Prologue
What a beautiful day, Emil Franke may well have been thinking to himself as he hurried through the streets of Prague on a cool November morning in 1937.Footnote 1 If only that day he had not been confronted by an unpleasant member of parliament's interpellations! The representatives of the Sudeten German Party were going to be asking about the wages of German minority teachers and Karel Domín, the rector of Charles University, was planning to ask about Straka Academy.Footnote 2 Franke knew the situation in the academy very well—by the beginning of the 1920s, his Ministry of Supply had already occupied some of its rooms, and Domín shed some light on this situation. In his interpellation Domin described the state of the foundation as the most painful chapter in the existence of foundations in Czechoslovakia. He finished his speech by asking a question: “Are you, as Minister of Education, willing to arrange for both the foundation and academy to be returned and kept for our students as the founder of this foundation intended?”Footnote 3 As Franke very well knew, at that moment in time the academy had barely any students. It was basically useless, it served no purpose.
Introduction
When Count Jan Petr Straka, imperial privy councillor and chamberlain, drew up his last will and testament, dated 18 February 1710, he left his estate to several foundations that were created through this bequest: one was to provide scholarships to support two poor people to study at the Jesuit college attached to the Church of St. Bartholomew in Prague's Old Town; the second was to provide scholarships for two poor young women to attend the Convent of St. Ursula in Prague's New Town; the third was an endowment to support one poor person, ill and abandoned, to enter the Monastery of the Brothers Hospitalers at the Church of Simon and Jude in Prague's Old Town.Footnote 4 The last and largest bequest was intended for the establishment of an academy for “poor sons of the Bohemian nobility,” which he put forward with the words: “For the continued devotion of the Five Sacred Wounds of Christ Our Lord, upon which I throw my sinful soul and through which I hope to attain God's mercy.”Footnote 5
This article tells the more than two-hundred-year story of a foundation that was created as an exclusive educational academy in Prague. At first glance this might look like the story of one institution. Indeed, this study traces the twists and turns the foundation and its administration had to go though in order to fulfill its founder's wishes. But the objective of this study is in fact broader. Over the course of the foundation's existence the constitutional order of the Bohemian lands changed several times and, as a result, the role of the state and its reach into private philanthropic activities also changed repeatedly. In this light, the study aims first to identify the changing relationship between the state administration and philanthropic institutions in the Bohemian lands and second to identify the problems that this changing relationship was confronted with over time. The study seeks to prove the hypothesis that the expanding role of the state into the social sphere had a dampening effect on individual solidarity. To test this hypothesis, consideration is given not just to the activities of the state in the social sphere but also to its growing redistributive role. Through taxation and the expansion of the state's sphere of influence these factors affected the costs of donating. Key in this is a seemingly paradoxical question: Must modernization and economic development necessarily be bought at the very high cost of a loss of solidarity?
The study draws on primary research focused on two types of sources: the archives of Straka Academy and Land Office, which are now stored in the National Archive in Prague, and legislation adopted in the Czech lands during the period under observation relating to foundations.
How to Set Up a Foundation
The bequest for establishing the academy is described in §18 of Straka's will. The count specified the site for the academy; it was to be built on a piece of land on the Vltava riverside in Prague's New Town that he had purchased for this purpose. Alongside details about uniforms, meals, the subjects that were to be taught at the academy, and the daily rituals to be observed, Straka also laid out in his will the terms of admission for students and the terms for hiring teachers. Applicants had to be without property, members of the Bohemian nobility, Catholic, and have a good academic performance. Teachers had above all to be of good quality, ought to be selected from all over Europe, and were to be paid well enough for them to be able to resist any pressure to corrupt them from students and their families. The Archbishop of Prague was to oversee the academy, and any moral violations were to be dealt with in the Bohemian crownland Diet or, outside its sessions, by the royal governors.Footnote 6 The will also set out the duties of the students, which included praying regularly for the founder: “for me the founder and my kinsmen, both dead and alive, pray every day with the smallest genuflection five Our Fathers and as many Hail Marys to honor the five sacred wounds of Christ Our Lord.”Footnote 7 The basic assets of the foundation were to be formed by income from a property bequest through a fideicommissum, on the condition that the family line had died out and any living women in the Straka family would be supported for the five years thereafter.Footnote 8
Count Straka died on 28 September 1720, ten years after drawing up his will. Fifty-one years later, on 4 February 1771, Straka's last male descendent, Count Václav Adam Jiří Straka of Nedabylice, died and his death marked the end of the Straka family line. Five years after that, in 1776, the conditions were met for implementing Straka's plan to establish an educational institution. Straka respected the contemporary legislation, the social circumstances, and tradition relating to foundations as evidenced by the terms for establishing the academy, the dividing up of responsibilities within the academy and the foundation, and the structuring of the academy's internal operations.
In Straka's day, Bohemia was a constituent part of the Habsburg monarchy. The power of the Bohemian estates had been broken after the Battle of White Mountain (1618), but the institutions of the estates monarchy had continued to exist, even if in attenuated form. The Bohemian Court Chancellory maintained the memory of the unity and autonomy of the Lands of the Crown of St. Vaclav, but it was an instrument of centralized royal control, transferred to Vienna in 1624. Bohemian and Moravian aristocrats made successful careers serving the emperor, but the concrete distinctness of the Bohemian crownlands eroded. The main financial organ, the Bohemian Chamber, functioned directly under the Viennese Court Chamber rather than through the Bohemian Court Chancellery.Footnote 9 Both the monarchy and crownland administration intervened relatively little in laws about foundations. In reality, the only thing that required the emperor's consent was the creation of a fideicommissum for generating foundation assets and any testament will also had to fulfill the conditions for registration in the Bohemian Tables.Footnote 10 Everything else, including the area of the foundation's activity, its purpose, and the amount of the foundation's endowment, was left entirely to the discretion of the founder. This liberal European system resulted from the fact that the legislation governing foundations had been formed under the influence of both Roman law and canon law. According to Roman law, a foundation could refer to property or to an association of persons formed to fulfill a certain goal. The Codex Justinianus from the early sixth century was the first to treat foundations as legal persons.Footnote 11 This fact contributed to the development of a legal concept of religious foundations (pia causa), which involved property donated by a donor for a specific charitable purpose. Further advances in foundation law with respect to issues concerning the oversight and formation of foundations (wills that benefited foundations, for example, did not have to be drawn up according to any prescribed form), their purpose, and the generation of assets consequently moved into the field of canon law; for many centuries, with the exception of monarchs, the Church in Europe held almost a monopoly on any kind of charitable activity.
A foundation was understood to mean the allocation of income from some kind of property (which could be a piece of land or a building) for some specific defined purpose and for all the future. But a foundation could also mean a particular institution that was established in order to fulfill a defined purpose. This could be an institute established for the common good or one in support of specific persons (known as a study foundation or scholarship fund). In legal terms, no distinction was made between whether a foundation was simply a donation of money or some other gift or whether it was an institution.
Straka clearly took into account contemporary circumstances when he prepared his will. Long before Straka wrote his will, Rudolf, Lord of Teuffenbach in Mayerhofen, wrote a will, dated 24 July 1650, which contained similar provisions for establishing a school for the nobility and with no ties to any religious order. Straka demonstrated explicit knowledge of this will in his own will by including a provision stipulating that should Teuffenbach's school come into existence earlier (as an older and wealthier institution), the plan for a similar institution laid out in his will should be renounced and instead all his resources should go to the sick and the poor, men, women, and especially orphans, and to establishing two hospitals to care for the sick and the poor. And if Straka Academy were to be established first, it would assume some of the expenditures laid out in Teuffenbach's will, and the hospitals would be built from Teuffenbach's legacy. In the end, Straka Academy was established first.
Straka's actions must be situated within the context of the tradition of mutual assistance that existed in his day. The roots of that tradition lay not just in Christianity (as the sentence in the introduction of Straka's will suggests), but beyond that, in pre-Christian times, in Judaism and antiquity. It formed out of the Jewish concept of one's neighbor or fellow (guests also fell into this category) to whom one must show mercy, compassion, and the requirement of justice before God. It was also influenced by Aristotle's concept of ethics based on virtue as a natural human disposition that is cultivated through life in society.Footnote 12 Christianity actually served to undo this feeling for public life that had been cultivated in antiquity by turning man's attention away from society to focus on life within the narrow sphere of the family. At the same time it reproduced the Judaic love for one's neighbor and justice before God and added to them the requirement that one must strive for the salvation of one's soul; the intercession on behalf of the poor played a special role. The Renaissance rediscovered and enriched Christian love for one's neighbor with antiquity's concept of virtue and philanthropy, and humanism added the message about the need to work for the common good, bonum commune, an innovation introduced by the medieval Church fathers, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.Footnote 13
In Straka's time, almsgiving was the main form of charitable activity and from the fourth century was defined as one of the three ways, along with fasting and prayer, in which Christians could fulfill the obligations of Lent and prepare themselves for Easter, the most important holy day of the year.Footnote 14 Almsgiving was about helping those worse off than oneself, and was thus a way of practicing the principle of love for one's neighbor and thereby for God. Later it also became a way of providing help to pilgrims, inspired by the Judaic interpretation of guests as one's fellows. In medieval society, striving for the salvation of one's soul led to the rise of charity, which was an attempt to make this ad hoc form of assistance more systematic and effective. In addition to individual acts of compassion, which included remembering the poor in one's will or some other worthy cause, charitable gestures could also be made by providing organized care for the elderly, beggars, and disabled or abandoned children in the form of hospitals, convents, almshouses, and orphanages, which were initially established and funded by devout monarchs, church dignitaries, and religious orders, and later also by the nobility, burghers, town councils, and top state authorities.
Straka formulated the conditions for the administration of his foundations in conformity with contemporary customs: he divided up responsibility for administration of the foundation between the archbishopric, the Bohemian Diet, and the office of governors. Generally, this was not so much to ensure conformity with valid legislation but rather to ensure that the founder's intentions were fulfilled. Donors did not usually expect to have any further influence themselves or through their family members on their donation's administration. They entrusted its administration to an institution that had most in common with the function for which the foundation was established. At that time, the administrators of a foundation therefore tended to be local authorities, rectors of colleges, the archbishopric, and the Bohemian Diet. The founder, however, laid out the rules that the administration was required to follow on every issue, whether it concerned property or selecting which students to support.
Straka also followed contemporary tradition when it came to the choice of students and gave priority to members of his own family in all his foundations, except the one that was intended for establishing the academy. As noted above, the preconditions for benefiting from this foundation were poverty, nobility, Catholicism, and good study performance. Similar conditions can be found attached to other study foundations that were not large and whose purpose was to help just one or two students continue their studies. In some cases, conditions referred to the type of study or institution a student could participate in, in others there were conditions about the recipient's background, and sometimes the conditions related to study, such as meals. The oldest study foundation of this kind in Bohemia was the Anna Wunschler Study Foundation, founded on 26 October 1583 in Cheb, the purpose of which was to help poor students buy books.Footnote 15 By the end of the seventeenth century there were eight-five study foundations in Bohemia, sixty-two of which were seminaries, founded at various Jesuit or Piarist colleges, usually established by wealthy Catholic aristocratic Bohemian families.Footnote 16
As a result of this increase in the number of foundations being established and with the spread of the Enlightenment emphasis on education, over the course of the seventeenth century a distinction began to emerge between foundations operating in the field of education and the broad spectrum of other charitable foundations; the term “charitable foundation,” however, was still used as an umbrella term in Straka's era. It encompassed any kind of care for any individual with a social or health problem and of any age—or social status. It was not just about helping people without income and on the margins of society, but about helping those excluded from their own reference group. This could mean members of the nobility who had become poor, nuns and priests too old for service, gifted children, or just children related by blood to the founder. The first to distinguish themselves from these charitable foundations were religious foundations, which had links to religious institutions and supported the religious faith. The social sphere remained the field of activity foundations were most broadly engaged in and covered both social security and health care. From the late sixteenth century, educational foundations, established in support of education in the widest possible definition of the word, began to distinguish themselves from these two dominant fields. These foundations represented a means of enabling gifted individuals to study whose family circumstances prevented them from doing so. While the origins of educational foundations in the Bohemian lands can be traced back to the thirteenth century, when foundations began to be formed in support of religious education, in those early stages such foundations were always religious foundations. One of the first—rare—purely educational foundations was Charles University, established by Charles IV in 1348. For several centuries the educational foundations provided the basic financial resources for various colleges, seminaries, secondary schools, and elementary schools.Footnote 17 The foundation behind Straka Academy represented a combination of an educational and study foundation, on the one hand laying out a plan for the development of a unique educational institution and on the other stipulating the rules for supporting the students who would study there.
How to Bring a Foundation to Life
By 1776, when the conditions for executing Straka's will were met and income from the family fideicommissum could be directed into building an academy, the legal and administrative situation in the country was different from the time in which the will had been written: the principles and institutions of government had changed and the state had begun to intervene in the affairs of both foundations as well as education.
During Joseph I's reign (1705–11) there were some changes in how the central authorities approached the estates, including the creation in 1710 of a commission to revise the Renewed Land Ordinance for Bohemia. But it was under Maria Theresa (r. 1740–80) and her son Joseph II (r. 1780–90) that reforms were undertaken that have been called “enlightened absolutism.” These reforms increased the ties binding the Bohemian crownlands directly to Vienna and continuous efforts began to forge a unified, centralized, bureaucratically administered realm. In 1749 a major change in central administration abolished the Bohemian and Austrian court chancelleries, replacing them with two institutions common for both the Bohemian crownlands and the Austrian provinces. Administration and financial matters were linked in the United Bohemian and Austrian Court Chancellery, and judicial matters were placed under the Supreme Court.Footnote 18 In a rescript dated 22 June 1763, the royal governors and chamber in Bohemia were replaced by a Gubernium, authorities operating as offices of the crown headed by the highest burgraves in the land (for Bohemia and Moravia).Footnote 19
In 1754, under the pressure of the monarchy's difficult financial situation after the Seven Years' War, Empress Maria Theresa called for the registration of all the foundations that existed within the empire; this registration included information on their administration, purpose, and property. In 1760 special rules were introduced on the form a foundation deed should take, and in 1762 Maria Theresa subordinated foundations to oversight by the monarchy. From then on, the accounts of foundations, along with a statement of current assets and financial records, had to be submitted for inspection, and, most significantly, every new foundation had to be registered and a certified copy of its foundation deed filed with the authorities. Two years later, a rule was introduced that newly established foundations had to deposit the foundation capital in ad fundos publicos (a public trust fund) as well as any real estate that was not profitable for the foundation. In 1776 a “foundation commission” was established made up of members of the Bohemian Gubernium and the Bohemian Tables Office and chaired by the highest burgrave.
From 1784, study foundations were subject to a decree requiring scholarships intended for specific persons to first be submitted to the Imperial Study Commission for inspection and then presented to the emperor for approval. At the same time a distinction between foundations for the poor and study foundations was established stipulating that study foundations could not serve as substitutes for support from charitable institutions.Footnote 20 When Emperor Joseph II abolished Jesuit colleges and seminaries in 1785, the financial support provided from the specific study foundations was paid directly to the students. This practice continued until the establishment of the Prague Seminary in 1803.Footnote 21 After 1786 foundations were required to transfer student scholarship obligations to the Gubernium and deposit them in the imperial treasury, from which students could then obtain their scholarships.
The first administrator of the property bequeathed in Straka's will, Count Josef Deym, was appointed in 1776, and from the outset had to deal with a number of disputes over responsibilities that arose as a result of these changes, many of which directly contradicted the wishes of Count Straka. These disputes related to the depositing of income from the fideicommissum, the foundation statute, and even the form of the academy as well as who would select the students. There was even a dispute over who exactly were the “governors” that Straka designated in his will as the overseers of the foundation's functions and whether members of the Gubernium were actually the legal successors to the royal governors of Straka's time. Representatives of the Bohemian estates maintained that they should select recipients and that the emperor should only be informed of the results. In the 1790s, however, the emperor strengthened his influence over the naming of new scholarship recipients when the foundation's funding fell into deficit.Footnote 22 In 1798 the court chancellery was called on to submit its proposed list of scholarship recipients directly to the emperor, who then decreased the number of recipients. Despite complaints from the estates the emperor had this procedure for awarding scholarships confirmed in 1801 in a decree issued by the Imperial Court.
A fundamental issue was the foundation's statute. In 1777 Empress Maria Theresa appointed Count Kašpar Heřman Kinigl to work on the wording of the foundation's statute and the form the academy was to take. In opposition to Count Straka's will, Kinigl not only made different proposals as to the clothing and housing of the students but also changed the number of students there were to be, the subjects that would studied, and the arrangements for teaching and student supervision. The most important change, however, was that he proposed merging the future academy (and before that its financial resources) with an existing foundation established by Emperor Ferdinand II in 1622.Footnote 23 Empress Maria Theresa then changed the color of the student uniforms he proposed and even suggested merging the academy with the existing St. Bartholomew's seminary.Footnote 24 With this, Straka's plan for an academy was transformed from a secular institution to a church one and from an institution for poor Bohemian noblemen to one intended for the nobility and townsmen and members of the Jesuit seminary. Above all, the Bohemian estates, whom the count had wished to have oversight over the academy, were entirely excluded from the decision-making process. They responded by writing a complaint in 1781, but after a decree was issued on 27 October 1783 abolishing the Bohemian Diet, not only was the issuing of the foundation deed postponed, but everything relating to the fate of the foundation, including financial issues, was transferred to the agenda of the Gubernium. The administration of property was transferred to the Council for the Administration of Imperial Property, and the administration of the foundation's economy was assigned to the Department of Imperial Foundation Accounts in Vienna.
In 1791 there arose a new wave of resistance from the Bohemian estates to interference from imperial administration in Bohemian affairs, including in Straka's bequest. This occurred in response to a proposal submitted to the renewed Bohemian Diet in October 1790 by the former president of the Council of State, Count František Antonín Kolowrat, to establish an educational institution for the nobility that would include students supported under existing foundations (including Straka's) but that would also be open to other applicants, domestic and foreign, for an annual fee of 450 gulden. It would provide accommodation, food, and an education in those subjects typically studied by the nobility, such as fencing, riding, French, and Italian, and also, of course, Czech. Representatives of the estates were opposed to this and pointed out that Straka's students would be fewer in number than he had wished for and the money would then flow into the “imperial purse.”Footnote 25 They therefore requested that responsibility for the administration of Straka's bequest be returned to the estates, first so that they could resume control over selecting whom to award scholarships, with the condition that they would annually submit a statement of accounts to the government, and second so that the process of establishing the academy could begin.
The Imperial Court insisted that the academy could only be established once sufficient funding had been collected, but it did return the administration of Straka's bequest to the Bohemian estates. It did so on condition that the estates not burden the fund with any administrative expenditures and that they annually submit a statement of accounts and a list of scholarship recipients. In 1792 administration of all of Straka's property was transferred from the Council for the Administration of Imperial Property to the Bohemian Diet. Fifteen years later, in 1807, however, an imperial decree was issued for the purpose of establishing a student seminary out of an endowment from Archduchess Maria Anna, Ferdinand I's wife; and the foundations of Ferdinand and Straka were to be incorporated into this seminary. The estates came out against this again, with the reminder that Straka's foundation was intended solely for young nobleman, while the seminary was also for the wealthy urban class, and that while the students were, like those of the envisioned seminary, supposed to study scholarly subjects, they were also supposed to devote themselves to fencing, riding, and languages. Despite these objections the emperor confirmed the plan to establish the seminary, which was to take place in 1826.
In the meantime, however, the estates worked on creating their own foundation deed for the academy; Joseph, a Freiherr from Bretfeld, was put in charge of this in 1808. In September 1810, he submitted a plan to the Bohemian Committee, which envisioned both the foundation and the planned academy remaining, in conformity with the wishes Straka expressed in his will, in the control of representatives of the estates, who were then to submit their reports to top imperial officials in Vienna for auditing.Footnote 26 In 1811 this proposal was sent to Vienna for approval. The emperor imposed only a few changes on the estates' plan. The form of the foundation deed that was issued was consistent with contemporary practice: the foundation deed was issued and presented to Emperor Francis I (r. 1792–1835), instead of the estates, and it reproduced much of Straka's original will. The estates retained the right to nominate scholarship recipients, but they would be named by the emperor. The merger with the seminary would take place, but only until such time as a separate academy could be established, and the students supported by Straka's foundation would be provided with additional courses in languages and physical exercise. A more than two-month period in 1813 was reserved for commenting on the proposal. The estates made just one comment, which had to do with the foundation capital (the estates set a higher sum for it). The foundation deed was signed by Emperor Francis I on 3 February 1814.
By that time the Civil Code, announced in a letter patent (No. 949 Coll.) by Emperor Francis I on 1 July 1811, had already come into effect on 1 January 1812. It dealt with foundations in its second section, “On the Right to Things” (§ 646), laying out the basic regulations relating to foundations that applied until the 1950s. The code defined a foundation as income from money, land, or rights that was from then on to be donated to “institutions of public benefit, such as religious prebends, schools, hospitals, houses for the poor, or to certain persons for their subsistence.” The code left some details to be dealt with in other legislative measures, thereby opening the way for an extraordinary increase in such legislation. Dozens of rules were formulated on top of the Civil Code relating to specific types of foundations and concrete municipalities.
In Bohemia, in particular, the fiscal management of municipalities and foundations and funds established by municipalities or ones to which they contributed rested on a broad range of legislation. There were rules governing every transaction involving the foundation's principal funds, inheritance, and administration. There also were another couple of dozen laws relating specifically to study foundations and these involved rules about awarding scholarships, their use, changes to them, and their payment. Some regulations were aimed at the parents of scholarship students, others at the schools that admitted them, or they dealt with privileges such students had in relation to compulsory military service.Footnote 27 In the first half of the nineteenth century, however, in addition to legislative changes certain events took place that altered the financial circumstances of foundations. First, in 1811, the state went bankrupt and the monetary assets of foundations suffered a dramatic devaluation.Footnote 28 Second, as a result of the revolutions in 1848, the following year a law was adopted abolishing robota and disburdening the land, which served to diminish any income in kind foundations had enjoyed, since land was the main source of foundation property at that time.Footnote 29
Legislation on foundations eventually stabilized; foundations were subject to oversight, dozens of rules and regulations, and authorization from the state: either from a political land authority or from the Imperial Foundation Office, to which a donation was bequeathed in a will. The Imperial Foundation Office was also the body that issued approval of the foundation deed, which had to include a word-for-word version of the donation deed, and information on how the foundation capital was deposited, the principles of the foundation's administration, and how the resources were to be distributed. The bodies of a foundation could take the form of physical or legal persons, and if they were not explicitly identified in the donation deed, they were determined by the Imperial Foundation Office. It gave priority to legal persons because, by their nature, they bore witness to the foundation's continuity (municipalities, districts, land authorities, ministries, institutions). A foundation could only be dissolved if its capital was lost, it no longer had a purpose, or there were no longer any recipients of its support. In the latter case, this led to a permutation in the foundation, where the foundation capital was passed to another foundation with a similar purpose. The power to make this decision lay with the relevant ministry: in the case of student foundations that meant the Ministry of Education. The capital of any foundations that were dissolved became the property of the state.Footnote 30
In 1851 discussions began on the new foundation deed for the Straka foundation, which the Gubernium had already drawn up in 1839. In the aftermath of the revolutionary changes in 1848, the seminary was dissolved because it was not considered feasible for students of law or philosophy to live in the same system as theology students. The Bohemian Committee agreed with this view. Because the practice of scholarship payments was renewed, current students supported by Straka's foundation were to complete their studies with the assistance of scholarships that were paid in cash to them through their parents or persons authorized to act on their behalf. The Bohemian Committee, which was supposed to discuss the new proposal, did not do so, and justified the delay as owing to political changes that resulted in the Bohemian Committee relinquishing this authority to the next Crown Diet, and to the fact that the changes to the foundation practices were such that the scholarship system would have ceased entirely. Consequently, historian František Palacký and the legal representative of the estates, Dr. Karel Helminger, were asked to make use of all the earlier documents and draw up a detailed expert opinion on the Straka Academy. By 1861 they had still been unable to obtain all the relevant materials, including the new version of the foundation deed from 1839.
In 1851, in connection with the dissolution of the seminary, the discussion was renewed about establishing the academy in conformity with the plan laid out in Straka's will. The accounts office of the estates and the estates' legal representative were asked to comment on the plan. The accounts office came out against establishing the academy because it deemed the size of the fund to be insufficient for fulfilling its purpose at that time, and the purchase of a building for the academy would decrease the income from the capital, which would put Straka's other foundations at risk. The legal opinion, by contrast, insisted on fulfilling the founder's will. The Bohemian Committee concluded that there were insufficient funds for creating the academy and instead proposed creating a special fund for the building's construction. In this way, the academy would exist in conformity with Count Straka's will, but the existing practice of “awarding monetary scholarship,” which eluded control, would be eliminated.Footnote 31 The conclusions reached in this inquiry were not acted on until 1867, when the Bohemian Committee informed the Gubernium of its intention, starting in 1868, to always leave one half of the income from the foundation capital to form the basis of a fund for the construction of the academy building. The Gubernium agreed to this, but the issue of the foundation deed was reopened. The Bohemian Committee therefore asked the archivist and historian, Prof. Dr. Antonín Gindely, to formulate a new expert opinion.
Gindely submitted his document in May of the same year, and in it he focused on three issues: which persons were to be authorized to use the scholarship, the management of the foundation, and its oversight. According to Gindely, the royal governors in the Kingdom of Bohemia (to whom Straka referred in his will as the intended administrators of his academy) should be taken as the highest Bohemian officials, which even in Straka's time would have had to be members of the Bohemian nobility. In Gindely's opinion, the Bohemian Committee, at least some of whose members would conform to Straka's intentions, would be legally consistent with royal representatives. In an analogical form of reasoning, Gindely concluded that oversight over the foundation should lie with the Bohemian Diet as the successor to the earlier Crown Diets—regardless of the fact that their composition differed. The issue of the scholarship students was more complicated, most notably with respect to the matter of their Czech nationality. Gindely inferred that this term could not be interpreted as nationality in linguistic terms, “as until 1710 no distinction was made between members of the nobility by nationality, even though members of the nobility were not able in that period to speak Czech.”Footnote 32 Therefore, Czech nationality had to be interpreted in political terms and would include applicants whose parents and grandparents had spent “the greater portion of their lives in Bohemia,” or obtained a noble title by means of Inkolat conferred by the emperor. And because the last Inkolat had been conferred in 1847, this was a closed group that would not grow any further. The estates agreed with Gindely and in 1869 they drew up a new foundation deed and submitted it to the emperor for approval in April 1870.
In 1876 the Bohemian Diet began discussions on establishing the academy. However, much had changed in the 150 years that had passed since Straka wrote his will, not just in a legislative and institutional sense, but also with respect to education and foundations. While the first two factors form the frame within which every foundation functions, the second two define the arena in which the competing interests of private and public subjects compete in the field of education.Footnote 33 First, the future academy was confronted with a surge of foundation activity. There was an increase in the variety of fields foundations were engaged in, their functions and founders, and in the sheer number of foundations. While in 1787 there were 178 study foundations in Bohemia, a century later, in 1891, there were 933. In the nineteenth century, Bohemia had the largest number of study foundations of all the lands of the monarchy.Footnote 34 Philanthropy was no longer just in the hands of the church, the monarch, or the wealthy nobility. Over the course of the nineteenth century, foundations were also established by members of the business class and by various associations.Footnote 35 These two groups widened the spectrum of founders of foundations to include entrepreneurs, shareholders, small business owners, pub owners, and even reformed criminals, and ad hoc “committees.”
Foundations were also no longer just formed to reflect the principle of “love thy neighbor.” As society's perception of philanthropy changed, new motives for establishing foundations emerged. The Enlightenment invested foundation activities with a new mission, the need to work for the general good, and a general belief in progress and the importance of popular education. With the advent of economic development and the industrial revolution, philanthropy came to form a part of the status of the new bourgeois class. While in Straka's era “philanthropist” and “philanthropy” were rarely used terms and were always employed in reference to the Christian concept of compassion and charity, in the second half of the nineteenth century these terms came to signify more general efforts to improve the material and moral lot of humanity. Philanthropy was no longer an all-consuming feeling and instead became an activity guided by high-minded human motives and pursued for the benefit of persons in need: the ill, the poor, and the socially excluded. In the contemporary Rieger's Encyclopedia, the word philanthropy is defined as working for the welfare of all humanity out of a belief in human dignity.Footnote 36 As well as efforts to right the wrongs of the world, however, a donor's motivations could also include an attempt to protect his property beyond the grave. Although there was no administrative fee for applying to establish a foundation, there was a tax attached to the transfer of property and for inheritance, and founders were looking for ways to avoid paying taxes. For instance, the state offered tax relief to a foundation if the founder named it after the ruling emperor, so in the late nineteenth-century wigmakers and barbers, restaurant and pub owners, harpists, brokers, and public officials set up Jubilee foundations named for the emperor and king Francis Joseph I.Footnote 37
Second, the future academy also faced competition from an existing network of public schools and educational institutions. While compulsory school attendance had been introduced a century earlier, the state was now asserting its ideas about education not only through school curricula and student assessments but also by means of funding for education.Footnote 38 The monarchy created new sources of income from new taxes that were used to subsidize its educational funds, which were then used to finance its goals in the field of education. State budgets began to evolve into their modern-day form around the turn of the twentieth century, but at that time they were still conceived of as a kind of monetary fund, on top of which there emerged over time what were known as “targeted funds.” The most important of these funds tied in with the reforms introduced by Maria Theresa and Joseph II, when, for the first time, the state set itself a list of tasks and put together special funds to finance them. Funds for education were among the first to be established, along with funds for hospitals, maternity hospitals, orphanages, mental hospitals, and prisons.Footnote 39
The changes described above led to increased competition among educational institutions, so the Bohemian Diet came to the opinion that it would be enough to fulfill Straka's will if scholarship students were to attend these public institutions. The Bohemian Committee therefore proposed using resources from the reserve construction fund to build a training facility for riding, fencing, and physical exercise, which were not offered at the public institutions. This altered version of the academy was granted imperial approval in 1877.
But by 1880 the Bohemian Diet had reopened the question of what would be taught at the academy. A committee headed by Dr. Julius Grégr proposed that, on completion of the construction of the training facility, the surplus funds would be used to expand the academy's functions to include courses in the disciplines that were not taught at public schools. In 1883 this led again to a reassessment of what the academy's function should be. A new statute, with a vision of the academy as a complex educational institution, was suggested, with references to other countries where such institutions enjoyed great popularity and served as competition to public institutions financed by the government.Footnote 40 The Bohemian Committee presented its proposals in October 1884. The picture of the academy they put forth essentially corresponded to what the academy was like during its existence. It proposed three categories of students: students with a full scholarship, students with a partial scholarship, and tuition-paying students. In addition, students supported by “external” scholarships could still be admitted, but only in exceptional cases, and with a maximum number of ten such students per academic year. The Bohemian Diet almost immediately passed a resolution on establishing Straka Academy and submitted it for approval. On 2 April 1885 Emperor Francis Joseph I approved the resolution.Footnote 41
In the course of the subsequent preparation of the academy's organizational statute, another in a long series of disputes over decision-making powers broke out between the government in Vienna and the Bohemian Diet in Prague. The Vienna Ministry of Culture and Schooling assigned the Bohemian Gubernium and the Imperial Foundation Office the responsibility for preparing the statute. The Bohemian Committee objected, so a committee was set up comprised of representatives of the Gubernium and the Bohemian Diet. But even on the floor of this committee the disputes over decision-making powers did not subside. The biggest disputes were again waged over who the “governors” in Straka's will referred to, what their duties were, and who was eligible to be a student. The Bohemian Diet insisted on “Czech nationality,” based on the imperial Inkolat, and submitted a list of 1,000 eligible Bohemian families drawn up by Dr. Gindely. The protest was successful and in 1888 the academy statute was approved by both the Bohemian Diet and the Ministry of Culture and Schooling and on 25 September 1889 also by Emperor Francis Joseph I.
The academy building was constructed between 1892 and 1896, based on the winning design by architect Václav Roštlapil.Footnote 42 The foundation's reserve fund covered the total cost of construction. The doors of Straka Academy opened to its first students in the 1896–97 academic year—186 years after the death of Count Straka.
How to Keep a Foundation Alive
When the building of Straka Academy opened to great fanfare on 21 March 1897, no one would have thought that this was not the start of the most glorious chapter in the academy's history but was instead the beginning of its final chapter. The academy building offered seventy young noblemen an extraordinary environment to learn in. In addition to study halls, classrooms, and bedrooms, it had a chapel, ceremonial hall, gymnasium, baths, hospital, garden with an outdoor gym, playing field, and swimming pool in the Vltava River. The costs of running the academy were covered from income generated by the foundation capital and by the fees paid by some of the students. The scholarships covered (all or half) of the costs connected with study at a public school (tuition, teaching aids, and books), the costs connected with study within the academy (language classes, physical exercise and swimming, fencing, riding, drawing, and singing), and the costs of meals, accommodation, services, and so on. The meals the academy offered were of a quality that matched the standards the nobility were used to: lunches and dinners were held in collective dining halls and only the best Austrian wine was served. Czech and German were used equally as the languages of instruction and in everyday communication. In addition to their studies, students were required to attend Mass daily, where they had to pray for the founder and recite the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary at least three times, and three times a year they had to take Holy Communion.
Count Straka's vision of an elite educational institution for the Czech nobility seemed to have been fulfilled. The academy also provided for secondary education, first at a German and Czech gymnasium in Malá Strana, and from the 1899–1900 academic year in its own German- and Czech language department. It also provided for technical education at public educational institutions, including universities, in order to instill the Christian-Catholic faith [in students] as a fundamental principle in life and thus cultivate in them a high-minded strength of character, a truthfulness, openness, and a masculine professional competence, and guide them towards a position of social status, good manners, the practice of adherence to the law, respect for authority and order, a patriotic right-mindedness, and true loyalty to the Catholic Church, to the Emperor and King, and to the homeland.”Footnote 43 Very soon, however, the academy entered a battle for survival, which unfolded against a backdrop of growing competition between educational institutions, the development of state social policy, World War I, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
The existence of public schools meant that state-supported schools in themselves were not a problem until the monarchy and lands began subjecting private foundations to certain social measures. As in most European countries at that time, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy began devoting attention in the late nineteenth century to legislation designed to protect workers (regulating the labor of women and young people) and provide insurance (accident, health, and unemployment insurance remained voluntary for the time being), but the biggest burden for Straka Academy was the introduction of retirement insurance for public and private white-collar workers in 1906.Footnote 44 Insurance appreciably increased the expenses of foundations running institutions established in the fields of education, health, or social welfare. Straka Academy quickly began to feel the pinch: the private gymnasium that had opened in the 1899–90 academic year gradually closed down after 1911, and the money drawn from the sale of the property and equipment went into the academy's new fund, which in 1928 was transferred to the academy's reserve fund. But, as we shall see below, the students never benefited from these resources.
The academy had been running for less than twenty years when World War I broke out. The war, of course, foremost affected the students and class prefects, who were called up to fight. Because there were fewer students than usual, the Bohemian Administrative Commission decided first that the academy empty beds and rooms—and then, in December 1914, the entire building—be made available to the Royal Bohemian Red Cross.Footnote 45 With the academy serving as a military hospital and some of the expenses being borne by the monarchy, the Bohemian Administrative Commission agreed to let university students be paid their usual scholarship. Throughout the time its building was used by the Red Cross, the academy was relieved of its obligations to pay a house tax, but it had to bear some of the costs linked to the hospital.Footnote 46 In the 1918–19 academic year the academy announced a competition to fill three full and several half scholarship positions.
It might seem that the establishment of Czechoslovakia as an independent state in 1918 would have had no substantial influence on the operations of private foundations. In the autumn of 1918, a “Continuity Act” (No. 11/1918 Coll.) was adopted, whereby all existing Bohemian and imperial laws and regulations were to remain in effect. By this act all legislation and regulations passed under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and applicable in the Bohemian lands and Slovakia became Czechoslovak laws and regulations, as long as they were in effect on 28 October 1918. In truth, there were very few amendments to legislation relating to foundations and the ones that were introduced affected only some new foundations, military foundations, the implementation of the Peace Treaty of Saint-Germain, and amendments to the conditions of foundations in Slovakia and Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. However, if we also consider the changes in the fields of social welfare, education, culture, and church affairs that were instituted by the new republic and that foundations were required to adhere to, the scope of the changes becomes much greater. A dramatic change to the world of foundations also becomes obvious when we take into account the laws that were introduced in connection with the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the ensuing changes in society: the abolition of noble titles, the introduction of acts on currency reform, land reform, and the nostrification policy. These processes affected the statutes and property of all foundations. Straka Academy was no exception.
The nostrification policy played a key role. The approach of the Czechoslovak administration to foundations was similar to the simultaneous process applied to enterprises: Many foundations may have had their administrative bodies or scholarship students in the newly established Czechoslovakia, but their foundation capital, in the form, for instance, of securities, was in Austria.Footnote 47 These issues, which were connected with the implementation of the Peace Treaty of Saint-Germain, were resolved through international negotiations, the outcome of which was an agreement that applied to civil foundations, 470 military foundations, and institutions of social assistance, and to the distribution of their property; church foundations were not subject to the terms of the peace treaty.Footnote 48 This international negotiated agreement bound both successor states to hand over to each other assets in their territory belonging to any kind of foundation, including family-based ones, that were located in the territory of the other successor state as long as those foundations had been founded within Austria-Hungary before 28 October 1918 and were not exclusively intended for persons who were citizens of their respective new states. The stumbling block was the issue of the property. Czechoslovakia did not want to recognize debts as part of the capital of foundations, while Austria insisted that even debts be assumed and calculated into the total sum of the settlements. While by 21 March 1927 Austria had transferred to Czechoslovakia deeds of all the foundations affected by this agreement, including their annuities, bankbooks, and securities, the Czechoslovak administration was slow to sort out the foundations in its territory.
In an effort to reach into foundations' internal affairs, the Czechoslovak administration intervened much more in their operations than it had before. Some steps the state administration took were simply arbitrary and affected the merging of foundations, the payment of scholarships, or even the amount of the overhead contribution paid from the foundation capital to the relevant land or municipal authority, or the form of the foundation's capital. The decision of one public official could alter the content of a foundation's statute and even intervene in such important issues as determining the conditions for awarding support or changing the name of a foundation. Moreover, the state did not act entirely consistently in this area: sometimes it accepted the founder's noble background and the property as family property, other times it did not and decided to use the income from foundation capital or the capital itself for some other purpose.Footnote 49
The lack of clarity in the legal context of foundations made their work difficult, but the land reform and monetary reform often made it impossible. These reforms frequently had the effect of fundamentally altering a foundation's financial base. Land reform affected foundations by causing a shuffling of land assets which in many cases were still the main source or at least an important part of the foundation capital.Footnote 50 The process of the confiscation of land from former owners and its distribution to the transferees proceeded sporadically and the land remained in the hands of the state for a substantial period of time; the result was ineffective management of the property, which for the foundations constituted a loss of the income that they depended on for the distribution of subsidies. Monetary reform, accompanied by a capital levy, had a similar effect, because property that formed the basis of the foundation capital was not relieved of the obligation of paying this progressive tax.Footnote 51
Another factor that had a significant effect on the financial difficulties of foundations was that both the Austro-Czechoslovak settlement concerning foundations and the financial rehabilitation and inventory of property for the purpose of the capital levy formed part of the agenda of the Bohemian Office as the highest authority dealing with foundations in the country, but the enormous number of foundation deeds that had to be processed by the Bohemian Office obviously created a heavy workload. A necessary consequence of all these factors was that the state administration had only a limited overview of not just the total current foundation capital in the country but even the number of foundations that existed in the territory of the new state. It was only in 1929 that the state attempted to resolve the situation definitively by setting up the Commission for Foundation Real Estate in the Czech Lands. At its first meeting, the commission stipulated that certain foundations had to have their property secured; these were foundations that owned a large amount of land and buildings on lucrative sites in the capital city. It is no surprise that Straka Academy was one of these foundations.
Straka Academy never returned to its original mode after the war. Contemporary commentators usually explain the academy's inactivity and decline as owing to the fact that, according to Count Straka's will, students were supposed to be nominated by the Office of Governors and approved by the emperor, neither of which existed anymore. Given that the foundation had already tackled similar problems in the preceding centuries and had always found a solution, the academy's decline was more likely due to the inability of the state administration to act, combined with some politicians' aspirations to find another function that the property of Straka Academy could be used for and thereby win some political capital. A new statute for the foundation was drawn up in 1920 but it was never approved.Footnote 52
Moreover, the Red Cross's occupation of the building during World War I proved to be just a prelude to what would follow later. By 15 November 1918 the building of Straka Academy had become a harbor for various state institutions, including the Bohemian Office, ministries, and commissions. Yet by May 1919, President T. G. Masaryk announced that the building should be freed up for students, and the Revolutionary National Assembly adopted a resolution to this end; in 1923 one part of the building was leased by Academic House.Footnote 53 In 1931, however, more than three-fifths of the building of Straka Academy was still occupied by non-student institutions and offices and used as private residential space. Various state and semi-state institutions vied with each other for space in the building without taking any interest in the opinion of Straka Academy. Over time the academy's property was destroyed and stolen. On top of that, the occupants did not pay for heating or water and did not even pay rent, nor were they willing to sign a lease with the academy. At the same time the foundation was accused of ineffective management inconsistent with the standards of the new republic and was the target of anti-German clichés. Straka Academy was trapped: Not only did the dilatory behavior of the state administration prevent the academy from being used for its original purpose and in accordance with the foundation's amended statute, but it also threatened the foundation's very existence. The academy was destroyed by the abolition of noble titles, the introduction of a new education policy, social legislation, and the abovementioned land reform.
The Act on the Abolition of Titles of the Nobility gradually deprived the foundation of students. During the 1921–22 academic year the academy still had thirteen scholarship students, two years later there were just seven, and in 1928–29 there was just one. The state's education policy also took students away, most notably by abolishing private schools and increasing investment in public schools. Over time all private educational initiatives were gradually forced out of the education sector. The academy's employee costs were increased by social legislation that added to the number of different types of insurance it had to pay. Land reform sequestered property that the foundation depended on for income. The foundation and the academy fell into a long state of debt and did not have the resources to pay for scholarships or wages. Yet at the start of 1919 it had been a wealthy foundation whose property encompassed the academy's building, located in the center of Prague; vast, mostly forest estates amounting to around 3,000 hectares; farm buildings; and securities. The 1935–36 academic year is the last one for which there are any records. At that time the academy had just one employee. When experienced minister Emil Franke went to face questions about the state of the academy from MP Karel Domín in 1937, as described in this article's prologue, the academy no longer actually had any students or employees.
Other foundations faced the same problems, and in almost every sector, including education. There were more than 10,000 foundations, but because they had very little foundation capital, which was reduced by land reform, monetary reform, and nostrification policy, they were (often) merged and redirected toward a different purpose. Some foundations were moreover put at an advantage by new legislation: donations to Masaryk's National Fund or toward establishing and increasing the foundation capital of the T. G. Masaryk Institute were freed from taxation. New foundations were founded expediently to take advantage of public subsidies.Footnote 54 Such foundations later often did very little or no work at all.
Nevertheless, the concept of solidarity and charity had slowly but dramatically transformed since the late nineteenth century. At the end of the nineteenth century, more than simply an expression of love for people and thereby for God, philanthropy had become a term full of the enthusiasm and desire to change the lives of others as philanthropists saw fit and in conformity with their ideas about what was right.Footnote 55 It was also, however, a means of obtaining resources from various funds and budgets. A pioneer in this area was Josef Hlávka, a non-noble representative of that class of society that laid claim to social prestige in the late nineteenth century by actively entering the field of philanthropy, which had previously been the domain of monarchs, the church, the nobility, or the urban wealthy classes. There were three new elements in Hlávka's strategy that came to assume increasing importance in the field of philanthropy in the ensuing decades. First, an essential part of his philanthropy was the publicizing of the work; donations to individual foundations were made public “at the right time.” Second, when creating such institutions as the Czech Academy and the National Economics Institute, Hlávka was already thinking about who would be members of the institutions he established; his circle of close friends and acquaintances grew to include people who might prove useful. Third, Hlávka understood that the Bohemian Lands did not yet have an abundant number of new wealthy philanthropists and the nobility was running out of steam, and in those circumstances there was no getting by without the help of the state; every large philanthropic undertaking needed the state, its financial resources, and the future security it had to offer.Footnote 56 His strategy intersected with the efforts of the state to take a more active role in work that had previously been the domain of the private sector, mainly in education and social work.
These changes began to be fully apparent after World War I. Until that time charitable activities occurred randomly, as though in response to a sudden “stirring of the emotions.”Footnote 57 They lacked any system or order and tended to focus on individuals; but after World War I institutions appeared on the scene that focused on entire groups in society and were founded in law.Footnote 58 Instead of charity being provided by people with a disposition to help others and a sense of solidarity, whether for religious, humanitarian, or other “ambitious” reasons, their place was taken by state employees, who were working in areas in which they often had no particular knowledge. Hand in hand with these changes, opinions on the nature and scope of the state's role were transformed: the state nationalized schools, introduced compulsory insurance, established state hospital trusts, and even the many newly established charitable organizations were intended to support the public sector. All this shows how in the First Republic the concept of philanthropy shifted from a notion of an independent, individual, private initiative to an activity to supplement the work of the state or work in support of the state itself. It was in this way and at that early date—and not after 1948, as is usually claimed—that the state began, perhaps unconsciously, to work on systematically forcing private institutions out of the sphere of mutual solidarity.
The destruction of foundations in Czechoslovak territory was brought to completion by the Nazi occupation. From a legal perspective, the only addition to the legislation contained in the Collection of Laws and Regulations and in the Protectorate Codes after March 1939 was the legal code of the Third Reich. But from a practical perspective, the property of foundations and the foundations themselves were located in confiscated territory. The Office of the Permanent Representative of the Commissar of Public Order was established in Prague, one purpose of which was to dissolve all associations and confiscate the property of foundations, which between 1939 and 1941 was deposited first in two Czech and two German banks, and then distributed to various German organizations and foundations.Footnote 59 In 1941 Czech associations and foundations were abolished and all or part of their capital was confiscated and transferred to the Bank der Deutschen Arbeit in Prague and then to central foundations in Prague and Brno as well as Hradec Králové and some local foundations as well as to the foundations of Heydrich, Lažanský, and Hácha.Footnote 60
After World War II the assets of foundations and funds were deposited in the Land Bank. Despite repeated calls for applications to be filed for the return of confiscated property, only 1,565 administrative bodies for 6,263 foundations were submitted by the end of 1949.Footnote 61 However, even their applications could not be accommodated because not all the confiscated assets could be traced. Even in this situation, some foundation administrations requested the return of financial resources and securities that did not belong to them. By contrast, in the aftermath of the occupation and the Holocaust some administrations no longer existed and others were unable to find the necessary materials with which to seek compensation.
The period after World War II was too short. The constitution of 9 May 1948 instituted changes in the legal code; by then the changes to the political and economic system had already taken place.Footnote 62 In 1952, following a government resolution, any foundation capital that had been located was nationalized. A year earlier the activities of volunteer associations had been declared hollow, self-serving, and a relic of bourgeois society; the Act on Voluntary Organizations and Assemblies (Act No. 68/1951 Coll.) of 12 July 1951 transferred the center of associational activities to mass organizations controlled by the Communist Party.Footnote 63 Those organizations, however, consisted of only a narrow spectrum of activities and had also lost their philanthropic and charitable aspect; the biggest “philanthropist” came to be the state. Foundations disappeared from the legal lexicon, from the eyes of the public, and ultimately from historical memory.
Conclusion
This article sought to tell the story of an institution, of Count Straka's foundation, and of the exclusive educational institution for the poor sons of the nobility that was built from his bequest. The first students entered the academy in 1896, 186 years after the death of Count Straka; the last student was admitted in the 1928–29 academic year, just 32 years later. The study traced the twists and turns that the foundation had to go through to fulfill the wishes of its founder, and looked at the factors that had the effect of altering the outcome of the founder's wishes and ultimately led to the foundation's (as well as the academy's) demise. The study thereby also addressed the question of how the relationship between the state and foundations changed over time, what problems foundations faced, and how the perception of human assistance and solidarity in society also transformed. Through the example of Straka Academy the study proves the initial hypothesis that the state's expanding role in the sphere of social welfare and its redistributive function have had a constraining effect on individual solidarity.
In the early eighteenth century, all that was required to set up a foundation was a love of God and “thy neighbor,” a respect for tradition, and trust in the prevailing social order, along with any small amount of property. Over the course of several decades, the ideas of the enlightened monarch about what was right in the framework of consolidating central state power began to alter the objectives of donors and even what Count Straka had envisioned in his will. Many aspects of his vision therefore could no longer be brought to life: The institutions he had entrusted with upholding his last will no longer existed or had changed and new institutions had emerged in their place. Constraints were placed on the freedom the foundation's administration had in deciding how to use its financial resources, and the state, through the person of the emperor, determined who would be the recipients of the foundation's support. It proved impossible to build the academy itself in precise conformity with Straka's wishes, as the state intervened in a number of ways, determining who the students were to be and how many, their housing, and, among other things, even the color of the students' uniforms.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, industrialization, a new concern with civil rights, the emergence of various associations in civil society, and the growing influence of secular authorities led to more dynamic institutional changes in the foundation sector, which opened up to new groups of donors, and new fields of activity and objectives of assistance began focusing on new subjects. Changes in the economy, in land ownership, and in society as a result of the Revolution of 1848 transformed the capital base of foundations. Legislation was introduced that required foundations to observe the provisions of the new civil code and dozens of special new laws were enacted regulating not just the foundation sector but also various specific areas of social life. These new social and economic realities primarily affected the sectors of education and social welfare. When the conditions were finally met for establishing Straka Academy in the late nineteenth century, the foundation had to accept these social and economic realities and abandon the donor's other wishes. They did not even grant him the five Our Fathers he had asked for!
Alongside institutional changes, there also occurred a shift in the perception of what solidarity means. Instead of an expression of an individual's love for others manifested through the donor's ideas about what was right, philanthropy began to connect itself more to the humble circumstances of those receiving the assistance. In one key area of charitable activity, namely poverty, there was a shift in the perception of what helping the poor was about from being seen as an act of compassion to a view of the poor as victims of their own failure and a definition of the poor as recipients of state support.Footnote 64 The close link between the donor and the beneficiaries began to break down when the first voluntary associations emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, still further when the state became involved in philanthropic work by addressing social issues through legislation, and when philanthropic activity began to serve as a vehicle of social prestige for the new economic elites.Footnote 65 Economic factors and the attempt to safeguard personal property through foundations moved into the foreground. This was accompanied by efforts (on the part of the new philanthropists) to take a part in the state's redistribution processes. For many founders, involving the state in their philanthropic efforts was motivated by the sad experience that long-term legacies, like Straka's, had a hard time meeting their objectives. It did not occur to them yet that the state could nationalize, merge, or change the purpose of foundations.
Such changes occurred in interwar Czechoslovakia, when the social reform process was gaining strength across Europe. Foundations in Czechoslovakia were affected by key institutional-economic processes in the twentieth century: the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, so-called nostrification, the introduction of capital levy, and land reform. Foundations were only rarely able to withstand this concentration of new pressures. When titles of the nobility were abolished, many of the foundations lost their ties to the founders; the introduction of nostrification and land and monetary reforms deprived them of their sources of income. Those who had been the recipients of support from foundations up to that time lost their source of social assistance. Foundations were divided up between Austria and Czechoslovakia and some of them, specifically those with few assets, were merged. The statutes and purposes of foundations and the recipients of their support were altered and changes were imposed on how foundations deposited, invested, and used their capital and income. Never before had the state interfered so deeply in the internal operations of foundations. The state's new social legislation also made the work of foundations more difficult and in some cases led to their demise. At the end of the interwar period foundations in the Czech lands underwent a decline in two ways: the loss of foundation capital and the demise of the model of foundation life that had been passed down over the centuries.
The First Republic completed the process of transforming the perception of philanthropy, which moved away from independent private initiatives toward being a supplementary function of the state and an activity in support of the state. The state began to squeeze out private forms of philanthropy (the volume of resources available does not change regardless of who distributes them), without itself being able to offer an effective and efficient system of social responsibility. This was made most apparent by the crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Foundations began to be deemed relics of the past and discriminatory tools of charity. Philanthropy ceased to serve as a vehicle of personal identity, as the main role in the philanthropic field began to be played by the state and it became the biggest “philanthropist,” bestowing resources on its citizens that it had first collected from them. And the state did not have to discover new areas of assistance on its own; the social institutions it supported and that developed show that the state simply adopted the ones that private citizens and institutions had identified in the preceding centuries.
Despite the various intervening factors, even at that time no one would have questioned the fact that Count Straka's bequest was behind the establishment of Straka Academy; the foundation created to establish the academy was supported by income from his property, which was also used to build the academy itself. Within several years, however, the Nazi occupation and confiscation of the property of Czech foundations also changed this situation. The nationalization of property after 1945 and the Communist seizure of power in 1948 marked the formal end of the once diverse world of foundations.
These were processes that Count Straka could not have envisaged. He based his will on the conditions that were common in his lifetime and on a tradition that stretched back centuries. Foundations had been an essential part of the social and cultural environment of both European and Bohemian society since the Middle Ages and had always been one of the basic ways of expressing and practicing the idea of human solidarity. Charitable activities were not just about giving; they represented a way of a certain perception of the world in which one lives.
Epilogue
It was only after 1989 that space reopened for the emergence of foundations in the Czech Republic. Around 5,000 of them were established within just several years, in most cases without any capital or charitable purpose. Many just took advantage of the taxation status of nonprofits or were used to launder money. Only 250 of them were able to satisfy the requirements for foundations instituted in a special act on foundations introduced in 1998. The building of what was once Straka Academy is now the seat of the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic.
