6

‘Still Croatia Has Not Fallen’

Na noge se dižte!     Get up from your knees!

Ma u ruke sada!     Sword now in your hands!

Tudjinstvo nek padne,    May the foreigners fall,

Slavjanstvo nek vlada!    And Slavdom rule!

Kukuljevi, ‘Slavjanke’1

The prosperous torpor into which Slavonia sank in the eighteenth century and the wretched torpor into which Dalmatia sank at the same time were ended by the whirlwind of reform unleashed by the Emperor Joseph II, and by the subsequent impact of the French Revolution. The programme of reforms of the Habsburg Emperor centred on curtailing the privileged position of the Catholic Church, allowing Protestants freedom of worship, abolishing feudalism, introducing a more equitable system of taxation and promoting German as the lingua franca throughout the empire. The reforms caused uproar in Hungary and Bohemia and aroused the indignation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the nobles everywhere.

The reforms predated Joseph’s coronation, as he had been co-ruler of the empire since 1765; it was under his influence that the Jesuit order had been dissolved throughout the empire and the Jesuit school in Zagreb converted into an academy. But the storm broke only after his mother’s death in 1780. In 1785, in one swoop, Croatia was virtually abolished. Zagreb found itself part of a new unit of local government based in Zala, in Hungary, while eastern Slavonia was merged into a region centred on Pecs, also in Hungary. The post of ban was rendered virtually redundant. The Croat nobles and the bishops were astonished. Maria Theresa had tinkered with centralisation through the Croatian Royal Council and its subsequent absorption into the Hungarian Royal Chancellery. But that was nothing compared to this avalanche. The equilibrium of centuries was upset, and in their panic the outraged Croats threw in their lot with the more powerful conservative force of the Hungarian nobility. In a landmark act in 1790 the Sabor surrendered most of its prerogatives to the Hungarian parliament. Henceforth, its jurisdiction was confined to justice and education while all other legislation was entrusted to the joint parliament in Pressburg (Poszony in Hungarian, Bratislava in Slovak), in which Croats had only a few seats. Moreover, the Sabor could now only meet at the same time as the joint parliament. The Croats had decided in haste. They repented at leisure. After 1790 they found that they had made themselves hostages to the rising force of Hungarian nationalism.

The timid and conservative nobles and bishops might have borne with this state of affairs had Hungary remained a conservative force seeking only the restoration of the status quo ante. Instead, the Hungarians tried to Hungarianise Croatia, by enforcing the use of the Hungarian language and incorporating Slavonia into Hungary proper.

Joseph’s premature death in 1790 ended the programme of radical reforms. But the ferment had scarcely died down before the outbreak of the French Revolution. The turmoil in Paris had little echo in rural Croatia. But in Zagreb and Dubrovnik the local bourgeoisie was soon excited by the events in France, especially when the Croats were called on to fight the French and small cells of Jacobins made themselves evident. One of the channels of subversion in Croatia was the freemasons’ lodge. These spread into Croatia partly as a consequence of the Seven Years’ War, during which a number of Croat officers found themselves imprisoned in the fortress of Magdeburg with French officers who were certainly freemasons. ‘There seems no doubt that the Croatian officers learned the secrets of the craft from their French colleagues, so that on their return to their native land they established lodges of their own.’2

When they returned to Croatia these officers found an enthusiastic patron in Count Ivan Draškovi, who founded lodges in the 1760s and 1770s in Zagreb, Glina, Varaždin and Križevci. A lodge was later founded at Otoac, in Lika. It was significant that several of these lodges obviously existed for the exclusive benefit of officers serving in the Krajina. It is the only explanation for the foundation of a lodge in a town like Otoac, then a village without even a school. Glina was the headquarters of the 1st Frontier Regiment. These lodges may not have been hotbeds of revolutionary Jacobin thinking, but they did play an important role in disseminating anti-clerical and rationalist ideas among the lesser nobility and the army officers. Certainly that was the opinion of the reactionary Emperor Francis I (1792–1835), under whom all secret societies were forbidden in 1798.

In 1794 the first Jacobin agitators surfaced in Zagreb, erecting a ‘tree of liberty’ in the middle of the city like the ones to be found in most French towns in the 1790s. It was hung with a placard bearing a long revolutionary poem which started ‘Zakaj išli bi Hrvati prot Franzuzu vojevati?’,³ meaning ‘Why should Croats make war upon the French?’ The author of this forty-verse hymn to the French Revolution was never discovered. However, it is most likely he belonged to the circle of Hungarian and Croat Jacobins led by Ignjat Martinovi, a Franciscan friar from Vojvodina,4 who was executed in Buda in 1795 for plotting a republican uprising in Hungary.⁵ Francis I was horrified to discover this evidence of treason in the quiet backwater of Croatia. The finger of suspicion even touched the Bishop of Zagreb, Maksimilijan Vrhovac. Although by virtue of his office he sat at the apex of the ancient feudal hierarchy, he was an enlightened and progressive cleric. A child of the Romantic movement, he encouraged his clergy to record the folk sayings and oral lore of the peasants in his diocese. Most of all he was determined to promote the use of a standardised literary Slav language, which, in the spirit of the Dalmatian writers of the Renaissance era, such as Bartol Kaši,⁶ he thought ought to be called ‘Illyrian’ rather than just Croatian.⁷ After Martinovi was arrested in December 1794 he incriminated the Bishop by suggesting he might have written the revolutionary poem that had been hung from the ‘tree of liberty’. In the climate of reactionary hysteria the Bishop’s enthusiasm for Slavic studies and his patronage of the Illyrian movement rendered him suspicious in the eyes of the authorities.

The scene then shifted to Dalmatia. In 1796 and 1797 large numbers of Croatian soldiers from the Frontier had been employed in fighting the French in Italy. The war ended in failure for Austria, and on 18 April 1797 Napoleon and Francis agreed to exchange Habsburg-ruled Lombardy, which the French had seized, for Venice’s possessions in Dalmatia. In May the French took Venice, while on 5 July a Habsburg Croat general, Juraj Rukavina, entered the city of Zadar. In October, the transfer of Dalmatia to Austria was confirmed in the Treaty of Campo Formio.

In Dalmatia and Slavonia the arrival in Zadar of a Croat general aroused great popular enthusiasm and sparked off a campaign of agitation in the Sabor in favour of uniting Dalmatia and Slavonia. These hopes were misplaced. General Rukavina was a Croat patriot, but also a servant of the Habsburg dynasty, which had no interest in stoking the fires of Croat nationalism. To prevent the unification movement from gaining momentum, the Habsburg authorities made it clear that Dalmatia and Slavonia would retain separate administrations. They also ensured that political power in the Dalmatian cities remained in the hands of the tiny Italian-speaking elite, even though Italian speakers made up at most only about 10 per cent of the population.

There was, therefore, a mood of disappointment in both Dalmatia and Slavonia with Habsburg rule by the time Austria entered the Third Coalition against France in 1804–5, alongside Britain, Sweden and Russia. After the crushing military defeat at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805, Austria was forced under the terms of the Treaty of Pressburg of 26 December to cede its recently gained possessions in Dalmatia to France. The treaty was a landmark in Croatian history. For the first time, a revolutionary and progressive, albeit foreign, government was installed on Croat soil. For a few months French rule over Dalmatia was uncertain as Russia occupied the bay of Kotor, in modern Montenegro, as well as the island of Korula, while British ships hovered in the Adriatic Sea. But by May 1806 the new French commissar for Dalmatia, General Lauriston, had established control over the entire region, with the exception of Dubrovnik. But time was running out for the city-state. By the eighteenth century Dubrovnik was a political and economic fossil. It had been many centuries since the populace had played any part in its government by acclaiming laws outside the palace of the rector (knez), but by the eighteenth century even the vestiges of representative government had been discarded. Officially the government of the republic was still divided between several bodies – the rector, the Grand Council, the Minor Council and the Senate. In practice all power was concentrated in the Grand Council, which elected the Senate out of its own members. And the Grand Council was entirely composed of nobles who never married out and hardly ever allowed any new blood in. Even within this tiny noble caste marriage was forbidden between the families of the most ancient nobles of all, the Salamanchesi, and the ‘new’ nobles, the Sorbonnesi, who had been created after an awful earthquake in 1667 forced the nobles to let in some new members, to make up for the ones who had been killed.

Because the nobles would not allow new members, in the eighteenth century, they began to die out. From about 200 or 300 members in the sixteenth century, the Grand Council was down to between sixty and eighty by the eighteenth century. Another side-effect of the ruling elite’s ultra-conservatism, of course, was that the populace and the middle classes ceased to identify with the state, its independence or its famous liberty. Economically Dubrovnik – like Venice – was only a shadow of its former self in the eighteenth century. The value of trade in the Mediterranean had declined; its position as an entrepot between Venice and the Balkans was worth very little now that Ottoman-run Bosnia was so torpid.

Dubrovnik, in short, was a rotten fruit and ready to drop into the lap of anyone who asked politely. On 26 May, General Lauriston and a force of 800 French soldiers did indeed ‘ask’ for permission from the Senate of Dubrovnik to be let into the city, and the following day the gate was opened, after two senators read out a formal protest. The pretence that the French were only passing through was maintained until 31 January 1808, when they ordered the Senate to dissolve itself. Marshal Marmont, the French governor of Dalmatia, who was created Duke of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) by Napoleon, fell in love with Dubrovnik and the courtly society of its aristocracy. It was, he said, ‘ce petit pays, qui jouissait du plus grand bonheur, dont les habitants sont doux, industrieux, intelligents; oasis de la civilization au milieu de la barbarie’.8

Marmont’s reference to barbarians was apt. From 17 June to 6 July 1808 a combined force of Russians and Montenegrins bombarded the city, killing at least 100 people and destroying Catholic churches outside the city walls in a manner that anticipated that other, more recent Montenegrin assault on Dubrovnik, in 1991. But by the end of July Marmont had arrived in Dalmatia with three regiments and, by the Treaty of Tilsit, Russia was obliged to cede to France Dubrovnik’s southern possessions around the bay of Kotor, to the relief of the Catholics who dominated the coast and to the chagrin of the Orthodox who dominated the wild interior. In the town of Budva, the French discovered an enthusiastic and influential supporter in a local Croatian nobleman, Count Miroslav Zanovi.

The French got to work immediately, reorganising their new acquisitions after several centuries of decay and decline under Venice. Formally the province was subject to the viceroy of the kingdom of Italy, of which Napoleon was king. The first civil governor, Vincenzo Dandolo, was based in Zadar. The province was divided into four districts, Zadar, Split, Makarska and Šibenik, which were sub-divided into cantons and councils (opchinas). Dubrovnik and Kotor, following their acquisition in 1808, were placed in a separate administrative unit.

The reforms swung rapidly into action. On 12 July 1806 the first newspaper in Dalmatia appeared, the King’s Dalmatian, printed in Italian and Croatian, and with two editors, Fr Paško Juki, a Franciscan Croat, and Bartuo Benincasa, an Italian. The pages on the left were printed in Italian and those on the right in Croatian. The print run of 1,100 was modest, reflecting the sad fact that under Venetian rule almost the entire population had become illiterate. Feudalism was abolished, the system of punishments was modernised and the guillotine made its appearance. There were attempts to reforest parts of Dalmatia that had been reduced to a virtual dustbowl by the Venetian policy of stripping its colonies of their raw materials. Tobacco and potatoes were introduced to widen the range of crops that was grown by the peasants. There were new hospitals and an energetic programme of road-building. In Zadar a college of higher education was established, which was later transferred to a suppressed monastery in Dubrovnik. The college was intended to educate a future class of officials and administrators. Alongside the college, the new government set up seven high schools, nineteen primary schools for boys and fourteen for girls, and under an educational decree of 1807 all families by law had to educate at least one of their children.

The liberal spirit that underpinned the Napoleonic administration of Dalmatia showed itelf in matters of religion. Superfluous monasteries and convents were closed to make way for educational institutions. The Serb Orthodox community was assisted, with the establishment of a permanent bishopric in Šibenik funded from the provincial budget. This budget, which had to be approved by the government of Italy in Milan, was based on peasants’ tithes, a pasture tax, the salt monopoly of the island of Pag and other islands and customs taxes levied on imports. The French had little time to oversee the reforms, however. In 1809 Austria declared war again on France, and Habsburg armies under Generals Stojevi and Kneževi invaded Dalmatia from Slavonia. For a time, Marshal Marmont was forced to withdraw in order to join Napoleon. But on 5 July 1809 Austria was defeated again at the Battle of Wagram, and after this decisive encounter France was able to extract enormous territorial concessions, which effectively reduced Vienna to the status of a second-rank power. Under the terms of the Treaty of Schönbrunn of 14 October 1809 France’s existing Dalmatian possessions were augmented by Carniola, in modern Slovenia, a slice of southern Carinthia and a large part of Slavonia running from Jasenovac westwards to Karlovac.

The Marmont regime in Ljubljana continued to press on with reforms, founding more schools and trade schools. In 1810 a new newspaper, La Télégraphe, appeared, French having being declared the official language of administration. In the same year, Marmont despatched an Illyrian delegation to Paris for the Emperor’s wedding, headed by the ever faithful Count Zanovi of Budva and the Bishop of Ljubljana, in the expectation that the dazzling spectacle of the imperial capital would make the Dalmatians and Slovenes more enthusiastic about French rule. At the same time, 100 youths were selected for training at the officers’ military academies at Saint-Cyr. outside Paris, and at La Flèche. Another 100 youths were sent to France to learn trades.9

The French regime in Dalmatia crumbled rapidly in the aftermath of the disastrous campaign in Russia, in which many soldiers from the Krajina fought with distinction. In 1813 Austria demanded the return of Dalmatia as the price of neutrality, while Britain seized the islands of Vis and Korula. On 17 August an Austrian army under General Radivojevi attacked from Slavonia without warning, and, after meeting little resistance in an assault on Karlovac, Austria declared war. The Illyrian Provinces melted away. On 15 November Dubrovnik declared its independence and once more, though not for long, hoisted the Libertas flag above the city. In Budva, Count Zanovi’s house was sacked by a pro-Montenegrin mob. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Austria’s right to Dalmatia was confirmed and on 3 August the region was declared the Kingdom of Dalmatia, partly to emphasise the fact that Dalmatia would remain separate from Slavonia. Count Zanovi was incarcerated in jail in Zadar until 1816, after which he returned to Budva, dying in poverty in 1834. Dubrovnik’s brief attempt to re-establish its independence was quashed. The victorious Austrians hauled down the flag of Libertas as soon as they entered the city, which they ensured was included without differentiation from the rest of Dalmatia in their gains of 1816.

The French regime in Dalmatia was heavily criticised as an ‘occupation’ by historians in the Communist era. For a mixture of ideological and patriotic reasons they refused to accept the notion that a foreign empire could possibly have played a positive role in Balkan or Croatian affairs. It is true that the expansion of French territory in 1809 was a mixed blessing for the Croats, simply because Slavonia was cut into two, gravely disrupting the economies of Zagreb and Karlovac. And it is true that by the end of the French era Dalmatia was being taxed heavily, in order to fulfil Napoleon’s injunction that the provinces should all pay for themselves. The cost of supporting a large military force weighed heavily on such an impoverished region. It is also true that the French regime was extremely unpopular outside the circles of revolutionary aristocrats like Count Zanovi, owing to the anti-French agitation of the lower clergy among the peasants.

Yet this is not enough to condemn the French experiment. Dalmatia had been brought so low by Venice over the centuries that most of its inhabitants were not in a position to appreciate the enlightened French policies. The newspapers remained unread because no one could read. Even the choice of Croatian words in them was controversial, as the use of the Slav tongue had been suppressed by the Venetians for so long that no one had any idea what dialect to use, although Marmont favoured the usage of Dubrovnik. Squashed and squeezed by their temporal lords for so long, and succoured in their misery only by their priests, it was not surprising that the mass of Dalmatian peasants heeded the clergy’s fearful warnings about the ‘godless’ French, and assumed their reforms were the work of the devil.

The underlying problem of the Illyrian Provinces was that it formed no logical national or geographical unit. It was established as a dagger to point at the heart of Austria. The Croats, Slovenes and Germans in it could not be welded into a nation by a whim of the French Emperor. The Slovenes in the northern part were convinced they were not Croats, or ‘Illyrians’. The Croats who comprised the majority of the population were unlikely in the long term to remain satisified with an arrangement that left them divided between two empires. Nevertheless, unpopular, short-lived and somewhat artificial as it was, the Illyrian experiment was significant for the future of Croatia. The flame of Slav nationalism had been kindled and would not be put out, however much Metternich tried to recreate the world of before the French Revolution. The immediate effect of the international decisions of 1816, however, was to turn the clock back. In Dalmatia the Austrians returned power to the Italian minority, as a counterweight against the movement for union between Slavonia and Dalmatia. There were no more attempts to publish newspapers in Croatian. In Slavonia the old conservative order struggled on, though under increasing pressure from Hungary.

It was in this conservative atmosphere that Ljudevit Gaj was born in the town of Krapina, in the hills of the Zagorje, north of Zagreb, in 1809. Gaj’s influence on the future course of Croatian and southern Slav nationalism was far-reaching. He borrowed most of his ideas from other people, was not a great writer and ended his political career enmeshed in scandal. Nevertheless, he was a most successful propagandist and, even if his ideas were not his own, it was his energy that made of them a popular movement.

Like many nationalists, he was something of an outsider. Neither of his parents was a Croat. His mother was German, deeply religious and Catholic, and his father was a Slovak. Gaj was fascinated in his childhood by a legend that his home town was the birthplace of the mythical patriarchs of the Slav race, eh, Leh and Meh, the founders respectively of Bohemia, Russia and Poland. His burgeoning interest in Croatian history was fed by studies in the local Franciscan monasteries and by his friendship with the local clergy (with the exception of a handful of eccentric landowners, the clergy were then the only educated people in Slavonia who were remotely interested in the question of Croatian history). These early studies bore fruit in his first book on the history of Krapina, which was published in German after he completed his studies in Karlovac.

From 1826 to 1831 Gaj studied in Vienna, where he dedicated himself to writing a more general history of Croatia. In the course of the work he would break off for trips back to Krapina, where he would question aged peasants in the hope of salvaging scraps of oral folklore. In short. Gaj was a budding young Romantic, imbued with that era’s fascination with ruined castles and whispered enchantments, and genuinely interested, in a patronising way, in the memories and customs of the peasants. From the start he was affronted by the prospect of Magyar domination and was convinced that Hungarian nationalism threatened to wipe out what little remained of the Croats’ own identity, language and culture. ‘In an illiterate land such as ours, it seems important, yes, most necessary, to bring all powers to bear upon awakening an effective and noble cultural patriotism,’ he wrote in 1827. ‘The history of our fatherland has already taught me how much [it] deserves to be lifted out of the miserable Magyar darkness.’10

This was not merely an intellectual conviction born out of the study of history books. As a student, young Gaj had been irritated by his education in Varaždin, where the language of instruction was Latin, the ethos was Hungarian and nothing was taught about Croatia, or in Croatian. The problem for Gaj was that, while the history books filled his head with the long-ago glory of the Croatian state, there was little to catch hold of in the present. To the east, the Serbs had preserved a strong sense of national identity across the centuries through the millet system of the Ottoman Empire and the organisation of the Serb Orthodox Church. In 1804 the Serbs in the rich arable woodland of Šumadija south of Belgrade had revolted against the rule of the Ottoman janissaries. In spite of setbacks, they succeeded in establishing a semi-autonomous principality, although Serbia nominally remained part of the Otoman Empire. After the resurrection of the Serbian state, a talented linguist, Vuk Karadži, an official attached to the new prince, Miloš Obrenovi, in 1818 published a new standard dictionary of the Serbian language. Karadži’s reform of Serbian was based on the motto ‘write as you speak’. It aroused strenuous opposition from conservative churchmen in Sremski Karlovci but was destined to carry the day. With their new state, new prince and new dictionary, the Serbs seemed to Gaj in many ways more assured of a bright future than the Croats themselves.

Hitherto the Croats’ contacts with Serbs had been few and far between. For all the similarities between the two peoples and their speech, the fact that the Serbs were Orthodox in religion and wrote with the Cyrillic script while the Croats were Catholic and used Latin letters created a gulf between them. Gaj’s interest in Karadži and the new Serbian principality in the east was quite a new thing. Again in German, he wrote the poem ‘Der Zeitgeist unde die Kroatien’ in 1827, asking: ‘You faithful vassals of Rome, do they also want to rob you of your mother tongue?’ The problem was – what mother tongue? Karadži had the backing of a prince and mini-state for his work; Gaj was an intellectual seeking a patron. There was no agreement at all about what language Croats ought to speak and write in. For centuries it had been little more than a peasant dialect. The upper classes in Dalmatia spoke Italian. In Slavonia they spoke German or Hungarian at home, and Latin at school and in the Sabor. Looking round at the Slav dialects, Gaj had plenty to choose from. In his native Krapina and in Zagreb, the local language was the kajkavski dialect, which was close to Slovene. In Istria, on parts of the Dalmatian coast and on most of the islands, the akavski variant held sway, while in Dubrovnik, the rest of Dalmatia and Herzegovina the štokavski variant prevailed (kaj, a and što all meaning ‘what’).

The language of Dubrovnik was the most attractive choice, as it was the language of the Illyrian writers of the Renaissance, of Gunduli and Osman. The cult of Dubrovnik – the bastion of Slav culture, identity and freedom against the invading Turks and Italians – was at its height in the mid- to late nineteenth century; the leaders of the Croat national revival trooped down to Dubrovnik as pilgrims to a shrine, while the plays of sixteenth-century Dubrovnik were then at the height of fashion in the drawing rooms of Zagreb. It was a cult symbolised in overloaded fashion by the picture on the great curtain of the new Croatian national theatre in 1895, which depicted the leaders of the Croatian revival sweeping towards the figure of Gunduli, seated on a throne against a background of the skyline of Dubrovnik and of Zagreb – the one the symbol of Croatia’s great past, the other the hope of the future.11

Another reason for choosing štokavski was that it was close to Karadži’s Serbian, and Gaj was convinced that Hungary could be kept at bay only by the co-ordinated action of all the southern Slavs in the Austrian empire. The biggest drawback to Gaj’s linguistic plans was the opposition to štokavski in conservative circles, and especially among the clergy, in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia and centre of Gaj’s endeavours. Gaj moved in 1829 to Pest, where his shock on encountering the sudden explosion of Hungarian nationalism stimulated his determination to carry through the work of writing a standard Croatian orthography. In the Hungarian capital he came into contact with another influential figure, a pan-Slav Lutheran pastor, Jan Kollar, a Slovak. Kollar shared the idea that was common to the Dalmatian Renaissance writers, that the Slav family of nations could be broken down to a few basic national and linguistic units, Russian, Polish, Czecho-Slovak and southern Slav, and that it was the duty of each to develop and cross-fertilise with the others. It was in this time of enthusiastic endeavour in 1831 that Gaj wrote a famous poem that was to become the anthem of the Croatian national revival of the nineteenth century, ‘Još Horvatska nije propala’ (No, Croatia has not perished). The lyrics were remarkably similar to a contemporary Polish poem-song, which it seems Gaj adapted to his own uses. Original or not, it served as a triumphant manifesto of the creed of the Slav national movement in Croatia:

Still Croatia has not fallen

Our people have not died

Long she slept, but she’s not vanquished

Her sleep dreary death defied.

Still Croatia has not fallen

We are in her still alive.

Long she slept, but she’s not vanquished

We shall wake her and revive

With an orthography printed in 1830 in the Zagreb dialect and the instantly popular ‘Još Horvatska’ to his name, Gaj returned to Zagreb with the aura of a promising celebrity and was fêted by a circle of gentry and local officials. His entry into Croatian politics was timely. In 1827 Hungary had pushed through an ambitious piece of legislation intended to confirm the subordinate status of Croatia to Hungary, with a law making Hungarian a compulsory subject in Croatian schools. The move provoked uproar in Croatia, where the radicals were determined to promote schooling in Croatian while reactionaries wished to retain education in Latin. In 1832 there were fist-fights in the academy at Zagreb between Hungarian and Croatian students, following an attempt by one of the professors to give lectures in Croatian. Gaj was in his element and immediately applied for permission from the Habsburg authorities to set up a newspaper, Novine Horvatske (Croatian News) with a weekly literary supplement, Danica (Morning Star), written in the Zagreb dialect.

Growing Hungarian pressure divided the Sabor and encouraged the formation of parties. Until 1848 the Sabor had the same membership it had had since the Middle Ages, comprising the bishops of Zagreb and Senj, the magnates, the high sheriffs of the counties and a few other representives of the royal free cities. The so-called ‘peasant nobles’ of Turopolje, descendants of the Bosnian nobles who had fled the Turkish invasion in the sixteenth century, were also represented in the Sabor, though as a bloc rather than individually.12 Such a conservative body, passing the time drawing up petitions in Latin, might have been expected to have been thoroughly reactionary, and hostile to Gaj’s Illyrian agitation, with all its overtones of the Napoleonic experiment in Dalmatia. And many of the Hungarian or Magyarised Croat aristocrats were indeed hostile. So were the ‘peasant nobles’ of Turopolje, who clung to every vestige of their ancient political privileges. Then there was the Church hierarchy. Many of those were not especially pro-Hungarian, but they were appalled by Gaj’s linguistic reforms and by the assault he had led on the old Zagrebian kajkavski dialect. Many thought the Church had done well to keep the language alive over the centuries in the face of competition from German and Hungarian and were annoyed by Gaj’s apparent contempt for their labour. There was a confessional dimension to the Church’s hostility. Many clergy were suspicious of the tendency of Gaj’s Illyrians to suppress differences between Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. The conservatives’ stronghold was Zagreb and the old conservative royal free cities of Varaždin and Križevci.

Gaj’s Illyrian supporters naturally included all those elements who felt stifled or impatient with the feudal conservative order, such as the lower clergy, seminarians, students, officers serving the Krajina and the emerging middle class in more economically advanced towns such as Karlovac.13 The Krajina was a stronghold of Illyrian sentiment, partly because the Illyrians strongly championed the unification of the Krajina with Croatia. But the Illyrians also had aristocratic supporters in the unreformed Sabor, and this fusion of Illyrian intellectuals and progressive nobles formed the basis of the National Party, a great political force opposing the Hungarians and their Croat supporters throughout the nineteenth century.

The most prominent of these aristocratic Illyrians was Count Janko Draškovi (1779–1856), lord of the magnificent castle of Trakošan, whose father had played such an influential role in the spread of freemasonry in Croatia. His political pamphlet Disertatia (Dissertations) in 1832 was the first public Illyrian manifesto. Written in Croatian, which was itself a significant point, it demanded the union within the Habsburg Empire of Slavonia, Dalmatia and Bosnia and the restoration of the prerogatives of the ban that had been surrendered to Hungary in the 1790s.

The rapid progress of the Illyrians was demonstrated in November 1832 when the new session of the Sabor opened in an atmosphere of high excitement. There were cheers when General Rukavina, the liberator of Zadar, made his acceptance speech as the new commander of the Military Frontier in Croatian, rather than in traditional Latin. Emboldened by the mood, the Sabor instructed its deputies to the joint parliament in Pressburg to raise the threat of rescinding the concessions made in 1791.

In Vienna the imperial authories under Francis I had decided to allow the Croats to let off steam, in order to put pressure on the Hungarian nationalists, who posed a greater danger.

In May 1833 Gaj even managed to get an audience with the Emperor and, following this apparently agreeable encounter, was given permission in July 1834 to start his new paper. There were great difficulties in securing a printing press and enough money, but on 6 January 1835 the first issue of Novine Horvatske (still written in the Zagreb dialect) saw the light of day. The Illyrian ideology of the newspaper was reflected in the bylines of the correspondents, all of whom signed their articles as ‘an Illyrian from…’.

Within a year, the newspaper had adopted the što dialect and had changed its title to Ilirske Narodne Novine (Illyrian National News). The actual circulation of the newspaper was trifling, a mere 500 copies or so – a fact that reflected both the content of the newspaper and the shortage of Croats who were wealthy and literate enough to take any interest in such a project. But there was no gainsaying Gaj’s success in launching the movement of national revival in Croatia. The evidence was everywhere. In theatres, his song ‘Još Horvatska’ was sung at the end of performances. His ideas took hold almost instantly in the seminaries and in the academy of Zagreb. In Varaždin, Križevci and Karlovac, reading rooms were set up where the public could browse through his ruminations. At home, the Sabor in 1836 and 1839 took up many of the Illyrian causes, calling for the establishment of elementary schools and a Learned Society to promote the use of the Slavic tongue. The Sabor of 1839 also championed the cause that was dearest to Illyrian hearts, the reunification of Dalmatia and Slavonia, as well as repeating the call for the incorporation of the Krajina into Croatia.

Gaj’s effusive loyalty to the dynasty at first ensured the favour of Vienna. On a visit to Vienna in 1836, Gaj rejoiced in the discomfort that the Croatian movement was causing the Hungarians and in the manifest support the Croats enjoyed from the imperial court, while in 1839, the Emperor even sent Gaj a diamond ring as a token of his gratitude for the services that the dynasty thought he was rendering. One year later, in a calculated snub to Hungarian ambitions to Hungarianise the educational system in their Slav and Romanian domains, the Emperor indulged the Sabor by ordering ‘Illyrian’ to become the principal language in Croatian schools.

These were the halcyon years for Gaj and for the Croatian national movement. From nowhere they appeared to sweep all before them. Loyal to the Emperor and empire, demanding only the restoration of those rights the Habsburgs had themselves confirmed in 1527, the movement was on firm ground when it resisted Hungarian claims. By preaching up the ‘Illyrian’ or southern Slav aspect of the movement at the expense of the more traditional Croatian and Catholic angle, Gaj’s followers avoided antagonising the Serbian Orthodox community in the Krajina, even if they failed to interest them very much. In 1841 Gaj made a triumphant visit to Dubrovnik, journeying on to the Montenegrin capital, Cetinje, in the company of Karadži and returning to a hero’s welcome in Zagreb.

In 1841 the Illyrian movement and Gaj’s fortunes reached their apex. Although he was to remain the most powerful intellectual influence in Croatia until he was rained by scandal in 1848, he was never again so wholly in command in the nation’s hearts and minds. But the very success of the Illyrian movement galvanised the conservatives into action and in 1841 the pro-Hungarian aristocrats formed their own political party, which advocated the closest possible ties between Croatia and Hungary. At first known as the Madjaroni (Magyarones), they later adopted the name Unionists. From the early 1840s these conservatives were able with greater success to cast the Illyrian movement as a crypto-revolutionary project. By 1842 these complaints were increasingly aired, especially after the appointment of a new ban, Franjo Haller, a strong conservative. Thanks to Haller, as well as to a perception in Vienna that the Illyrians were stepping over the line, Gaj’s stock fell in imperial circles. There were no more tokens of the Emperor’s favour; instead Gaj was compared to Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the radical nationalists in the Hungarian parliament. The axe fell the following year, when, on 11 January, by imperial decree, the use of the word ‘Illyria’ was banned. The censors got to work in Zagreb, officials of Gaj’s National Party came under pressure and the newspaper was forced to change its name to the Narodne Novine (National News).

The Illyrian movement did not disappear; it merely changed its name into the National Party. However, Gaj never quite recovered his equilibrium after the loss of imperial favour in 1842, and he began to explore radical notions of union between Croats and Serbs, and even Croatia’s detachment from the Austrian empire and its union with the new principality of Serbia – ideas that were beyond the pale for all but a few extremists. In 1845, the ban on the use of the word Illyrian was lifted. The new bout of political activity transformed Croatia’s sleepy county elections. In 1845 there was unprecedented violence at the polls as conservative Turopolje ‘peasant nobles’ and National Party supporters fought pitched battles, and thirteen people were killed after troops sent to restore order after the vote opened fire on the crowd. At the Sabor of that year, as well as the usual call for the union of Croatia, Dalmatia and the Krajina, the narodnjaki (nationals) called also for the restoration of Maria Theresa’s Croatian Royal Council, the promotion of Zagreb’s academy into a university and the elevation of the Zagreb diocese to an archdiocese.14

On 28 March 1846 the first opera in Croatian, Ljubav i zloba, by Vatroslav Lisinski, was performed in Zagreb. A chair in Illyrian studies was founded in Zagreb academy and an assembly hall for the sympathisers of the National Party was opened in the Upper Town in February 1847. Meanwhile a Croatian cultural organisation, Matica Ilirska, the Illyrian Bee, had received permission from Vienna to start activities, with the goal of encouraging the publication of Croatian classics, especially the great writers of Dubrovnik, as well as publishing works on Croatian history and ethnology. Matica also published an influential periodical, Kolo (Circle). The last unreformed Sabor before the revolutionary events of 1848, which met in October 1847, voted for a solidly Illyrian agenda. Goaded by the intemperate speeches of Kossuth in the Hungarian parliament, in which he declared he did not see Croatia on the map and that only a sword could decide between the Hungrians and the Croats, the assembly rejected Magyar linguistic imperialism. Illyrian was declared the national language of the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia (although the Sabor had no jurisdiction over Dalmatia), and Latin abolished at last as the language of the Sabor’s proceedings. A second motion demanded the repatriation of all the prerogatives of the Ban and the Sabor that had been surrendered to the Hungarian parliament. The motions generated such enthusiam that crowds gathered outside the building to cheer while women spectators in the gallery threw flowers into the chamber.

The events of the 1848 revolution marked the end of Gaj’s career, ironically, as the Year of Revolutions and the opportunity it provided to launch an attack on Hungary in the defence of both Croatia and the Emperor fulfilled so many of his dreams. At the start of the trouble, following the fall of Metternich in March and an attempt by the Hungarian parliament to incorporate Slavonia into Hungary. Gaj raced back from Vienna to Zagreb and, drawing up in a coach in Ilica Street, shouted, ‘Revolution! Revolution!’ to an enthusiastic crowd outside. But that summer he was ruined by the affair of Prince Miloš of Serbia.

The Prince, a member of the exiled Obrenovi dynasty, was travelling through Zagreb on his way to Vojvodina. The government in Belgrade, then under the Karadjordjevi dynasty, wanted Miloš killed and let it be known that Serbia’s attitude towards the Illyrian movement would depend on Gaj carrying out this request. In the event, Gaj arranged for the Prince to be arrested in Zagreb and imprisoned. However, he was not killed, but released after paying Gaj a sum of money. The scandal was then exposed and it brought to the surface accusations that Gaj was in the pay of foreign powers. The uproar destroyed his reputation. Discredited and isolated, in 1849 he sold his newspaper to the repressive government in Vienna of Alexander Bach, a supreme act of bathos. He was never elected to public office again and by the time he died in 1872, in the office of his newspaper, he was a diminished figure.

Gaj’s was an imperfect legacy and later generations disparaged his attempt to forge a new Illyrian patriotism that transcended the old barriers and hatreds between Catholics and Orthodox. Many Croats came to believe that he had bargained too much of Croatia’s individual identity away in the attempt to form a common front with the Serbs, only to find that the Serbs were interested not in Illyria, but in Greater Serbia.

He was criticised as a plagiarist. ‘If [the Illyrian movement] had not created Gaj it would have created someone else sooner or later, who perhaps would have been a better writer, though that does not diminish his services or the fact that he truly successfully began a work for which he felt a general need,’ was the verdict of one historian.15

Such writers noted that Gaj had borrowed most of his ideas from his Illyrian colleagues, especially Ivan Kukuljevi and Bogoslav Šulek, while arrogating all the glory to himself:

Gaj was a very complicated personality whose work comprised two great contradictions. On the one side he was the people’s tribune, propagating the broadest Yugoslav concepts and and aiming for an all-embracing political solution to our national question … and on the other secretly keeping up his ties with the Austrian court and the government in Vienna, giving them declarations of loyalty and accepting from them (and indeed from the Russian Tsar) money.16

There is some truth in the charge that Gaj muddied waters with the Illyrian movement and that it was, at the end of the day, an artificial sentiment that could flourish only in the minds of intellectuals and their aristocratic patrons. The average Croat or Serb peasant certainly never came to think of himself or herself as Illyrian, and Illyrianism faded in the era of mass politics, when the peasants got the vote.