The Czech National Revival: how a language came back from the edge

Around 1800 educated people in Prague spoke German with one another, and Czech was widely seen as the language of servants, peasants and the odd eccentric. Less than a century later, Czech was the language of a national theatre, a university, a flourishing press and a political movement. That reversal is the National Revival, and it explains why Czechs care so much about their language, their theatre and their small local museums.

"Revival" is slightly misleading. Czech never died. It had lost status in the educated and official world after the seventeenth century, and the Revival gave it back a role it had not held for generations.

The problem: a language without a place

After the defeat of the Bohemian Estates in 1620 (see the Battle of White Mountain and its consequences), the political and cultural elite of the Czech lands drifted towards German, and Czech was cut off from higher education and administration. Joseph II's reforms in the 1780s made German the language of the state, for efficiency rather than hostility. Czech survived in villages, in church and in a modest popular literature, but it lacked the vocabulary, the dictionaries and the confidence for scholarship or modern science.

The educated men who began the Revival did not set out to launch a political movement. Many were priests, teachers and scholars who loved the language and feared for it. They wanted to prove that Czech could do everything German could.

The scholars

Josef Dobrovský, a priest and philologist, wrote the first major scientific grammar of Czech in German in 1809, because that was how a scholar could be heard. He thought the language might not survive, but his work set the rules. Josef Jungmann, a teacher and translator, did the practical work of invention. His large Czech-German dictionary, completed in the 1830s, collected old words, borrowed from other Slavic languages and coined new ones, giving the language a vocabulary for philosophy, science and modern life. Some words in current Czech come from him or his circle.

František Palacký, the historian, wrote a multi-volume history of the Czech nation, which put the Hussite period at the centre of Czech identity and gave the movement its story. Ask a Czech why the Hussites matter and you will often hear Palacký's version, shaped as much by the nineteenth century as by the fifteenth. See the Hussite movement explained for the medieval facts.

Institutions and amateurs

The Revival needed institutions, and many were founded by private citizens and aristocrats. The National Museum opened in 1818, with patriotic Bohemian nobles among its backers. The Matice česká, founded in 1831, raised money to publish Czech scholarly books. Reading societies, choral groups and amateur theatre circles spread the habit of Czech public life across small towns. The Sokol movement, founded in 1862 by Miroslav Tyrš and Jindřich Fügner, combined gymnastics with national education, and for decades its mass displays were a major public event.

Music and theatre carried the movement to a wider audience. A play by Josef Kajetán Tyl in 1834 included a song, Kde domov můj (Where is my home), which later became the Czech national anthem. Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák composed works that put Czech subjects and rhythms on the European stage. The National Theatre, paid for by a national public subscription, opened in 1881, burned within weeks and reopened in 1883 after a second collection. The story is still told as proof that ordinary people built it.

Literature and the great forgery

Poetry played its part. Karel Hynek Mácha's Máj (May), published in 1836, is the best-known Romantic poem in Czech, and Božena Němcová's novel Babička (The Grandmother), from 1855, is a classic that generations of schoolchildren have read.

The Revival also had its embarrassments. In 1817 and 1818 two manuscripts were announced as discoveries of medieval Czech poetry, the Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora manuscripts. They were enormously popular and were used to argue that Czech culture was old and sophisticated. They were later shown to be forgeries, largely connected with the librarian Václav Hanka. A heated public dispute in the 1880s, in which the philosopher and later president Tomáš Masaryk sided with the sceptics, eventually settled the matter: the manuscripts were nineteenth-century fakes. Nation-building and honest scholarship do not always agree.

Women in the movement

Women were more central than the scholarly portrait suggests. Němcová wrote, collected folk tales and campaigned for the Czech cause in a hostile age. Karolina Světlá and Eliška Krásnohorská wrote fiction, poetry and, in Krásnohorská's case, the libretti for several Smetana operas. In 1890 Krásnohorská helped found Minerva, the first girls' grammar school in Austria-Hungary, in Prague. Girls' education was a Revival project like any other: a nation that wanted to speak for itself needed educated mothers, teachers and writers, and the women of the movement said so loudly.

From culture to politics

By the 1840s, cultural demands were turning into political ones. In 1848, across the monarchy, Czech leaders asked for language equality, civil liberties and a constitutional Austria. The revolution in Prague that June failed, but the Czech public sphere survived, and in the 1860s a freer atmosphere allowed Czech newspapers, parties and elected councils to grow. The fight over language in schools and offices became the centre of Czech politics until 1918, a context set out in the Habsburg era in the Czech lands.

The division of Charles University into Czech and German halves in 1882 is a good marker of the change. A century earlier there would have been no demand for a Czech university; now there was one, and it could not be refused.

What it means today

The Revival explains several habits that puzzle newcomers. Czechs take correct spelling and grammar seriously, and the Institute of the Czech Language publishes the official rules and an online reference book. They are attached to amateur choirs, brass bands, Sokol halls and reading clubs. The National Theatre is treated as a shared possession. Towns commemorate local revivalists with plaques and street names, so that Jungmannova, Palackého and Tylova appear on maps all over the country.

When a Czech colleague is delighted that you have learned a few phrases, or when a teacher corrects your accent with unusual intensity, the Revival is part of the reason. The language was rebuilt by people who were told it could not be done.

Both the National Museum and the National Theatre run public programmes. Check their official websites for current times.

Frequently asked questions

What was the National Revival?

A cultural and then political movement from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century that rebuilt Czech as a language of scholarship, literature, theatre and public life.

Who were its main figures?

Scholars such as Josef Dobrovský, Josef Jungmann and František Palacký; writers such as Karel Hynek Mácha and Božena Němcová; and composers such as Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák.

Were the old manuscripts real?

No. The Dvůr Králové and Zelená Hora manuscripts, published in 1817 and 1818 as medieval poetry, were later shown to be forgeries.

Why was the National Theatre so important?

It was paid for by public subscription and gave the Czech language a grand stage. It opened in 1881, burned soon afterwards and reopened in 1883.