposed to the American policy of that name, which was not equal at all.Footnote 52 At the municipal level, in the Bohemian Lands, this took the form of the Czech and German movements each having their own towns, as well as their own monolingual public primary school systems. From about 1900, voluntary associations formed in Bohemia and Moravia through which municipal officials could exchange information and coordinate the communication of their interests to other bodies. It was all too common, however, for neighboring municipalities within the same Crownland to belong to different and rival associations, Czech and German.Footnote 53
Finally, the position of municipalities within Austrian politics gradually changed, from bold and challenging to conservative and even retrograde. This trend both reflected and caused the failure to bring about any significant reform of the municipal electoral system. In the 1870s, the electorate for Parliament resembled that for municipalities. But by World War I, all adult males could vote for parliament, and they were no longer partitioned into property-based electoral bodies. Diet electorates did not grow or level out nearly as much, yet still changed significantly. Municipal electorates, for their part, shrank, if not absolutely then at least proportionally. Some formerly enfranchised women joined the lower classes as nonvoters.Footnote 54
The democratization of elections to the Parliament may have helped to render it less capable of forming working majorities. Municipalities, on the other hand, anything but democratic, rarely had that problem. Rather than miring down in factional struggles, municipal governments proved united and resolute in using their powers to make life difficult for Social Democrats and for other working-class political activists. Long after the oldest and most elitist German and Czech parties—Liberals and so-called Old Czechs—had faded from relevance in Parliament and in the diets, they continued to hold sway in many municipalities. Not that they failed to respond to the changing times. Their stance toward the state softened, becoming much less hostile. On the German side in particular, some leaders looked to increases in central state power at the expense of self-government, especially in the field of policing, as their best hope for holding back the hordes.Footnote 55
National politics evolved somewhat differently in municipalities which were growing rapidly. Growth implied factories, and workers—who were more in need than the middle classes of certain services delegated by the state to municipalities. Workers, though, usually could not vote. Indeed, the special statutes of the largest cities enfranchised a particularly small part of the population and tended to assign less than 10 percent of voters to the first and second electoral bodies.Footnote 56 Tensions could run high, particularly in German-led cities or towns that pulled workers from Czech-speaking parts of the countryside and thereby poured national oil onto a class fire.
In such municipalities, which included Brünn/Brno in Moravia and Budweis/Budějovice in Bohemia, German leaders used self-government to preserve national power. Making selective grants of burgher status, which entitled non-taxpayers to vote in the third electoral body, they counterbalanced the growing number of Czech taxpayers who lived inside the municipal boundaries. They also refused to incorporate neighboring municipalities that were developing large working-class districts. One effect was to preserve the German majority in the municipal government, even as Czech-speakers became a large majority within the metropolitan area. Another was to off-load onto surrounding, poorer, Czech-led municipalities the financial burden of providing schooling and social services to many people who worked downtown.Footnote 57
Prague, which Czechs dominated already in the 1860s, was exceptional, not only for its size. The municipal government, far less constrained by a German minority than the Bohemian or Moravian diets were, styled itself increasingly as a sort of shadow Czech government within Austria. It convened international exhibitions, interacted with foreign governments through their consulates in the city, established a Czech-French press service, and acted in various international fora as a representative of the Czech “nation.” Then again, not all politics was national. Prague, too, refused to incorporate new working-class districts, although they were overwhelmingly Czech-speaking.Footnote 58
Differences were also significant between Bohemia and Moravia. In Bohemia, linguistic mixing was less common at the local level. Nationalization also took hold earlier. In most cases, municipal council majorities that did not coincide with linguistic majorities had been reversed by the 1870s. (Budweis/Budějovice was one of the twenty-three exceptions.) In Moravia, the “battle for town hall” in many cases started much later and was still underway in 1914. Moravia also lacked district self-governing bodies, so national conflict centered more tightly on municipalities. In the field of language rights (discussed in the next section), no legislative ordering of affairs at the municipal level was ever achieved in Bohemia. But in Moravia, the so-called Moravian Compromise of 1905 established generous minority rights for individuals in their encounters with municipalities and with other self-governing bodies.Footnote 59
Finally, a distinction should be made between linguistically homogeneous and linguistically mixed municipalities. In homogeneous ones, nationalization of the ethnic sort that came to prevail in Austria generally meant that only one national movement fielded candidates. After the 1860s, though, it usually fielded two, three, or more slates. Both national movements developed multiparty systems. (The Social Democratic Party claimed to be neither Czech nor German, but internationalist. The minority of its adherents who could vote at the municipal level, however, increasingly divided into Czech and German factions in the Bohemian Lands.) In bilingual municipalities, the parties within each national system frequently formed an electoral coalition. Instead of choosing between right and left (or to be more precise, right and more right), voters could chose only between Czech and German. In the absence of proportional representation, linguistically mixed municipalities acted as what Malíř terms a “brake on political differentiation.”Footnote 60
Nationalization and Municipal Daily Life
As they captured and nationalized the municipalities, how did the Czech and German national movements of the Bohemian Lands use those structures to nationalize daily life, to push national views of the world on nonelite parts of the population? They did so above all through language policy. The Provisional Municipal Law of 1849 and the Crownland municipal orders of the early 1860s said next to nothing about language use. As has already been noted, the second sentence of Article 19 of the General Rights of Citizens, from 1867, stated that “For all languages whose use is customary in a land, the state recognizes equality of rights in schools, government offices, and public life.” And “government offices” surely included municipalities. But for years, few laws or decrees converted the “recognizes” of Article 19 into actual protection, especially at the municipal level. National majorities in municipal governments—majorities that, to repeat, did not necessarily coincide with the linguistic majority of inhabitants—regularly discriminated against the language of their national rival. This Tocquevillian “tyranny of the majority” bears examination.
Some municipalities exploited their right of self-government to decide that they would conduct their business in only one language of the land—perhaps just in internal communications and deliberations, and perhaps in dealings with the public as well. Residents who knew only the other language had to find translators and interpreters at their own expense, even if some of the officials with whom they dealt were bilingual. Here, policy at the municipal level contrasted increasingly with that of the courts and of the political administration.Footnote 61
Municipal governments also used and abused their powers to promote Czech over German, or vice versa, in public schools. Responsible under the 1869 Imperial School Law for providing a free primary education to all resident children, they nonetheless refused, in some cases, to open a school that used the language of the weaker side and, in other cases, to fund such schools adequately. Encouraging parents in other ways as well to enroll their children in a “majority” school, municipalities engaged in what was decried by German leaders as “Czechization” and by Czech leaders as “Germanization.” The actual effect in town after town seems to have been nationalization in both directions.Footnote 62
Municipalities also practiced linguistic and thus national discrimination in public life more generally. A famous case, from the 1890s, was the decision by Prague's municipal council to make all street signs monolingually Czech and to declare the Czech names official proper nouns whose use was required even in the German language. Other municipal ordinances focused on the language used in inscriptions on gravestones.Footnote 63
This black-and-white, Czech-and-German description of dynamics, however, requires the folding in of some shades of grey. In the Bohemian Lands, the German language had long been used in public life and in education much more than the Czech language. Only gradually did that pattern come to be understood in ethnically national terms, as unequal and thus as unjust. In the 1860s and 1870s, the reluctance of a German-dominated municipal government to open a Czech-language school could still stem from a hostility not so much toward Czechs as toward the idea of compulsory formal education. Reluctant to open Czech-language schools, with all their costs and social implications, were some Czech-dominated municipal governments, too.Footnote 64 National parties began using town halls in aggressively national ways only some time after capturing them. And in the meantime, minority language rights and other limits on majoritarian rule at the municipal level were growing.
A pivotal source of language rights, Gerald Stourzh has shown, were Austria's high courts. In 1883, in a case concerning Budweis/Budějovice, the Administrative Court of Justice in Vienna, finding a violation of Article 19 of the General Rights of Citizens, overruled an attempt by the German majority of the municipal council to prevent members from speaking in Czech if they were capable of speaking in German. Subsequent decisions established the right of citizens to communicate in whichever language of the land they wished with municipal authorities and to be communicated with by those authorities in that language as well. Between 1884 and 1886, on the basis of Article 19 and of the Imperial School Law, the same court also constructed a right of parents to demand the opening of a minority school by a municipality, provided that resident, school-age children belonging to that minority averaged forty or more in number over five consecutive years.Footnote 65
A lesser source of language rights at the municipal level was new legislation. In 1873, a Bohemian law partitioned school boards at the local and district levels into Czech and German bodies. Municipal councils continued to appoint a substantial number of representatives to the boards, which set budgets that the municipality then had to fund. But the national majority on a municipal council now found itself constrained in its efforts to appoint disproportionately penny-pinching men as the overseers of minority schools by the stipulation that it could appoint only men who were “members of that nationality for which the school represented by the local school board is meant.” Czechs were to set the budget for Czech schools and Germans for German ones; budget disputes between the municipality and either local school board were to be decided by the district school board of the “nationality” in question.Footnote 66 Some municipal councils attempted to circumvent the spirit of the law by appointing “Czechs” who actually acted more like Germans, or vice versa. This tactic, in addition to fanning local national conflict, prompted the Administrative Court of Justice to develop a due process for determining national belonging.Footnote 67 After 1873, “minority” schooling in Bohemia expanded enormously.
In Moravia, a package of laws known as the Moravian Compromise of 1905 included a similar national partitioning of local school boards. It also contained a law “concerning the regulation of the use of both languages of the land within the autonomous administrative authorities.” Each municipal council, laid down Law 3 of the Moravian Compromise, could decide in which language(s) of the Crownland the municipality would officiate, conduct its internal affairs, and communicate with Crownland and imperial administrative authorities. A municipality that used only one language, however, had to accept written submissions in the other. As a rule, it had the right to have those submissions translated at Crownland expense and then to adjudicate them in its own language. Excluded, though, were the largest municipalities, as well as any of Moravia's municipalities in which 20 percent of residents were shown by the decennial census to use the other language. They were required, in all written and oral communication with any party, to use the party's language.Footnote 68 Legislation of the same sort was proposed more than once in Bohemia, but never won passage by the diet, in which national extremists kept gaining ground.
Limits on majoritarian rule in the field of municipal language policy also took softer forms. Imperial authorities leaned on municipal governments to refrain from discrimination by linking language policy unofficially to subsidies for all kinds of employment and construction. Perhaps most important, national underdogs did their best to pressure their opponents in town hall. Using the press, self-help organizations, the law, private ties, and discourses of national equality and justice, they achieved much, case-by-case and step-by-step, between the 1860s and World War I.Footnote 69
Municipal institutions were put to national uses in everyday life in nonlinguistic ways, too. National leaders in town hall hired clerks, police officers, inspectors, engineers, public health officials, janitors, and other workers on the basis of national loyalties. They discriminated in awarding charity, public contracts, and business licenses. As has already been mentioned, they froze municipal boundaries, so as not to incorporate newer districts whose residents tended to side with the other national movement. They used their leverage to support national causes both symbolically and financially, as well as to shape elections and censuses. Even in nationally homogeneous communities, they permitted particular public statues, named streets after particular people and places, and promoted the performance in municipal facilities of particular plays and music.Footnote 70
Conclusions
Municipalities served as an important ecological niche for the Czech and German national movements, as a setting in which they thrived. What distinguished the municipalities from other niches, such as civic associations, schools, the press, diets, and the Parliament? How did the municipal and the national affect one another, and what insight do their dynamics offer into Bohemian and Austrian politics more generally?
Redlich and Klabouch, the German and the Czech scholars with whom this essay began, agree that the Czech movement benefited more from municipal structures than did the German one. They point to the importance of municipalities as a school for Czech politics; many a Czech mayor went on to serve in one of the diets, in Parliament, or even in the imperial government. More broadly, they credit municipalities with contributing to the trend of Czech socioeconomic indicators catching up to German ones between 1848 and 1914.Footnote 71 Czech-dominated municipalities, whose demand for infrastructure and specialized services was just as insatiable as that of German-dominated ones, promoted the growth of non-German enterprise. They provided significant backing for Czech culture, including the fine arts and architecture. And whether Czech-dominated or not, all municipalities with Czech-speaking residents were required by law to participate in developing the primary tier of a modern Czech school system, roughly on par with its German counterpart.
Talk of Czech gains may seem to imply German losses, at least from national perspectives. Yet, German leaders probably embraced municipal self-government no less than did Czech ones. This was because of imperial Austria's nature as something other than a nation-state and of what Klabouch terms the undercurrent of “hostility toward the state” of local government. The Czech movement gained vis-à-vis the German movement, and both gained vis-à-vis the Habsburg state. Or to be more precise, their increasingly co-equal dominance of municipalities, the lowest branches of the imperial Austrian state, promoted its nationalization—in German and Czech senses simultaneously (not to mention Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, and Slovene ones). Contributing to this trend was the fact that the rules of the municipal political game favored national actors considerably, Habsburg actors to some degree, and others not at all. Municipal electoral orders, based on wealth and status, meant that Social Democrats, proponents of a politics of class, had almost no voice in town halls. Imperial Austria did not become a national state. But it became a multinational state and indeed a multinationalizing one, especially through its municipalities.Footnote 72
Although the undemocratic nature of the municipal franchise helped the national movements against popular Marxism, it hindered them from nationalizing the lower classes. Czech and German leaders waged many battles against each other for town hall. But they generally remained mindful of their middle-class commonalities and did not try overly hard to expand the electorate. To the extent that nationalization of the lower classes (and of Social Democracy) did occur, it was probably more in other niches. Questions of party politics and class aside, however, the national niche of municipal politics tended not to cultivate extremes. It lay somewhere near the middle of a continuum in terms of the ability of the national movements to shut out one another, as well as the higher reaches of the Habsburg state, and to cultivate at least an appearance of national self-determination.
National majorities, both German and Czech, turned out to profit from a structuring of municipal politics devised at the middle of the nineteenth century to serve not their interests, but those of a nonnational state. National minorities, also both German and Czech, turned out to benefit from limitations imposed on municipal self-government by that state, which discovered new legitimacy, but also new dangers, in becoming multinational. Such were the ironies and unintended consequences generated by the encounter of the municipal with the national in the Bohemian Lands of imperial Austria between 1848 and 1914.
