The Making of the Slovak People’s Party: Religion, Nationalism and the Culture War in Early 20th-Century Europe 9781350109377, 9781350109407, 9781350109384

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The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

International Library of Twentieth Century History The International Library of Twentieth Century History comprises monographs for scholars and libraries focusing on historical events of the 20th century, with a special focus on World War II and European History. The series presents original research and as such aims to widen our knowledge of the period by publishing new voices in the field. Published Terrorism in Pakistan: The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the Challenge to Security, N. Elahi America’s Forgotten Middle East Initiative: The King-Crane Commission of 1919, Andrew Patrick The Hidden War in Argentina: British and American Espionage in World War II, Panagiotis Dimitrakis Women, Antifascism and Mussolini’s Italy: The Life of Marion Cave Rosselli, Isabelle Richet Historians at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial: Their Role as Expert Witnesses, Matthew Turner Forthcoming Armenia and Europe: Foreign Aid and Environmental Politics in the Post-Soviet Caucasus, Pål Wilter Skedsmo Censorship and Propaganda in World War I: A Comprehensive History, Eberhard Demm

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party Religion, Nationalism and the Culture War in Early 20th-Century Europe Thomas Lorman

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Thomas Lorman, 2019 Thomas Lorman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjasa Krivec Cover image: Andrej Hlinka (priest and politician) speaks at the state celebration in Nitra Czechoslovakia on 12 August 1933, which he disrupted. (© CTK / Alamy Stock Photo) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0937-7 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0938-4 eBook: 978-1-3501-0939-1 Series: International Library of Twentieth Century History Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note on Terminology

vi vii viii

Introduction: In the Name of God 1 1 The Liberal Onslaught 9 2 A New Opposition 51 3 The Birth of the Party 103 4 Purging the Party 125 5 Turning against Hungary – Turning against Czechoslovakia 149 6 A Path to Fascism? 187 Conclusion: The Other Culture War 219 Notes Bibliography Index

231 282 299

Illustrations Map 1

Former Hungarian counties that were incorporated into interwar Slovakia ix

Figures 1 2 3

František Skyčák, the first leader of the SĽS 50 A party meeting in northern Hungary 102 A caricature of Slovak nationalists attempting to be parliamentarians 147

Acknowledgements As this book has been over a decade in the making, I have depended on the help and the patience of many people. My first thanks must go to the staff of the marvellously efficient British Library in London, the staff of the National Széchényi Library in Hungary who provided such a fruitful place to work, the staff of the Slovak National Library in Martin who went out of their way to make me feel welcome, the ever-helpful staff of the library of UCL’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies and the staff of the Bodleian Library in Oxford who were always attentive and efficient. In addition, the staff of the Slovak National Archive in Bratislava, the Slovak State Archives in Bytča and Nitra, the National Archive of Great Britain in London, and the Primate’s Archive in Esztergom, Hungary were all invaluable in promptly providing me with the materials from which this book is partly woven. I would also like to extend my thanks to the many colleagues who have given their time and knowledge. In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to Philip Barker, Thomas Croft, Simon Dixon, Andrew Gardner, Rebecca Haynes, Philip Howe, Katya Kocourek, Kati Lacey, Daniel Miller, Árpád Popély, Martyn Rady, David Short and Trevor Thomas. I am especially grateful for the advice provided by the anonymous readers of I.B. Tauris, and the combination of guidance and patience offered by my commissioning editor which also helped bring this book to fruition. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends whose company over the years provided refreshment when the struggle to do justice to the topic of this book seemed overwhelming. It is for them, and especially for G and for D, that this book is dedicated.

Note on Terminology Labelling any group of people by an ethnic category is problematic. The nationalist politicians with whom this study is concerned were convinced that all the peoples of Central Europe could be squeezed into narrow ethnic boxes. Nevertheless, defining who belonged in which box was always a contested process, riddled with generalizations and intolerant of ambiguities. The debate about who was a Slovak, and what it meant to be a Slovak, has continued throughout the past two centuries. Official statistics for the period examined in this book provide little assistance. For example, no official census prior to 1939 recorded the number of Slovaks. In Hungary, censuses in this period simply asked respondents to list their mother tongue (except practising Jews who were defined according to their religion) while censuses in interwar Czechoslovakia asked people to declare their national identity, but did not accept that a separate Slovak nationality existed. Nevertheless, a long campaign to persuade speakers of Slovak (a branch of the Slavonic language family) that they were members of a Slavic or Slovak nation, the so-called Slovak national awakening, had achieved considerable success by the end of the nineteenth century. Even the Hungarian government accepted by that point that there was a Slovak ‘nationality’ although not a Slovak or Slavic nation. In spite, therefore, of the fact that this ‘nation building’ project remained incomplete in the first half of the twentieth century, for the sake of simplicity these Slovak speakers will be called Slovaks. This book will also follow a useful convention and distinguish between ‘Hungarian(s)’, when referring to the entirety of Hungary’s inhabitants and state institutions, and ‘Magyar(s)’ when referring to the specific ethnic group and their language. Place names will be given in the version that can be easily located on a modern map, although their Magyar equivalent will usually also be provided. As, however, the counties were abolished shortly after Hungary collapsed, their names will first be given in Magyar.

ix

Map 1  Former Hungarian counties that were incorporated into interwar Slovakia.

x

Introduction: In the Name of God

In the early afternoon of 14 March 1939 church bells rang out across Slovakia to celebrate the destruction of interwar Czechoslovakia and the creation of the first Slovak state in recorded European history. It was a triumphant moment for Slovak nationalists and specifically for the Slovak People’s Party (Slovak: Slovenská ľudová strana, hereafter SĽS) which, during the previous thirty-four years of its existence, had struggled against a series of governments that had officially denied the existence of a separate Slovak nation. During this time, the SĽS had become the most popular Slovak party in pre-1918 Hungary and the most popular party in interwar Slovakia. Electoral success, however, occurred in tandem with a long process of radicalization. The SĽS repeatedly claimed that it alone had the right to represent the Slovak nation. It also incessantly denounced its opponents as a threat to the survival of the nation and the morality of the people. Moreover, the party leadership was prepared to circumvent the electoral process in order to advance its objectives. For example, in 1918, it helped break the Slovaks away from Hungary with the help of the invading Czechoslovak army, and in 1939 it helped break the Slovaks away from Czechoslovakia in tandem with the invading Wehrmacht. A useful starting point to understand why the SĽS flourished within, and then turned against, both Hungary and Czechoslovakia, is the first series of radio broadcasts by party leaders that heralded the declaration of independence on 14 March 1939. The first broadcast was given by Alexander ‘Šaňo’ Mach, the chief of the propaganda office of the Slovak government, shortly after the Slovak parliament had unanimously hailed the formal declaration of independence. A brief interlude of patriotic music had not completely died away when the thirtysix-year-old leader of the radical wing of the party, who had once dreamed of becoming a priest, but had eschewed clerical vestments in favour of a jet-black paramilitary uniform, came over the radio waves. The state broadcaster had promised that Mach would bring ‘joyful news’ for the ‘entire Slovak nation’, but his high, melodious voice struggled to provide sufficient gravitas. He began his broadcast by addressing those he considered his only true compatriots: ‘Slovak men, Slovak women … from the will of the Slovak nation and in the name of God,’ he proclaimed, ‘we have, in the last half hour, proclaimed an independent

2

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

Slovak state.’ Presenting Slovak independence as the triumphant culmination of a centuries-long struggle, he would later reminisce that this was ‘the happiest day of my life’.1 That evening the new head of state, Jozef Tiso, a portly fifty-one-year-old parish priest who had briefly obtained the rank of monsignor and who had spent the previous twenty-one years climbing the ranks of the party, took to the radio to affirm Mach’s momentous announcement.2 His speech was short, repetitive and uncompromising. Addressing his ‘dear Slovak nation’, Tiso affirmed that ‘the unanimous decision of the Slovak parliament’ had, on 14 March 1939, ‘brought to life an independent Slovak state’, which he insisted had ‘fulfilled the yearnings of our national ambition’. He also promised that ‘our Slovak state will never give up its independence’, that it would act ‘not with hatred, passion, coarseness, and crudeness, but in a Christian way (Slovak: po krestanský)’, and that his government would soon enact antisemitic legislation. Tiso then concluded his speech with the rousing call, ‘let the spirit of the Lord hover over our state, and let the spirit of Christianity guide all of us in all our calculations so that the Slovak nation will grow, become mighty and flourish in an independent Slovak state’.3 It is tempting to dismiss both Mach’s and Tiso’s speeches as a self-serving blend of nationalist and religious hyperbole that concealed the real reasons why they, and their colleagues, had decided to declare independence. Neither man, for example, mentioned that Slovak independence allowed them to resume their positions in the Slovak government, from which they had been dismissed by the central government in Prague four days earlier. In addition, neither man mentioned that the previous evening Adolf Hitler had personally warned Tiso that if Slovakia did not immediately declare independence it would be dismembered by its neighbours. Hitler was determined to occupy the western, ‘Czech’ half of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, and Slovak independence, which dissolved the common state of the Czechs and Slovaks and nullified the international guarantees of its territorial sovereignty, gave him the legal pretext to finally launch his invasion. Nevertheless, a close reading of Mach and Tiso’s speeches that day reveals that Slovakia’s declaration of independence was not merely an act of political expediency and self-serving opportunism. A genuine idealism, forged from a blend of intense nationalism and religious conviction, also inspired both men, and their party, to place their faith in national independence and Nazi Germany.4 Both men began their radio broadcasts by addressing only their fellow (ethnic) Slovaks. Clearly, Mach and Tiso had no interest in speaking to, or for,

Introduction

3

the Czechs, Germans, Jews, Magyars, Roma (Gypsies) and Rusyns, who also lived in Slovakia. Their nationalism was narrow and exclusive, forged by the internecine ethnic conflicts that had convulsed Central Europe for the past century. Slovak independence was, according to these men’s reading of history, the glorious fulfilment of the ‘Slovak national awakening’ that had taken place in earlier centuries, and that had launched the long struggle against Magyar and then Czech rule. Both Mach and Tiso also claimed to speak for the ‘entire nation’. They discounted the possibility that any Slovak could favour the preservation of what remained of Czechoslovakia or oppose their decision to create an independent Slovak state. The implication that rival points of view were always illegitimate was not, however, merely theoretical. The government that Tiso headed, and in which Mach served, had already, in the previous six months, banned all rival political parties, eliminated all critical publications, and eviscerated civil society and the autonomy of local government. Both speeches were also clearly animated by the conviction that Slovak independence had a spiritual as well as a national purpose. Both Mach and Tiso presented Slovak independence to their listeners as a triumph that had taken place with God’s help and would receive God’s blessing. In doing so, both men sought to affirm the long-standing belief among Catholic Slovak nationalists that the defence of Slovak national culture was an integral part of the wider struggle to defend the Catholic faith. This belief had animated the men who founded the first incarnation of the SĽS in 1905. They also claimed to speak ‘in the name of God’ and insisted that they spoke for the ‘entire Slovak nation’.5 Nevertheless, in spite of all the ideological certitude on display in Mach and Tiso’s rhetoric, both speeches were also imbued with deliberate ambiguity. Both men, for example, studiously avoided any mention of what Slovak independence would actually mean in practice. Aside from Tiso’s brief comment that ‘the government has already prepared a law concerning the Jewish question, which only recent events have prevented from being approved by our parliament’ there was absolutely no discussion of policy either domestic or foreign. Even the deal that permitted the German army to occupy a strip of territory along Slovakia’s western border, euphemistically termed a ‘zone of protection’, the following morning was understandably left unmentioned.6 An additional layer of ambiguity was created by the decision to allow Mach to give the first speech announcing Slovakia’s declaration of independence. As Mach was an outspoken admirer of Adolf Hitler, his role as the herald of Slovakia’s independence suggested that the radical wing of the SĽS was in the

4

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

ascendancy. Yet at the same time Mach was denied a ministerial post in the reshuffled cabinet which implied that more moderate men would remain in charge of the new Slovakia. Tiso’s vague assertion that the ‘trappings of the past’ still needed to be ‘eliminated’ was, however, an ominous sign that the leaders of the new Slovak state were intent on carrying out a brutal transformation of the country. That transformation became evident the following month when the country opened its first concentration camp and culminated with the mass deportation of most of the country’s Jews in 1942. At the time, however, even critics of the new regime greeted the declaration of independence with public apathy, although a growing number of far-sighted Jews made their way to the various foreign consulates in the hope of being given refuge outside Slovakia. Both Mach and Tiso’s speeches were, therefore, not only the product of the tumultuous events that redrew the map of Central Europe in the months before the outbreak of the Second World War. They were also animated by profound beliefs and ingrained ambiguities that had been at the core of the SĽS’s ideology since its foundation at the very beginning of the twentieth century. A thorough explanation of the making of the party requires, therefore, an exploration of both its nationalism and its religiosity, as well as the use it made of ambiguity which maximized its appeal, but also made it susceptible to repeated bouts of radicalization. The nationalism that animated the SĽS was evident throughout the party’s existence. It always presented itself as the defender of the Slovaks, and only the Slovaks, first in pre-1918 Hungary and then in interwar Czechoslovakia. It also made no attempt to attract the support of non-Slovaks and rarely entered into a formal coalition with non-Slovak parties. Nevertheless, as was the case with nationalists throughout Central Europe, the SĽS did not seek only to defend their nation’s identity, but also to mobilize or ‘awaken’ the nation. In practical terms that meant developing a new type of political party that could mobilize the population and achieve electoral success. The results were remarkable. Within less than six months of its establishment at the end of 1905, the SL’S had obtained six of the 413 seats in the Hungarian parliament and had become the most successful Slovak political party in Hungarian history. In spite of intense pressure from the government and an electoral system that was marred by a narrow franchise and ingrained corruption, it still retained three of these seats in the 1910 parliamentary elections. Then, after the introduction of universal suffrage and proportional representation by the new Czechoslovak government, it obtained thirteen of the 281 seats in the national assembly in the 1920 elections and increased this to 23 of the 300 seats

Introduction

5

in the 1925 elections. That made it the most popular party in Slovakia where it had won almost half of all the possible parliamentary mandates. It then retained its position as the most popular party in Slovakia in the 1929 elections, when it won nineteen seats, and the 1935 elections, when it won twenty seats. Finally, in January 1939, after the party had taken control of the autonomous Slovak administration, it imposed a new electoral system which gave it sixty-one of the sixty-three seats in the Slovak parliament. It was this SĽS dominated parliament that endorsed the declaration of national independence on 14 March 1939.7 To explain this record of electoral success this book will examine the broader context that inspired the creation of a new Slovak political party. It will examine the reasons for Slovak Catholic opposition to the Hungarian government’s ‘liberal’ ideology and their embrace of what Carl Schorske called the ‘sharper tone’ of populist rhetoric. It will also examine how these Slovak Catholic critics disseminated their ideas through a proliferating array of publications and how they organized their fellow Slovaks in a mass of organizations. A particular focus will be the wide range of Catholic associations that were founded before the First World War in northern Hungary from parochial sodalities to nationwide cultural associations. This book will then demonstrate how this Catholic Slovak civil society provided a launchpad for the creation of a new Slovak nationalist party and made possible the series of electoral breakthroughs that both emboldened and, paradoxically, frustrated the SĽS.8 To fully explain the party’s organizational success and ideological radicalization this book will also give due weight to the central role that the Catholic faith played in the making of the party. The two men who led the party from 1913 onwards, Andrej Hlinka and Jozef Tiso, both of them parish priests, have received considerable attention from scholars. This book will, however, also explain how a much larger group of Catholic clergymen played a key role in building and popularizing the party and many of its associated publications and organizations. They always made up a significant proportion of the party’s local activists and MPs.9 Attention will also be paid to the party’s ideological roots that reached back to the reinvigoration of Catholicism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and propelled the Slovak People’s Party onto its path to power.10 This rethinking, which had a transformative impact on Catholic parties across Europe, was endorsed by a series of papal encyclicals that began to be issued during the pontificate of Leo XIII and his immediate successors. These encyclicals inspired both the clergy and the laity to mobilize the faithful against what they regarded as the mortal threat posed by liberal governments, secular

6

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

intellectuals, and the worldwide growth of the socialist movement. This ‘culture war’ unleashed a new spirit of Catholic ‘activism’ in central Europe and infused the SĽS with a conviction that the Slovaks were at the epicentre of a great struggle to preserve the Catholic faith in Central Europe. That larger struggle necessitated the creation of a new activist politics, a new political party, and ultimately a new independent Slovak state. As this book will demonstrate, the history of the SĽS up until 1939 explains how the party blended together a religious conflict against the enemies of Catholicism with an ethnic conflict against the enemies of the Slovaks to provide not only the vision, but also the passion that assured its eventual success.11 Nevertheless, the party’s obsession with mobilizing the nation and defending the faith was always accompanied by layers of ambiguity that played a crucial yet underappreciated role in ensuring its eventual seizure of power.12 Partly, the SĽS relied on ambiguity to present itself as both a nationalist and a Catholic party, when almost a third of Slovaks were Protestants and Slovak national identity was still a contested concept. Partly it relied on ambiguity to present itself, in both pre-1918 Hungary and post-1918 Czechoslovakia, as an implacable opponent of each successive government, while simultaneously seeking to cut deals, extract concessions, and affirm its loyalty, first to the Kingdom of Hungary, and then to the Czechoslovak Republic. For example, the party leadership repeatedly made deals with Hungarian politicians it openly despised. It also joined, from 1927 to 1929, a Czechoslovak coalition government while continuing to vote against its coalition partners.13 The ambiguity that enveloped the SĽS also manifested itself, both before and after 1918, in a tendency to avoid putting forward concrete and realistic demands, preferring repetitive catch phrases, sloganeering, and hyperbole that was rarely taken seriously. So much uncertainty, for example, surrounded the party’s ultimate objectives that Slovakia’s declaration of independence on 14 March 1939 surprised not only the Czechoslovak government which had up to that point governed Slovakia, but most of the party’s own MPs. This book will, therefore, explain precisely why and how the SĽS used deliberate ambiguity to bind together the disparate factions and rival personalities whose cooperation was necessary to transform it into a mass party. Finally, this book recognizes that political parties are not just organizations, but also collections of personalities. The following chapters will, therefore, give due weight to all of the leading men who helped make the SĽS. This book will, therefore, break new ground in taking both the ideology of the party and all of its leading persons seriously. In doing so it will provide new insights into why even

Introduction

7

an electorally successful and devoutly Catholic political party could partially succumb to the fascist appeal that had revolutionized politics throughout Central Europe by the end of the interwar period.14 It should, therefore, be obvious that to explain why the SĽS allied itself with Adolf Hitler in 1939 to create an independent Slovak state, this book must begin with the origins of the party in the years leading up to its founding in 1905. In Chapter 1 this book, therefore, explores how the ideology of the party was forged in opposition to the ‘liberalism’ of the pre-First World War Hungarian government. In Chapter 2 it will consider how the groundwork for a new party was created through the establishment of a network of associations and institutions that mobilized Slovak society and gave the party its first electoral successes. In Chapter 3 it will trace the precise factors that led to the formation of a new Slovak Catholic party in pre-1918 Hungary, and in Chapter 4 it will examine how this party tried and failed to turn its anti-liberal ideology into a viable political programme before 1918. In Chapter 5 this book will examine how the impact of the First World War led the SĽS to break away from Hungary and become both a supporter and critic of the new Czechoslovak state. This chapter will also look at how the party’s efforts to curb Czechoslovak ‘liberalism’ turned it into a mass party, but also provided fertile ground for the radical wing of the party to emerge and flourish. Finally, in Chapter 6 it will examine the personalities and organizations that made up this radical wing of the party. This book also examines how the wider party was radicalized by the emergence of new leaders who were contemptuous of democracy, inspired by Nazi Germany, and imposed their authority upon Slovakia to create an independent Slovak state.

8

1

The Liberal Onslaught

The term ‘culture war’ is now employed to describe conflicts throughout the world that have little to do with the state and nothing to do with the Catholic church, but the term itself also has a specific historical meaning and a specific historical context. As Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser explain, There had always been intermittent institutional friction between church and state in central and western Europe, but the conflicts that came to a head in the second half of the nineteenth century were of a different kind. They involved processes of mass mobilization and societal polarization. They embraced virtually every sphere of social life: schools, universities, the press, marriage, and gender relations, burial rites, associational culture, the control of public space, folk memory, and the symbols of nationhood. In short, these conflicts were ‘culture wars’, in which the values and collective practices of modern life were at stake.1

The most famous of these conflicts was initiated in Prussia, later Germany, by Otto von Bismarck who ‘launched a salvo of laws intended to neutralize Catholicism as a political force’ and in doing so triggered what one of his supporters called a ‘struggle of culture’ (German: kulturkampf). Other states in Europe also launched their own assaults, notably France, where ‘anti-clericalism’, the desire to reduce the privileges and influence of the Catholic clergy, had periodically burst forth since the 1789 revolution and reached fever pitch during the third republic from 1871. Likewise, unified Italy had expropriated the Papal States from the Pope and ‘imprisoned’ him within the walls of the Vatican.2 Hungary had also witnessed its own anticlerical outbursts, notably during the reign of Joseph II, 1780–1790, and again during the ‘Age of Reform’ from 1825 to 1848 when an earlier generation of liberals had launched what Gabriel Adriányi has described as ‘a battle against the church’. The bishops’ refusal to permit the blessing of ‘mixed marriages’ or allow any of the offspring of such marriages to be raised outside the faith evoked particular ire, but no practical

10

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

solution.3 It was not, however, until the 1890s that the culture war burst forth in Hungary when the government made clear its determination to curb the power of the Catholic church and impose its authority on the private lives of all of the country’s inhabitants by reforming marriage, regulating the religious upbringing of children and assuming the responsibility to record all births, deaths, and marriages. Confronted by furious resistance, Prime Minister Sándor Wekerle twice felt compelled to submit his resignation. Fresh elections were also required to firm up the government’s support and dissuade the Habsburg emperor, Franz Joseph, from wielding his veto. Ultimately, however, the government’s determination to enact reform proved irresistible and laws XXXI-III were placed on the statute book in the spring of 1894.4 From that point on the state made civil marriage obligatory. It authorized all marriages (and divorces), with the bridal couple required to visit the office of a local official prior to the now optional religious ceremony. Likewise, the state would, from this point on, prevent children being automatically instructed in the Catholic faith if only one of their parents adhered to the Church of Rome. Finally, the responsibility for recording all births, deaths, and marriages would no longer be the responsibility of clergymen, but would instead be carried out by trained and supposedly impartial state officials. It is tempting to dismiss these reforms as merely symbolic. The obligatory visit to the mayor’s office on the day of the wedding was easily incorporated into the series of rituals that still invariably included the solemnization of the marriage ceremony in church and temple. Marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics also remained exceedingly rare, particularly in rural areas, and it made no practical difference to most people whether the details of their life were stored in their local church or a government office. Such dismissiveness would, however, miss the larger point and ignore the larger context. The Catholic church had always relied on the state to preserve its supremacy, and when the state turned against the church, as the culture wars that had already broken out elsewhere in Europe once again demonstrated, the consequences for the faithful could be horrendous. Moreover, the Wekerle government’s reforms came at a time when the established denominations of Europe were convulsed by a ‘crisis of religion’, provoked by doubts about whether the Christian picture of God was believable. A persuasive re-dating of the history of the world, the widespread acceptance of Darwin’s (and others’) theory of evolution, as well as radical reinterpretations of the Bible that described much of its content as symbolism rather than fact, together raised the disturbing question of whether the faith was actually supported by evidence.5

The Liberal Onslaught

11

Some Christian churchmen responded by adapting their theology, the Vatican did not. Its Syllabus of Errors issued in 1864 insisted that ‘a great war is being waged against the Catholic church’ and included among the enemies of the faith not only such obvious targets as ‘pantheism, naturalism and absolute rationalism’, and the ‘pests’ of ‘socialism [and] communism’, but also the claim that ‘the civil authority may interfere in matters relating to religion, morality and spiritual government’.6 Likewise, in 1893, as the Wekerle government’s reforms were making their way through parliament, the Vatican informed the local hierarchy in Hungary that ‘considering the direction in which your country is going … it is greatly to be feared that there is impending evil far more harmful to religion’. Indeed, as Robert Nemes has observed, ‘Liberals and Catholics alike rapidly turned the dispute … into a referendum on the liberal vision of progress and patriotism.’7 Encouraged by the magnitude of the stakes involved, as well as the uncompromising and alarmist rhetoric of the dispute’s chief protagonists, it is understandable that Catholics throughout Hungary responded to the new legislation with a fury that now seems exaggerated. Thus, even if the reforms were largely symbolic, symbolism mattered, particularly in a country where illiteracy was rife and gesture politics predominated. The above reforms replaced the church with the government office as the place where Catholics in Hungary got married, where the faith of their offspring was to be determined, and where the details of their lives would now be recorded, stored, and potentially exploited. Just as the intellectual authority of the clergy was sapped by an onslaught of scepticism and criticism, the new legislation ensured that temporal authority had visibly begun to seep away from the priest to the politician and the government official. That seepage was particularly problematic in northern Hungary, where both the local population and the local clergy tended to be Slovak speakers, while local officials, whether elected or appointed, were invariably Magyars, either by birth or inclination. According to one contemporary source, of the 46,449 officials in Slovakia, no more than 300 were ethnic Slovaks, and only 132 openly proclaimed their Slovak identity.8 Not surprisingly then, Slovak Catholic publicists reacted to the new legislation with particular vitriol, as power was perceived to have been ceded from the Slovak-speaking priest to the Magyar-speaking official. Even Slovak Protestants condemned the new legislation, for they also noted what even Catholic Magyars who criticized the government’s legislation ignored: that the Wekerle government’s reforms constituted an assault on both the Catholic faith, and Slovak language and culture.9

12

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

For example, the rather staid Katolícke noviny, which served as the in-house journal of the Slovak-speaking Catholic clergy, responded to the new legislation with a passion it had never previously displayed. Among the broadsides that the paper directed against the new legislation were a series of twelve articles that denounced not only the government’s reform of marriage policy, but also its entire governing philosophy. That philosophy was summed up in a single word that served as the title of the entire series: ‘Liberalism’.10 Revealingly, the author of these articles, Juraj Gogolák, a Slovak priest best known for his publications aimed at children, and who contributed to various periodicals under the pen name Irievič, placed his criticisms of the marriage reform within a far broader condemnation of the government’s policies. In particular, he denounced their impact on the faith, morals and culture of Hungary’s Slovak-speaking minority. Gogolák singled out the supposedly new-found popularity of taverns and the scourge of drunkenness, the growing influence of ‘liberal-Jewish and freemason newspapers’, the rise of socialism, materialism and atheism, the spread of ‘unnatural’ technological innovations and urbanization, the apathy of the clergy, and ‘the destruction of the maternal, native languages of one’s fathers.’11 In the concluding lines of his final article, Gogolák also spelled out to his Slovak Catholic readership that this assault on both the Catholic faith and Slovak culture demanded a political response. ‘We must’, he proclaimed, ‘drive liberalism out of the church and out of politics. We demand that in politics Christian doctrines are asserted and not liberal mumbo-jumbo. Whoever, therefore, is in good conscience with the Catholic church must join the ranks against liberalism. And may God help us in this struggle.’12 Gogolák’s impassioned call heralded a remarkable half-century of Slovak Catholic activism. Four years prior to Gogolák’s articles a meeting of senior government officials who oversaw the Slovak-populated counties of the north of Hungary concluded that Slovak Catholics were reassuringly immune from all forms of agitation.13 In 1894, however, the territory which would, after 1918, become Slovakia, and which was then referred to in the Magyar language as the ‘highlands’ (Magyar: felvídék), became one of the centres of resistance to the new legislation and one of the most bitterly contested fronts in Hungary’s own version of the pan-European culture war. Mass meetings that were held in protest at the new laws attracted in excess of 10,000 attendees. By the end of the year a new opposition party, the Catholic People’s Party (Magyar: Katholikus Néppárt, hereafter KNP), had been established with the Slovak highlands as one of its bastions of support and Gogolák’s Katolícke noviny as one of its loyal

The Liberal Onslaught

13

journals. Then, ten years later, as the KNP prepared to enter into a government coalition with many of the politicians who had supported the earlier anticlerical legislation, dissident Slovak Catholics formed a new party to carry on their culture war against Hungarian liberalism. That party, the SĽS, over the forty years of its existence remained, in essence, an anti-liberal party driven by the same anger that had inspired Gogolák’s fury in 1895. Its leadership was convinced that it was fighting an ongoing culture war against each successive government, first Hungarian and then – after 1918 – Czechoslovak to defend both the Catholic faith and Slovak culture. Clearly, the liberalism which Gogolák, the Katolícke noviny, and later the SĽS struggled against was not one akin to Western models of liberalism. Classical liberalism was led by the middle classes, extolled the value of meritocracy, and was wedded, (at least theoretically) to the principle of free speech. Hungarian liberalism was none of these things. As elsewhere in Central Europe, liberalism in Hungary before 1918 was grounded in a distinct historical tradition: it was enacted by a narrower social elite, and it was driven by a larger nation-building project. It was led by the nobility, upheld hereditary privileges, and was prepared to silence its critics with censorship and imprisonment for ‘agitation against the state’. At times it degenerated into crude chauvinism and blatant self-interest. Some scholars have even rejected the term ‘liberal’ being applied to the regime which governed Hungary up until 1918. The disgruntled émigré historian Oszkár Jászi, for example, set the tone for much later scholarship when he declared in his book on the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire that the ruling party in Hungary ‘had nothing liberal in its character except its benevolent attitude towards Jewish finance and big business’.14 As László Katus has also pointed out, in pre-First World War Hungary ‘liberal equality remained a fiction even within the traditional elite’, which retained a nationalist, hierarchical even messianic outlook that some scholars have termed ‘conservative liberalism’, ‘revisionist liberalism’ or even ‘the illusion of liberalism’.15 There are, however, scholars who have recognized the expansiveness of the liberal project in Central Europe, and the fear it could arouse in more militant Catholics. As Michael Gross has put it, liberalism in this part of Europe was ‘not simply … a political movement and set of economic principles but more broadly … a body of cultural attitudes and social practices’ characterized by an ‘affinity for the new, an orientation towards the future, a belief in progress’, as well as a hostility to ‘feudalism, absolutism and religious orthodoxy’.16 Writing almost forty years before Gross, Hugh Trevor-Roper also highlighted the polarizing power of the European liberal project, pointedly noting that the

14

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

triumph of liberalism had ‘victims as well as victors, and the victims did not surrender quietly’.17 Successive governments in Hungary from the 1860s onwards certainly showed little concern for the victims of their policies. Instead, they revelled in their ability to impose their authority and their values upon the country, which included curbing the privileges of the Catholic church. Gogolák was, therefore, correct, when he asserted that the government’s ‘anti-clerical’ legislation was merely the latest manifestation of the government’s ongoing project to transform the country. Prime Minister Wekerle made exactly the same point when, in introducing the draft legislation in parliament, he declared that ‘twenty-five years of experiences and – dare I say it – successes speak in favour of these laws’.18

The historical context In reality, Hungarian liberalism was inspired by a longer history, one which fuelled not only the government’s determination to transform the country, but also made Slovaks such as Gogolák so apprehensive about that transformation. The conquering Magyar tribes that arrived in the Carpathian basin by the end of the ninth century had granted the Slovaks neither separate rights nor separate duties. The Slovaks’ homeland was fully integrated into Hungary’s political structures, their prominent families were gradually assimilated with only the rarest of exceptions, and waves of immigrants arrived including Germans, Jews, and the Roma. Towns were granted local privileges and prospered, but the great mass of the Slovaks eked out their existence in the impoverished mountain valleys north and northeast of the Danube. When necessary, the Magyars called a Slovak a ‘tót’. Usually, however, they ignored their northernmost compatriots. As Béla Grünwald, one of Hungary’s great nineteenth-century historians, and the first to publish a serious study of the Slovak national movement, noted in 1878, ‘Our politicians and statesmen have not paid attention to the Slovak highlands. … The botanists, geologists, and historians criss-crossed and researched [this region], but not the politicians.’19 The Hungarian political elite’s refusal to take Slovak nationalism seriously was compounded by the inchoate nature of Slovak national identity. The name ‘Slovakia’ (Slovak: Slovensko) had only been invented in the seventeenth century. The first maps which purported to show the borders of Slovakia as a region of Hungary were not published until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the codification of the Slovak language remained a (contested) work in progress into the interwar

The Liberal Onslaught

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period.20 Moreover, although a Slovak ‘cultural awakening’ had gathered pace since the eighteenth century, the Slovak intelligentsia remained relatively small. Many Slovak speakers were appallingly ill-educated, and Slovak nationalism, when it finally made its belated appearance, struck much of Hungary’s social and political elite as almost comical. The Slovaks did not, they insisted, constitute a nation or even, reputedly, ‘a person’ (Magyar: a tót nem ember). Yet for men like Gogolák the isolation of the Slovak speakers of northern Hungary had its advantages, for it had preserved their language, their culture, and their devotion to the Catholic faith. Approximately three-quarters of Slovak speakers in Hungary at the end of the nineteenth century still spoke no other language but their mother tongue. Moreover, about three-quarters of all Slovak speakers were Catholics and renowned for their religiosity. Having endured what they regarded as Magyar rule for a millennium, Gogolák and his allies were convinced that both the culture and the faith of their people in northern Hungary could still resist the liberalism of the government if Slovak Catholics were motivated and mobilized.21 Their conviction that Slovak culture was the vehicle by which the intensity of the faith was passed on to each new generation drew particular inspiration from a long line of nineteenth-century Slovak writers, who popularized the idea that the Slovaks were, like all Slavs, a uniquely moral people. Gogolák and his fellow clergymen, who founded and led the SĽS, simply updated this myth when they argued that this moral character derived not only from the Slovaks’ racial identity, but also from their Catholic identity. From this foundation they proceeded to argue that a ‘holy struggle’ against liberalism was necessary to defend both the Slovak culture and the faith of their people.22 As Alexander Maxwell has, however, persuasively argued, the anger that men like Gogolák felt towards the liberalism of their political overlords was always tempered by a long-standing loyalty to Hungary that endured in the broader population until the very end of the First World War. This loyalty was encapsulated by the Hungarus idea, which emerged in the eighteenth century, when the traditional belief that only the (multi-ethnic and multilingual) nobility constituted the natio hungarica was replaced by nationalist claims that the plebs were also part of the nation, and Hungary was exclusively the land of the Magyars. Hungarus Slovaks, concerned that Hungary’s inhabitants would be ranked not by class but by ethnicity, extolled their own variant of civic nationalism which called for the old natio hungarica of the nobility to be expanded to include not only the Magyar plebs but all of the country’s ethnic inhabitants in a new Hungarian nation (Slovak: Uhorský národ). In practical terms, Hungarus

16

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

Slovaks wanted Hungary to remain a community of peoples, and believed that the replacement of Latin by Magyar as the language of officialdom and public discourse could, perhaps paradoxically by today’s standards, coexist with the preservation of regional/minority cultures, languages and distinct identities.23 This Hungarus loyalty to Hungary was felt so strongly by some Slovaks that, even after the collapse of the country in 1918, an estimated 1400 Slovak-speaking intellectuals chose to remain in Hungary rather than become part of the new Czechoslovak republic.24 Traditionally, the Slovak-speaking Catholic clergy had played a key role in bolstering the Hungarus idea among their parishioners. They emphasized that the House of Habsburg was a Catholic family which upheld the primacy of the faith throughout the entire empire and they stressed that Hungary was itself the Kingdom of Mary (Latin: Regnum Marianum) in which all of her Catholics could feel at home. Such ties were, however, fraying even before the Wekerle government affirmed with its marriage reform in 1894 that even in the ‘Kingdom of Mary’ the interests of the state took precedence over the traditions of the church. As Peter Brock has sketched out in his own study of the Slovak national awakening, the Hungarus idea was already under sustained assault by the 1840s by a series of writers (notably Ján Kollár). These critics were inspired in particular by German philosophers, such as Herder and Fichte, who argued that all nations possessed a distinct linguistic or ethnic identity. Writers following these ideas thus implicitly rejected the Hungarus ideal of a multilingual and multi-ethnic Hungary. Kollár, for example, claimed that Slovak speakers had more in common with the larger Slavic nation, with whom they shared a commonality of language and cultural traits, than they did with the other inhabitants of Hungary such as the Magyars. This ‘panslavism’ had the additional benefit of encouraging the Slovaks to imagine themselves as part of a powerful nation (the Slavs) with a serious culture, and it enabled them to refute jibes about Slovak backwardness (and drunkenness). By incorporating the Slovaks into a larger nation, panslavism also allayed the fear, widespread among Central European intellectuals, that the smaller nations of Europe were inevitably doomed to assimilation and extinction. One variant of panslavism that gained currency among Slovaks was the theory that the Slovaks constituted one nation with the Czechs. The two peoples had, it was claimed, formed a common state in the eighth and ninth centuries called the Great Moravian Empire, a Christian state that was destroyed by the invading pagan Magyars. The similarities between the languages spoken by the Slovaks and the Czechs, as well as their common history in the Habsburg Empire since 1526, were also seen as tangible evidence that the two peoples constituted

The Liberal Onslaught

17

a single Czechoslovak nation, and contacts between Czechs and Slovaks were facilitated by the abolition of border controls, tariffs, and better transport links between the two peoples in the decades before 1914. These competing claims about the national identity of Slovak speakers encouraged a growing number of Slovak speakers to define themselves in ethnic nationalist terms. Older local, regional, and confessional identities, which John Swanson has termed ‘tangible belonging’, remained evident, but for a growing number of Slovak speakers they were superseded by a sense of belonging to a larger nation for, as Martyn Rady has emphasized, this was ‘one of the ways by which the peoples of the Habsburg Empire made sense of their world’. He notes that this process was reinforced by the censuses which were held in every decade from the 1860s onwards and required all the inhabitants of Hungary, apart from practising Jews, to define themselves according to their ‘mother tongue’ (Magyar: anyanyelv). Even ardent Hungarus Slovaks were, therefore, likely to refer to themselves on the census as ‘of Slovak mother tongue’ (Magyar: tót anyanyelv), which could easily be (mis)read as a claim to membership in a Slovak or Slavic nation. The efforts of cartographers, ethnographers, and artists among others, Rady continues, also ‘impressed the idea that people had a single linguistic and cultural identity’ and he concludes that these identities ‘once impressed acquired potency’.25 For the Slovaks, a sign of that potency had come in 1848 when Ľudevít Štúr, who had won election to the Hungarian Diet, led a failed revolt against the government in Budapest. Inspired by the nationalist revolutions that had broken out elsewhere in Europe and in Hungary, he and his allies adopted a similar revolutionary rhetoric. They denounced the ‘Magyar tyrant’ who had oppressed the Slovak nation for ‘a thousand years’, and employed a language that had been embraced by nationalists across Europe, insisting that the Slovaks were now ‘awake’. Confronted by bands of insurgents who were willing to use armed force to obtain their ‘historic rights’, the Hungarian government had to launch a major military operation that gave Slovak nationalists a new set of romantic heroes and enduring grievances. Štúr, himself, withdrew from politics after his failed revolution and consoled himself with dreams of a Slovak–Russian alliance before his untimely death in 1856, but he continued to inspire generations of Slovak nationalists inspired by his nationalist idealism and his capacity to be both a man of letters and a man of action. In 1861 in the small town of Martin, previously Turčianský Svätý Martin (Magyar: Turócz Szent Marton) located in the far north of today’s Slovakia, another gathering of Slovaks tried a different tack. They drew up a memorandum

18

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

which was sent to the Hungarian authorities, and to their king and emperor, Franz Joseph. This audacious document endorsed the Hungarus idea, that the Slovaks and Magyars had shared a harmonious common Christian homeland for almost a millennium. It nevertheless also insisted that Slovak speakers constituted a nation, distinct from the other inhabitants of Hungary, and other Slavic speakers, which was endowed with rights including the right to territorial autonomy.26 Once again, however, Slovak nationalist demands proved fruitless. The memorandum was dismissed by both the Hungarian government and Franz Joseph who were aware that the nascent Slovak nationalist movement was small and powerless. Nevertheless, the memorandum affirmed that Slovak nationalism had survived military defeat in 1848, and the imposition of Habsburg martial law in the wake of the failed revolutions. Moreover, the demand for autonomy would remain a rallying call of the Slovak nationalist movement for the remainder of the nineteenth century, and would be re-employed to dramatic effect by the SĽS in interwar Czechoslovakia. After 1861 the Slovak nationalist movement was clearly split into two streams, the one remained wedded to the ‘panslav’ idea that the Slovaks were part of a wider Slavic nation, the other insistent that the Slovaks (and perhaps the Czechs) constituted their own nation. Confessional differences tended to map onto this divide. Panslavism was largely espoused by the Lutheran leadership, who could more easily overlook the Russian state’s brutal treatment of its (Slavic but also Catholic) Polish and Uniate minorities. In contrast, the belief that the Slovaks had their own unique national identity tended to be more evident among Slovak Catholics, including all of the men who founded and led the SĽS. It is, nevertheless, important to note that the distinctions between these inchoate and competing notions of what it meant to be a Slovak were often blurred, malleable, and transitory, shaped by a larger process of discovery and debate rather than a simple awakening,27 in which the Hungarus idea that Slovak speakers were Slavonic Hungarians existed alongside claims that Slovaks were actually part of a wider Slavic nation, or a narrower Czechoslovak nation, or comprised their own distinct nation.28 The greatest threat to the Hungarus idea before 1918 was, however, those Magyar nationalists who were convinced that Slovak speakers could be, and gradually would be, absorbed into the Magyar nation. They appeared to affirm Slovak nationalists’ claims that Hungarus Slovaks were servile to the Magyars, or had self-magyarized which led to them being dismissed as magyarones (Slovak: maďaron), a pejorative term for magyarized Slovaks who were unable or unwilling to defend their language and culture. As a result, by the beginning of

The Liberal Onslaught

19

the twentieth century, Slovak speakers were being forced, in increasing numbers, to choose between the arguments of Slovak and Magyar nationalists.

Magyar nationalism Magyar nationalism, like all European nationalist movements, owed much to the obsession with ‘national identity’ that emerged in the wake of the Enlightenment, but it can also be traced directly back to the loss of Hungary’s independence in 1526, when the last ‘Magyar’ king Lajos II was killed at the Battle of Mohács by the advancing Ottoman army. The House of Habsburg, which formally took possession of the Hungarian crown and all of its various peoples after this catastrophe, never managed to, and rarely even sought to, Germanize the population. Nevertheless, it always remained a foreign dynasty (although it grew a patriotic Magyar branch), with whom Hungary’s nobles cooperated, bargained, and occasionally battled. Hungary under the Habsburgs retained, therefore, its own body of laws, customs, and layers of government. These privileges were jealously guarded by the Hungarian Diet, later parliament (Magyar: országgyülés), and by the local assemblies that oversaw the affairs of each county and the kingdom’s largest settlements. Hungary’s jurists, historians, and politicians were also instilled with the conviction that their own distinct body of law and custom that had accumulated since the eleventh century represented the ultimate check on royal (Habsburg) centralization. Most Habsburg emperors felt, therefore, compelled to respect what came by the end of the eighteenth century to be known as Hungary’s ‘ancient’ constitution, and generally worked with Hungary’s elite rather than against them. For example, each Habsburg emperor underwent a separate coronation in order to become the king of Hungary. Only Joseph II, who ruled from 1780 to 1790 and became known in Hungary as the ‘hatted king’, refused.29 The Habsburgs’ usual deference to Hungarian law and custom did not, however, prevent rebellions, first to stymie Habsburg centralization (1604–06; 1703–11), later to obtain complete independence (1848–49). The last of these revolts, the brutal ‘revolution and war of independence’ that coincided with the Slovaks’ own failed ‘national uprising’, was finally crushed by the combined force of the Habsburg and Russian armies after seventeen long months at the Battle of Világos. After this defeat, Hungary endured over a decade of direct and occasionally harsh rule from Vienna. In 1867, Emperor Franz Joseph made

20

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

one final effort to placate Hungary with a ‘settlement’ (German: Ausgleich) that granted what can best be termed autonomy or ‘home rule’. With the 1867 settlement the Habsburg Empire was transformed into a dualist state, one-half of which was cumbersomely termed ‘the kingdoms and lands represented in the imperial parliament’ (German: Reichsrat). This ‘Austrian’ half of the empire was governed by the emperor and his directly appointed ministers who were very much his men. In contrast, the other half, formally called ‘the lands of the Hungarian Crown’, was governed by men who were technically appointed by the emperor (on the grounds that he was also King of Hungary), but who actually derived their authority by belonging to the largest party in the Hungarian parliament. In consequence, Hungary’s government was repeatedly prepared to clash with their ‘king’ when, for example, he asked for more taxes or opposed the institution of civil marriage. The emperor still retained direct control over foreign affairs, the army, as well as enjoying sundry rights and privileges as both Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary (although he delegated most of his authority over the Catholic church in Hungary to the authorities in Budapest). Delegations from the two parliaments in Budapest and Vienna, meeting under the auspices of the emperor, were also tasked with resolving common financial matters. Although they proved incapable of agreeing on the appropriate level of taxation necessary to preserve the Habsburg Empire’s status as a Great Power, and Austrian and Hungarian politicians occasionally seethed at the other’s obstinacy, the settlement endured. The first thing to note about the men who were entrusted with the government of Hungary after 1867 was they tended to belong to the noble class that had always constituted the ruling elite in Hungary and, up until the nineteenth century, claimed to be the sole members of the natio hungarica (along with a small number of burghers). A significant number were titled aristocrats, but their influence was slowly shrinking. The dominant group, however, comprised the gentry, who were often well-educated in law, and who managed their land holdings or enjoyed a successful career in the service of the government.30 They were also, almost without exception, at least in sentiment, Magyars.31 While some of the great noble Catholic families remained loyal to the Habsburg family (German: kaisertreue) rather than any national ideal, and while a smattering of parliamentarians proudly asserted their German or Slavic heritage, the vast majority of the political class regarded themselves as the natural leaders and the natural guardians of Hungary who had been entrusted with defending the Magyar national interest.32

The Liberal Onslaught

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The second thing that must be noted about Hungary’s political elite in this period is that they were divided not by class or ethnicity, but by their differing attitudes towards the 1867 settlement. On what was referred to as ‘the Left’ in parliament sat a hard rump of men, who belonged to the Independence Party (Magyar: Függetlenségi Párt) later Independence and Forty-Eighter Party (Magyar: Függetlenségi és Negyvennyolcas Párt), who became known as the ‘Forty-Eighters’. They publicly clung to the romantic ideals of the failed revolution of 1848 and passionately denounced Vienna, the home of the Habsburgs. It was not until 1906, when they briefly became the new governing party, that they moderated their anti-Habsburg rhetoric. Up to that point, power was held by the so-called ‘Sixty-Seveners’ who proudly defended the Ausgleich while constantly attempting to extract fresh concessions from Vienna.33 Under the utterly cynical guidance of the long-serving Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza, most of the SixtySeveners were bound together in what was known as the Liberal Party (Magyar: Szabadelvű Párt) in which internal party discipline appeared to trump all other considerations, and in which the Catholic church and non-Magyars were viewed as an obstacle to the authority of the government and the reform of the state. Those who found such slavish obedience intolerable, either to ministers or to manifestos, formed a series of ‘conservative’ opposition parties including the ‘United Opposition’, ‘Moderate Opposition’ and, from 1892, the ‘National Party’ (Magyar: Nemzeti Párt), but along with the ‘Forty-Eighters’ they, too, remained firmly ensconced on the opposition benches until 1906. Until then, the ‘Sixty-Sevener’ Liberal Party was in charge and thoroughly deserving of its nickname of the ‘government party’ (Magyar: kormánypárt), as a result of both its lengthy time in government and its total control of the government apparatus. In the eight elections held from 1875 to 1901 it never won less than 56 per cent of the seats in parliament. As regards its actual policy, as Andrew Janos has astutely argued, the Liberal Party upheld the Ausgleich ‘not as an act of subservience or loyalty to the [Habsburg] dynasty, but as an act of pragmatism and shrewd calculation’. It ‘jealously guarded the country’s constitutional autonomy and prerogatives’, and dreamed of the day when ‘the centre of power in the monarchy would shift from Vienna to Budapest’.34 In the meantime, the Liberal Party endeavoured to create what László Kontler has called ‘the mirage of greatness’.35 The ‘Sixty-Seveners’ were also imbued, almost as a matter of course, with a conservative temperament that inspired their support for the Settlement but they too were also susceptible to either tub-thumping patriotism or nationalist paranoia. They were certainly aware that Hungary remained, at the beginning of

22

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

the twentieth century, much as it always had been, an overwhelmingly agrarian country that lacked economic clout. Its infrastructure was, at best, a work in progress, and its populace was mostly ill-educated. It possessed only four proper universities, around half the population was illiterate, and only a minority actually described their mother tongue as Magyar in each official census. Moreover, memories were still fresh of the interethnic conflicts of 1848–1849 when the Slovaks, as well as the Croats, Romanians, and Serbs, had risen up against the Hungarian revolutionaries on behalf of the ruling Habsburg dynasty. In a part of Europe unsettled by acquisitive empires and new nation-states, Hungary’s discontented minorities and under-performing economy could easily be viewed as a threat to the survival of the country. This encouraged the Liberal Party to embark on the project of transforming Hungary into a modern state and a great power.

Centralization Perversely, having repulsed the centralizing tendencies of Habsburg rule, the ‘Sixty-Seveners’ began their work by imposing their own centralizing policies upon the kingdom. In doing so they established what Dániel Szabó has insightfully termed the ‘supervised society’.36 The Croats were granted their own pale version of Home Rule in 1868 (Magyar: Nagodba), but they were firmly overseen by a Ban (Magyar: Bán) appointed by the government in Budapest. Transylvania, which had enjoyed wide-ranging autonomy since the sixteenth century, first in the Ottoman Empire and then under the Habsburgs, was integrated into the rest of Hungary. Other territories were also stripped of their political and legal distinctions, including the old Military Frontier and the Saxon Royal Land. At the same time, calls for autonomy which were voiced not only by the Slovaks, but by some of Hungary’s other minorities such as the Romanians of Transylvania, tended to be regarded as either treasonous or deserving only of derision.37 Hungary’s political elite was not, however, merely being hypocritical when it demanded greater autonomy from Vienna while it concentrated ever more power in Budapest. The centralization of power was at the core of the liberal project. Theoretically, because it affirmed the supremacy of parliament over vested local interests, and practically, because only a strong central government was deemed capable of modernizing the country. Moreover, a governmental system headed by the prime minister (Magyar: miniszterelnök), assisted by a minister of justice (Magyar: igazságügy-miniszter), who presided over a

The Liberal Onslaught

23

single legal system, a minister of the interior (Magyar: belügyminiszter), who presided over a single administrative system, and a finance minister (Magyar: pénzügyminiszter) who presided over a unified system of taxes and tariffs, were all hallmarks of the great European powers. Indeed, this ministerial system was an almost exact copy of the widely admired and ruthlessly centralized French administration. Centralization was also desirable from a Magyar nationalist perspective. The Magyars were, in many places, a minority, including in the Slovak-populated highlands where they made up no more than a quarter of the population. Nevertheless, their control of the levers of powers in Budapest ensured they would remain in charge of the entire country.38 At the local level, real power was exercised by the főispán, sometimes translated as sheriff, directly appointed by the minister of the interior to oversee each of the kingdom’s sixty-three counties. Each főispán was assisted by an alispán, who served as his deputy, and by officials (Magyar: szolgabíró) who oversaw each district (Magyar: járás) of the county. The venerable county assemblies provided little counterbalance. Elected by a narrow franchise consisting of the largest taxpayers, and largely composed of exactly the same type of man who tended to vote for the governing party, they rarely served as more than glorified talking shops. In any case, their deliberations were overseen by the főispán who possessed the right to veto their proposals. The largest municipalities did possess their own mayors and councils, but these too were limited in both their scope and in their ambition.39 The growth in the power of the central government can also be measured by the streams of laws that emanated from parliament and the decrees that emanated from each government ministry, as well as the growth in the number of state employees whose numbers more than doubled between 1890 and 1910.40

The electoral system The Liberal Party’s policy of centralization was reinforced by its grip on parliament. The upper house was stuffed with representatives of the greatest noble families, who tended to sympathize with the Liberal Party’s policies as well as a smattering of religious leaders who represented Hungary’s largest religious communities, and who rarely voiced public opposition to the government. The lower house, where power had continued to gravitate from the eighteenth century onwards, was elected, but both the voting system and the franchise were increasingly anachronistic.41 The 413 elected members of the lower house were

24

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

selected by single-member constituencies of varying sizes on the first-past-thepost-principle according to a franchise which excluded not only all women, but also three-quarters of the adult male population. This narrow electorate was actually made up of those men over twenty years of age who owned sufficient property, paid sufficient taxes, belonged to the professional classes, or who possessed the right to vote as an ancestral privilege. In 1901, 1,025,259 men qualified, rising to 1,162,241 men in the 1910 elections out of a total population of over eighteen million people.42 Some scholars have argued that the composition of the electorate was particularly unfavourable for candidates from Hungary’s minorities. They note that although the Magyars comprised less than half of the population, they made up around 57 per cent of the entire electorate, and formed the majority in over 60 per cent of all constituencies. In contrast the economically less well-off Slovaks, it has been alleged, were underrepresented in the electorate. Recent research by József Pap has, however, challenged some of these conclusions.43 He has shown that Slovak speakers made up 9.1 per cent of the total electorate at the turn of the century rising to 11.4 per cent in 1905, an increase from 87,000 voters in 1901 to almost 120,000 in 1905, of which around 80,000–100,000 lived in the territory of today’s Slovakia. They constituted, therefore, half of the electorate in this region, and formed a majority in around fifty of the eighty-one constituencies in this region, as well as in one further constituency in present-day Serbia.44 The ‘open ballot’ voting system was another important factor in skewing elections in the Liberal Party’s favour. As the minister of education, Albert Apponyi, proudly explained in 1907, ‘voting is everywhere uniform, public, and oral. Each elector, having given his name and established his identity, proclaims in a loud voice the name of the candidate for whom he intends to vote, and beside the elector’s name is written that of the candidate for whom he votes.’45 What Apponyi neglected to mention were the myriad ways in which this system could be abused. For example, the president who oversaw each local poll was appointed by a Central Electoral Commission that was invariably controlled by the governing, usually liberal, party. Various shenanigans could also be used to prevent eligible voters actually voting, and their votes could also be misreported or not recorded. In addition, government officials used bribes, threats, and punishments to manipulate voters into supporting the Liberal Party. As a result, the lavish provision of food and drink by rival candidates, the raucous, chaotic atmosphere in which voting was conducted, and the wave of allegations of electoral malfeasance that followed each set of elections, were all standard features of the Hungarian electoral process before the First World War.46

The Liberal Onslaught

25

Nevertheless, the press provided a check on the scale if not the scope of these abuses, and parliament did occasionally disqualify victorious candidates if there was clear evidence of electoral malfeasance (although this too could be exploited by the government to disqualify opposition MPs). Moreover, the opposition parties were also adept at employing various dirty tricks. They could even, on occasion, defeat Liberal Party candidates throughout the country when the public mood turned against the government, as occurred in the elections held in 1905 and 1906. In reality, the narrow franchise and the various electoral abuses merely enhanced (or concealed) the much more substantial advantages that the governing Liberal Party enjoyed over its rivals, the greatest of which was that it alone possessed a de facto nationwide party organization. All of the chief rivals of the Liberal Party were not mass parties but political clubs. Only the Hungarian Social Democratic Party (Magyar: Magyarországi Szocialdemokratikus Párt, hereafter MSZDP) made a serious effort to develop a nationwide organization, but owing to the narrow electorate, the hostility of the authorities and its overwhelmingly urban support base, it failed to get a single one of its candidates elected to parliament before 1918. In contrast, the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party, and the various factions that had broken away from the Liberal Party, enjoyed parliamentary representation but consisted, in reality, of a parliamentary fraction headed by a few prominent personalities, a club in Budapest, and at most a handful of supportive newspapers. At the local level, and especially in the countryside, there was no visible party organization or office, and it was generally only at election time that attempts were made by any of these parties to actually engage with the electorate. The Liberal Party was not, of course, immune from such amateurishness. For example, it only permitted new members to join who had been personally nominated by two members of the party’s parliamentary fraction.47 Compensating for this cliquishness was, however, an entire government administration that was expected to serve as the Liberal Party’s own nationwide organization. Each főispán, who oversaw each county on behalf of the government, was also expected to serve as the Liberal Party’s local election agent. They maintained lists of voters, dispersed government funds and even selected the party’s candidates while employing every means at their disposal to ensure that the government party’s candidates were victorious. Lower ranking officials throughout the country were complicit in this electoral meddling, which was fuelled by a powerful combination of idealism and naked self-interest. These officials had generally convinced themselves that only Liberal Party hegemony could preserve the 1867 Ausgleich on which the stability and

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The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

prosperity of the country rested. They were also aware that severe consequences could be meted out to those government officials who failed to do their bit to ensure that the Liberal Party remained victorious. Compliant officials were rewarded not only with regular promotions, but also with the possibility of a place in parliament. For example, over half of the Liberal Party’s MPs elected in northern Hungary in the 1910 elections had previously served as local officials or had spent time working in one of the ministries in Budapest.48 It is also important to note that the power of the governing Liberal Party was particularly well entrenched in the periphery of the country, where rival party organizations were at their weakest, the authority of government officials at their strongest, and the electorate was most sharply skewed in favour of the Liberal Party. So entrenched was the power of the party that one-third of its candidates usually ran unopposed, or were ‘parachuted’ into a constituency where they had never previously resided in the belief that the quality of a candidate counted for less than his party affiliation. As József Pap has concluded in his comprehensive study of the composition of the Hungarian parliament, it was in this period that ‘Representatives were chosen by the party leaders, not by the public.’49 For all of these reasons, the Slovak highlands had become one of the bastions of electoral support for the Liberal Party. In 1901 it won sixty-three of the eightone seats in the region, and it replicated this success in the 1905 elections, even though it lost its majority in parliament. In the 1906 elections it was defeated nationwide, but still remained the most successful party in the Slovak highlands with thirty-two seats. In 1910 it resumed its dominant position not only nationwide, but also in this northern-Hungarian region where it won fiftyeight seats. It is no surprise, therefore, that Hungarian liberals believed, above all, in centralization, for this ensured the supremacy of the central government over the entire country, and the supremacy of the Liberal Party over the central government.50

Anticlericalism To claim that the Catholic church was a persistent target of the reformist zeal of the governing Liberal Party may seem at first glance surprising. Many of its leading members were devout Catholics, and the church retained throughout this period its privileged status as the empire’s, and by extension Hungary’s, state religion. The prince primate, who was the head of the Catholic church in Hungary, as well as the four archbishops of the kingdom, every diocesan bishop,

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two auxiliary bishops, and three abbots and provosts were all entitled to sit in the Upper House of parliament, and state events invariably took place with the formal presence and blessing of the Catholic hierarchy.51 Nevertheless, as Paul Hanebrink has observed, from the governing Liberal Party’s perspective, ‘In a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state like Hungary, only the state and its laws could guarantee the survival of a cohesive and productive society’ and this in turn required ‘the supremacy of civil law over religious faith.’52 Successive governments proceeded, therefore, to launch a lengthy, convoluted and increasingly bitter struggle to curb the Catholic church’s privileges, and in doing so provoked Hungary’s own variation of the Europe-wide anticlerical culture war. The first government to be formed after the 1867 settlement, headed by Gyula Andrássy (1867–1871), permitted each locality to determine whether its local schools should be stripped of their denominational status, placed all remaining confessional schools and Catholic charitable associations under state supervision, prevented the church from blocking divorce proceedings in mixed marriages, encouraged non-Catholics in mixed marriages to educate their offspring (of the same sex) according to their own faith, and forbade the promulgation of the Vatican’s doctrine of infallibility. Then, in 1885, most of the auxiliary Catholic bishops were expelled from the Upper House, with their places taken by leading Protestant churchmen and later the most senior rabbis.53 It was, however, the first Wekerle government (1892–1895) which enacted the most serious curbs on the power of the Catholic church when it made civil marriage compulsory, regulated the religious education of children, and empowered the state to record all births, deaths and marriages. This government also began to enforce the earlier restrictions on the church’s privileges that had been passed into law by the Andrássy government, but which had been enforced only sporadically. In addition, it failed to raise the salaries of the clergy in line with the rising cost of living and stepped up the monitoring, and blocking, of clerical appointments to keep troublesome priests away from places and positions of influence.54 It mattered little that the government’s curbs on the church’s authority paled in comparison to Imperial Germany’s anticlerical policies, the so-called Kulturkampf, which saw bishops arrested and churches closed, or the anticlerical policies of France’s Third Republic, which closed down over 3,000 Catholic religious institutions, one-third of Catholic schools, and stripped Catholicism of its status as a state religion.55 Nor did it matter that it was in fact devout

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Catholics, including both Andrássy and Wekerle, who took the lead in driving through these anticlerical policies, while continuing to privately consult with the local Catholic hierarchy on matters of public policy. The government had clearly abandoned its earlier policy of ‘quieta non movere’ towards the church, while substantial numbers of Catholics, Magyars and non-Magyars, alike were now convinced that the government’s liberal policies constituted, in Hanebrink’s words, ‘a direct assault on their religious beliefs and a clear sign that alien liberal values had become hegemonic in Hungary’.56

Magyarization Non-Magyars in Hungary, including Slovak Catholics, had, however, an additional reason to be aggrieved by the government’s liberal policies. Just as John Stuart Mill, one of the intellectual godfathers of nineteenth-century liberalism, had sneered at the Breton who had chosen ‘to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit’, so too did the governing Liberal Party sneer at the various non-Magyar peoples in the kingdom whose inability to speak the Magyar language allegedly excluded them from fully participating in national affairs.57 Convinced that the future success of the country depended on the entire population being transformed into loyal citizens able and willing to contribute to the general prosperity, the governing class in post-1867 Hungary regarded the minorities who clung to their own languages and distinct identities as an intolerable obstacle to progress. Confronted by the fact that less than half the population of Hungary officially identified themselves as ‘of Magyar mother tongue’, the government sought to instil into the entire population a Magyar identity or as R.W. Seton-Watson succinctly put it, ‘to convert the historical state into the national state by the instrument of magyarization’.58 There were a raft of reasons why successive Hungarian governments embarked on this contentious policy, the strongest of which have been concisely summarized by Bryan Cartledge as utilitarian. He, too, has concluded that ‘if Hungary was to remain a viable unitary state within the Dual Monarchy she required one official language for the language of state business’, and that, in order to open up opportunities for social advancement, ‘it would be difficult … to make out a case against the provision of instruction of the Magyar language in all schools … as early as possible’. Cartledge has, however, also observed that magyarization was never inspired solely by utilitarian justifications. This

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was demonstrated, he notes, by pressure for Magyar to be not only a necessary language of instruction, but ‘the sole language of instruction’ in schools, or the only language permitted on street signs or gravestones.59 One plausible explanation for this linguistic chauvinism is that it stemmed from the Magyars’ crippling lack of confidence in themselves and their neighbours. Memories of 1848, when some Croat and Slovak speakers had sided with the Habsburgs against their own government, and when some Romanian peasants had lynched their Magyar landlords, were made rawer by the failure of the revolution. There was also awareness that the existence of sizeable minorities, most obviously the Romanians and Serbs, encouraged their ethnic kin in the neighbouring states of Romania and Serbia to dream of swallowing large chunks of Hungary’s territory. Slovak nationalism awakened similar fears among officials who were convinced that any claim of a distinct Slovak identity was proof of ‘panslav’ and Russophile sympathies.60 The Magyar elite’s own grievances at the historical injustices wrought by centuries of foreign occupation (first by the Ottomans, then by the Habsburgs, which had supposedly reduced the numbers of Magyars in the population from about 80 per cent in the late fifteenth century to 40 per cent by the beginning of the nineteenth century), also blinded them to the injustices they wreaked on their own minorities with the policy of magyarization.61 There were, of course, cynical reasons for the government in Budapest to embark on this policy. It certainly bolstered the Liberal Party’s nationalist credentials in response to the accusation that they had betrayed the ideals of the 1848 revolution by agreeing to the 1867 settlement. Above all, however, magyarization was driven by the chauvinist assumption that Magyar culture was superior to the other cultures of the country. The Slovaks, who were repeatedly characterized as passive, primitive, drunk, ‘incapable of nationhood’ and ‘ripe for assimilation’, were obvious targets of such arrogance.62 The governing elite could have chosen to accommodate rather than assimilate Hungary’s various minorities. Ferenc Deák, one of Hungary’s wiser politicians, oversaw the passing of a ‘Nationalities Law’ which formally permitted the various peoples of the kingdom to use their mother tongue in their dealings with officialdom and the courts, while schools would determine their working language based on the ethnicity of the students in the same way that churches traditionally determined the language of services based on the mother tongue of their parishioners. Instead of being inclusive, however, the Nationalities Law became bitterly contested as it was also a poorly drafted and ambiguous piece of legislation. For example, the concessions it offered to the

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minorities were juxtaposed with an insistence that the only nation in Hungary was the ‘Magyar political nation’ (Magyar: Magyar politikai nemzet) to which all the various minorities – or ‘nationalities’ (Magyar: nemzetiségek) belonged.63 It was particularly unfortunate that the law failed to explain what the phrase ‘Hungarian political nation’ actually meant, and failed to clarify why only nonMagyars would henceforth be classified as belonging to the various nationalities. Later historians have come to contradictory conclusions about the law’s intentions. It has, for example, been lauded as ‘one of the most enlightened measures of its kind ever adopted’ and lambasted as a quintessential expression of Magyar chauvinism.64 Certainly, cynical politicians made full use of its terminological inexactitude to win plaudits from their chauvinistic audiences. Kálmán Tisza, who served as prime minister from 1897–1890, latched onto this terminology to insist that Hungary had only one nation, the Magyar nation (Magyar nemzet) and that there was, therefore, no such thing as a ‘Slovak nation’.65 The essential weakness of Deák’s Nationalities Law was not, however, that it was ambiguous, but that it was irrelevant. Throughout the nineteenth century Magyar nationalists insisted that the Magyar language should become the sole language of their state, and their fervour was not dimmed by the passing of the Nationalities Law.66 It is true that the use of minority languages was permitted in some lower courts, some denominational schools, many Catholic parishes, and that most officials were required to know the local language in the region where they served. All this was, however, also the case prior to 1868 when Deák’s law was eventually placed on the statute books. What really changed after this date was that parliament and the various government ministries devoted considerable effort to enacting legislation that evaded, subverted or directly overturned both the letter and the spirit of the Nationalities Law.67 These shenanigans were grounded in the conviction that the law was merely a sop to the minorities which had rapidly outlived its purpose. Thus, when Hungary’s foremost expert on constitutional law, Győző Concha, was asked about the provisions in the Nationality Law that protected minority rights, he reputedly confessed that he had ‘forgotten that point’.68 More bluntly, István Tisza, prime minister of Hungary from 1903 to 1905 and again from 1913 to 1917, admitted in parliament that the Nationalities Law was ‘impossible to enact’ because it was ‘idealistic’.69 Government efforts to magyarize were regarded by many Slovaks as not realistic but antagonistic. Magyarization even struck at the Slovaks’ own sense of personal identity as it required them to record their names in compliance with the rules of Magyar-language orthography and to adopt the Magyars’ custom of

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recording their surname before their first name in all official records.70 In addition, only Magyar national heroes were venerated in official commemorations, public statues, and school text books, while Budapest became not only the seat of government, but also the focal point for the promotion of Magyar culture. This was driven home by the ‘Millennium Exhibition’ of 1896 that was held in the capital, a huge yearlong festival that celebrated the one-thousandth anniversary of the Magyars’ conquest of the Carpathian basin. The mania for commemorating Magyar national heroes in statues and mass spectacles continued unabated there and in every city throughout Hungary until 1918.71 In addition, injury was added to insult for as Magyar was the usual language of the courts, most native Slovak speakers were either linguistically disadvantaged, or required the expensive services of translators to even put forth their cases.72 The magyarization of schooling was especially controversial, as the Magyar language became the norm at every level as a result of a series of laws and decrees from 1879 onwards. By 1913, of the 206 senior schools in Hungary, 175 used Magyar as their sole language of instruction, and none conducted the bulk of their teaching in Slovak, while of the 18,603 primary schools, 73 per cent used Magyar and only 2 per cent (369 schools) used Slovak.73 The reduction in Slovak-language schooling was blamed not only for stripping Slovaks of their national identity, but also for alienating them from the education system with the result that over half of all Slovaks were illiterate; they constituted only 2.3 per cent of the high school population and they occupied a miniscule proportion of the senior administrative, financial and cultural positions.74 As the first leader of the SĽS, František Skyčák, explained to his fellow members of the Hungarian parliament in 1907, Slovaks were so ill-educated that even the intellectuals would soon be speaking ‘kitchen Slovak’,75 while Anton Bielek, another of the SĽS’s founding members, argued in a pamphlet he published in 1896, that the government’s policies had not only financially impoverished the Slovak peasantry, but had also destroyed the older traditions of Slovak village life when ‘people didn’t visit the tavern’ and ‘God lorded over each family’.76 Ferdinand ‘Ferdiš’ Juriga, another leading figure within the SĽS, was equally adamant about the threat that magyarization posed to both Slovak identity and public morality when he warned that either ‘children … will be moved from the school into the church’ or that they will be deprived of a (Slovak) education and will be ‘thrown out into the eternal fire’. His pessimistic conclusion was that if nothing changes ‘in some fifty years … they will show the last Slovaks like a race of dying out monkeys’.77 The same point about magyarization’s impact on faith and morality was also made repeatedly by the long-serving leader of the party, Andrej Hlinka. As he explained to the judge at his trial for agitation against the

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state in 1906, the government’s effort to magyarize schools in northern Hungary meant ‘the people are far behind the standard of civilization; they become the victims of drunkenness, usury, and immorality’.78 Even some Magyars concurred that the forcible magyarization policy in schools was one of the chief causes of ‘the pitiful cultural backwardness’ of the non-Magyar peoples, as did a vigorous group of foreign critics who continued for decades after the fact to excoriate the government’s policies as, in Rebecca West’s words, ‘triumphant cruelty’.79 The English observer R.W. Seton-Watson, who had a particular gift for summing up the Slovak nationalist viewpoint, did concede that the ‘backward economic state’ of the Slovak village was ‘aggravated by social changes’ and, especially, the presence of the ‘ubiquitous Jew’, but he too put the ultimate blame on ‘Magyar chauvinism’.80 The frequent claim by Slovak nationalists that magyarization had a deleterious impact on the moral values of Slovaks was exacerbated by the magyarizing efforts of the Catholic church in the Slovak-populated regions of the highlands. Since only those who had attended secondary schools were sufficiently educated to enter the seminaries, and since no secondary school taught through the medium of Slovak, an increasing proportion of the clergy in the highlands of Hungary were likely to be either Magyars or ‘magyarized’ Slovaks. That trend was reinforced by the local Catholic hierarchy’s insistence that the language of instruction in the seminaries must be Magyar. Slovak-language materials were removed from the libraries of these institutions, and Slovak catechists were occasionally penalized for advocating the wider use of their mother tongue.81 As a result of these measures, and the increase in the number of speakers of Magyar in the Slovak highlands, in the thirty years following the 1867 Ausgleich, it has been estimated that well over one hundred Slovak-speaking parishes had a clergyman who was only prepared to use the Magyar language in his dealings with his parishioners.82 This should not have been the case. The Catholic church was always, at least theoretically, hostile towards nationalist movements, not least because they invariably challenged the claim of universal authority by the Papacy. Italian nationalism was, for example, regarded by the Vatican well into the twentieth century as an anathema, and Catholics were urged not to participate in Italian elections. Efforts by various states to foster national unity were also usually viewed by the church with suspicion on the grounds that this necessarily resulted in the state ‘curtailing the prerogatives and influence of the church’.83 The inability of a growing number of clergymen to instil the faith into their parishioners through their native language should, therefore, have caused dismay

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among their ecclesiastical superiors, while the series of laws that were passed from 1879 onwards to promote the use of Magyar in schools, which directly intruded upon the autonomy of Catholic schools, should have provoked the fury of the church hierarchy. In reality, however, Hungary’s bishops often proved as enthusiastic as government ministers in promoting magyarization. As Frank Henschel has observed, the Catholic hierarchy in Hungary and the anticlerical liberal government both agreed to abandon the culture war after 1895 and instead focus on a mutually beneficial project that he calls the ‘nationalization of religion and consecration of nation’.84 Likewise, the Katolícke noviny claimed in 1906 that ‘the people see that the bishops and the priests have made their peace with civil marriage and atheism or do not allow a fight against this’.85 For Slovak Catholic critics, the hierarchy was afflicted by a lethargy that sapped at the faith and empowered its enemies. As Gabriel Adriányi has put it, ‘Bishops lived and behaved liked aristocrats … [while] the lower orders of the clergy lived as they pleased. They chased better benefices, did scarcely any pastoral work, and preferred to devote their energy to managing their parish estates and participating in the life of high society.’86 Arguably, the clergy’s support for magyarization both reflected and compounded these divisions between the flock and its shepherds. If the bishops in northern Hungary insisted on using the Magyar language they would be increasingly isolated from the Slovak-speaking majority in their dioceses. Likewise, if the priest only gave his homilies in Magyar, or only offered instruction to his parishioners in Magyar, or only taught in Magyar in the local school, the Slovak-speaking population of the parish would, it was argued, be both intellectually and emotionally alienated from Catholicism.87 Andrej Kmet, a prominent Slovak priest, captured the despairing mood of his fellow clergymen who were convinced that magyarization would lead to the destruction of the Catholic faith among the Slovaks. He wrote in 1898, in the Katolícke noviny, that ‘nowhere in the world is there a more neglected, forsaken people than the Slovak Catholic people … They don’t allow us to pray in Slovak, they don’t allow us to learn the Catechism in Slovak, they don’t allow us to sing, in the churches, to the glory of God in Slovak, they don’t allow us to preach the word of God in Slovak.’88 According to Alojz Kolísek, a Czech priest who took a close interest in Slovak spiritual affairs, the spiritual impact of such cultural chauvinism was devastating. In Slovak parishes, he insisted, prior to these magyarization efforts ‘all of the people sang together with religious ardour’, but after Slovak songs and sermons were banned ‘the people were silent’.89

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The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

According to Hlinka, magyarones were also unconcerned with ‘the education of the people’. He claimed that they preferred to go ‘to the club, to social functions, [and] to card-game parties’ and warned that ‘if the people have to look for these magyarone priests, not in the school, in the church, or in the confessional, but in the casino (club), at the skittles alley, or on day trips, then the coldness and aversion of the people is not to be ascribed to us [Slovak-speaking priests], but to them [i.e. the magyarones]and their behaviour’.90 Another founding member of the party warned that these ‘lord-priests’ were ‘like Nebuchadnezzar before his fall’,91 while yet another founding member simply described the Catholic hierarchy’s magyarizing efforts as a ‘sin against the holy spirit’.92 Such concerns were reinforced by the case of the village of Horná Súča (Magyar: Felsőszücs) in Trencsén County (Slovak: Trenčín) in the northwest of today’s Slovakia. In this traditionally devout Slovak-speaking parish disgruntled villagers attempted to assassinate their own parish priest who was unwilling to teach the faith in Slovak. Likewise, in the village of Lúčky (Magyar: Lucski) in Liptó County in the far north of the highlands, the appointment of a magyarizing priest led the villagers to boycott the local church for several years. Most famously, tensions between Slovak parishioners and magyarone clergymen in the nearby village of Černová (Magyar: Csernova) led to violent protests and culminated in the gendarmerie shooting fifteen of the villagers dead.93 It is worth noting that there was still extensive provision of Slovak-language religious services across northern Hungary as well as in the capital Budapest. There was also a large network of Slovak-speaking priests who had their own societies, journals and publishing houses, and who were occasionally rewarded by being posted to the elite Pazmaneum theological college in Vienna or promoted to positions of influence within the hierarchy. For example, the head of the Catholic church in Hungary from 1912, János Csernoch, was himself a Slovakspeaker. Moreover, viewed overall, magyarization was less aggressive in Hungary than the assimilationist policies pursued by some other European countries and North America, which partly explains why it was largely ineffective; in absolute terms the number of people identifying as Slovaks in Hungary actually increased by 228,000 persons between 1850 and 1910.94 Most of those former Slovak-speakers who identified as Magyar-speakers did so voluntarily (Magyar: önmagyarosodás), and even some Liberal Party politicians privately recognized that the magyarization of the entire population was a practical impossibility.95 Nevertheless, the fact that the percentage of the population of Hungary who described themselves as Slovak-speakers in the official censuses declined from 13.2 per cent in 1850 to 11.9 per cent in 1880 and fell to 9.4 per cent by

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1910, exacerbated fears among Slovaks about ‘the death of the nation’ that had circulated around Central Europe throughout the nineteenth century. In particular, magyarization crystallized Slovak Catholic opposition to liberalism and gave it an exceptional intensity. It fused together the defence of the faith with the defence of the nation, and in doing so helped give Slovak nationalism a moral quality that made compromise difficult and facilitated radicalization.96

The economic crisis The economic transformation of the country between 1867 and 1914 was a remarkable achievement that gave the impression that Hungary was rapidly becoming a modern and successful economy. In reality, as one of Hungary’s more sober officials recognized, irrespective of the growth of commerce, trade and industry, ‘agriculture [was] the principal, almost the only industry in Hungary’ which ‘directly or indirectly … [supported] three-fourths of the inhabitants’ of the country.97 Nevertheless, the Liberal Party enthusiastically concentrated on promoting manufacturing interests and free trade and thereby laid itself open to the allegation that it had sacrificed the interests of rural people on the altar of industrial growth and economic modernization. Children as young as twelve could be put to work in factories, there was no guarantee that Sunday would be a day of rest, employees could still be expected to work in excess of twelve hours a day, and much of the peasantry was impoverished. Successive governments did oversee an enormous effort to improve Hungary’s infrastructure that manifested itself most obviously in the rapid growth of the railway network which grew eightfold between 1867 and 1913. The prime beneficiaries of this investment were, however, again manufacturing and commerce, which were also bolstered by the general elimination of internal tariffs, the wholesale adoption of the Austrian commercial code, various direct and indirect subsidies, and tax exemptions. The state’s willingness to nationalize 13 per cent of the country’s industrial production when necessary also demonstrated the importance of industry in the government’s plans for modernization. The result was an almost uninterrupted economic boom that began in the 1860s and continued up to the start of the First World War, but it was a boom that left much of the country in relative poverty.98 Agricultural interests were directly afflicted by the pro-manufacturing policies of the liberal regime. Taxes on agriculture compensated for low taxes on industry, while relatively free trade encouraged the import of agricultural products that

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The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

undercut the prices and therefore the profits of domestic producers. The arrival of American exports and Russian cereals onto the European market also depressed prices (and profits), while the spread of philoxera temporarily devastated wine production. As a result, the agricultural sector in Hungary managed average annual growth of only 1.39 per cent in the period 1870–1913, which was surpassed by the rapid growth in industry and mining (3.05 per cent a year) and trade, banking and transport (3.18 per cent a year). As a result, agriculture’s share of GDP declined from 66 per cent to 44 per cent, and the percentage of the population directly employed in agriculture declined from 77 per cent in 1869 to 62 per cent in 1910.99 Moreover, the statistics showing the growth of Hungarian agriculture in the period conceal an important difference between the larger estates, which flourished due to their investments in mechanization, drainage and fertilization, and the small-scale farmers who generally lacked the means to substantially improve their position.100 The government did introduce numerous efforts to improve the conditions of agriculture in Hungary. The regulation of rivers, while limiting some peasants’ access to water supplies, did reduce the threat of destructive flooding. Agricultural schools were established to spread new and more efficient farming ideas, and the Ministry of Agriculture oversaw invaluable work to improve animal husbandry and crop production. Moreover, the government was able to persuade Vienna to agree to a small increase in agricultural tariffs in 1882 and again in 1892. Nevertheless, Macartney was basically right when he wrote that ‘the agrarian labour legislation of the period consisted almost exclusively of enactments designed to prevent the labourers from defending their interests against those of the landlord’.101 Certainly, the government was unwilling to take the radical measures necessary to dramatically improve Hungary’s agricultural fortunes. It would not shift the tax burden to industry and commerce, as that would penalize the most vibrant part of the economy and lead to a surge in urban unemployment. Furthermore, it would not countenance a dramatic programme of land reform which would have undermined the sanctity of private property and alienated those landowners upon whose support the Liberal Party depended. Thus, each successive government proved incapable of solving what was, in any case, a Europe-wide agricultural crisis. Rather, a succession of ministers relied on tinkering and wishful thinking while giving the strong impression that they were essentially unconcerned with the plight of the peasantry. The stench of narrow self-interest was made more pungent by the fact that, between 1867 and 1918,

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eleven of the men who ran the Ministry of Agriculture were aristocrats, and the other eight were members of the landed gentry.102 The impoverishment of the agricultural workforce was again a more acute phenomenon in the Slovak-populated counties of northern Hungary. This was partly because a significantly larger proportion of Slovaks were employed in agriculture as compared to the population as a whole. In the region that would later be termed Slovakia, the population living in rural areas (defined as settlements with less than 20,000 people) was 87.4 per cent in 1910, and the number of Slovaks involved in some form of agricultural labour was 70.6 per cent whereas only 50.6 per cent of Magyars were employed in the most sluggish sector of the economy.103 Moreover, rural poverty was naturally at its worst in the poor-quality soil of the mountainous areas of northern Hungary, where the bulk of the Slovaks resided, and whose poverty was exacerbated by the persistent use of inefficient farming methods and a lack of mechanization. In large parts of northern Hungary just 1–2 per cent of the peasantry earned something approximating the average income.104

Emigration Nothing appeared to expose the hidden economic crisis more than the mass emigration which began immediately after the Ausgleich and which effectively continued unchecked until the outbreak of war in 1914.105 It was indicative of the impoverishment of Slovak villages that even in absolute terms, more Slovaks emigrated to America than Magyars (26.5 per cent of the 1,463,693 people who emigrated from Hungary to America between 1901 and 1913 were Slovakspeakers) and that only the Irish and the Norwegians emigrated in proportionally greater numbers to America in this period.106 The government did, superficially, seek to curb emigration. In 1881, 1903 and 1909 it passed laws that forbade unauthorized ‘agents’ from promoting or facilitating foreign emigration.107 Nevertheless, the governing elite remained largely unconcerned about the crisis afflicting rural life. Migration was even welcomed by some officials as a source of foreign remunerations and a corrective to the prevalence of dwarf holdings that was blamed on ‘over-population’.108 Only after the turn of the century did the government publicly describe mass emigration as a negative phenomenon, and even then it failed to diagnose the roots of the problem. Instead, the minister of the interior explained to his senior

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officials that although emigration was ‘from a political and national economic standpoint unfortunate’; it was the result of an organized ‘movement’ and could be substantially reduced by vigilance and counter-propaganda.109 In contrast, the founding members of the SĽS described Slovak emigration as an unfolding catastrophe caused by the whole range of liberal policies that had impoverished the Slovaks from centralization and magyarization to ‘the Jewish invasion’.110 Dr Pavel Blaho, the party’s expert on agrarian matters, for example, asserted in 1906 that ‘the collapse of the small farmers in Hungary is terrible and it has no parallel in any other country in Europe. The emigration of the people to America is also rooted in this sad truth.’ He then proceeded to lament ‘those who rule over this misery, the lords, counts, and magnates who do not feel the horror, the danger caused by their rule, their politics, their administration.’111 Vavro Šrobár, another founding member of the party was even blunter. Among the reasons he gave for favouring the new Czechoslovak state in 1918 was the mass emigration of the Slovaks. Their departure, he insisted, was proof that Hungary was a ‘political hell’, and added ‘is it surprising that the Slovak people escape from their homeland in their hundreds of thousands?’112

Urbanization A belief that the government was responsible for mass emigration overlapped with concerns about the simultaneous flow of the rural population into Hungary’s largest cities. These processes occurred with unprecedented speed throughout Hungary after the 1867 Ausgleich, and both phenomena resulted in growing numbers of Slovaks leaving their ancestral villages. Between 1869 and 1913 the number of settlements with a population over 5,000 increased from 239 to 417, the total population of these settlements increased from 2.9 to 6.2 million, and their share of the total population increased from 21.3 to 33.8 per cent. Furthermore, 20 per cent of the entire population lived in fairly large towns which had at least 20,000 persons while the capital Budapest grew from 270,000 inhabitants in 1869 to 880,000 by 1910.113 The Liberal Party’s de facto support for urbanization, which manifested itself in the effort to improve roads, build railways, invest in cities and promote Budapest as ‘the heart of the country’ ensured that it would also be blamed for both external and internal migration. Nevertheless, for the government, the rebuilding of Hungary’s cities, and particularly Budapest, was the crowning achievement of the period, embodied by the reconstruction of Hungary’s capital

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city, with its newly built squares and avenues, magnificent palaces, splendid bridges and pioneering metro and tram systems, which began to be referred to as the ‘pearl of the Danube’ or the ‘eastern Paris’. This building boom sucked in Slovak immigrants more rapidly than did the allure of a new life in the United States. Ján Podolák in his study of pre-war Slovak village life, for example, estimates that at least 80,000 Slovaks left their villages every year in search of seasonal labour, while Ladislav Tajták has estimated that by 1910 more than one in three Slovaks had left their homes in search of work.114 As one Slovak Catholic journalist caustically noted, the government’s belated concerns about emigration missed the point that from a Slovak perspective, the movement to other countries was less destructive than the flight to the larger Hungarian cities. In America, the writer claimed, Slovak emigrants were able to use their native language in churches and schools, whereas in Hungary similar provision for Slovak-language in the cities was much sparser, and religious services in Slovak were rare.115 Concerns about the threat that emigration posed to rural life were, of course, widespread throughout Europe: in Germany, for example, where the movement of the peasantry into the cities (German: Landflucht) had resulted in the 1890s being the first decade in modern history when the number of Germans in the countryside declined in absolute numbers.116 In response, a new generation of völkisch writers asserted that this ‘crisis’ threatened the very vitality of the nation. For such thinkers, it was ‘not within the city, but in the landscape, the countryside native to him, that man was fated to merge with and become rooted in nature and the people (German: Volk)’. In contrast, emigration and urbanization supposedly ‘uprooted’ the people and detached them from their national traditions, or as one völkisch writer put it, cities were ‘the tombs of Germanness’.117 Although an expanding body of modern scholarship has demonstrated that the Catholic church could thrive in urban areas,118 Catholic clergymen and intellectuals in Hungary and throughout Europe were broadly convinced that the flight to the cities inevitably loosened the traditional ties that had bound the émigré to his rural parish and his faith. As Carl Zangerl puts it in his study of Bavarian Catholicism at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘the movement of Catholics from rural areas to the cities invariably increased the chances of their exposure to “antireligious” influences’. The ‘widely differing material needs, social relationships, and … life chances’ resulting from industrialization and urbanization, Zangerl concluded, ensured that ‘the socioeconomic underpinning of Catholic solidarity was seriously weakened’.119

40

The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

It was not only Catholic clergyman in Hungary who succumbed to this fear of urbanization. Even the prominent Magyar poet János Arany denounced the ‘alien’ character of Budapest, while, as Gwen Jones has demonstrated, other turn-of-the-century Magyar writers ‘excoriated the city as the source of all vice’ and described Budapest as, for example, ‘an international Sodom’.120 This antipathy could also easily mutate into hostility towards all the phenomena that were associated with urbanization including capitalism, cosmopolitanism and the high concentrations of Jews in the cities of the kingdom.121 Slovak Catholics were, however, particularly susceptible to these fears. This was not only because migration to the city or abroad was more common in the Slovak-populated areas, but also because Slovak nationalists argued that the distinctiveness of Slovaks was intimately bound up with the fact they lived overwhelmingly in rural areas. As one of the leading pre-war Slovak nationalists explained to an English readership, ‘The vast majority of the Slovak race is made up of peasants tilling the soil, fishers and craftsmen, pedlars and men engaged upon home industries – in other words, classes who are in direct and permanent contact with the surrounding nature.’122 This ‘flight to the cities’ not only ended this ‘permanent contact with the surrounding nature’, it also encouraged the Slovaks’ assimilation into the Magyar nation. The spread of Magyar language knowledge, for example, occurred almost five times more quickly in the towns than in the villages.123 The city of Košice (Magyar: Kassa), the largest city in the eastern half of the Slovak highlands, illustrates the extent to which the Slovak-speaking part of the population’s use of the Magyar language could alter one’s national identity. In 1880 just under 40 per cent of Košice’s inhabitants described themselves as Slovak-speakers. Thirty years later that number had fallen to just under 15 per cent.124 To understand why this flight to the cities was seen as a threat both to Slovak morals and the Slovak language, it is essential to note that throughout the Slovak-populated counties of Hungary, almost every large town had a majority Magyar-speaking population, while the Slovaks in the surrounding countryside tended to live in almost monolingual villages. Slovak migrants were, therefore, generally compelled to learn Magyar in order to flourish in their new place of residence, the first step towards losing their Slovak identity. Towns in Slovakpopulated areas were also hotspots of magyarization, as they attracted Magyar migrants, and served as the headquarters for (usually Magyar-speaking) officials.125 No better example of this phenomenon exists than the city that served as the primary destination for Slovak speakers in Hungary – the capital Budapest –

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which was also the seat of the central government, and a showcase for Magyar culture. It was Budapest, the eighth largest city in Europe, and the continent’s second fastest growing metropolis which, as Gwen Jones has noted, ‘was to embody the aspirations of Hungarian liberalism’ and, in the government’s own words, ‘exert an irresistible intellectual and material attraction over all parts of the country’.126 That attraction had induced an estimated 66,000–84,000 Slovak speakers to permanently migrate to Budapest, but at most only a third (24,000) still officially described themselves as Slovak-speakers by 1900 and even fewer (11,000 in 1890) remained monolingual, statistics that highlighted the extraordinarily rapid pace of magyarization in Hungary’s capital city.127 It should not be surprising, therefore, that the Slovak Catholic writers who founded the SĽS employed some of their harshest language to condemn urban life and urbanization as a ‘modern social sickness’, and a root cause of the ‘modern moral crisis’ that incubated both new diseases and immoral behaviour. Cities were compared to ‘vampires … that suck into themselves the rural people’, while Budapest was singled out by one of the party’s first MPs František Jehlička, who worked and lived there from 1906–1918, as a city ‘run by Jews’, which impoverishes the immigrant, regards people as ‘meat’, and ‘devours our daughters and our youth’.128 Even Slovak Social Democrats added their voice to this attack on Budapest when, for example, a progressive journalist responded to ongoing reports of high rate of injuries in the construction industry in the capital, which employed a large number of Slovak migrants, by writing that ‘Budapest is being built with blood instead of mortar’.129 At the same time the populist Slovak Catholic press idealized rural life as a bastion of Slovak culture and Catholic morals. For example, the Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, edited by some of the men who went on to found and lead the SĽS, repeatedly denounced the flight to the cities as a threat to both the faith and the identity of the Slovaks. The degeneration of the urban population was then contrasted with ‘those who live in villages’ who ‘have a love for the people, they adore the language of their mothers, that language in which they pray to God’.130

Alcoholism and the fear of moral collapse According to Slovak Catholic critics, the immorality instigated by the government’s liberal policies was not only rampant in Hungary’s cities, but had also begun to undermine the traditions and values of the [Slovak] countryside.

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The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

Mass migration was blamed for falling birth rates and marriage rates as it was typically young males who were most likely to emigrate. For example, around two-thirds of all emigrants from the Slovak heartlands to America were under the age of thirty, with men comprising an even greater proportion of the emigrants. This raised concerns about the feminization of Slovak society and the moral collapse of the countryside summed up by the spectre of villages filled with unmarried women condemned to permanent spinsterhood.131 Even progressive Slovak writers grouped around the Hlas journal, bemoaned the supposed epidemic of ‘fallen’ Slovak peasant women that they blamed on economic inequality and an uncaring bureaucracy.132 One manifestation of this supposed moral decline was the growing popularity of manufactured spirits and public alcoholism. Concerns that Slovaks were experiencing an epidemic of drunkenness at the beginning of the twentieth century were, in part, a result of the changes in the way alcohol was produced and consumed that took place across Europe at this time. James Roberts has, for example, argued that the alleged growth of both alcohol consumption and alcoholism in Central Europe in the nineteenth century was ‘rooted in the development of agrarian capitalism’ which encouraged landowners ‘to convert their surpluses of staple crops into alcohol’. As a result, ‘the use of strong drink, once a luxury of the affluent, was now readily within the financial grasp of the common man’ with the result that production soared, prices fell and alcohol consumption appeared to rocket.133 Slovaks had, however, always been prolific consumers of alcohol. Stereotypes about their alleged fondness for hard spirits, particularly fruit brandies, date back to at least the beginning of the nineteenth century. Much of the production of alcohol, and the resulting intoxication, had traditionally occurred within the home. Until the late nineteenth century home distilling was the norm, and taverns were fairly rare. That changed in the decades before the First World War, as a result of the spread of the railways, improvements to the roads and developments in farming and manufacturing. In the period after 1867, cheap mass-produced brandy flowed out from the cities, along with increasingly good quality beer, which led to a rapid growth in the number of taverns which could now offer alcoholic products that were almost as cheap as home-distilled brandy. Moreover, taverns often provided a wide range of other functions that attracted customers. They often served as a restaurant, general store, hotel and bank and acted as an informal social hub of the local community. They also invariably provided various forms of credit to their customers, whose income was often seasonal, or facilitated the work of other moneylenders, but the rates of interest

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tavern keepers were required to charge to make their businesses viable fuelled allegations that they corrupted, indebted, and impoverished their customers.134 Concerns about the Slovaks’ fondness for hard spirits, the popularity of taverns and the immorality that was a by-product of drunkenness were already being voiced by Slovak clergymen in the mid-nineteenth century. Voluntary associations to promote moderate drinking in the highlands were founded by Catholic priests in the 1840s. They insisted that brandy (Slovak: palenka) was an ‘unhappy spirit, which plagues body and soul, and multiplies domestic discord and misery’. Even stronger language was employed by Catholic writers at the turn of the century when the Catholic press redoubled its assault on the spread of taverns and public drunkenness with a rhetoric that verged on the apocalyptic.135 The future leader of the SĽS, Jozef Tiso, for example, described the prevalence of alcoholism among his countrymen as ‘the hellish wrath of the devil’ which destroyed religious sentiment and, ultimately, national identity.136 Slovak Catholic writers also tapped into a long tradition of blaming the alcoholism of their fellow countrymen on the Jews.137 The interweaving of the temperance movement with antisemitism was exacerbated by the widespread conviction across Central and Eastern Europe that most rural taverns were run by Jews who ruthlessly exploited their drunken and indebted Christian customers.138 Thus, the usually staid Esztergom newspaper that served as a mouthpiece of the Catholic hierarchy in Hungary, claimed, for example, that in the village of Šurianky (Magyar: Surányka) in Nyitra County (Slovak: Nitra), among the ‘great sins’ of the inhabitants was ‘uncontrolled drinking’ of ‘the hellish brandy’ which ‘destroys families and entire nations physically and morally’. It was, the paper continued, ‘the poison that fills the pockets of the Jews who have come from the swamps of the Devil’s personal hell’.139 Similar sentiments were expressed by Ján Kempný, one of the most prominent patriotic Slovak priests at the turn of the century who, in a speech he gave in 1898 to his fellow clergymen, conceded that ‘drinking was always popular’, but added ‘not to the extent it is now’. He insisted that in earlier times ‘there weren’t as many taverns as there are now and there weren’t such tavern keepers as there are now’, and proceeded to paint a rosy portrait of the old ‘Christian tavern keeper, who was personally a good Catholic’ and prevented his customers from drinking too much. Jewish tavern keepers, in contrast, were attacked by Kempný and his fellow clergymen as thoroughly immoral and destructive. These proprietors were accused of being concerned only with profit, and of exploiting their role as providers of credit to charge absurdly high rates of interest that trapped their addled and addicted customers in a cycle of debt and permanent poverty.140

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The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

Writing thirteen years later, another leading Slovak churchmen, the Bishop of Košice (Magyar: Kassa) Augustin Fischer-Colbrie, attempted to support such allegations with hard evidence. He reported that in Saros County (Slovak: Šariš), located in his diocese in Eastern Slovakia, there were 674 taverns of which, he claimed, 621 were run by Jews. He also insisted, without providing additional evidence, that the high concentration of taverns in the rural parts of the county demonstrated that this was both a new and a profoundly destructive phenomenon.141 The supposed growth of Jewish taverns and public drunkenness in the Slovak-populated regions was also presented by Slovak Catholics as a deliberate tactic of the liberal government which supposedly encouraged drunkenness and indebtedness among the Slovaks to diminish their national feeling. As the Slovak folk artist Dušan Jurkovič insisted in 1911, ‘The authorities realize clearly enough that [it] is impossible to … exterminate an entire race so well preserved and distinctive as the Slovaks, but for this very reason they give free play to demoralizing influences, in the hope of ruining those they fear.’142 The alleged ubiquity of Jewish tavern keeping and the epidemic of drunkenness that was supposedly sweeping across northern Hungary also provided another explanation for the popularity of the Liberal Party in the Slovak highlands. Jewish tavern keepers, it was claimed, supported the philosemitic governing party by ensuring that their Slovak customers were too intoxicated to vote or could be blackmailed into voting against their fellow Slovak and Catholic candidates. Indeed, one of the founders of the SĽS, Anton Bielek, was so obsessed with Jews who corrupted the morals of Slovak voters that he published an entire volume of short stories about the ways they supposedly perverted the electoral process.143 In fact, as James Mace Ward has noted, all of the founding members of the party were convinced that, in his words, the governing liberal party ‘manipulated voters with drink, while the Jew got rich quick plying the poison, transforming himself from poor immigrant into village master’.144 Such rhetoric could even lead to violence. In 1898, following a by-election, rival voters clashed in the village of Lisková (Magyar: Liszkófalu), Liptó County. The supporters of the Catholic party, however, directed much of their anger at a Jewish tavern keeper who they blamed for their defeat and assaulted his premises, which forced the gendarmerie to intervene and resulted in the death of five persons including a Jewish school teacher.145 The Catholic press in general, and the Slovak Catholic press in particular, was also generally keen to report on the various incidents of criminality that

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both appealed to the salacious interests of their readership and illustrated the declining morals of the country. Fresh statistics that apparently showed an increase in alcohol consumption, divorce and crime rates were always, for example, highlighted by the Catholic press as were any scandals, crimes and general misdemeanours that took place in the capital, Budapest, where even the police concluded in 1913 that ‘the struggle for survival drives new victims into the arms of crime every single day’ and one of its districts was given the nickname Csikágó (Chicago) due to its street pattern, population growth and rising crime rates.146 The fact that recorded crime rates in Budapest actually fell between 1908 and 1912, in spite of continuing population growth, went unrecorded in the Slovak Catholic press.147 The rise in the number of divorces granted by the courts in Budapest, which increased from 36 in 1896 (the first year after the government reformed the process) to 757 in 1914, also encouraged rural Slovak Catholics to regard Budapest as both a den on inequity and a warning sign of what would eventually take place in the rest of the country.148 As the Slovak priest Katuš Bielek noted in a Slovak journal that was specifically intended to provide inspiration for the clergy’s sermons, ‘Immorality, people without bread, crimes and murders are the signs of our era.’149 Further proof of this supposed moral collapse was provided by the rise of the Social Democratic movement in Hungary, which also highlighted the deleterious impact of industrialization and urbanization, as its support was most pronounced in the larger factories in the largest cities. As the Katolícke noviny pithily put it, in 1897, ‘The father of the socialists is liberalism.’150 By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the Social Democrats were even making their inroads into rural areas of Hungary which only exacerbated the panic of their opponents. The Hungarian Independent Socialist Party (Magyar: Magyarországi Független Szocialista Parasztpárt), which focused on rural agitation, even secured the election to parliament of the first ever socialist MP, Vilmos Mezöfi, who represented an impoverished rural constituency in eastern Hungary. Similar agrarian socialist movements also appeared among the Slovaks.151 In response, the prominent Slovak Catholic priest, journalist and supporter of the SĽS Eduard (Ede) Šándorfi captured the fear felt by his fellow clergymen towards what they invariably regarded as an alien, Jewish threat to faith, nation and morality when he proclaimed that the social democratic movement ‘overflowed the Slovak land to the colossal ruin of the faith and religiosity of our people’ and ‘our believers in time will in multitudes gather under the red banners of social democracy’.152

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The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

The growth of the social democratic movement served, therefore, to foment moral panic and helped inspire a growing number of Slovak Catholic priests to enter the political arena. For example, Hlinka warned in 1895 that ‘if we [priests] do not embrace the present responsibility [to combat the government’s reforms] … the people will turn away from us and we will be left alone’.153 His fellow clergyman and another of the party’s founding members Jehlička, also explained that his primary motive to enter politics was ‘so it could not be said that only non-Catholics and secular people struggled for the rights of the Slovak people’, adding that ‘if the national struggle of the Slovak parties occurs without the participation of priests it could lead in an anti-clerical direction’.154 Juriga was even more melodramatic when he told his readers that he imagined a Slovak child, responding to the failure of the clergy to defend their faith from the liberal onslaught, telling its parents that ‘for me the Catholic faith is useless. I am ashamed of myself because of it – I am converting to Calvinism’!155

Philosemitism The Liberal Party was also blamed for the growth of the Jewish population and even the achievements of a remarkable number of Hungarian Jews in their chosen area of expertise. The Liberal Party had in the 1890s demonstrated its philosemitism by passing, in the wake of the anticlerical legislation of 1894, Law XLII of 1895 which gave the Hebrew religion the same status as the Catholic and Protestant churches. More subtly, the government imposed no restrictions on Jewish in-migration from other parts of the empire (such as Galicia) and from Russia. This raised the Jewish population in Hungary from 242,000 in 1840 to 910,000 by 1910, while the number of Jews in the total population increased from just over 2 per cent to about 5 per cent in the same period.156 In a society obsessed with statistical trend lines as a guide to future developments, and a conviction that cities were a portent of the future under continued Liberal rule, the fact that Jews made up almost a quarter of the population in Budapest, (23.1 per cent) heightened fears of ‘judification’. Moreover, the Liberal Party’s willingness to allow Jews to enter the universities, bureaucracy, parliament, and become the predominant element in industry, commerce, the law, arts and culture, ensured that their visibility and influence far exceeded their still relatively small share of the population.157 It would, however, be simplistic to place the entirety of the responsibility for the growth and success of the Jewish community at the feet of the governing

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Liberal Party. There is ample evidence of antisemitic sentiment on the government party’s benches: Jews were still excluded from key positions of power and influence, substantial Jewish out-migration coincided with the growth of their co-religionists in Hungary, and significant numbers of Jews converted to the Christian religion or simply ceased practising the religion of their forefathers. Nevertheless, it was abundantly clear that the Jewish community’s unquestionable success was also, in the words of one of the greatest historians of Hungary, ‘the most powerful prop to the ruling classes’, and permitted critics of the government, including the men who founded the SĽS, to equate philosemitism with liberalism, and thereby embed antisemitism into their antiliberal rhetoric.158 Moreover, as the occasional historian has noted, the non-Magyar element of the population, including the Slovaks, were particularly susceptible to the appeal of antisemitism which became a leitmotif of the Slovak nationalist movement in the nineteenth century and the SĽS in the first half of the twentieth century.159 First, the Slovak-populated north of Hungary sat directly across the border from the large Jewish population of Galicia, became a first stop for many Jews who immigrated to Hungary and encouraged talk of a ‘Jewish invasion’.160 Moreover, although Jewish communities had existed in the largest Slovak towns since the medieval period, the new arrivals, from poorer and more backward Galicia, were generally more impoverished, devout and distinct than those Jews who moved to the larger cities. The rural Jews in the Slovak highlands were, therefore, more likely to be viewed as an alien element than their co-religionists in other parts of Hungary.161 Secondly, a widespread resentment of Jewish financial success was always likely to be more intense in the relatively impoverished northern counties than in more prosperous parts of Hungary. There were multiple reasons for this financial success. Many Jews possessed the entrepreneurial spirit common to all immigrant communities. In addition, as the Jews had been traditionally excluded from holding noble rank and owning land, they were required to seek alternative means of prospering and had placed great value in literacy, adaptability and intellectual prowess. In addition, the bulk of the Jewish migration into Hungary occurred at the same time that the economy was being reshaped by the beginnings of industrialization and the dramatic growth in the service sector. Jewish migrants had, therefore, the means, motive and opportunity to gravitate towards commerce, industry and the professions, and rapidly formed a substantial portion of the middle class throughout the country. In the Slovakpopulated counties of Hungary, which were poorer, more rural, and possessed a

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The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

smaller middle class, the growth of shops, taverns, banks, factories and offices that was a defining feature of nineteenth-century social-economic transformation was overseen, in large part, by the Jews who, for example, are estimated to have comprised around 70 per cent of all the businessmen and bankers working in the Slovak highlands.162 Thirdly, those Jews in the Slovak regions who assimilated, usually opted to embrace the Magyar culture rather than the culture of their Slovak neighbours. Magyar was, after all, the formal language of the country and its mastery appeared to be a prerequisite for social advancement. Even assimilated Jews remained, therefore, generally estranged, at least culturally, from their Slovak-speaking neighbours. Thus, although a smattering of Jews did support Slovak cultural activities, the Slovak nationalist press was able to use popular antisemitism to bolster the struggle to defend the Slovak language and culture by claiming that Jews were ‘agents of magyarization’.163 In the Slovak popular imagination the Jews also tended to be regarded as enthusiastic supporters of the Liberal Party. Indeed, Jewish support for the government, which had permitted them to settle and prosper in Hungary, granted them religious equality, and tended to refrain from blatant antisemitic rhetoric, ran deep. As Rebekah Klein-Pejšova has noted, many Jews were grateful to the governing party which offered them ‘protection from popular antisemitism and cleared a path for their social mobility through education and religious equality.’164 In addition, the governing Liberal Party drove through the abolition of legislation that discriminated against the Jews, and appointed Jews to both the upper house of parliament and its own parliamentary fraction. In return, the more prosperous Jews who had been enfranchised proved loyal supporters of the Liberal Party. In Budapest, for example, where every second voter was Jewish, governing party candidates were regularly returned with ‘overwhelming majorities’ while in the countryside Jews, along with local civil servants, provided a usually reliable body of votes for governing party candidates.165 Writing for an English audience in 1911, Eduard Šándorfi went one step further and claimed that Jews not only supported the Liberal Party, but also used their economic influence to force their Slovak neighbours to do likewise. He claimed that the Slovak Catholic voters in his parish ‘were for many years supporters of the government of the day’ because ‘they were extremely poor and largely in the hands of the Jews, who controlled the whole life of the district and were of course the willing instruments of the government’.166 Karol Medvecký,

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another Slovak Catholic priest and early supporter of the SĽS, summed up Slovak concerns about Jewish in-migration in the monograph he published on the town of Detva (Magyar: Gyetva) in 1905. In his detailed description of its demographics, he claimed that prior to 1848 ‘there was not a single Jew’ in the village or the surrounding area, but after local ‘self-defence’ had been ‘demolished’ by the government, the first Jews arrived. Many of these Jews, he continued, adopted Magyar names, became ‘big businessmen’ who exploited the peasants, and ‘many of them are already today voters and owners of the most profitable estates in Detva’. Bemoaning ‘this terrible undermining of everyone’s moral and physical condition’, Medvecký added that ‘presently their numbers have grown to 274 souls’.167 Even supposedly progressive Slovaks were prone to similar sentiments. Fedor Houdek, a frequent contributor to the progressive Slovak journal Hlas, could confidently assert at the turn of the century that ‘the fact is that in Slovakia business and industry is in the hands of the Jews. … If we want, therefore, to endure in this struggle and grow stronger economically, we must seize business and industry from the hands of our enemies.’ For men such as Houdek, the government’s philosemitism, like its support for urbanization, industrialization, magyarization and centralization, became another reason to reject Hungarian liberalism and seek a viable alternative to the governing Liberal Party.168 In summary, the culture war that erupted in 1894 in northern Hungary was not merely provoked by specific government legislation, namely the reform of marriage, but was fuelled by a much broader, deeper and enduring anger at centralization, magyarization, industrialization, urbanization, mass emigration, a supposed moral collapse and the growth and success of the Jewish community. Slovak Catholic priests and intellectuals were, unsurprisingly, determined to take part in this culture war unleashed by the Liberal Party’s policies. They were convinced that they were, as Katya Kocourek has noted, ‘the guardian[s] of the Slovak nation’ with responsibilities ‘that stretched far beyond the village pulpit’. They felt, she explains, ‘responsible for coordinating the socio-economic existence of the Slovak people as well as shaping their spiritual outlook’.169 It was Anton Bielek, a prolific chronicler of the impoverished yet god-fearing character of Slovak village life, who summed up the mood of the new generation of Slovak Catholics nationalists when he wrote in 1896 that there was a ‘heart felt yearning for men who are called to their people, who serve to preserve and assist [the people’s] interests’ and these men had to be the clergy ‘who are councillors,

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The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

Figure 1  František Skyčák, the first leader of the SĽS. Source: A szövetkezett balpárt arcképcsarnoka, Budapest, 1905, p. 223.

friends, leaders of the people’.170 Or as Hlinka put it, ‘the people seek a leader. And who is the appropriate leader … its spiritual father, its priest.’171 It should, therefore, be unsurprising that it was Slovak Catholic clergymen, along with a smattering of journalists and businessmen imbued with similar convictions, who took the lead in establishing new associations, organizations and ultimately new parties that, it was hoped, would ensure victory for the Catholic church over its liberal, socialist and Jewish enemies.

2

A New Opposition

In response to the outbreak of the Europe-wide culture war in Hungary, a growing number of Slovak Catholics looked to new associations, organizations and ultimately political parties to defend their interests against the liberal onslaught. Likewise, new opposition parties established new associations to attract the support of alienated Slovak Catholics. There were, of course, a range of opposition parties which competed for the support of Slovak voters. It was not, however, until the creation of the KNP in 1894 that a party finally appeared that directly appealed to Catholics throughout Hungary and received an outpouring of support in the Slovak highlands. At the same time, Slovak Catholics also threw themselves into the great project of establishing a network of publications, associations and financial institutions that, they hoped, would mobilize the population against the Liberal Party and also served as a launch pad for new Catholic parties; first the KNP and then the SĽS.1

The Independence and Forty-Eighter Party Prior to the establishment of the KNP, the most vigorous opposition party in Hungary was the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party, although it was afflicted by numerous splits and a second-rate leadership. This party, as its name suggests, traced its intellectual origins directly back to the 1848 revolution and the ideas of its leading revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, who possessed a cult status that was undimmed by his years in exile after 1849 and his death in 1894. Theoretically, at least, the party always remained cloaked in the mantle of progressive social reform that Kossuth and his fellow revolutionaries in 1848 had not only preached but, with their abolition of the last vestiges of feudalism, practised. Occasionally, the party even paid lip service to various proposals for further reform. It was, for example, the only party in parliament that called for the expansion of the franchise in its party manifestos. In reality, however, as

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The Making of the Slovak People’s Party

Jörg Hoensch has caustically observed, the party ‘degenerated into squabbling factions’ bound together only by a shared hostility to the governing Liberal Party and a tendency to blame all of Hungary’s problems on the machinations of Vienna, including the dissatisfaction Hungary’s minorities.2 Moreover, as Kossuth was the quintessential example of a nineteenth-century liberal, the Forty-Eighters were ill-equipped to challenge the Liberal Party’s governing philosophy. The Independence and Forty-Eighter Party had, for example, thrown its support behind the government’s anticlerical legislation, and had generally proved as enthusiastic about magyarization as the most chauvinistic MPs on the Liberal Party’s benches. The Forty-Eighters were equally keen to revel in the economic development of the country and the growth of its cities, and they supported the government’s efforts to remove the barriers to Jewish advancement and assimilation. Their key deviation from the programme of the Liberal Party was that the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party regarded Hungary’s transformation after 1867 as having occurred in spite of, rather than because of, the 1867 settlement with Vienna.3 It is true that a handful of the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party’s MPs did endorse Kossuth’s own belated realization that magyarization was impractical. His call from exile for Hungary to form the core of a new, multi-ethnic ‘Danubian Confederation’, in which the Magyars would naturally take the leading role, was not, however, taken seriously, even by his son and Independence and FortyEighter Party’ leader Ferenc Kossuth. Admittedly, on the local level, some of the party’s MPs did make the occasional half-hearted effort to attract the support of the minorities, provided the odd speech in Slovak, and appealed to some Slovaks’ nostalgia for the populist ideals of the 1848 revolution.4 Such efforts were, however, limited in scope and effectiveness. Neither the parliamentary fraction nor the party leadership explicitly appealed to Slovak voters. The party, for example, never managed to establish a single Slovak-language newspaper or elect a single self-proclaimed Slovak into its parliamentary fraction. Slovak Catholics were also alienated from the party by the fact that the Kossuths, both father and son, were Protestants whose reputation derived in part from their hostility to the Catholic Habsburgs. Leading ‘Forty-Eighters’ had even introduced a parliamentary bill in 1870 that demanded the nationalization of the entire property of the Catholic church.5 As a result of its Magyar nationalist and anticlerical reputation, the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party had limited support in the Slovak highlands. For example, it managed to win only two of the eighty-one constituencies in the 1901 elections and three in the 1905 elections. Even in 1906, when it became the largest party in the country as a whole,

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it won only twenty-two seats in the Slovak highlands. Even this partial success was short-lived. In 1909 the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party broke up into two rival factions which, in the elections the following year, managed to win only six seats in the region.6

The conservative opposition There were a number of politicians who did seek to navigate an independent course between the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party and the Liberal Party. From 1892 to 1900 they grouped together in the National Party which was founded by MPs who supported the Ausgleich, but who had also, for various reasons, broken from the governing Liberal Party. The most prominent member of this group was one of Hungary’s most outstanding parliamentarians, Albert Apponyi, whose rhetorical powers were admired by his allies and opponents alike. Although Apponyi had sizeable estates in northern Hungary and could, when he wished, give a rousing speech in Slovak, he was incapable of offering a genuine alternative to the liberal ideology. He was, for example, as enthusiastic about magyarization as any of the Liberal Party MPs. As was the case with most of his fellow MPs, Apponyi’s advocacy of magyarization stemmed from his ingrained beliefs about the superiority of Magyar culture and his conviction that it was in everyone’s interest for all inhabitants of a country to speak the same language; and for him that language could only be Magyar. He was, for example, convinced that ‘the chief task allotted to … schools is the strengthening of a uniform national feeling among the inhabitants of manifold races and denominations.’ He then proceeded to put his thoughts into practice following his entry into the cabinet in 1906 when he ushered through parliament one of the most egregious pieces of magyarizing legislation, the so-called Lex Apponyi of 1907, which almost eliminated the provision of Slovak-language education in schools.7 Another on-off critic of the Liberal Party was Gyula Andrássy the younger son of the former prime minister who had been instrumental in arranging the 1867 settlement and who had then governed the country from 1867 to 1871. The younger Andrássy was not an obviously fanatical Magyar nationalist. He had little time for the cult of Kossuth, refused to join the ranks of the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party, and was committed to upholding the Ausgleich. He was also, however, just as disparaging of Hungary’s minorities as the most incorrigible advocates of magyarization on the Liberal Party’s benches. After becoming

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minister of the interior, he was just as repressive towards the minorities as any of his predecessors. In reality, Andrássy’s disagreements with the Liberal Party, from which he broke away first in the late 1890s and again in 1904, were a result of personal disputes rather than serious ideological differences. Along with Apponyi, and the rest of the conservative opposition (sometimes known as ‘dissidents’ or ‘independent MPs’), he endorsed all the key planks of Liberal Party policy including the centralization of power, curbs on the Catholic church, the policy of magyarization, the promotion of industry, commerce and urbanization, and a tolerant attitude towards the Jews. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Slovak Catholics who opposed the Liberal Party also opposed the Independence and FortyEighter Party and the conservative opposition.8

The SNS Whereas the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party and conservative opposition parties appeared to offer nothing specific to either Slovaks or Catholics, the Slovak National Party (Slovak: Slovenská národná strana, hereafter SNS) appeared to offered much but provided little. It was founded in 1871 as part of a great organizing drive by Slovak nationalists in the wake of their unsuccessful campaign for autonomy in 1861, which also produced a short-lived cultural society, the Matica Slovenska (1863), a Slovak women’s association, Živena (1869), a ‘National House’ (Slovak: Národný dom) that supported cultural activities (1887), and a National Museum (1890). This ‘national awakening’ also led to the creation of a smattering of societies, journals and newspapers of which the most prominent was the SNS’s flagship paper, the Národnie noviny. Through this newspaper the party leadership strove to defend Slovak culture and condemned the full range of the Liberal Party’s policies. In spite of its obvious appeal to Slovaks, the SNS was afflicted by crippling weaknesses. First, as a result of its lack of electoral successes and the government’s magyarization policies, it had become so demoralized that it boycotted every election from 1884 until 1901. As a result, the passivity became self-reinforcing, as the party leadership became ever more pessimistic and lethargic the longer the boycott continued without success.9 Secondly, the SNS was run by a coterie of Lutherans who showed little interest in mobilizing the Slovak Catholic clergy. The leadership’s hope, for example, that the Russian Czar would invade Hungary and liberate the Slovaks roundly irritated Slovak Catholics. They had

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no desire to be placed under Orthodox Russian tutelage, and were horrified by the Russian empire’s treatment of their fellow Catholics in Poland. The few priests that did join the party were also excluded from all of the key leadership positions.10 Thirdly, the SNS leadership was elitist and isolated in the remote town of Martin located in the far north of today’s Slovakia. As Stanley Pech has astutely noted, the SNS was ‘not so much a party as a political-cultural interest group’. It was run by an increasingly elderly and self-consciously bourgeois leadership which, as one caustic observer noted, devoted most of its dwindling political energies to planning excursions into the nearby mountains to sing folk songs.11 The SNS’s inability to pose a serious challenge to the Liberal Party was primarily due to the malign influence of Svetozár Hurban-Vajanský, a prolific writer and publicist. He possessed ‘unheard of respect’ among educated Slovaks, helped to mould the Slovak nationalist mind-set, and became the party’s leader from 1898 to 1914. Under Hurban-Vajanský’s tutelage Slovak nationalism became consumed with the politics of grievance, obsessed with its own sufferings, and increasingly paranoid about magyarization. The true Slovak was, according to Hurban-Vajanský forged by his Christian faith, Slovak language and rural identity, all of which were supposedly in near irreversible decline. Rather than advocating practical solutions to any of these problems, Hurban-Vajanský preferred the rarefied company of the small band of Slovak intellectuals who gathered around him and bemoaned the lack of a Slovak nobility that could effectively defend Slovak national interests. Inspired by his deep panslav sentiment, he also forlornly waited for the Russian Czar to send his army to the rescue and showed no interest in turning the SNS into an active and effective political force.12 From the 1880s onwards a new generation of Slovaks were, therefore, forced to operate outside the ineffective parochialism of the SNS leadership in order to reinvigorate the Slovak nationalist movement. Student societies were at the forefront of this effort. For example, the writer, journalist and one of the future founders of the SĽS Anton Bielek, had already established in his secondary school in the 1870s an association (Slovak: spolok) called Budič. He also established a Slovak-language library, ‘recited Slovak language poems’ with his fellow students, and published a literary magazine.13 Slovak university students also established associations including the Tatran, Slovenský literarný spolok and Národ in Vienna, the Slovenský spolok in Budapest and the Detvan in Prague.14 There were also secret societies, such as at the Protestant seminary in Bratislava (Magyar: Pozsony).15

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It was the members of the Detvan society in Prague who led the effort to reinvigorate the SNS. As witnesses to the growth of Czech-language culture in this period, and as beneficiaries of Czech largesse they became convinced that the Slovaks needed to align with the more numerous and more prosperous Czechs in order to flourish. They were particularly influenced by the ideas of radical writers such as Leo Tolstoy and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a lecturer at the University of Prague who went on to become Czechoslovakia’s first president. Masaryk was, himself, of mixed Slovak and Czech parentage, had a deep affection for Slovak folk culture and was convinced that both the Czechs and the Slovaks constituted one single Czechoslovak nation. As well as instilling this Czechoslovak nationalism into his Slovak students, Masaryk also imbued many of them with the same strident anticlerical attitudes that had led him to break from the Catholic church. He urged his Slovak admirers to engage in politics and to gain the support of the population through ‘small scale projects’ (Czech: drobné práce) such as the publication of new journals and the establishment of new associations.16 Seeking to put these principles into effect, the members of Detvan returned to Hungary after completing their studies and launched a new journal, Hlas, in 1897 which gave them the nickname ‘hlasists’. They also distributed books and brochures, raised money for schools across Slovakia, gave lectures, and helped establish various societies. Their aim was to ‘organize’ the entire body of Slovak students in order to ‘gain them for the nation’ on the grounds that ‘work and only work makes us of the people and Slovaks’. By 1901 the hlasists were openly demanding that the SNS should adopt a ‘realistic’ approach, create a proper party organization and abandon its electoral boycott.17 A number of young Slovak Catholic priests initially supported the hlasists. They were impressed by the hlasists’ energy, their criticism of the moribund SNS, and their belief that the Slovaks required a moral renewal as well as a national ‘awakening’. As Vavro Šrobár, one of the publishers of Hlas, put it in the article entitled ‘Our Efforts’ that he published in 1898, ‘We want first and foremost for the Slovak people to be renewed morally.’18 Nevertheless, Šrobár’s own agnosticism, and a series of articles in Hlas which were scathing of both the local Catholic hierarchy and Catholic theology, alienated many of the clergymen who had initially supported the hlasists.19 As Kocourek has observed, the hlasists’ ‘preoccupation with the moral wellbeing of the Slovaks sprung from a concern for their socio-economic rather than their spiritual needs.’ This ensured that suspicious Slovak Catholic clergymen ‘dismissed the movement as an unfounded “sociological experiment.”’20

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Another pressure group embedded within the SNS was led by Milan Hodža, an energetic and charismatic figure who marked himself out as a brilliant populist journalist and became another of the founding members of the SĽS. Descended from a prominent family of Slovak nationalists, Hodža regarded the SNS as his natural political home, but he rejected the isolation and elitism of its leadership. Assiduously cultivating an image as a friend of the common people, he rejected Hurban-Vajanský’s claim that Slovak nationalism needed its own elite class of nobles. Instead, Hodža called for a resurgence of the anti-elitist principles which had animated Slovak nationalism in its most productive era leading up to the 1848 revolution. The solution, he argued, was to align Slovak nationalism with ‘the farmers’ (roľnictvo) or simply ‘the people’ (ľud) who were viewed as ‘naturally practical and collaborative … skilled in hand and shrewd in head’. It was the common people who, Hodža insisted, must become ‘the base and fundament of our national politics’. In practical terms this meant that all Slovaks needed to be educated about the root causes of their plight, organized into associations and parties and empowered through a relentless push for universal suffrage.21 It was Hodža who first publicly challenged the passivity of the SNS leadership when he helped organize a meeting of Slovak, Romanian and Serbian students in November 1897 in Budapest. That meeting formally proclaimed its ‘dissatisfaction with the current political oversight exercised by the leadership’ of the struggle for minority rights (Magyar: nemzetiségi politika). He followed this up with an article in the Slovenské listy in July 1898 that, Károly Vigh asserts, was the first public call for a new spirit of ‘activist’ politics. He emphasizes Hodža’s proposal that the Slovak nationalist movement should ‘make use of economic and cultural means’ to appeal to ordinary Slovaks.22 Seeking to engage a new Slovak audience, Hodža moved to Budapest and in 1903, at the age of twenty-five he launched the Slovenský týždenník newspaper that became the most widely read Slovak nationalist newspaper in the years before the First World War. That success made him a driving force in the reinvigoration of the Slovak nationalist movement and the launch of the SĽS. The paper’s success was due to its populist (Slovak: ľudová’, Magyar: népi, German: völkisch) style that Hodža expertly harnessed to appeal to the Slovak peasantry and the working classes. The paper’s appeal relied on its direct style of writing, a zest for cutting-edge reportage, and plenty of illustrations to illustrate his points. Adding to its appeal, Hodža’s Slovenský týždenník lacerated Hungary’s political elite. Particular targets were the government’s policy of magyarization, its alleged enthusiasm for unfettered capitalism, the ignorance of the ‘gentlemen’

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who kept power for themselves, and the poverty, illiteracy and alcoholism that afflicted ordinary people. Unlike Slovak Catholic publications, however, Hodža’s paper was not obsessed with the Jews and refrained from the more scurrilous forms of antisemitism.23 Despite his paper’s success Hodža was still something of an unknown quality, easily dismissed as mercurial and petulant, who lacked the connections and the funds to immediately become the leader of a new political movement. As a Protestant who showed no great interest in resisting the government’s anticlericalism, he was also likely to be viewed with scepticism by many Slovak Catholics. In addition, his obsession with the rural peasantry could easily be misconstrued as a form of class-based politics which Catholic clergymen usually found repellent. Also working against Hodža was the fact that both he and the hlasists were initially unwilling to establish a new political party that would break from the SNS’s passivity. As Vavro Šrobár put it, ‘We have no intention to call for a schism in the nation, nor do we have plans to found a political party.’ His own personal reticence at this point probably stemmed from a prolonged period of depression exacerbated by an unhappy marriage; but both Šrobár and Hodža were always likely to eventually mount a serious challenge to the SNS’s apathy. Both men were stubborn, driven and disliked submitting to the authority of others they thought deficient.24 Along with the evident failings, apathies and mounting dissatisfaction that beset the SNS, each set of parliamentary elections produced fresh evidence that there was a hunger among a part of the electorate for Slovak nationalist candidates. In spite of the electoral corruption, and the governing Liberal Part’s advantages, Slovaks continued to win election to parliament even when they lacked the practical support of the SNS. The desire for an active Slovak nationalist party, that would vigorously compete for votes, seats and influence, was therefore evident in Slovakia even before the establishment of the SĽS in 1905.25

The KNP Dissatisfied with all of the opposition parties, politically active Slovak Catholics awaited a new political force that could challenge the Liberal Party. That force arrived in 1895, born out of the frenzied opposition to the wave of anticlerical legislation that had entered the statute books in the previous year. Catholic leaders in Hungary had already resolved to enter the political arena at the

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beginning of the 1890s, and with the passing of the Wekerle government’s fresh package of curbs on the church’s influence, they were convinced that the time was right to form a new political party. The KNP was initially founded, therefore, to force the Liberal Party from power and repeal all of the anticlerical legislation that had been passed since 1867. To do this, however, the KNP had to maximize its appeal by attracting the support of Slovak Catholics. It, therefore, tapped into concerns about chauvinistic Magyar nationalism by emphasizing its loyalty to the Catholic House of Habsburg, which distinguished it from the more chauvinistic Magyar nationalist parties. Crucially, it also advocated a more tolerant attitude towards the minorities compared to any of the other major parties in Hungary. Its founding manifesto of 1895, for example, declared that ‘our party wishes to behave towards the minorities (Magyar: nemzetiségek) with complete civility’ and ‘grant their demands’ so long as they ‘are in accordance with the unity of the Hungarian state and its national character’.26 An explanatory pamphlet distributed by the KNP during the first elections it contested in 1896 fleshed out this promise. It declared that all the minorities in Hungary should ‘have the right to use their language alongside Magyar’, while the party leadership promised the complete and rapid implementation of the 1868 Nationalities Law, arguing that Slovaks could, and should, be ‘made to feel at home’ in Hungary. The KNP went further, therefore, than any other party in parliament at this time in appealing to the minorities, including the Slovaks, and was rewarded with a surge of support in northern Hungary.27 The KNP, initially, even took further steps to bolster its appeal to the minorities. It denounced the chauvinistic rhetoric of the Liberal Party, published election materials in the Slovak language, and encouraged its parliamentary candidates in Slovak-populated areas to give speeches in Slovak. One of the KNP’s Magyar leaders, Ferdinand Zichy even publicly apologized to a Slovak audience for being unable to give a speech in their own mother tongue and proudly declared that his son was learning the Slovak language.28 The KNP’s attempt to attract the support of Hungary’s minorities did not, however, extend to the Jews. Instead the party lambasted the government’s ‘philosemitic’ policies and used antisemitism as the glue that held its socially and ethnically diverse coalition of voters together. Although the party leadership, in common with the bulk of Hungary’ aristocracy, regarded the Jews as a religious rather than a racial group, favoured Jewish assimilation, and, in general, did not obsess over the ‘Jewish question’, at the local level party activists put ‘practical antisemitism’ at the forefront of the KNP’s appeal. They advocated the

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boycott of Jewish shops and businesses and the establishment of new Catholic associations designed to exclude Jews.29 As Miloslav Szabó has persuasively argued, the Slovak-language nationalist press was able to justify its support for the Magyar-dominated KNP by playing up the party’s antisemitism. Catholic Slovak journalists insisted that, in the highlands of Hungary, the fundamental political divide was between ‘Jewish Liberalism’ and the ‘Christian people’ rather than between rival Magyar and Slovak national identities.30 The KNP also appealed to Slovak Catholic clergymen and publicists who welcomed a party which eagerly proclaimed that it was ‘of the people’ (Slov: ľudová). This turn of phrase drew on the populist discourse that had grown increasingly popular in Hungary in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that had claimed that the true ‘Magyar people’ (Magyar: Magyar nép), lived in the villages, while the alien and degenerate elements lived in the towns. In this clash between rural and urban values, referred to in the Magyar language as the népi-urbánus (‘folk-urban’) clash, the KNP proclaimed itself to be on the side of the rural, Christian ‘people’. Such rhetoric reinforced the party’s appeal among those Slovaks who lived in the countryside and, for the reasons discussed in the previous chapter, were hostile to urban culture and urbanization.31 The party’s appeal to Slovaks was not, however, merely rhetorical. Slovaks took leading places in the local organizations of the party. In Liptó County, for example, four of the eight founding members of the party were ethnic Slovaks.32 Slovaks were even able to be nominated as parliamentary candidates by the KNP. Four did so in 1896 and six did so in 1901, two of whom were actually elected to parliament.33 For example, Hlinka, a future leader of the SĽS, was nominated to stand for parliament in a by-election in Ružomberok (Magyar: Rozsahegy) in Liptó County in 1898 with the backing of the local leadership of the KNP. The party’s foremost newspaper, Alkotmány, even fiercely defended him against charges that he was a ‘panslav’.34 As a consequence, Slovak support for the KNP was enormous. Following the launch of the party, a meeting in the Slovak town of Žilina (Magyar: Zsolna) obtained 8500 signatures of support for the party manifesto, while the county as a whole produced 122 separate local declarations that expressed their ‘full agreement’ with the ideology of the party.35 Catholic priests in western Slovakia, a future stronghold of the SĽS, were particularly vociferous in their support of the KNP. Employing the same tactics that they would later employ in support of the SĽS, priests used the power of the pulpit to praise the

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KNP and savage the government. As one priest explained to his parishioners, ‘Liberalism is a sin, and whoever falls into this sin is awaited in hell with all of its horrors and agonies.’ Another Slovak priest appealed to his parishioners to support the KNP candidate ‘on his knees with tears in his eyes’. He even ordered them to ‘go to the churchyard, dig up the bones of your parents, tear the crucifix from their hands and spit upon the cross’ if they truly intended to vote for the Liberal Party’s candidate. Several Slovak priests even refused to provide the sacraments to those who persisted in voting against the KNP. Another priest in the north of Hungary even banned government-supporting voters from entering his church and ordered them instead ‘to make their way to the Jewish temple’.36 KNP-supporting Slovak priests also regularly used their sermons to promote the party’s programme, held party meetings directly outside the churches after Mass on Sundays, and even led their parishioners in a religious procession to the polls on election day. The courts permitted these activities. Priests were permitted to agitate for the KNP so long as the agitation took place outside the church and did not openly, and verifiably ‘stir up hatred against another class, ethnicity or faith’.37 Even the moribund SNS provided KNP candidates with unofficial support. The SNS’s flagship newspaper, the Národnie noviny, initially lauded the KNP’s establishment and the SNS leadership formally granted its activists a ‘free hand’ to campaign for candidates who ‘may work against the official governing liberalism’. There was even talk of a formal pact between the two parties, although this came to nothing.38 Summing up Slovak support for the KNP an anonymous writer argued, in 1898 ‘Slovaks are for [this party] because the Slovak nation is a Christian nation which feels and loves its own faith, its own church and its rights and therefore at this time only in the People’s Party finds its protector and defender.’ The writer did add, however, that ‘it is a different question whether the People’s Party deserves the fullness of our trust that it will fight for the Slovak nation’.39 In light of this it should come as no surprise that the eighty-one electoral districts in present-day Slovakia provided the strongest support for the KNP in the entire country. In fact, the very first member of the KNP to be elected to parliament, János Zelenyák, represented a constituency in the Slovak highlands, and the party continued to enjoy its greatest support in this region. Ten of its twentyfive MPs were elected in northern Hungary in 1901 as were eleven of its twentyfive MPs in 1905, eighteen of its thirty-three MPs in 1906, and six of its thirteen MPs in 1910.40

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The KNP and Catholic civil society The KNP’s electoral success in the Slovak highlands not only revealed what a determined Catholic political party could achieve in this region, but also provided a template for the future organizational development of the SĽS. Crucially, the KNP was the first parliamentary party which sought to become a mass party with a genuine nationwide party organization. Party committees were established in each county to oversee party propaganda and select candidates for local and national office. Catholic clubs and other associations were promoted as a forum in which the party’s ideas could be publicized, the party actively sought to improve the lives of the rural people, and Catholic priests encouraged their parishioners to attend party meetings and vote for the party’s candidates.41 In Nyitra County, for example, the party ‘dispatched lists of Catholic voters’ to every priest in every village to ensure maximum voter turnout. The party leadership was aware, as Gyula Popély dryly notes, that the party’s ‘agitators were in large part local Catholic priests’.42 At the same time the KNP also placed great store in mobilizing and organizing the entire populace, not just the narrow elite that possessed the right to vote. As Robert Nemes has observed, the first protest meetings that were organized by Catholic critics of the government when the culture war erupted in Hungary in the mid-1890s, deliberately appealed to ‘ordinary townsmen and peasants’ and celebrated the diversity of the attendees which cut across class, ethnic and gender divisions.43 Likewise, the KNP’s huge and lengthy gatherings throughout the Slovak-populated region were assiduously promoted by pamphlets, posters, and exhortations to attend in Catholic newspapers. They were also enlivened by music and other entertainments, and were attended by dozens of local clergymen and thousands of their parishioners. These gatherings were always open to all, irrespective of whether they could vote or not, and invariably included speeches in Slovak, and attracted both men and women.44 Notably, the orators at these gatherings employed the ‘sharper’ rhetoric that Carl Schorske first identified as being a key component of populist politicians’ appeal in fin-de-siècle Central Europe. The KNP’s speakers shamelessly used aggressive rhetoric, stripped of all subtlety, nuance, and self-doubt. It is tempting to dismiss such rhetoric as an attempt to bamboozle an ill-educated and fearful rural audience but it was, at least, intelligible to all layers of Hungarian society. Moreover, bitter denunciations of urban culture, predatory capitalism, and the influence of the Jews provided a sharp contrast with the high-blown boasting that

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was often a feature of Liberal Party speeches. Popular clergymen, experienced in haranguing their parishioners from the pulpit, invariably dominated the speaker’s platform at KNP rallies. The savagery of their attacks could also, as Nemes astutely notes ‘shore up the unsteady alliance of social groups in the Catholic camp’. By sharpening their criticism of the governing Liberal Party’s reforms, they appealed to both the aristocratic leadership of the party, which pined for a return to paternalism and deference, and the embittered lower classes, that had failed to obviously benefit from the ongoing modernization of the country.45 The KNP’s first manifestos were also specifically designed to attract rural support. They called for financial concessions for farmers, the relocation of factories into the countryside, the establishment of additional cooperatives to help small farmers, and a promise to defend workers against ‘big industry’.46 As Gyula Popély has noted, ‘This was the first time that a [Hungarian] bourgeois party included in its program social demands in the interests of the common people’. He contrasts this with the other pre-1918 parliamentary parties which showed little genuine interest in the ‘everyday lives of the ordinary citizen’.47 The KNP’s determination to maximize its appeal to Slovak Catholics was also evident in its launch of a new Slovak-language newspaper, Kresťan. This paper marked itself out by employing the new sharper rhetoric that the party had pioneered at its mass rallies. Peppering its reportage with accounts of the latest depravities in the capital Budapest and frequent allegations of Jewish misdeeds, its writing style was blunt, simplistic and accessible. The newspaper’s appeal was also boosted by its use of serialized popular short stories, dramatic pictures and special supplements which appealed to children and young adults. The responsibility for editing the paper was handed over to two Slovak Catholic priests, Jozef Janda and Eduard Šándorfi, both of whom relished the opportunity to attack what they regarded as the Jewish, Freemason and liberal press.48 Especially under Šándorfi’s guidance, the Kresťan also adopted a proudly Slovak character that repeatedly highlighted the party’s promise of favourable treatment of Hungary’s non-Magyar minorities. This was summed up by the paper’s declaration that ‘we are Slovaks, we love our land (Slovak: vlast) and our mother tongue’.49 Šándorfi also channelled his own frustrations about the plight of the Slovaks into an increasingly ferocious assault on the Jews and freemasons who he blamed for the dominance of the Liberal Party. His particular blend of savage criticism, populist rhetoric, fervent Catholicism, Slovak patriotism and relentless

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scapegoating turned the Kresťan into one of the most popular Slovak-language papers by the beginning of the twentieth century. At its peak it could even rival the popularity of the Liberal Party’s own Slovak-language (and generously subsidized) publications such as Krajan and the Slovenské noviny.50

The new civic activism The KNP’s wider effort to organize and mobilize the population was, nevertheless, only one manifestation of a broader mania for new associations, organizations and institutions that would revolutionize politics throughout Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century. This mania can be traced back to the growth of civic activism across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Enlightenment had stimulated a new enthusiasm to disseminate writings or form voluntary associations that ranged from small clubs to national organizations and, ultimately, mass political parties.51 As James Roberts has put it, ‘Association was the catchword of an age distrustful of government and confident in man’s capacity for social and moral improvement.’52 The explosive growth in the number of associations (as evident in Russia and Central Europe as in Western Europe and North America in this period) was driven by a desire for self-improvement, the betterment of society, a belief in the efficacy of organization and association, or simply as a response to the tedium of life.53 The spread of all sorts of associations throughout Central Europe also owed something to urbanization, industrialization, technological innovation, the growth of democracy, and the spread of ‘nationally uniform’ systems of local administration.54 This civic activism made its first appearance in Hungary in the 1770s with the establishment of the first ‘reading circles’ which circulated literary materials, dabbled in politics and operated in semi-secrecy due to their anti-Habsburg attitudes. It was not until the 1820s that the country’s first registered professional, cultural, patriotic, self-help, charitable and educational societies made their appearance.55 From the mid-point of the nineteenth century their numbers increased dramatically. In the first decades of the century, there were only fiftytwo functioning associations in Hungary. Even in 1862, there were a mere 579 registered associations throughout the country. By 1878, however, there were 3995 such associations, (with 672,000 members), and their numbers continued to increase rapidly.56

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The growth in associations in the nineteenth century was initially an urban phenomenon. Elena Mannová, for example, has estimated that in Hungary in 1878 one in every four townsmen was a member of some form of association as opposed to only one in every thirty-two rural inhabitants.57 By the end of the nineteenth century, however, even some villages possessed an active associational life. A single village could, for example, possess a gentlemen’s club (Magyar: kaszinó), a reading circle, an agricultural cooperative, a hunting association, a voluntary fireman’s association, an amateur choir and an orchestra.58 Slovak-populated areas of Hungary were not, of course, immune from this mania. As Michal Potemra has noted, they too were affected by the same economic and social forces that had inspired the spread of associational life across Hungary in the nineteenth century. Notably, in 1844, a group of Slovak nationalists had established the Tatrín society which proudly proclaimed that ‘the field of its activities [is] the whole spiritual life of the nation’ and which played a key role in bringing Slovak Catholics and Protestants together to create a single codified language.59 It was not, however, until the end of the nineteenth century that the Slovaks began to establish associations in significant numbers which then served as a launch pad for new political parties, including the SĽS.60 Even the Catholic church embraced the new activist spirit. Belatedly it recognized that the ‘fever for association’ was not the poisoned fruit of the anticlerical Enlightenment. Catholic associations, the Vatican recognized, could bind Catholics closer to the church and serve as a barrier against what it termed ‘the spirit of revolutionary change which has long been afflicting the nations of the world’. In particular, the church hoped that the new Catholic activism would help beat back the secular tide that had assailed Catholicism throughout the nineteenth century and manifested itself in unfettered capitalism, the rise of socialism and the relentless assault on religious dogmas by scientists and philosophers.61 The Catholic church was in a superb position to oversee the organization of the faithful. Alone among all the major religious denominations in Europe, it possessed a single well-structured hierarchy that could rapidly disseminate a call for action to the faithful. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the primary means by which the Pope instructed and advised his flock on matters both spiritual and temporal were the series of encyclicals that he regularly issued on a wide variety of topics. These encyclicals were invariably clearly written, pleasingly concise and cogently argued. As a result they were quoted verbatim by Catholic intellectuals and parish priests alike and were translated into all

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the major languages of Europe, including Magyar. Thus, when Pope Leo XIII became the first Pope to use his encyclicals to urge Catholics to embrace the new civic activism, it had a force that no other church or institution could match. Leo XIII’s famous encyclical Rerum Novarum, issued in 1891, was the first to specifically urge Catholics to establish new associations. It called on the faithful to ‘strive to unite working men of various grades into associations’ and applauded ‘societies for mutual help; various benevolent foundations … institutions for the welfare of boys and girls, young people, and those more advanced in years’. Even ‘workingmen’s unions’ were lauded, if they possessed a Catholic character, with the Pope declaring they ‘should become more numerous and more efficient’.62 Rerum Novarum was followed up in 1901 by a further encyclical, Graves de Communi Re, which rejoiced that in the final years of the nineteenth century ‘many new institutions were set on foot, those which were already established were increased, and all reaped the benefit of a greater stability’. The Pope then proceeded to single out for praise ‘popular bureaus which supply information to the uneducated; the rural banks which make loans to small farmers; the societies for mutual help or relief; the unions of working men and other associations or institutions of the same kind’.63 These calls for action by the Vatican provoked a tremendous response throughout Catholic Europe as well as further afield. In Spain there were increasingly frantic calls by clergymen for ‘a vigorous program of pastoral action’ including ‘the establishment of schools, parish associations, cooperatives and credit unions according to the ideas of social Catholicism then in general circulation’.64 In Germany, what Carl Zangerl calls ‘positive Christianity – the conviction that one had to live as well as believe as a Catholic’, inspired the establishment of ‘a variety of occupational, recreational, and educational associations that catered to the material and spiritual needs of Catholics’. These offered among other things ‘technical training and direct material assistance in the form of free legal counselling, burial funds, health insurance, and saving funds’. This effort also succeeded, as Zangerl points out, in ‘breaching the liberal press monopoly … by helping to establish numerous small Catholic newspapers’.65 In Italy, the new Catholic activism manifested itself in the establishment of national organizations such as ‘Catholic Action’, ‘farmer and worker leagues, consumer and producer cooperatives, mutual aid societies, rural professional institutions, civic centres, provincial libraries, schools, youth recreational institutions and retreats, [which] provided free legal and secretarial services for

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the poor, information on emigration, established savings banks and rural credit houses, arranged real estate transactions, and pushed surface transportation’.66 In Belgium, ‘Catholic Action’ organizations, which were directed by the bishops, included specific associations for labourers, students, farmers and French and Flemish speakers. All of these associations published bulletins and newspapers, formed study clubs, organized retreats, and assisted their members with ‘special temporal needs’.67 The same desire for a new Catholic activism was, naturally, also apparent in the Habsburg Empire. In the western, Austrian, half of the Empire, Catholic intellectuals had long bemoaned ‘the indifference of the upper and middle classes’ and ‘the irreligiosity of the proletariat’. The solution, they increasingly concluded, was that ‘the people need Catholic unions’.68 A number of Austrian priests drew particular inspiration from ‘neo-Thomist/neo-scholastic’ theology which was inspired by the writings of Thomas Aquinas and insisted that the clergy had to engage with the changing world around them and ‘compete successfully with secular rivals’. Some of these Austrian priests helped establish the Christian Social Party (German: Christlichsoziale Partei) that, in 1897, seized power in Vienna and inspired Catholics throughout the Habsburg Empire to try and emulate its success.69 Hungarian Catholic writers also called for a new spirit of activism to counter the threats to the church in the eastern half of the empire. For example, the prominent Magyar Catholic theorist, M. Szentimrey, asserted in 1878 that to avoid the ‘catastrophe’ of socialism ‘we have to in time strengthen ourselves’, and argued that one way to do so was to establish credit and consumption organizations. These organizations, he argued, would both reduce the poverty in which socialism festered and demonstrate that the Catholic church was able to defend the interests of the poor just as effectively as its Social Democrat rivals.70 Such calls for activism received a spur from another of Pope Leo XIII’s papal encyclicals, Constanti Hungarorum, which was issued in 1893 and was specifically addressed to the church in Hungary. This encyclical urged the clergy to ensure ‘the growth of Catholic institutions’, for example by directing its ‘zeal and devotion towards the education of children and adolescents’, and to not ‘spare any industry or ingenuity to help these schools increase and develop successfully’. In response, Catholic clergy and intellectuals in Hungary launched a new campaign to establish Catholic associations across the country. The premier Catholic association in Hungary, the Society of Saint Steven (Magyar: Szent István Társulat), was exceptionally zealous in enacting the papacy’s calls

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for a new Catholic activism in Hungary and ramped up its production and distribution of (primarily Magyar-language) Catholic literature.71 Curiously, several priests of Slovak origin were among the first to promulgate the Vatican’s call for a new Catholic activism. Writing in 1891 in the foremost Catholic Hungarian journal of its era, the Katholikus Szemle, the future Bishop of Szepes (Slovak: Spiš) Sándor Párvy, fostered lavish praise on Rerum Novarum. He also lauded the efforts of Catholics in other countries where they were ‘zealous in their work’ and where their associational, literary activities were ‘astonishing’. Two years later, his fellow Slovak speaker, Fischer-Colbrie, also took to the pages of the same journal with his own call for a new Catholic ‘activism’. In particular, he called on his fellow priests to take the proposals in the papal encyclicals seriously in order to win their parishioners back to the faith.72 An article in the same journal by Ferencz Csippék gave a clear example of how such activism could work in practice. It also revealed, however, the concerns of some clergymen about where such activism could lead. Csippék specifically urged the clergy to embrace the thinking behind the papal encyclical’s calls for new associations by establishing agricultural cooperatives that would encourage ‘workers to voluntarily band together in collective work’. He warned, however, that priests had to closely supervise such associations to prevent ‘excessive collectivization’.73 Fischer-Colbrie had, however, no such obvious reservations. In 1895 he again used the Katholikus Szemle to develop his earlier call for a new Catholic activism into a specific programme of action. This reinvigoration of the Catholic faith in Hungary would, he proposed, be spearheaded by the establishment of a range of new Catholic associations that would demonstrate the practical benefits of the faith for the people. He argued, for example, that the conditions of the peasantry could best be improved, and the spread of socialism prevented, by new Catholic associations. In particular, he advocated the establishment of Catholic credit associations (Magyar: hitelszövetkezetek) as well as schools, clubs for workers, (Magyar: munkás körök), the distribution of popular publications (Magyar: népirodalom) and the establishment of numerous local libraries (Magyar: népkönyvtárak). Fischer-Colbrie also was one of the first Hungarian Catholic writers to link the need for new Catholic associations with the need for new Catholic parties. He explained to his readers that in other countries these parties had defended the Catholic faith and could prove to be a vital instrument in preventing the growth of socialism among the peasantry in Hungary. It is no coincidence that

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his article was published just as the first Hungarian Catholic party, the KNP had begun its activities, and just as Fischer-Colbrie became an early and resolute supporter of the party.74 These calls for the reinvigoration of Catholic associational and political life in Hungary also bore practical fruit in 1896 when the first congress of Hungarian Catholic associations took place in Budapest. This congress, attended by Catholics from across Hungary including the Slovak-populated areas, sought to coordinate the efforts of the new Catholic associations, share best practices, and encourage the establishment of further associations.75 One of the organizers of this congress, Ödön Gyürky, subsequently published a handbook that laid out precisely how to establish a local Catholic association. It also provided handy tips on how to avoid any conflicts with local officials that might lead to the closing down of the association. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century Catholics in Hungary, including Slovak Catholics, had both theoretical and practical guidance for how to establish new Catholic associations that provided a framework within which new political parties, including the SĽS, would emerge.76

Slovak Catholic activism Slovak Catholic priests and intellectuals responded positively to the new fever for associations which, they believed, could both reinvigorate the faith of the people and defend their distinct national culture. It is, however, difficult to gauge precisely how many Slovak Catholic clergymen and intellectuals were actually engaged in this effort. Contemporary observers claimed that somewhere between 500 and 1,000 persons were involved in the Slovak nationalist movement, including between 70 and 268 Catholic priests, and between 56 and 730 teachers, but their sources are unclear, and their numbers essentially guesswork.77 Some of the more prominent clergymen involved in these organizational activities have, however, been enshrined in the Slovak national pantheon. Jozef Škultéty, the first professor of Slovak language and literature at the Commenius University in Bratislava, used a series of lectures he gave in America in the 1930s to remind his audience of notable examples of nineteenth-century Slovak clerical activism. In particular, Škultéty singled out the work of Juraj Holček who urged Slovak seminarians ‘to prepare for Slovak activity’ and visited schools throughout Slovakia to encourage the teachers in a similar fashion. He also singled out the parish of Rybník, where the local priest focused on elevating

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his parishioners ‘intellectually and patriotically’, ‘put his community on a sound economic, material basis’ and turned it into ‘a model community’; as well as the parish of Nesluš in Trencsén County, where the local priest worked with his parishioners to purchase ‘all the land and woods in that district, which had belonged to the nobility’; and the town of Bytče (Magyar: Nagy Bittse) in the same county where the local priest ‘was a blessing to the whole neighbourhood through his work’ Likewise, Škultéty praised the work of František Sasinek, who ‘donated over 40,000 florins during his life to Slovak patriotic enterprises’, and Andrej Kmet, who founded the Slovak National Museum.78 These clergymen inspired a wave of publicists at the turn of the century to call for an urgent emulation of their efforts throughout the highlands. Gustav Izak, for example, copied the question and answer techniques of the Catholic catechism in a pamphlet he published in 1893, which declared that it was the ‘duty’ of every Slovak to ‘spread among the people Slovak books’. They should also ‘buy and read one Slovak magazine’ and ‘establish reading circles, libraries, singing groups, theatre groups, fireman’s associations, and other charitable associations’. All of these associations, Izak argued, as well as ‘the theatre and lectures, not only build national self-awareness, but also bring us together’.79 The blend of Catholic and nationalist ideology that underpinned such calls for new associations was also apparent in a pamphlet published by Andrej Rojka in 1900 entitled A Fatherly Call to My People. In this pamphlet Rojka, like Izak, emulated the question and answer format of the Catholic catechism to urge his fellow Slovaks to ‘establish everywhere reading groups and libraries’. He also added that particular attention should be paid to ensure that ‘Slovak Christian writings and papers must be read in full on Sundays by every man and every woman’. Sprinkling his admonitions with explicit antisemitism, Rojka also urged his fellow Slovaks to ‘avoid brandy and the taverns of the Jews like cholera’.80 Responding to his defeat in the 1896 parliamentary elections the Slovak candidate for the KNP, František Veselovský, added his own call for a new Slovak Catholic civic activism. He called on his supporters not to be downhearted, but to renew their efforts, for just as soldiers ‘have to be armed and trained’ so the Slovaks had likewise to achieve ‘victory’. That means, he continued, ‘you have to create, you have to organize’. In particular, Veselovský urged his supporters to ‘read … good books, journals, newspapers and documents’, to ‘organize entertainments and useful activities on Sunday afternoons and holidays and on winter evenings’ and to ‘let their not be a single village without a reading circle for grown-ups or without a Sunday school for the children’. Veselovský also informed his readers that the best person to preside over these organizations

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would be the local priest, adding that such organizations had both a political and a moral purpose, for they would keep the youth ‘away from the tavern … and other such meeting places’.81 In exactly the same manner, Hlinka responded to his defeat in the 1898 parliamentary elections in Ružomberok with his own call for civic activism. In particular, he urged his supporters to redouble their efforts, declaring, ‘we must still do much work, much to instruct, much to write, much to call attention to … so that we can defend the rights of the citizen’.82 He also regularly used his newspaper, the Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, to promote Catholic associations in Slovakia. As soon as the paper was launched in 1897, Hlinka contributed a series of articles which were based on his experiences establishing a consumer cooperative in his parish of Sliač, formerly Tri Sliač (Magyar: Három Szliács) in Liptó County. His primary argument was that ‘much poverty oppresses the Slovak people, and only with the help of associations can this be removed’.83 Likewise, Juriga also urged his fellow priests to combat atheism and defend their Slovak flock by emulating the efforts of Catholics elsewhere in Europe, and even the Social Democrats, with their ‘dozens of speeches, tens of meetings, hundreds of thousands of brochures’ and their ‘professionally edited journalism’.84

The Slovak Catholic press Juriga’s call for a rejuvenation of Slovak Catholic journalism coincided with the rapid growth in the number of Slovak-language Catholic publications.85 The first distinctly Catholic Slovak-language paper, Katolické noviny pre obecný ľud, was founded in Budapest in 1849 and endured in various forms for decades. It was not until the end of the century, however, that the Slovak-language press and the Catholic Slovak-language press began to flourish.86 Up until the 1880s, each of the handful of Slovak-language Catholic newspapers had less than a thousand subscribers, but their popularity surged around the turn of the century. Between 1888 and 1900, for example, ‘the number of Slovak newspapers and periodicals more than doubled’ from twelve titles to twenty-eight. By 1914 there were sixty Slovak-language titles published in Slovak. In 1906 alone, some ‘4.7 million copies of Slovak newspapers and periodicals’ were distributed by the Hungarian post office. At the same time, specifically Catholic newspapers and journals were launched with increasing frequency. The official directory of the Catholic church in Hungary listed forty-five separate Catholic publications by 1907.87

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Slovak Catholic priests played a key role in the growth of Slovak-language publishing, contributing to and editing newspapers, and authoring and publishing pamphlets, one-off almanacs and books. The Catholic Society of Saint Adalbert (Vojtech) (Slovak: Spolok Svätého Adalbert (Vojtecha)) alone oversaw the publication, prior to 1918, of 346 separate Slovak-language books, as well as new translations of both the Old and New Testaments into modern Slovak. The society also ensured that a wide range of Catholic reading materials, from prayer books to the ever popular Lives of the Saints, were available at low prices in the Slovak language. In the years before 1918, the society allegedly published 3.6 million copies of its various publications.88 Equally prolific was the leading Slovak Catholic printing press, established by Karol Salva in the Slovak Catholic stronghold of Ružomberok in 1888. During its first decade of operations it had already published 600,000 copies of various books and pamphlets.89 A single Catholic calendar, the Putnik svätovojtesky had a print run of 50,000 copies, and Catholic priests contributed the bulk of the 1,200 books on religious themes that were published in the Slovak language between 1901 and 1918.90 More broadly, they also used their pulpits to promote the sale of Slovak-language newspapers.91 In the years before 1914, the Slovak-language Catholic press expanded to include not only the Katolícke noviny, but also the Kazateľňa, which provided themes for sermons for each week and each feast of the liturgical year. It also embraced the Kráľovná sv. ruženca, which was dedicated to the promotion of the Rosary; the Sv. Adalbert (Vojtech), which possessed the revealing subtitle ‘A Monthly for the Defence of the Catholic Faith’ (Slovak: Mesiačnik na obranu katolickej viery); the Posol b. srdca Ježišového and Sväta rodina, which were published by religious orders, and the KNP-supporting Kresťan newspaper. In addition to these newspapers and journals, there were an array of one-off publications, including various almanacs which provided, along with a list of Catholic feasts and name days, articles that occasionally strayed into political issues.92 The most influential of the Slovak Catholic newspapers, which became the flagship of the SĽS, was the Katolícke noviny. It was initially financed by the Society of Saint Adalbert and served as the in-house journal of the Slovak-speaking clergy.93 Although initially written in a dry manner, it repeatedly denounced the ideology and morality of liberalism. It also threw its weight behind the KNP, promoting its rallies and candidates. Its editor Martin Kollár also put his support for the party into practice when he successfully ran on a KNP manifesto in the county assembly elections of 1896 and the parliamentary elections of 1901.

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His paper was, however, perennially short of money, could only be published fortnightly, obtained a mere 600 subscribers, and was constantly beset by doubts about its ability to survive.94 The second independent Slovak-language political newspaper was the shortlived but influential Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, which began as a monthly publication before gradually increasing its frequency of publication. It ran from 1897 until 1903, and was for most of its existence published in Martin by Andrej Hlinka and Anton Bielek.95 Bielek was a devout Catholic who had worked as both a school teacher (until his suspension for nationalist agitation) and an officer in a Slovak-owned bank. He was best known, however, for his novellas that provided a series of portraits of Slovak village life that blended acute social observation and relentless anti-liberal propaganda. These novels, with their simple, impoverished, yet resilient, God-fearing characters, are quintessential examples of Slovak populist writing from the pre-1918 era. Not only did they capture the rhythms of Slovak village life, but they also provided lacerating depictions of manipulative officials and Jewish tavern keepers who allegedly corrupted the peasantry and drove them to alcoholism, emigration and suicide.96 His fellow editor, Hlinka, born in 1864 in rural poverty in a suburb of Ružomberok, was already by 1897 a rising star in the Slovak nationalist firmament. Reasonably well-educated, he had served as parish priest in a number of isolated and impoverished parishes in Liptó County and neighbouring Árva County (Slovak: Orava) in the far north of Hungary. Eventually, he secured a plum parish in Ružomberok where he would remain for the rest of his life. Hlinka was not, as his biographers are keen to point out, an intellectual, but he knew how to speak ‘the language of the people’. He imbued his sermons and writings with both intense religiosity and unshakeable nationalist fervour that was rooted in a genuine and lifelong affection for ‘the Slovak tribe, my people’. He was also endowed with remarkable energy that made him a prolific contributor to an array of Catholic Slovak newspapers, and one of the driving figures in the creation of a distinctly Slovak and Catholic civic society in the highlands. He remained a dominant personality in the SĽS from its founding in 1905 to his death in 1938.97 Under Bielek and Hlinka’s guidance, the Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud emulated the Kresťan’s populist writing style and its savage critique of the government’s liberal ideology. All this helped the paper sell more than twice as many copies per edition as the most prominent Slovak nationalist newspaper, the staid Národnie noviny.98 Unlike the Kresťan, however, it was always explicit in its promotion of the Slovak language. It was prepared, for

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example, to denounce not only magyarization, but even the magyarizing efforts of Catholic clergymen.99 More broadly, Hlinka and Bielek’s newspaper began to develop the outlines of a broader platform that would serve as a basis for the reinvigorated Slovak nationalist movement. It demanded ‘Slovak equality before the law’, Slovak instruction in primary and secondary education, the right to develop a ‘national culture’, and the right to vote.100 The Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud’s target audience was not only the Catholic clergy, with a number of Catholic priests contributing articles and donating money, but also the Catholic Slovak peasantry. It, therefore, dished up not only religious instruction, but also practical advice, salacious reporting, and vicious scapegoating. Jews were a frequent target, with the paper even reporting allegations that they had carried out ritual murders.101 It also displayed some sympathy for the socialist movement and its campaign for better working conditions and universal suffrage. It was, however, incapable of offering any serious critique of capitalism beyond repeated attacks on Jewish economic exploitation and occasional attempts to launch an economic boycott of the Jews under the slogan ‘buy only from Christians, sell only to Christians, and serve only Christians’.

Slovak Catholic associations: The Society of Saint Adalbert The leading Slovak Catholic organization was the Society of Saint Adalbert, which had been founded in 1870 as a break-away body from the Hungarian Catholic Society of Saint Steven. It concentrated its efforts solely on the Slovak-speaking populace. Proclaiming itself to be founded by ‘lovers of the Catholic faith and of the Slovak nation for the publication of books written in the Catholic spirit’ it played a key role in funding and promoting Slovaklanguage Catholic publications. These included both religious and political works that attacked socialism and Marxism, textbooks for school children, and an annual almanac (Slovak: kalendár).102 In spite of efforts by some members of the church hierarchy, and tub-thumping politicians, to limit the distribution of its materials on the grounds that they were ‘unpatriotic’, even the perennially suspicious Ministry of the Interior privately conceded that the society was ‘not openly nationalist’.103 Its membership rose from 5,000 in 1885 to 9,000 in 1900, 25,000 in 1910 and 35,000 in 1918.104 The efforts of the society were also aided by contributions from Slovaks in America who, for example, provided 35,000 crowns for the building

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of a new headquarters in 1902.105 Its ambitious agenda was summed up by Simon Klempa when he used his re-election as vice president in 1895 to remind his fellow members that ‘by combining our strengths we work so that our people will constantly become more and more accustomed to taking and reading good, instructional books’.106 His fellow clergyman, Martin Kollár, captured the almost messianic convictions of the society’s leadership when he promised the annual meeting of the society in 1901 that ‘the church [in Hungary] will celebrate its glorious triumph everywhere, in every field’. For this to occur, Kollár insisted, his fellow priests ‘must establish good schools and libraries, Catholic clubs, reading circles and other associations; they must publish books and newspapers and priests must teach [the people] how to write, read’ in Slovak.107

Slovak sodalities The most common manifestation of the spread of Catholic associations across northern Hungary were the parochial sodalities. These gathered the faithful into groups at the parish level, each one dedicated to promulgating a particular aspect of the Catholic faith. As part of his campaign to encourage the development of Catholic associational life, Pope Leo XIII had given special attention in his encyclicals to promoting the cult of the Rosary which he mentioned in his various encyclicals on sixteen separate occasions. For example, in his encyclical Augustissimae Virginis Mariae, issued in 1897, the Pope not only lauded Catholic participation in ‘useful associations’ including ‘clubs, popular savings-banks, recreative classes, associations for the care of youth, sodalities, and many other organizations’, but he also added that ‘we do not hesitate to assign a preeminent place among these societies to that known as the Society of the Holy Rosary’. Adopting a martial tone, the Pope then proceeded to describe these sodalities as an ‘army of prayer’ which ‘unites together all who join the sodality in a common bond of paternal or military comradeship; so that a mighty host is thereby formed, duly marshalled and arrayed, to repel the assaults of the enemy, both from within and without’.108 The Pope had also made the same point in his encyclical Constanti Hungarorum, specifically issued in response to developments in Hungary in 1893, in which he declared that ‘this is the opportune time for the clergy to revive the sodalities and confraternities of the laity to their former honour and glory’. Making explicit their political dimension, he also added that these sodalities could help the Catholic struggle against liberalism by ‘cultivating in

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the people piety and a Christian way of life’ and ‘strengthening that salutary harmony of mind and heart’ that he insisted was the duty of every Catholic clergyman.109 In response a huge number of new rosary prayer groups were established throughout Hungary, and each member took responsibility for a daily recitation of one part of what was an arduous set of prayers.110 One prominent Slovak priest, Richard Oswald, even published a book specifically aimed at promoting the establishment of such societies which proved so popular that it was translated into Magyar.111 In this book, Oswald laid out the rules and responsibilities of the ideal rosary sodality. It should, he advised, consist of fifteen persons who came together in a ‘rose garland’ to each recite one decade of the rosary per day. His ambition was that such groups would then come together in ever larger associations (eleven such prayer groups would form a ‘rosebush’ and fifteen such rose bushes would form a ‘Marian rose garden’). Oswald, and other Catholic writers, also demanded that these sodalities should be organized and disciplined. All of their members should be, he insisted, formally registered, drunks and swearers should be excluded, and each group should meet, at a minimum, every Sunday.112 The Slovak Catholic press also threw its weight behind the campaign to promote rosary clubs. The Katolícke noviny urged, for example, in a leading article in 1900, that every parish should form its own rosary group.113 Another Slovak Catholic priest and publicist, Katuš Bielek, specifically described the establishment of rosary groups, as well as other Catholic associations, as the best way to counter ‘the struggle of the unbelievers and free-thinkers against the faith’. ‘The aim of these groups’, he continued, ‘has to be mutual help and support for both physical and spiritual needs in both religious and social matters’.114 There is, indeed, clear evidence that these rosary sodalities were concerned with social and political matters. The rosary sodality in Košice, for example, which traced its origins back to 1870, set itself the task of erecting and renovating alters in local churches which were dedicated to the Virgin Mary throughout the Slovak highlands. It also demonstrated its larger regional (Slovak) identity by, for example, raising funds for a village in neighbouring Szepes County which had been devastated by fire.115 Other rosary sodalities organized pilgrimages, held public readings and supported boycotts of Jewish shops.116 There were also allegations that members of these rosary sodalities could be pressured to vote according to the wishes of the local priest. In at least one case, a Slovak priest threatening to prevent his parochial sodality from holding meetings, and even

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warned that he would strip a parishioner of his presidency of the sodality, if he, or any of his fellow members, voted for the Liberal Party candidate.117 Other Catholic sodalities that spread across the highlands also had an explicitly moral message with their focus on the defence of marriage, the promotion of charity or the campaign against alcoholism.118 Some of these sodalities could be exceptionally well-organized. The Society of Saint Vincent de Paul in the western Slovak town of Skalica (Magyar: Szakolcza), for example, possessed a president, deputy president, secretary, treasurer and cloak room attendant all of whom were elected by secret ballot.119 The spread of these sodalities across the Slovak highlands was, in the decades before the First World War, remarkable. According to records compiled by church inspectors around the years 1908–9, the typical parish in the Slovak highlands had between two and three sodalities, over 80 per cent of all parishes in northern Hungary had a Marian sodality, and, on average, each sodality possessed over 300 members. In the southwest of modern Slovakia alone, the combined membership of all Catholic sodalities in the years before the First World War had already exceeded 18,000 persons. It is also a testament to the new spirit of Catholic activism which spread across the Slovak highlands around the turn of the century, that around 45 per cent of these sodalities were founded after 1900, and about half of these were founded after the creation of the SĽS in 1905.120

Slovak Catholic clubs Another sign of the flourishing Catholic associational life in the highlands in the years before 1914 was the spread of Catholic clubs (Slovak: Kruh; Magyar: Kör) that included sundry associations for Catholic teachers, farmers, workers, small businessmen and the youth, which existed alongside the parish sodalities.121 The first such club was the Central Catholic Club (Magyar: Központi Katholikus Kör) later renamed the Budapest Catholic Club (Magyar: Budapesti Katholikus Kör), which was only founded at the end of the 1880s. With the establishment of the KNP in 1895, a major effort was made to establish a range of Catholic clubs throughout the country.122 By 1896, there were already 307 Catholic clubs in operation, as compared to only 80 clubs that were affiliated with other political parties. Their number then rose to over 1,000 by the beginning of the twentieth century.123

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Growth was equally rapid in the north of the country where, prior to 1895, only sixty Catholic clubs had been registered with the authorities. In the decade following the establishment of the KNP at least 119 additional such clubs were founded, with particularly prominent examples in Žilina, Kysucké Nové Mesto (Magyar: Kiszucaújhely) and Ružomberok. Then, in the decade following the creation of the SĽS in 1905, at least 229 further Catholic clubs were founded across the Slovak highlands (see table below). The Growth in Catholic Clubs in Northern Hungary, 1880–1914 County

Abaúj

Árva

Bars

Gömör and Kishont Hont

Catholic clubs registered before 1895 1895–1904 1905–1914

6

3

5

3

1

4 21

4 1

1 10

6 14

6 12

County

Komárom

Liptó

Nyitra

Pozsony

Saros

4

3

7

11

3

15 20

3 3

26 37

19 40

3 11

Szepes

Trencsén

Turócz

5

2

1

3

3

16 3

7 34

1 0

5 14

3 9

Catholic clubs registered before 1895 1895–1904 1905–1914 County Catholic clubs registered before 1895 1895–1904 1905–1914

Zemplén Zólyom

These numbers may even have been an underestimate. Parochial records suggest that some form of Catholic club, in addition to the sodalities, was present in about half of all the parishes in the Slovak highlands by 1909 with an average of approximately 150 members.124 The success of these clubs was, in large part, due to the efforts of the Slovak-language Catholic press which vigorously promoted their establishment. For example, in the spring of 1896, the Katolícke noviny published a series of articles that singled out even the humble Catholic reading clubs for particular praise. These were normally established in villages, had premises that rarely consisted of more than a room or two and provided a limited range of free newspapers and books to their members. Nevertheless, the Katolícke noviny claimed that they ‘not only strengthen our Catholic faith and spread Catholic culture, but also rectify the morals of our community’. It then proceeded to provide detailed instructions on how to obtain the authorization

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of the authorities for the establishment of local Catholic clubs, how to organize them, and listed the rules by which they should be governed.125 Although these Catholic clubs came in a wide variety of forms and sizes, they were invariably highly organized, regulated, and carefully managed to ensure both their financial viability and continuing adherence to the aims of their founders. They tended to be presided over by the local Catholic priest who served either as president (Magyar: elnök) or patron (Magyar: védnök). In larger clubs, the priest was also assisted by a deputy president (Magyar: alelnök), and a committee of officers (Magyar: valasztmány). These officers could include a secretary (Magyar: jegyző) who took the minutes at meetings, a financial officer (Magyar: pénztárnok), a speaker (Magyar: háznagy) who maintained order at meeting, a lawyer who ensured the working of the club satisfied all legal requirement, and where appropriate a librarian. All of these officers were elected by the members who were required to pay an annual fee to ensure the smooth running of their association.126 Several of these Catholic clubs developed even more complicated structures, with various ranks of members and various subcommittees. The Catholic Youth Club in Rajec, for example, had three tiers of membership, full, partial and associative (Magyar: rendes, pártoló and segélyező). Likewise, the sizeable Catholic club in Skalica, which had by 1910 acquired 450 members, possessed not only a thirty-nine member executive committee, but also additional subcommittees that dealt with the social and cultural activities of the club, and arranged special meetings for women, younger people, teetotallers, and an associated rosary sodality.127 One such subcommittee that arranged cultural events, lectures, and performances for the Catholic club in Spisšká Nová Ves (Magyar: Igló) in Szepes County even arranged the publication of an annual volume that reported on developments in the club. It also included articles by its members that, among other things, warned its readership of the threat that the social democratic movement posed to their faith.128 The Catholic club in Modra (Magyar: Modor), Pozsony County also appears to have discussed political topics, as it held lectures on the dangers of socialism and the need for an explicitly Catholic political party.129 The exceptionally vigorous Skalica Catholic Club went even further in its political activities. It provided an array of Slovak-language political newspapers to its readers including four explicitly Catholic publications, two political journals, two economic journals, and a Czech journal that was purely for ‘entertainment’. It also held religious plays, evening dances, and charity events, arranged the music for processions, pilgrimages, religious celebrations, and weddings, endeavoured

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to persuade its members to boycott Jewish-owned taverns, and held weekly lectures on local and national economic, cultural, and political developments. The Ružomberok Catholic club was almost as active; it originally subscribed to over a dozen Slovak-language journals and ‘organized lectures, performed plays, established a choir, organized group excursions, meetings, concerts, etc.’130 Equally active was the Budapest Slovak Catholic Workers Club (Slovak: Budapeštiansky slovenský katolícký delnický kruh), founded in 1902 by Eduard Šándorfi. This club’s express political purpose was, according to Šándorfi, that ‘workers who spoke Slovak would through religious and patriotic undertakings be led away from destructive tendencies’. He was particularly alarmed by the growing number of Slovak Catholics who were attracted to socialist clubs because they provided companionship and free Slovak-language papers. His own club held meetings every Sunday morning after a Mass celebrated by a Slovak-speaking priest, and organized occasional cultural evenings involving lectures, recitals, and choral performances. It even provided free newspapers, including the Katolícke noviny, which became the flagship paper of the SĽS.131 The Catholic club in Bratislava explicitly listed among its founding objectives the intention to hold readings, provide newspapers and various journals to its members, maintain a library, and organize various events to ‘advance the spiritual, social and material interests of the Catholics of Bratislava and its environs’. Admittedly, the cultural entertainment organized by this club appears to have consisted entirely of various forms of light entertainment, including performances by Roma musicians, readings from low brow literature, and the occasional classical music recital. Such events did, however, attract members, and provided them with a forum to discuss more serious topics.132 A similar level of activity was also evident in some of the inauspicioussounding Catholic youth and reading clubs. One single club for young Catholic men, for example, had 242 members, and a library with over 300 books. It was open seven days a week, and organized lectures on theology, history, economics, and practical affairs. It also offered singing classes, arranged special Masses to celebrate the high holy days, and held supervised and strictly alcohol-free balls.133 Another such club arranged excursions, oversaw physical training sessions, organized concerts, imposed a membership fee, and was again overseen by a president, deputy president, secretary, and five-man supervisory committee.134 A third such youth club also blended Slovak nationalist and Catholic ideals. As one of its members proudly noted, ‘we learn everything with a Slovak spirit, we sing our national songs, we read a full range of journals … and we don’t visit the Jews or drink in the taverns’.135

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Július Markovič, a leading figure of the KNP in Trencsén County, also provided a lively description of the Christian Bourgoise Reading Club (Magyar: Keresztény Polgári Olvasókör) that he helped to found in the town of Nové Mesto nad Váhom (Magyar: Vágújhely). The club, he wrote, ‘was heavily visited. Every Sunday and on [religious] holidays we held various useful presentations, and the rooms of the club were packed with listeners. During the summer we organized group excursions where … a choir performed various selected works, and appropriate speakers extolled Christian understanding and purposeful work to their audience.’136

Other Slovak associations: Banks Slovak Catholics also participated in efforts to establish banks which could improve the welfare of their customers by providing cheaper loans than their Magyar and Jewish competitors. From the 1840s onwards, a network of Magyar or Jewish-owned banks had spread across northern Hungary. Their customers tended to belong to the upper classes, who also tended to be Magyars or Jews. As Roman Holec has explained, it was hoped that Slovak-owned banks would challenge this ‘economic discrimination’, which was blamed for the impoverishment of the Slovaks. The founders of these rival Slovak banks found particular inspiration in the Czech idea of economic nationalism encapsulated by the slogan ‘each to one’s own’ (Slovak: svoj k svojmu).137 By providing affordable loans to their customers, these banks also sought to politically ‘liberate’ Slovaks and enable them to vote for Slovak nationalist candidates. As Július Markovič put it, at the founding meeting of a people’s bank he established in 1896 in Nové Mesto nad Váhom, ‘the Slovak people are becoming poorer, declining and becoming indebted. Usury has a strong harvest among them. The usurers, who force the people to vote against their convictions in elections, are getting richer and the Slovak people are declining … so it is necessary to establish a financial institution.’138 Or as Seton-Watson put it, the aim of these people’s banks was to stem ‘the excessive usury which gnawed at the very vitals of the Slovak peasantry and kept them in the thrall of the Jews and the magnates’.139 František Skyčák also explained his decision to found a local people’s bank on the grounds that ‘up to that point rural people could only obtain a loan with the assistance of the local tavern keeper’ and then had to pay both the publican and the credit institution a debilitating rate of interest.140 The first annual report of the Slovak-owned people’s bank in Trnava (Magyar: Nagyszombat) was even

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more succinct. The aim of the bank, it declared, was not to achieve the greatest possible profit, but to ensure that the local people became ‘propertied, educated, independent, and free’.141 These banks were not explicitly Catholic. Nevertheless, they received the full support of the Slovak Catholic press, often included Slovak priests on their boards, and sometimes even shared their premises with other Catholic associations. Slovak-owned financial institutions had established a presence in the larger towns in the highlands since the 1840s but, as one hostile observer of the Slovak nationalist movement noted, up until the 1870s, ‘the founder of these institutions looked for investors in every layer of society … without any ancillary aims or considerations’. From 1870, however, a growing network of Slovak ‘people’s banks’ (Slovak: Ľudová Banka) confided their appeal only to their fellow Slovaks and directed funds to Slovak and Catholic parties, including the future SĽS. They were aided by an inflow of funds from Czech financial institutions, who provided around fourteen million crowns of credits to these banks prior to the First World War.142 In practical terms the people’s banks employed three separate but overlapping innovations. The first was to provide long-term loans which could be offered at a comparably low rate of interest. These could initially be financed by offering shares to wealthy investors and later by attracting thrifty Slovak savers, who had previously lacked a satisfactory place to store their money.143 Typically, these banks charged around 6 to 7 per cent interest per annum for loans and provided a 4 to 5 per cent return on deposits.144 The second innovation was to rely on close personal relations with the customers, and references from the local clergy, to ensure that the recipient of the loan was both upstanding and would feel a moral and social obligation to not default on his loan. As the Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud explained to its readers: For those who need money, find two friends who want to vouch for you and go with them to the priest, put in your request to him, and if the priest finds this acceptable, he will happily arrange for a loan. … Sign the promissory note yourself along with your fellow guarantors, and the priest will send this in [to the bank], vouch for you, and the money will arrive on the third day.145

Thirdly, as with similar banks in other countries, nationalist rhetoric also helped to attract Slovak customers.146 These banks placed adverts in Slovak-language Catholic and nationalist newspapers (thus providing a valuable source of financial support for the Slovak press) and then benefitted from being associated

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with the Slovak nationalist cause. Moreover, almost all the workers at the banks were Slovaks who were able to speak the language of the local population, although the occasional Magyar or Jewish financial expert was employed when absolutely necessary.147 Revealingly, the first of these ‘people’s banks’ was established in 1868 in the home base of the SNS leadership, Martin. Twelve more were founded in the remainder of the century and then fourteen more between 1900 and 1907 as the basic model became increasingly popular. A contemporary overview of the spread of these people’s banks across the Slovak highlands, provided by Adolf Pechány, also suggests that the establishment of the SĽS in 1905 was not only assisted by these banks, but also provided an additional impetus for their expansion.148 For example, in Nyitra County, between 1903 and 1912, the number of Slovak-owned people’s banks had risen from three to five. Three additional subbranches of other people’s banks had also been established in the county, and the number of Slovak-owned smaller financial institutions had increased threefold. In total, Slovak-owned financial institutions in the county had, in the same nine year period, increased their combined financial capital from 180,000 to 2,165,000 crowns. In Trencsén County, the number of branches of Slovak people’s banks tripled and several smaller Slovak-owned financial institutions were established in the same period, including a credit union (Magyar: segélyegylet). The combined capital of all these institutions increased from 165,000 to 950,000 crowns. Likewise, in Turócz County (Slovak: Turiec), where the first Slovak people’s bank had been founded, the period between 1903 and 1912 saw the establishment of the first Slovak-owned insurance company with two additional sub-branches and an increase in Slovak financial capital from just under two million to just under three million crowns. In Árva County, the same period saw the establishment of its first two people’s banks, while in Gömör and Kishont County the single Slovak-owned people’s bank had almost doubled its capital to 220,000 crowns. In Hont County, a second Slovak-owned people’s bank was established, and the capital available to further Slovak nationalist aims had increased from 60,000 to 415,000 crowns. In Liptó County the number of Slovak-owned banks had risen from one to four, and their combined capital had increased from just under 333,000 to an astonishing 7,770,000 crowns. Moreover, in some parts of northern Hungary similar banks were only established after the formation of the SĽS in 1905. Such was the case in Zólyom County (Slovak: Zvolen), where by 1912, there were two banks, one smaller

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institution, and a total of 1,580,000 crowns in capital. Similarly, in Szepes County the first two branches of people’s banks had been established by 1912. Likewise, in Bars County (Slovak: Tekov), located in the south of today’s Slovakia, and in neighbouring Nográd County (Slovak: Novohrad), two such banks were founded after 1905, with 1,420,000 crowns in combined capital. Even in the eastern counties of Abaúj (Slovak: Abav), Saros and Zemplén (Slovak: Zemplín), where formerly no Slovak-owned banks had operated, a branch of the Tatra bank was finally established after 1905. It is, however, noticeable that the fewest people’s banks had been established before 1918 in those counties where the SĽS failed to run a single candidate. In contrast, Pozsony County—where the SĽS secured most of its electoral victories—had the largest concentration of people’s banks in Slovakia. It possessed five such banks that were headquartered in the county, as well as a sub-branch of a sixth that was based in Liptó County. In addition, a Slovak ‘Economic Bank’ with two additional sub-branches and two mutual societies (Magyar: Kölcsönös Segélyező Egyesület) had also been established in the county. Admittedly, some of these banks were fairly small and presumably uninfluential. For example, the people’s bank in Sered (Magyar: Szered) in Pozsony County possessed only 50,000 crowns in capital. The people’s bank in Pukanec (Magyar: Bakabánya) in Hont County had only 35,000 crowns in capital, while the people’s bank in Turany (Magyar: Nagyturány) in Turócz County had only a measly 24,000 crowns in capital.149 In addition, the people’s bank in Zvolen was founded by only twelve persons, while the thirty-nine shareholders who established the people’s bank in Ružomberok initially lacked the funds to purchase its own building and had to run it out of a house. The people’s bank in Jablonka consisted of two rooms in an ordinary house.150 The success of some of these banks was also remarkable. The people’s bank in Námestovo (Magyar: Námesztó), Árva County was founded in 1902 with a mere 100,000 crowns in capital by the first leader of the SĽS, František Skyčák. It was, however, able to recapitalize at double its net value in 1909 and at five times its net value in 1918.151 Likewise, the people’s bank in Ružomberok, which was established and later presided over by Skyčák’s successor as head of the SĽS, Hlinka, was initially founded in 1906 with 66,000 crowns in capital, but already had an annual turnover of 2,400,000 crowns by the end of 1907. It then carried through a successful recapitalization in 1910 that raised its capital to 200,000 crowns.152 Other Slovak people’s banks also achieved similarly remarkable growth in the years before 1914. The first people’s bank in Zólyom County, which was

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founded in 1902 with 100,000 crowns in assets had, by 1905, an annual turnover of over a million crowns. It was, therefore, able to pay a 5 per cent dividend, as its share capital increased to 500,000 crowns by 1908, and to one million crowns by 1912. As a result of its success, it was able to establish eight additional branches and sub-branches between 1907 and 1913.153 The growth of the people’s bank in Bánovce nad Bebravou (Magyar: Bán) was also extraordinary. Founded with 60,000 crowns in capital, it had, within two years, racked up total assets in excess of 900,000 crowns. By 1908, it was taking in 200,000 crowns in deposits per annum. Likewise, the two largest Slovak-owned banks in Liptó County had, by 1912, a combined capital of 7,400,000 crowns.154 Crucially, the growth of these banks was integral to the growth of the Slovak nationalist movement in general and the SĽS in particular. These banks supported the growth of the Slovak press with their advertisements, provided advice to other Slovak organizations and donated money to Slovak nationalist associations and, ultimately, nationalist parties. Moreover, by improving the general welfare of Slovak farming communities, they enfranchised Slovaks who had previously been excluded due to their low income. As a result, Slovak nationalists in this period placed extraordinary faith in the power of people’s banks to transform local politics. Ľudovít Bazovský, who was an on-off supporter of the SĽS, was convinced, for example, that if only he could establish a people’s bank in Hont County, then the local Slovak population would be empowered to unseat their local Liberal Party MP.155

Slovak cooperatives Following the establishment of parish sodalities, Catholic clubs and the people’s banks, Catholic priests and publicists also joined the countrywide effort to establish a variety of cooperatives. These were founded to defend the interests of small farmers, whose financial and moral well-being had been jeopardized by the government’s laissez-fair policies. Their efforts were also inspired by the rapid growth of similar cooperatives throughout other regions of central Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards and by the popularity of the cooperative movement in other parts of Hungary, as well as the support of prominent politicians in Hungary. József Majlath, a leading figure in the KNP, for example, used the pages of the Katholikus Szemle to argue that the establishment of credit cooperatives (Magyar: hitel szövetkezetek) could play a key role in efforts to prevent the peasantry from emigrating overseas. The well-connected umbrella

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organization for farmers’ interests, the Magyar Farmers’ Union (Magyar: Magyar Gazdaszövetség) also called for the establishment of at least one cooperative in every village in the country. The hope was that, as Dániel Szabó has noted, a ‘new organized society with a different moral basis’ would be created that would counter the ‘immorality and rootlessness’ of the governing liberal ideology. In 1899 there were only 712 cooperatives in the whole of Hungary, but as a result of these efforts, by 1914, there were around 1,276 consumer cooperatives with 658,000 members, as well as 2,462 credit cooperatives with 635,000 members. In addition, an additional further 344 explicitly ‘Christian’ cooperatives had been founded throughout Hungary.156 The growth of the cooperative movement in Hungary was also evident in the Slovak highlands, where a range of consumer and credit cooperatives were established from the late 1890s onwards.157 By the turn of the century there were, for example, thirteen cooperatives in Árva County, fourteen cooperatives in Liptó County and a further sixty-five spread across central and western Slovakia.158 It has been estimated that between 1894 and 1909 the number of these institutions in the territory of modern day Slovakia increased, in total, from 53 to 292, and that their total membership increased from just under 29,262 to 111,108 persons. As was the case with the people’s banks, it was in the Western part of the Slovakpopulated region, namely in the counties of Nyitra and Pozsony, where the largest number of cooperatives were established (125 of the total).159 Notably, many of the founding members of the SĽS helped set up cooperatives including Hlinka, Juriga, Hodža and Dr Pavel Blaho, who established at least twelve consumer cooperatives in the vicinity of Skalica.160 Church records from the years 1908–9 again provide insight into the spread of these cooperatives across the Slovak highlands, with around a quarter of the parishes possessing some form of credit cooperative and a third some form of consumer cooperative with an average of just under 200 members. It was also not uncommon to find two or even three agriculture cooperatives in an individual parish. For example, in Nyitra County alone, Bánov, Čachtice, Chtelnica, Dolné Dubové, Gbely, Nasvady and Pieštany all had an active consumer cooperative, a savings cooperative, and a farmer’s association in the years before the First World War.161 Contemporary accounts of how these cooperatives operated testify both to the reasons for their popularity and the impact they had on their members. Ľudevít Okánik, who had served as president of a Catholic reading club and then ran for parliament on an SĽS platform in 1910, described in an article he published in 1906 how the various cooperatives worked in his local town of Skalica. The credit association had, for example, 1,040 members who had bought shares in the cooperative. They were then able to apply for loans at low rates of

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interest. As Okánik proudly declared, ‘there is no financial institution in this vast country that would extend to the little people a lower rate of interest’.162 According to Šándorfi, who was active in the cooperative movement in Nyitra County, consumer cooperatives also benefitted by providing good quality products to the people which were 5 to 10 per cent cheaper than alternative wholesalers. Prospective buyers could again take advantage of low interest loans with no repayment required for at least three months.163 These cooperatives could also be established with relatively small amounts of capital. Six thousand crowns appears, for example, to have been the norm in Trencsén County.164 Their viability was also assisted by contributions from Slovaks in America, and by the existing people’s banks which provided additional funding and a pool of financial advisors. In Trencsén County, for example, the accountant of the local people’s bank not only served as an editor of the local Slovak-language newspaper, but also acted as ‘an advisor to all of the local cooperatives’.165 As with the Catholic clubs and sodalities there was also a clearly defined organizational hierarchy to these cooperatives. The local clergyman often served as president, accompanied by a board of governors which included prominent persons in the village such as the doctor and postmaster. These men were responsible for drafting and enforcing the rules and regulations of the cooperative.166 Unsurprisingly, considering the involvement of the (Catholic) clergy in promoting the spread of cooperatives, there were usually always economic, moral or social motives for their establishment. Clergymen who promoted cooperatives enthusiastically noted their transformative influence on their members. János Kokovay, for example, reported that ‘in most cooperatives one of the rules is that frequent visitors to the tavern don’t receive a loan’. As a result of its moral clarity, he continued ‘the cooperative is a form of school in which the spendthrift becomes prudent, the drunk becomes sober, the coursetongued becomes devout, the dissatisfied becomes happy, the helpless becomes strong, the poor become skilled, the immoral become moral, the mean become generous, and the jealous become charitable’.167 As Titusz Dugovich noted in his study of the Slovak nationalist movement, published in 1903, the ‘moral’ character of these cooperatives also invariably manifested itself in ‘pronounced antisemitism’.168 The Slovak Catholic press, for example, which eagerly promoted the cooperative movement, regarded their establishment as a means of improving the rural population and freeing them from debt and Jewish influence.169 Okánik, was especially proud that his local credit cooperative in Skalica refused to allow ‘capitalists’ (Magyar: tökepénzes), a code word for Jews, as members.170 His fellow priest Šándorfi was even blunter

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when he proudly declared in the Catholic newspaper, Esztergom, that the purpose of cooperatives was to ‘eliminate Jewish economic exploitation (Magyar: zsidó uzsorakereskedés)’. Another founding member of the SĽS, Július Markovič, helped establish a series of financial institutions across northwestern Slovakia at the turn of the century with the express intention to ‘protect Christian people from usurers’. Likewise, the third and final leader of the SĽS, Jozef Tiso, rejoiced that a local cooperative he established in the impoverished village of Oščadnica (Magyar: Ócsad) before the First World War had undercut the local ‘Jew’.171 Hlinka also established, in his small rural parish of Sliač, both a Catholic club and a cooperative, and was so proud of his efforts that he published the cooperative’s rules in a pamphlet to inspire others to emulate his successes. Among the rules Hlinka listed was the requirement that the elevation of the ‘morals’ of the members should be a core objective of the cooperative and that all the members of the cooperative had to be ‘Christian’ – that is not Jewish.172 As such these cooperatives directly emulated the German Christian Peasant Associations (German: Volksverein) which were established through the last decades of the nineteenth century. They also sought not only to free the peasantry ‘though collaboration from the debt which threatened the whole class’, but also to achieve ‘the spiritual and vocational education of their members’.173 These cooperatives had a cultural and even political import. Not only did they deal with the humdrum work of providing loans, arranging subscriptions, obtaining machinery, and bulk purchasing products, but they also provided their members with free newspapers, arranged lectures, and organized excursions. A number of them also had premises which served as a local recreation and/or cultural venue. As the authorities swiftly noted, the social and cultural activities of these cooperatives ensured that even the smallest could become a bastion of Slovak nationalist agitation.174 Reports by the authorities on these cooperatives do provide sporadic evidence that at least some of them possessed an explicitly Slovak nationalist political agenda. Government reports, for example, noted that cooperatives subscribed to Slovak nationalist newspapers, arranged public readings of Slovak nationalist writers and served as a venue for Slovak nationalist political gatherings.175 One cooperative was even accused by the authorities of facilitating both the distribution of agricultural products and also pamphlets extolling the Great Moravian Empire as the first incarnation of Slovak statehood. There were additional reports that the head of a cooperative would call in all loans from members who voted against a particular Slovak nationalist candidate.

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Membership in some cooperatives was also allegedly only provided to those who voted for Slovak nationalist candidates.176 The primary political purpose of all these Slovak economic associations was, however, more subtle. Slovak nationalists were convinced that if their countrymen could be economically ‘liberated’, then this would empower them to vote according to their conscience. Catholic and Slovak parties would, therefore, be able to break the Liberal Party’s grip on the electorate. One popular explanation for the electoral success of the governing Liberal Party was that voters were in debt to government-supporting landowners and Jews, and were thus afraid of voting against their creditor’s political interests. It was, therefore, hoped that the new Slovak cooperatives, like the people’s banks, would not only ensure that Slovak farmers received a fair price for their products, but also allow them to vote for Slovak and Catholic parties.177

Slovak missions The increasingly vigorous Catholic press and associational life in the Slovakpopulated areas of Hungary before the First World War was also bolstered by the energetic efforts of Catholic ‘missionaries’ who headed out in small teams to reinvigorate the Catholic faith throughout Hungary and the Slovak highlands. The Catholic church had a long tradition of using missions to win converts and/or rekindle the faith. The Jesuits, for example, had turned these visits into exhilarating spectacles at the height of the counter-reformation. Such missions had been used to particularly good effect among the Slovaks in the eighteenth century, helping to both bolster the faith and turn the dialects spoken by Slovaks into a literary language; an early (albeit unintended) example of how the defence of Catholicism and the promotion of Slovak culture frequently overlapped.178 The effectiveness of Catholic home missions was again underscored in the German lands in the wake of the quintessentially liberal 1848 revolutions as clergymen traversed the German countryside terrifying the villagers with their preaching. These missionaries set out to reconnect the church with its flock, confessing vast numbers of people who poured back into the churches. They also preached the virtues of financial prudence and self-discipline, and established a range of sodalities. Their efforts, as Michael Gross has persuasively argued, ‘revived and reshaped German Catholicism … initiated a counter-revolutionary, anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment mass religious and cultural movement’, and inaugurated ‘a revolution in the associational life of German Catholics’.179

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Slovak Catholic priests drew directly on this tradition of missions, and their success in the German lands, as a way to energize Catholicism in their own part of Central Europe. Martin Kollár, for example, used his re-election in 1901 as head of the Society of Saint Adalbert to remind his fellow priests that ‘when difficult times were visited on the church in Germany, she turned to her own Catholic people and they helped her achieve victory’. The message for the local Catholic hierarchy, he continued, was that it would achieve nothing ‘without the help of the common people of Slovakia’.180 From the 1890s onwards priests and monks engaged in exactly the same efforts in the Slovak-speaking countryside, as in Germany. Small groups of clergymen arranged visits to rural Slovak parishes or small towns that usually lasted between a week and ten days. Masses were held throughout the day, the confessionals remained open from morning till nightfall, and the sermons employed rhetorical fireworks to reignite the faith of the community. Greeted by large crowds at the stations when they arrived, the missionaries only left after they had planted a large cross in the centre of the village, a permanent marker that this part of the Slovak-speaking countryside had been reconverted to the Catholic faith. Contemporary reports in the Slovak Catholic press provide eloquent testimonies to the success of these missions. One such report, on a mission by two Slovakspeaking members of the (Lazarist) Congregation of the mission from Vienna to the village of Dojč on the western border of Slovakia in May 1901, declared that ‘all of the sermons were poignant, breaking the frozen hearts’ of their audience. As a result, ‘more than 13,000 believers attended holy Mass, many of whom had over the years forgotten their religious obligations’. Another mission to the village of Hlohovec, formerly called Fraštak (Magyar:Galgócz), led by two Jesuits, was also such a success that, according to one report, all work stopped in the local area and the church was filled from early morning till late in the evening. Attendance was reportedly so great at each of the almost hourly Masses, that were held throughout the day, that there was insufficient space in the church and the two priests lacked the energy to hear everyone who lined up for confession. On their final day the missionaries led 10,000 persons in one final procession to erect a missionary cross in front of which ‘the people remained deep into the night singing and praying’.181 A sense of the frequency of these missions is revealed in an obituary for a Czech priest, Jozef Tomášek, published in a Slovak Catholic journal in 1907. Over the previous three decades, the journal claimed, Tomášek had carried out over 600 missions, many of them in Slovak-populated regions, and ‘was universally famous as a brilliant preacher and splendid orator’. When he went on a mission ‘the people eagerly awaited his fiery sermons, seasoned by exemplary examples drawn from [real] life. He especially severely lashed the greatest fault

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of the people, drunkenness. In his sermons he proclaimed a fight to the death against brandy. And because of this the people loved him and glorified him.’182 Crucially, according to press reports, each mission resulted in the establishment of local Catholic associations or an upsurge in their membership. For example, as a result of the mission to Hlohovec discussed above, a total of 500 villagers were persuaded to join a temperance society and a religious sodality, the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Another mission to Podolinec in 1898 not only attracted 2,800 persons to Mass and confession, but also led to the establishment of a new temperance organization with 110 members. Likewise, a mission the same year to Skalica directly resulted in the establishment of both a new temperance organization with 200 members and a savings cooperative.183 The various aspects of Slovak Catholic civic activism, therefore, reinforced each other. The missions led to the development of sodalities, clubs, and cooperatives. In turn, these associations subscribed to and helped fund Slovak Catholic newspapers, as did the people’s banks. In return, the newspapers urged their readership to attend missions, join new associations and support Slovak financial institutions. Skalica, one of the bastions of support for the SĽS after 1905, provides a specific example of this cooperation. The local credit association provided funds for the local agricultural cooperatives, the local priests oversaw and promoted all of the cooperatives, and the local Catholic club provided both advice for the cooperatives and a venue for their meetings. Such cooperation ensured, as one supporter of the SĽS put it, that ‘at the same table sit together the priest, the factory worker, the small farmer, the wage labourer, and the day labourer’.184 Šándorfi also stressed the value of cooperation between different associations in his parish of Pobedím (Magyar: Pobedény), in Nyitra County. He claimed, for example, that the establishment of a Catholic cooperative had played a key role in the subsequent establishment of a Catholic club, which obtained its initial funding in the form of a generous loan from the cooperative.185

The limits of Catholic associationalism There were, however, severe constraints on the spread and influence of Slovak associational life in the decades before 1914. This was primarily due to the hostility that the authorities displayed towards any suspected manifestation of ‘panslav’ agitation. Already in 1874–5 it had broken up the foremost Slovak cultural association, the Matica Slovenska, as well as three schools which had taught in the Slovak language, in an attempt to nip the nascent Slovak nationalist movement in the bud.

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Even legal scholars were unsure whether the minorities had a right to form political parties, while the government remained willing to prevent any associations which it regarded as having an unacceptable political character.186 As Gyula Andrássy, minister of the interior from 1906 to 1909 put it, ‘I will not tolerate the political organization of the nationalities. I consider them to be in violation of our fundamental laws.’187 Slovak Catholic efforts to establish associations from the turn of the century onwards provoked a fresh crackdown by the authorities. The growth of Slovak-language publishing was matched by vigorous censorship and a ban on the open sale of most Slovak Catholic publications. These could only be purchased by pre-paying subscribers. Dozens of Slovak journalists were also fined or imprisoned for articles which came under the catch-all definition of ‘agitation against the State’. A special department of the Ministry of the Interior, headed by the preeminent Slovak linguist Samuel ‘Samo’ Czambel, was also tasked with a more careful monitoring of Slovak-language publications in order to assess whether they too were engaged in ‘panslav’ propaganda. Another suspicious observer of Slovak associational activity, Adolf Pechány, worked in the press office of the prime minister’s office. Strenuous efforts were also made by the authorities to monitor every subscriber to every Slovak-language and foreign language publication in the northern counties of Hungary.188 For example, in 1907, the minister of the interior issued strict instructions to each főispán in the Slovak-populated areas to monitor ‘agents’ of Slovak-language publications who were going house to house collecting subscribers.189 Additional funding was also provided to Slovak-language newspapers which were deemed patriotic in order to undercut the appeal of the antiliberal Slovak Catholic press.190 The Ministry of the Interior paid for free copies of patriotic newspapers to be distributed in Slovak-populated areas, and local officials in, for example, Árva County, joined in the work of editing local newspapers to ensure that they did not promulgate Slovak nationalist ideas.191 In addition, from 1895 onwards the Ministry of the Interior required each főispán to send in reports, (initially monthly, later half-yearly) on all ‘movements’ and ‘associations’ which had a nationalist character and/or were engaged in ‘panslav agitation’.192 The government also monitored American Slovaks who funded the growth of Catholic associations and the wider Slovak nationalist movement. New government offices were established on the northern border of the country to monitor inflows of funding as well as visits by American Slovaks. The Habsburg Empire’s embassy in America also monitored American Slovak activities. As

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László Szarka has, however, compellingly argued, the role of American Slovaks was ‘modest’, and what money was sent to Slovakia usually funded charitable causes rather than political objectives.193 The authorities also monitored and occasionally blocked the establishment of Catholic associations. Like all such organizations in Hungary, their establishment required the approval of the Ministry of the Interior. This was usually a formality which involved sending the rules of the club to the ministry in Budapest to demonstrate that it served exclusively cultural rather than political aims. The occasional főispán did, however, intervene to advise the Ministry of the Interior that some Slovak Catholic clubs should not be permitted. In Gbely (Magyar: Egbell) in Pozsony County, for example, where the local priest Pavel Blaho was a prominent Slovak nationalist, the local főispán helped block the establishment of a Catholic club on the grounds that ‘it would be only a source of unpatriotic stirring and incitement’.194 Even after a club was established, the authorities often appear to have kept a close eye on its activities. They monitored its membership, visitors, and the publications it subscribed to. Plainclothes detectives and informers were also used to acquire information about suspect political activities.195 Specific events which were organized by Catholic clubs could also be banned or restricted only to its registered members.196 Local officials also sought more unorthodox strategies to curb some Slovak associational activity. For example, in Považská Bystrica (Magyar: Vágbeszterce), Trencsén County, one district official even stood for election to his local Catholic club to prevent ‘panslavs’ taking control of the association.197 Likewise, in Árva County the local főispán devoted considerable energy in a failed attempt to prevent a ‘panslav’ being elected as the head of the local branch of the Tatra Bank.198 Locally, Magyar nationalists also joined in the struggle to counterbalance those Slovak nationalists who were allegedly exploiting the new spirit of Catholic activism. The Catholic club in Ružomberok was the scene of a fierce struggle between Magyars and Slovaks, led respectively by the local landowner and KNP MP István Rakovszky and Andrej Hlinka. Their dispute manifested itself in bitterly contested elections for the senior positions in the club, disagreement over whether the Magyar or Slovak language should be used at club events, and disputes over whether the club should subscribe to Slovak nationalist newspapers. As a result, Hlinka was temporarily forced to resign his membership.199 In Žilina, the local priest and active Slovak nationalist Romuald Zaymus was expelled from the local Catholic club within a year of its foundation on the grounds that he was using its premises to foment unpatriotic agitation.200

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Similarly, in Bánovce nad Bebravou, the local priest was singled out for criticism by the Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud newspaper for attempting to change the language of the local Catholic club from Slovak to Magyar. He had also insisted that all subscriptions to Slovak nationalist publications should be cancelled. Likewise, in Bratislava the local clergy forbade all Slovak-language theatre performances on the local Catholic club’s premises.201 The authorities were also convinced that the people’s banks were of crucial importance to the Slovak national movement and that their growth needed to be drastically curbed.202 Local officials launched investigations of these banks to discover any financial irregularities that would permit their closure for, as one főispán put it, ‘the primary tool of the panslav leadership for the obtaining of money is really the people’s bank’.203 General meetings of these banks were often personally monitored by local officials. On occasion, bank meetings were broken up if they were perceived as having an openly political character. For example, in Námestovo in 1907, a meeting of investors in the local people’s bank was dispersed by the gendarmerie.204 An indication of the government’s concerns about these banks is provided by a report from 1907 on one such institution in Nové Mesto nad Váhom, run by Július and Rudolf Markovič. Convinced that this pair of prominent Slovak nationalist brothers had an enormous influence on the ‘indebted people who blindly listen to the words [of these brothers]’ the local főispán recruited a paid informant from among the bank’s employees to keep him abreast of developments. Moreover, the towns’ patriotic inhabitants were encouraged to buy shares in the bank in order to throw out the Markovič brothers and the other Slovak nationalists who ran the bank. Although 400 shares were purchased, the local főispán was still reduced to appealing to the Ministry of the Interior to request further funding to seize majority control.205 A similar effort was made to sabotage the establishment of a branch of the Tatra Bank in Prešov (Magyar: Eperjes), Sáros County. The local Magyardominated chamber of lawyers forbade any of its members from having any financial dealings with the new bank. The local főispán also coordinated efforts by all the other financial institutions in the town to avoid any transactions with the new bank. As he explained to the appreciative minister of the interior, the intention was ‘not only to organize a boycott, but also to put such obstacles in the way of the bank’s operations that the very functioning of the bank will be rendered impossible’. Bishops in northern Hungary also acted to prevent any parish funds from being invested in Slovak nationalist banks.206 The authorities also made some efforts to sabotage the growth of the cooperative movement in northern Hungary. As early as 1865, an attempt to

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establish a cooperative in the SNS stronghold of Martin was blocked by the local authorities. The precise reasons for this decision remain, however, unclear.207 Certainly by the beginning of the twentieth century the Ministry of the Interior took steps to prevent Slovak nationalists exploiting the growing popularity of the cooperative movement. Every főispán in the highlands was, for example, instructed to discover precisely which cooperatives had fallen into the hands of the ‘panslavs’. In Trencsén County, the főispán reported in 1904 that five of the thirty-three local credit unions had a ‘Slovak national character’ and another three conducted their business in the Slovak language. This information was then used to block the establishment of Slovak consumer cooperatives which allegedly served political rather than economic aims.208 More subtle efforts were also used to undermine the Slovak cooperative movement. Since the Ministry of the Interior also oversaw the distribution of all liquor licences the authorities could use this as a means of reducing the popularity of cooperatives by boosting the popularity of rival establishments. The főispán of Trencsén County, for example, urged the relevant minister to deny such a licence to one applicant consumer cooperative , on the grounds that it had ‘panslav leaders’ and even possessed a ‘political office’ (Magyar: politikai központ).209 The authorities in Trencsén County also sought to undermine the local cooperatives by granting more liquor licences to aspiring tavern keepers so that they did not ‘fall into the hands of the panslavs’.210 The same tactics were employed by the authorities in Liptó County. Hlinka’s consumer cooperative in Sliač application for a licence to serve alcohol was rejected, while the Jewish proprietor of a tavern in the same village was according to his complaint immediately provided with a licence.211 Rival ‘patriotic’ associations were also established to counter the Slovak nationalist threat. The most notorious of these was the Upper Hungarian Cultural Union, better known by its acronym FEMKE (Magyar: Felvidéki Magyar Kulturális Egyesület), founded in 1883, which aimed ‘to strengthen Magyar patriotic feelings, religious and moral life, and love for God and country among the youth’ of northern Hungary. In the years leading up to 1914, the FEMKE worked closely with the Catholic church to promote the Magyar language and culture through a diverse range of cultural activities. It organized summer camps, published a children’s newsletter, and operated twenty-seven children’s nurseries. It also ran 38 singing and reading circles for young people, and 157 libraries.212 The second, and less well known, government-funded cultural association was the Hungarian Slovak Cultural Association (Magyar: Magyarországi Tót Közmuvelödési Társulat), which was established in 1885. It was tasked with fostering Slovak patriotism to the Hungarian state, and was funded by government subsidies and money confiscated from the Matica Slovenska. It also possessed a strongly

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Catholic flavour. Its president was always either a bishop or an archbishop, and it contrasted its own Catholic Hungarus ideology with the Protestant-dominated, and ‘unpatriotic’, Slovak nationalist movement. It published its own Slovak-language newspaper, Vlast a Svet, distributed free and/or subsidized patriotic publications (such as patriotic histories of Hungary), and had about 17,000 subscribers by 1914. The impact of the new spirit of Slovak Catholic activism can, however, be seen in the association’s decline. In the years before 1914 it was reduced to appealing to various branches of the government for additional financial support.213 In a number of counties, explicitly ‘patriotic’, ‘Christian’ associations and cooperatives were also established to inculcate their members with loyalty to Hungary.214 For example, the Bratislava Bourgeois Magyar Club (Magyar: Pozsonyi Polgári Magyar Kör) was founded in 1897 with the expressed aim of ‘developing the [city’s] burgher society in a pro-Hungarian direction’. Likewise, the local bilingual Bratislava Catholic Club, (Magyar: Pozsonyi Katholikus Kör) founded two years earlier, listed among its founding aims the ‘intensification of a patriotically-inclined culture’.215 The government also took action against Slovak priests and teachers in state schools who were not, as government officials put it in their private correspondence ‘from a Magyar national standpoint entirely trustworthy (Magyar: megbízható)’.216 The government ministry tasked with overseeing ‘religion and cults’ had been empowered as a result of the Ausgleich to act on the emperor’s behalf with regard to religious questions. It was, therefore, able to work with the church hierarchy to scrutinize and, if necessary, prevent ‘unpatriotic’ clergymen from being promoted or transferred them to less threatening and less welcoming parishes. Jehlička, who was elected to parliament on an SĽS platform in 1906, was, for example, immediately transferred to a remote Magyar-speaking parish from where it was impossible to commute to parliament. Such pressure had an effect. Within months he had a mental breakdown and resigned his seat.217 The local Catholic hierarchy also imposed its own sanctions on nationalist Slovak clergymen. Bishops forbade their priests from contributing to Slovaklanguage newspapers or establishing Catholic associations without their express permission. They were also explicitly forbidden from standing for election on a Slovak nationalist platform. Nevertheless, as the prince primate of Hungary also privately recognized, there were barely enough Slovak priests to cover the parishes where Slovak was needed. Only in extreme cases were Slovak nationalist priests transferred to Magyar-speaking parishes.218 Other priests were protected by their local patron who arranged their appointment and funding. Government officials were particularly critical of various members of the Habsburg dynasty,

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who were patrons of a number of parishes in western Slovakia, and did not object to the nationalist activities of the local clergy.219 A smattering of priests even used their parish funds to subscribe to Slovak-language publications including the flagship newspapers of the SĽS, without incurring any obvious reprimand.220 There were other limitations on the power of the authorities to clamp down on Catholic agitation and the Slovak nationalist movement. Often it was difficult to gain a clear picture of a particular priest’s activities. For example, the authorities failed to take any action against one leading Slovak nationalist priest, Anton Hromada, because of contradictory reports on his patriotism. According to one official ‘especially during elections, he strongly promoted the principles of the Slovak nationality party’, but another report declared that ‘he does not take part in active politics’.221 In addition, as Béla Grünwald argued in his study of the Slovak nationalist movement, local officials were unwilling to take action against Slovak nationalists because they preferred to avoid scandals and unpopularity. This was, he insisted, because local officials were responsible for promoting the interest of the governing Liberal Party. To do so, they cultivated good relations with all the local leading figures, including the local clergy.222 László Szarka has also noted that while some officials regarded every fresh manifestation of Slovak nationalist sentiment with growing alarm, others displayed an astonishing complacency as they were incapable of taking the Slovak nationalist movement seriously. He quotes the alispán of Zemplén County who dismissed the entire nationalist movement in his territory as consisting of ‘a doctor, a few lawyers, Catholic and Protestant priests and teachers … and one or two elderly peasants’.223 Slovak Catholic associations before 1918 were also afflicted by problems entirely of their own making. The most prominent Catholic clubs usually had a limited membership drawn from the narrow social elite that could afford the membership fee. Even the people’s banks worked with only that sliver of the Slovak population which possessed sufficient financial acumen to take out loans. Occasional admissions that the local population was estranged from these associations are revealing. For example, in Nová Baňa (Magyar: Újbánya), a local Catholic club was formed in 1898, but as the Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud reported, ‘few persons read its magazines, there are equally few books’. The paper also alleged that ‘the majority of the people don’t understand [its purpose] and avoid it like an old woman’s curse’.224 Even the Catholic club in Ružomberok, one of the more prominent Catholic associations in the highlands, still had problems attracting members. According to press reports, although there were 4,000 eligible persons in the town, the club had only 113 members of whom only forty-five actually attended

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meetings.225 The strict rules that governed many of these clubs also excluded many potential members. For example, the Budapest Slovak Catholic Workers Club blamed its low membership on competition from rival Slovak clubs as well as ‘the Slovaks poverty, lack of education and lack of bravery’. It also, however, banned anyone from becoming a member who had taken part in an affray, visited a Social Democratic organization, was in an extramarital relationship, or had been found drunk in a tavern on at least three occasions.226 Even worse, a number of Catholic clubs were essentially inactive. That was the case with the majority of the clubs in Szepes County. According to scathing newspaper reports, these clubs organized the occasional entertainments ‘once or twice a year’ and regarded such events as having fulfilled their spiritual responsibilities.227 The Catholic club in Tvrdošín (Magyar: Turdossin) was also singled out for criticism, with the Katolícke noviny mournfully reporting that the ‘fire’ which had led to its founding in 1895 ‘burnt out, flamed out, died out. The society was never open’.228 Even the Society of Saint Adalbert, the foremost Slovak Catholic association only persuaded, at most, one-tenth of the Slovak Catholic clergy to become members.229 Occasional reports also suggested that some cooperatives found it difficult to fulfil the hopes of their founders. Šándorfi, for example, publicly mourned the conditions in the cooperative he helped found in his local parish. He wrote that it began operating only ‘after much trouble’, and ‘its shop was not ready, there were no books, and it was incapable of dealing with the people’.230 Other associations were afflicted by internal disputes over the finances, such as the Catholic club in Skalica, where matters grew so heated that a number of dissatisfied members had to be expelled.231 Moreover, plenty of the associations may have included Slovaks among its members, but showed no evidence of possessing a distinctly Slovak character. One report published in 1915 on the 2,984 cooperatives that existed in Hungary at this point, reported that only 24 could be listed as Slovak when assessed by ‘the language of management … or the names of the leading men’.232 The banks which were set up by Slovak nationalists also received some sharp criticism. Vavro Šrobár reminisced that, the Tatra Bank in Martin, one of the more prominent Slovak banks, often wasn’t able to pay dividends because it was afflicted by ‘favouritism towards relatives (Slovak: svagrovstvo) and influence peddling (Slovak: protekcia)’. A number of these banks were also afflicted by the weaknesses of the management, by necessity drawn from only a small pool of possible candidates. As a result, according to Šrobár, ‘a lack of skill … brought these enterprises close to bankruptcy’.233 In addition, these banks reliance on Czech capital to fund their activities required them to charge higher rates of

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interest then if they had simply tapped the Hungarian financial markets. Some observers also concluded that the ‘spirit of altruism’ that had initially motivated their establishment of these banks was replaced by a ‘spirit of selfinterest and exploitation’.234 Moreover, not all attempts to establish people’s banks were successful as the authorities were happy to note. For example, in Svidník (Magyar: Felsővízköz), Saros County, an attempt by local Slovak intellectuals to raise the necessary money for the bank proved impossible.235

Political legacy In spite of their weaknesses, and the efforts of the authorities, all of these associations had the potential to exert a political influence on their members and provide the springboard for the establishment and success of the SĽS. Even the most basic village reading circles and youth clubs provided its members with Catholic publications that were usually critical of the governing liberal ideology. The Budapest Slovak Catholic Workers Club went even further in expressing its support for the SĽS by appointing the founder of the party, František Skyčák as its honorary president and another of the party’s leading figures Andrej Hlinka as one of its honorary chairmen.236 In reality, as Pieter Judson has persuasively argued, ‘even the most avowedly unpolitical associations [possessed] a real moral, and thus a political potential’.237 Béla Grünwald, a caustic critic of the Slovak nationalist movement, was also astute enough to recognize the political import of these associations. He noted that Slovak nationalists founded all kinds of mutual societies, savings banks, credit associations etc., tying the poorer customers to them through the less than timid pressure of the creditor, and skilfully exploiting that relationship. They also founded all kinds of other associations as well, especially in the smaller towns, where they sweettalked the lower ranks of the bourgeoisie and used the communal meetings of the various associations to increase the popularity of their party and attract more followers.238

The importance of Catholic and Slovak associations to the growth of the Slovak nationalist movement and the SĽS was also repeatedly noted by observers in the years before the First World War.239 A police report from Trencsén County in 1907 noted that as a result of the spread of associations in the county, ‘the atmosphere is more frenzied’ and ‘there are now districts where panslavism has reared its head which were previously peaceful’.240 In Liptó County, the despairing

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alispán informed the Ministry of the Interior that ‘the local Slovak people of this area have been whipped up to such an extent by nationalist agitators that without military assistance happiness cannot be restored’,241 and the főispán of Zemplén County writing the same year warned that the nationalist agitators in the last few years have been gaining greater ground in the Slovak-speaking population of the highlands, to such an extent that if state and society do not act arm in arm and block the advance of the traitorous nationalists by the most effective means, then the lurking danger of the present will turn into a serious crisis with grave and unforeseen consequences from a Magyar perspective.242

Moreover, on the rare occasions that the authorities discussed the precise causes of the growth of the Slovak nationalist movement in their counties, the role of Catholic associations was invariably also discussed. The főispán of Árva County, for example, blamed local Slovak financial institutions, as well as American Slovaks, for funding the growth of the nationalist movement. Likewise, the főispán of Nyitra County put the primary blame for the SĽS’s strong showing on the local cooperatives and the local clergy who were, he claimed, almost entirely Slovak nationalists.243 Such views were echoed by a delegation from the Ministry of Agriculture in 1909 that examined the Slovak nationalist movement’s strength in the most northerly counties. The delegation concluded that ‘the situation is most serious in Liptó County because there they [the nationalists] have financial resources and a network of ‘agents’ including ‘lawyers, doctors, priests, teachers in religious schools, and even in many places tavern keepers’.244 Other observers reached similar conclusions. The Budapesti Hirlap, for example, insisted that the people’s banks and the Catholic clubs were the ‘main nests’ of the Slovak nationalist movement.245 Nevertheless, the value of these associations in generating support for the SĽS before 1918 was crucial, particularly in an era where the ability to create a mass party appeared impossible, their long-term importance to the growth of the party also mattered. Most of their members would only be enfranchised after 1918, but they would then form a bedrock of voting support for the party. As Péter Miklós has argued, these Catholic associations in general ‘provided space for the expansion of the conservative Catholic political ideology’. Dániel Szabó has also noted that even the humble cooperative were ‘a potential base of political mobilization’ and ‘served as a model for the envisaged organization of society’ in the future.246 Membership in these associations instilled in a growing number of Slovaks the value of organization, the need for cooperation, an enthusiasm for democracy, and the ability to form their own network of

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autonomous institutions that were independent of, and even directly opposed to, the government. These Slovak Catholic banks, clubs, cooperatives, and sodalities tended to be remarkably well-organized associations. They were governed by rules, regulations and even membership dues. They were also democratic institutions, in which every official, apart from the local priest, was elected, often by secret ballot. They can be seen, therefore, as an embryonic yet autonomous civil society that stretched across the Slovak highlands and served as a surrogate party organization up until 1918 and a core reason why the SĽS transformed itself into a genuine mass party with the introduction of universal suffrage. It is, for example, suggestive that the leaders of the SĽS were all active participants in the growth of Slovak Catholic associations and institutions at the beginning of the twentieth century. If we merely consider the three men who led the party between 1905 and 1945, Skyčák helped established three banks, arranged the purchase of the Katolícke noviny and provided funding for additional Slovak-language publications. His successor, Hlinka, helped edit the Ľudové Noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, was a prolific contributor to other Slovak-language publications, and founded a temperance society, a consumer cooperative and a Catholic club in Sliač. He was also heavily involved in his local Catholic club in Ružomberok, and headed the people’s bank in the same town.247 The third and final leader of the party, Tiso, had, in the years before 1914, already contributed articles to various journals, ran two Catholic associations, and had helped establish a farmers’ cooperative, a Catholic club and a new branch of a people’s bank. In fact every one of the leading figures in the SĽS in 1905 was an active participant in the development of the Slovak Catholic press and the spread of Catholic associations across Slovakia at the beginning of the twentieth century. This pedigree of energy and activism continued to be a characteristic of the entire leadership throughout the party’s history.248 It is also worth noting that this network of sodalities, clubs, banks, cooperatives, associations and publications also constituted a civil society that was defined as much by what it opposed as what it strived to achieve. These associations, which sought to defend Catholic, rural and occasionally explicitly Slovak interests, were inspired by anger at not only the government, but also the local Magyar and Jewish elite. Notably, the explicitly ‘Christian’ character of some of these associations excluded the Jews from membership while Protestants were also excluded from the membership of explicitly Catholic clubs and the readership of explicitly Catholic newspapers. Indeed, many of these associations were established with the express purpose of undermining the Jews, and of course the Magyars, economic, cultural, and political influence.249 Unsurprisingly, the

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Figure 2  A party meeting in northern Hungary. Source: Jednota katolíckeho ľudu, January 1916.

SĽS, which grew out of this Catholic Slovak civic society, adopted not only its emphasis on mass mobilization and democratization, but also its exclusionary and divisive character. As was the case with the network of Catholic publications and associations, the party also divided the population of the Slovak highlands into good (Catholic) Slovaks on the one side, and supporters of the government, including Magyars and Jews, on the other. It was, therefore, not only the later successes of the SĽS which can traced back to the spread of Catholic associational life across northern Hungary before 1914, but also its divisive ethnic, sectarian and antisemitic ideology.250

3

The Birth of the Party

In retrospect, the formation of the SĽS in 1905 appears preordained. For a growing number of Slovak Catholics, the existing parties were fundamentally flawed. There were also a growing number of associations that could form the basis for the launch of a new Slovak Catholic and nationalist party. It was, after all, increasingly clear to a growing number of Slovaks that the KNP was not able to match their expectations. Its tolerant approach towards Hungary’s minorities was already being jettisoned by the time of the 1901 elections, when the party scrapped its earlier promise of better treatment for Hungary’s minorities. Instead, the party’s manifesto proclaimed its ‘attachment to the good Magyar people (Magyar: jó Magyar néphez való ragaszkodásunk)’.1 Moreover, anger was raised at the KNP’s efforts to prevent Slovak nationalist candidates standing for election on the party’s platform.2 Revealingly, in the 1901 elections, only four of the thirteen Slovak candidates even bothered to run on the KNP’s platform.3 Even the few Slovaks who did manage to get elected to parliament as unofficial KNP candidates became disillusioned with the party. For example, Martin Kollár had marked himself out as an energetic critic of the Liberal Party in northern Hungary. He was president of the Society of Saint Adalbert, he edited the Katolícke noviny almost single-handedly, he was a member of his local Catholic club in Trnava, and he served as an officer of the people’s bank in the same town. Unsurprisingly, he was also eager to take a more active role in the struggle against liberalism, and ran for parliament on the KNP manifesto. Nevertheless, he became so disillusioned by the lack of support from the party during the election campaign, that he began to describe himself as a ‘representative of the Slovak people’ rather than any particular party, rarely participated in parliamentary debates, and joined the SNS’s leadership committee.4 The KNP also alienated its Slovak support by continuing to play up its Magyar nationalist credentials after the 1901 parliamentary elections because it continued to be criticized by the Liberal Party for being too tolerant towards

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the minorities.5 In response, the KNP insisted, for example, that it had only promised concessions to the minorities in order to prevent them from supporting ‘unpatriotic’ political parties.6 The party leadership also refused to condemn the government’s occasional prosecution of Slovak nationalists for ‘panslav agitation’.7 When Slovaks who had been elected to parliament on unofficial KNP platforms, such as Kollár, did criticize the government’s treatment of the Slovaks, the rest of the KNP fraction and the party’s Slovak-language publications offered them no support.8 The newly chauvinist tone of the KNP was on full display in a book published by one of the party’s theorists, Zoltán Vásárhelyi in 1906, written with the blessing of one of its leading figures István Rakovszky. Although Vásárhelyi did urge the government to thoroughly investigate the complaints of the national minorities, he also bemoaned the failure of the government’s assimilationist policies. He blamed this failure on both over-optimistic expectations and on the local officials appointed by the liberal government who were, he insisted, too apathetic in confronting Slovak nationalist agitation. Such comments were likely to inflame Slovak concerns that the KNP was just as hostile to the minorities as the governing Liberal Party.9 Some scholars have also argued that the KNP was weakened by its ingrained conservatism which failed to chime with its (Slovak) supporters who yearned for a socially progressive alternative to the Liberal Party. The aristocratic leadership of the party was opposed to any programme of land reform, and rejected calls to improve the conditions of factory workers, such as the introduction of the eight-hour working day or the six day working week. Founded in opposition to the state’s encroachment on the freedom of the church, the KNP naturally found it difficult to demand a further encroachment of the state on the freedom of employers. It even opposed universal suffrage on the grounds that premature electoral reform would empower the social democratic movement which, it feared, would exploit the ill-educated and discontented masses.10 In addition the KNP angered some of its own supporters when, in 1903, the first leader of the party, János Zichy was replaced by his far less confrontational nephew, Aladár. The new leader favoured cooperation with the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party even though the KNP’s rank and file supported the 1867 settlement. Aladár was aware that the party had, by 1901, only managed to gain the support of just over 10 per cent of the electorate, possessed only twenty-five seats in parliament, and appeared to be confined in perpetuity to the opposition benches.11 Under his leadership the party sought to moderate its demands, and transform itself into a potential coalition partner that could advance some of its

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policies by cooperating with its erstwhile rivals. Thus, the new party leadership played up its Magyar nationalism and played down its sectarian origins, claiming that the KNP had been formed to defend ‘Christian’ rather than merely ‘Catholic interests’.12 For Slovak Catholics, who regarded the House of Habsburg as a buffer against Magyar chauvinism, the KNP’s willingness to cooperate with the largely ‘Protestant’ Independence and Forty-Eighter Party was especially disconcerting. Concerns that the KNP was about to conduct an ideological about-turn then appeared to be confirmed when, in 1905, it joined a largely symbolic committee that included the most prominent Magyar critics of the government. That brought the KNP into an informal coalition with notorious chauvinists such as the leading ‘Forty-Eighter’ Ferenc Kossuth and the former prime minister turned Liberal Party critic Dezső Bánffy, whose government had persecuted its critics from Hungary’s minorities with unprecedented enthusiasm.13 In response, a number of Slovaks who had eagerly supported the KNP publicly broke from the party. Július Markovič, who had played a leading role in establishing the party in Trencsén County, and had been willing to stand for election in 1901 on a KNP manifesto, became so angry with the party that he self-published an entire book in both Magyar and Slovak aimed at exposing its failings, as well as the authorities’ continuing maltreatment of Slovaks.14 Another ex-KNP candidate, František Kabina, used the pages of his short-lived newspaper, Hlas ľudu, to denounce his former party as a vehicle for ‘Magyar clericalism’, and claimed to have established the first incarnation of a rival people’s party which he declared would check the KNP’s influence among the Slovaks.15 No other prominent Slovak nationalist appears, however, to have taken his declaration seriously, and the newspaper he established to promote the new party promptly went bankrupt.16 Another Slovak MP, Ján Ružiak, also felt so angry at the KNP, who supported his expulsion from parliament, that he too established his own dwarf party, although this effort also came to nothing.17 The ambitious Slovak journalist and politician Milan Hodža, who was also one of the founders of the SĽS, succinctly expressed this new pessimism when he concluded in 1903 that ‘all of the political parties in Hungary have become nationalists’ including the KNP.18 Hlinka was another disillusioned supporter of the KNP. Although he had retained a seat in the SNS’s leadership committee from 1895, he had, nevertheless, run for election on a KNP manifesto in 1898, and gave speeches at KNP rallies in 1900.19 During the 1901 elections he had, however, briefly considered supporting an independent SNS candidate and offered only last minute and lukewarm

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support to the KNP candidate. He was even suspected of tacitly providing some support for the governing Liberal Party candidate in Ružomberok.20 As Hlinka later explained, he had come to regard the KNP as, among other things, insufficiently antisemitic, and concluded that ‘the leadership of the KNP were the fruit of the people – but only on paper!’21 Hlinka’s break with the KNP also manifested itself in the pages of his and Bielek’s Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud which had initially supported the KNP. Gradually the paper began to challenge some of the party’s orthodoxies, mounting, for example, increasingly frequent attacks on the magyarizing efforts of the Catholic church in Hungary, and openly expressing its support for universal suffrage and the secret ballot.22 The Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud was also enthused by the SNS’s partial willingness to abandon its electoral boycott, in 1901 when several of its leading figures had put themselves forward (albeit unsuccessfully) for election. Eager to see the SNS break out of its passivity, the Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud published the SNS manifesto and formally endorsed its candidates, while Bielek and Hlinka both adopted a more active role in the SNS leadership.23 Growing Slovak Catholic estrangement from the KNP was also underscored in the local elections of 1901, when Slovak Catholics ran against KNP candidates in the counties of Árva, Liptó, Nyitra, Trencsén, Turócz and Zemplén.24 The SNS was, however, in no position to take advantage of growing Slovak disillusionment with the KNP. Although some leading figures in the SNS stood in the 1901 elections, the party was still unwilling to promote a separate slate of candidates or coordinate the growing network of Catholic associations in Slovakia.25 The SNS even refused to arrange additional funding for Bielek and Hlinka’s newspaper, which could have served as a conduit between the SNS leadership and the Catholic populace, and after a series of squabbles the newspaper went bankrupt and ceased publishing in 1903.26 It was also noticeable that most Slovak Catholic priests and intellectuals still kept their distance from what many regarded as a Protestant party. There were even reports of Catholic priests in the highlands campaigning for Liberal Party candidates rather than their opponents, who were affiliated with the SNS.27 The SNS’s continued passivity also encouraged the hlasists to revisit the question of whether a new party was required to reinvigorate the Slovak nationalist movement.28 There was, therefore, an opening for the creation of a new political party which would seek to defend Catholic and Slovak interests, harness the network of Catholic newspapers, journals, sodalities, associations, banks and cooperatives

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to serve as the basis of a mass organization, embrace the new activist spirit, and contest elections to transform hostility towards the Liberal Party into a serious presence in parliament. It was, therefore, a fortuitous moment for František Skyčák, a wealthy businessman, devout Catholic and fervent Slovak, to embark on a career in politics, and ultimately launch a new party, the SĽS.

The new leader Skyčák was born in 1870 in the devoutly Catholic village of Klin (population 804) in Árva County in the far north of the country. His father, also a businessman who owned a successful textile factory, sent him to the well-regarded grammar school at Levoča (Magyar: Lőcse) to prepare him for a university education. Allegedly incapable of concealing his love for Slovak literature, Skyčák clashed with his Magyar or magyarone teachers and, following in the steps of his older brother, opted to complete his studies in Prague.29 In the Czech capital Skyčák joined the nationalist Slovak student club ‘Detvan’ which brought him into contact with other future leaders of the Slovak nationalist movement, including Vavro Šrobár. He then opted to return to Slovakia and gained experience in a local bank in Trstená (Magyar: Trsztena) and the people’s bank in Martin. He then used his family’s wealth to establish a new people’s bank in his home county which gave him significant influence in the local community as well as additional funds to launch a career in politics. Árva County was an attractive location for a Slovak Catholic to mount a bid for parliament; 94.7 per cent of the population were Slovak speakers, and 75 per cent of the population had been raised in the Catholic faith. It was also a county that was almost entirely reliant on agriculture and had been hard hit by the government’s support for industrialization and the gross inequalities of land ownership. Ten per cent of the population possessed no land at all and relied on obtaining licences to cut trees, although as the local newspaper noted, even landholding peasants relied on an unchanging diet of ‘potatoes and cabbage’ supplemented by ‘brandy in the morning and evening with bread’.30 Moreover, Árva County had the highest proportion of enfranchised voters in northern Hungary with 13.2 per cent of the population able to vote of whom a clear majority were ethnic Slovaks.31 A devout Catholic (one of his sons, Ferko, would go on to become a priest and prominent theologian), Skyčák kept his distance from the SNS and instead threw in his lot with the KNP. In 1905 he put himself up for election in his

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local constituency of Bobró (Slovak: Bobrov) on a KNP manifesto. Predictably, however, the party refused to endorse his candidacy and instead threw its backing behind the incumbent MP, Zoltán Zmeskál, who was one of the emblematic leaders of the KNP in northern Hungary. Born into a fiercely Hungarus Slovak Protestant family in 1841, Zmeskál followed in his father’s footsteps and entered the local bureaucracy of Árva County where he rose to the rank of alispán and married into the Pongracz family, one of the prominent noble families of the area. In 1894–5 he had, however, broken from the government over its anticlerical policies, resigned from his post in the administration, converted to the Roman faith, and immersed himself in politics. Zmeskál thus became one of the leading figures in the organization of the KNP in northern Hungary, represented his home constituency in parliament from 1896, and marked himself out as one of the most provocative members of the party’s parliamentary fraction with his passionate attacks on the Liberal Party and its Jewish supporters.32 Nevertheless, although Zmeskál was a fluent Slovak speaker, he made no noticeable attempt to challenge the government’s policy of magyarization. He was even appointed as an officer in the FEMKE, the notorious semi-official organization tasked with helping to magyarize the Slovaks. Thus, Zmeskál personally encapsulated the KNP’s supposed betrayal of its Slovak Catholic voters and Skyčák was well-placed to exploit this dissatisfaction.33 Recognizing Zmeskál’s strengths as a candidate, Skyčák set about carefully laying the foundations for a serious electoral challenge. In 1902, he launched a new people’s bank in Námestovo, the most important town in the constituency of Bobró. It was indicative of Skyčák’s connections with a network of Slovak Catholic interests that he was able to raise the 100,000 crowns for this endeavour by issuing 1,000 shares. These shares were purchased not only by local Slovaks from Árva County, but also by Slovaks in America and, significantly, Slovak Catholics in Ružomberok led by Hlinka, who personally purchased shares and persuaded other Slovak financial institutions to invest in Skyčák’s new bank. Skyčák also used his own funds and this network of Slovak Catholic investors to set up several consumer cooperatives and to modernize a local thermal bath in Bobró.34 Skyčák also benefitted from Árva County’s position as a centre for Slovak Catholic Marian sodalities. The monthly journal Kráľovná sv. ruženca, dedicated to promulgating the cult of the Virgin Mary and the rosary, was published there. This journal kept track of the activities of Slovak rosary groups and other sodalities and was able to provide Skyčák with a set of contacts he could tap for fundraising and voting.35 In addition, he became one of the prominent officers in

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his local Slovak-speaking Catholic club in Námestovo, which had been founded in 1903. Námestovo also possessed a Catholic library, founded in 1874, which provided reading materials in Slovak and Magyar to its members, and was the site of a club for Catholic teachers, founded in 1883. There were also Catholic clubs in the neighbouring towns of Tvrdošín, founded in 1889, Oravské Veselé, founded in 1896, and Zuberec, founded in 1900, as well as a county-wide Catholic club which had been founded in 1895. As well as relying on the support of all of these Catholic associations, from at least the autumn of 1904 onwards Skyčák also began attending the local meetings of the KNP to cultivate support from local party activists.36 Skyčák also helped set up a new local Slovak-language newspaper, Orava.37 In establishing this newspaper he was again able to tap into a remarkably diverse range of contacts who donated funds. Among the 226 persons who donated to the paper during its first year of publication were Hlinka’s associates in Ružomberok, persons close to the SNS in Martin, thirty persons from Prague, and other donors from Budapest, Vienna, Zakopane in Poland, and America.38 Skyčák then ensured his success in the 1905 elections by playing a double game of claiming to be an (unofficial candidate) of both the KNP and the SNS while allowing the Slovak nationalist newspapers to dub his platform ‘Slovak nationalist and populist’ and offer him their support.39 Able to appeal, therefore, to both Slovak Catholic and nationalist interests, and able to devote significant financial resources to his campaign, Skyčák defeated Zmeskál in the 1905 elections, and joined Hodža in parliament who had been elected as the representative of a mixed Slovak and Serb constituency in the south of Hungary (now Serbia).40 Skyčák then pulled off a brilliant tactical pivot. He was aware that after the 1901 elections three of the victorious Slovak nationalist candidates, Ján Ružiak, Ján Valášek and František Veselovský, had been stripped of their mandates after they incurred the wrath of the authorities. Concerned that he would suffer the same fate, Skyčák followed up his own electoral victory by submitting a letter to the KNP’s headquarters in Budapest in which he promised to adhere to the official party platform. He then dispatched another letter to the local főispán in which he promised that he would prevent the spread of Slovak nationalist literature in his constituency.41 Skyčák’s effort to present himself as a reliable supporter of the KNP platform was successful enough that the Kresťan newspaper listed him among the victorious KNP MPs, and the official parliamentary almanac listed Skyčák as the formal candidate of the KNP and his defeated rival, Zmeskál, as an independent candidate.42 Moreover, for the remainder of 1905, Skyčák avoided

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making a single speech in parliament that would allow him to be presented as an unreconstructed Slovak nationalist. He was therefore regarded as a loyal supporter of the KNP.43

The relaunch of the Katolícke noviny Beneath the surface, however, Skyčák had far greater ambitions than to merely remain a silent backbencher. At the end of 1904 he had secretly engineered the purchase of the Katolícke noviny, which served as the in-house journal of the Slovak Catholic clergy, but was perennially inflicted by financial problems and was completely reliant on its increasingly exhausted editor Kollár.44 Following Kollár’s election to parliament, the paper had generally steered clear of controversial political questions. Its passivity, however, angered young Catholic activist priests in the Society of Saint Adalbert who, in 1904, had publicly criticized the Katolícke noviny’s detachment from politics.45 Irritated by these attacks, distracted by his election to parliament, and afflicted by illness, Kollár publicly declared that ‘I can no longer maintain’ the paper.46 Seizing the opportunity, Skyčák engineered the creation of a financial partnership (Slovak: družstvo) which purchased the Katolícke noviny in December 1904 and appointed a new editorial board that proceeded to transform the paper into the intellectual flagship of the SĽS.47 Formally, the board was initially headed by Pavel Blaho, an elderly priest from the village of Gbely who had previously assisted Kollár in publishing the paper. Blaho promptly arranged for the paper to be published in the nearby town of Skalica, which was also the site of the oldest printing press in Nyitra County, had always specialized in publishing Catholic Slovak-language publications and could draw upon the active Catholic associational life in the area that was directed by his energetic nephew and future editor of the paper Dr Pavel Blaho.48 Skyčák then appointed three additional editors to run the paper, each of whom was at the forefront of the new activist movement in Slovak Catholic politics. The first of these editors was Anton Bielek, who brought to the paper the same populist style of writing which he had pioneered while editing the Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud. Bielek also recognized the power of populist slogans, and he pioneered the use of ‘for our Slovak language’ (Slovak: za tu našu slovenčinu), which along with ‘for God and nation’ (Slovak: za Bohu a národ) became the newspaper’s, and later the party’s, most popular slogans.49 Moreover Bielek had cultivated excellent links with a network of American Slovak donors

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and he could be relied on to obtain both readers and financial support overseas to ensure the newspaper’s viability.50 The other two editors, Ferdinand Juriga and František Jehlička, were young Catholic priests who would both go on to have remarkable careers as leading figures in the Slovak nationalist movement as well as members of both the Hungarian and the Czechoslovak parliaments. Both men had been born in small villages in western Slovakia, and both had marked themselves out in the seminary as intelligent and charismatic men who were rewarded by being sent to the Pazmaneum, the elite theological college in Vienna, to prepare for the clergy.51 Juriga, thirty-one years old in 1905, came from a reasonably prosperous farming family and had been ordained into the priesthood in 1898. He was then posted to a number of small parishes before ending up from 1904 as parish priest in the western Slovak town of Vajnory (Magyar: Pozsonyszőllős). He had been born in the same village Gbely, where his fellow editor Pavel Blaho was parish priest. Juriga had also attended grammar school in the newspaper’s new home of Skalica, but what ensured his elevation to the editorial board was his determination to use his rhetorical skills to defend both his Catholic faith and his Slovak culture.52 Already as a school boy Juriga had marked himself out as a Slovak patriot and following his consecration in 1898 he cultivated a reputation as a passionate devotee of Slovak culture and an intensely charismatic orator who laced his nationalist rhetoric with a steady stream of biblical metaphors. Even his tendency to slip into demagoguery, one of his many contemporary admirers insisted, ‘served the noblest aim. He wanted to win the Slovak masses over for the Slovak idea and rouse them from their lethargic Hungarus dreams’ and he was described by, among others, both Jozef Tiso and Alexander Mach as one of the politicians who inspired them both to join the Slovak nationalist movement.53 Juriga’s popularity was enhanced by his zest for life and passion for Slovak folk culture. He happily exchanged his clerical vestments for traditional Slovak folk dress and was, according to censorious British diplomatic reports, ‘very fond of drink’.54 Juriga had also embraced the activist creed and had thrown himself into the work of organizing and mobilizing his parishioners. Prior to becoming a newspaper editor he had established a local association for industrial workers and a reading circle to disseminate both clerical and nationalist literature, and he enthusiastically seized the opportunity as newspaper editor to spread his Slovak nationalist message and his desire to renew the Catholic faith to a new and wider audience.

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Jehlička was even younger, only twenty-six years old in 1905, yet he too had already racked up a significant raft of achievements and marked himself out as both a dedicated Slovak nationalist and one of the sharpest minds of his generation. An outstanding school student, he too had been sent to school in Skalica and had studied at the elite Pazmaneum in Vienna to complete his preparation for the priesthood. At the end of his studies he was awarded a doctorate in theology from the University of Vienna and a diamond ring from Franz Joseph as a prize for his doctoral dissertation.55 At the Pazmaneum, Jehlička had also been censored for his Slovak nationalism and learned to keep a low and studious profile, but following his ordination as parish priest in Modra in 1902 he was irrepressible. He taught in local schools, organized catechism classes, set up a local Slovak-language Catholic club, and infuriated the local mayor, who lobbied to have him transferred to a parish in Bratislava in 1904. There he once again devoted himself to organizing his parishioners, and established a local Catholic workers’ organization (Magyar: munkásegylet) which attracted sizeable numbers of small businessmen and workers.56 In addition, Jehlička had already begun to lay out the intellectual foundations of his aggressively Catholic, national and populist ideology with a series of articles that were published in the Katolícke noviny, Osvald’s Litárne listy and, even the SNS’s flagship newspaper, the Národnie noviny. Although Jehlička had initially embraced the ideals of the hlasists, he broke from the group and publicly denounced their irreligiosity and progressive tendencies in a number of precocious pamphlets and articles. By 1905 he had committed himself to a strident defence of both Catholic dogma and Slovak culture that rapidly marked himself out as one of the most compelling figures in the Slovak clergy.57 The new owners and editors of the Katolícke noviny also bolstered their links with other leading Slovak Catholic priests, including Hlinka who from 1905 onwards became a frequent contributor to the Katolícke noviny. In the small world inhabited by Slovak Catholic activists personal relations mattered, fostering political cooperation but also fomenting innumerable feuds. Both Hlinka and Skyčák, for example, had attended the same grammar schools in Ružomberok and Levoča, and Hlinka also enjoyed a close relationship with Bielek as they had jointly edited the Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud.58 Under the direction of Skyčák, Blaho, Bielek, Juriga and Jehlička, keenly supported by Hlinka and his own network of contacts, the Katolícke noviny was transformed in 1905 into the standard bearer of a new, populist Slovak

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Catholic nationalism that within the year had broken with the KNP and established the SĽS.59 The new editorial board immediately made clear its determination to play an important political role. It increased the publication of the paper from fortnightly to once a week, added the subtitle ‘political’ (Slovak: politické) to the masthead of the newspaper and expressed its confidence at the start of the year that ‘in a short time the Katolícke noviny will be the widest distributed among the uncorrupted, independent and, therefore, good Slovak papers’.60 While the paper never became the most popular Slovak-language newspaper, it managed to remain viable, attracted thousands of subscribers and played a key role in making the SĽS the most successful Slovak party in Hungary before 1918. Its success was based on the range of different readers who were targeted by the paper. It always remained true to its origins as a newsletter for the Slovak Catholic clergy as it provided news of clerical appointments, reports from Rome including discussion of the various papal encyclicals, frequent articles on theological matters and intense religious meditations on each of the feast days of the liturgical calendar. The paper, however, also positioned itself as a local journal for the town of Skalica and the region of Záhorie in the far west of today’s Slovakia, where it was published. Its editors all lived and worked in this region and they maintained close links with the Slovaks from this area. Thus the paper constantly reported on local events, such as local weddings. In addition, the Katolícke noviny also made a sustained effort to reach out to Slovaks across northern Hungary and even in America, publishing letters every week from different regions of Slovakia as well as the United States, serving as a bulletin board for Slovaks in different parts of Hungary and abroad and paid particular attention to promoting the growth of Catholic associations across the highlands. Finally, the paper was also unflinching in its criticism of both the governing Liberal Party’s policies and all those who it accused of supporting the spread of liberalism among the Slovaks which included, according to one contemporary, not only government officials, but also teachers, priests, bishops, ‘and everyone who stood in the service of the idea of the Magyar state (Slovak: madarskej štátnej idey)’. At times the critical tone of the paper descended into outright demagoguery, but it was always written in a straightforward, populist style that had been pioneered by Bielek during his earlier stint as the editor of the Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud.61 The populist politics of the Katolícke noviny neatly dovetailed with the activities of Hodža and his Slovenský týždenník, which was scathing about the

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passivity of the SNS and repeatedly called for a new effort to engage the Slovak population.62 Although Hodža was a Protestant, the editors of the Katolícke noviny admired his strident Slovak nationalism, his denunciations of the passivity of the SNS, and his deeply felt concerns for rural Slovaks. Skyčák, in particular, was so impressed by Hodža’s convictions and journalistic ability, that he secretly donated funds to help support the Slovenský týždenník.63

The parliamentary crisis of 1905 The new editorship of the Katolícke noviny began work just as Hungarian parliamentary politics reached a dramatic turning point. In the elections held in January 1905, when Skyčák finally won a seat in parliament, the Liberal Party which had governed Hungary since 1875 lost its parliamentary majority. Confronted by a rebellious parliament, unwilling to fund the joint AustroHungarian army without further concessions from Vienna, István Tisza had gambled on fresh parliamentary elections and lost. For the first and only time between 1867 and 1918, the sitting government lost its parliamentary majority. The Liberal Party was reduced to 159 seats while the Independence and FortyEighter Party became the largest party occupying 165 of the 413 seats. As no party held, however, a majority, Géza Fejérváry, an old army officer who had kept his distance from party politics in favour of absolute loyalty to his king and emperor Franz Joseph, was appointed prime minister with responsibility to get the necessary funds for the modernization of the army passed.64 Parliament was, however, in no mood to vote for higher taxes to serve what it saw as the interests of ‘Vienna’ and even proceeded to turn Hungary’s unwritten constitution on its head by disputing Franz Joseph’s right to appoint a prime minister of his choosing. In response, Fejérváry authorized his interior minister to prepare an electoral reform bill that would potentially widen the franchise and would have given the vote to a large number of Slovak Catholics. As the Fejérváry government was, however, propped up by what remained of the Liberal Party, Slovak critics were incapable of generating much enthusiasm for, or confidence in, its vague proposals to expand the franchise.65 The new editorial board of the Katolícke noviny was also increasingly critical of the KNP’s unwillingness to put forward its own proposals for electoral reform. They were aware that, despite the Liberal Party’s electoral defeat in the 1905 elections, it had still won sixty-five of the eight-four seats in Slovakia, and they saw this as convincing proof that the electoral system’s flaws were most acute in

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the Slovak highlands.66 They were also inspired by the example of Hodža, whose paper embraced the campaign for electoral reform on the grounds that it would enfranchise more rural voters, and thus more Slovaks. Through the columns of his Slovenský týždenník and at a series of public meetings throughout the summer and autumn of 1905 Hodža weaved together calls for an expansion of the franchise along with furious denunciations of both the magyarizing policies of the authorities and the spinelessness of the KNP. Similar arguments also began to appear in the Katolícke noviny.67 The paper’s editors were also angered by the KNP’s response to revelations that the Liberal Party had worked with senior ecclesiastical figures to oversee the transfer of Slovak priests to America. This scandal had been leaked by the editor of the KNP’s Slovak-language Kresťan newspaper, Šándorfi, who was then put on trial by the government for revealing state secrets. Although the case against him collapsed, he was sacked from his presidency of the Slovak Catholic club in Budapest and transferred to a small Slovak parish.68 Šándorfi was regarded by other Slovak priests as an outstanding defender of the Catholic cause. He served as editor of several Slovak-language Catholic publications and was passionate in his admiration of Slovak peasant life with a particular interest in collecting folk cures. His presence on the editorial board of Kresťan had made him a visible guarantor of the KNP’s sympathies to the Slovaks and his maltreatment by both the authorities and other Hungarian Catholics deepened the estrangement between Slovak nationalists and the KNP.69 Already in February 1905, just one month after the elections, The Katolícke noviny noted that the election results, and by extension the KNP’s presence in parliament had brought ‘nothing’ for the Slovaks.70 The paper then engaged in increasingly sharp polemics with the KNP’s Kresťan newspaper over its failure to support the use of Slovak in religious services, picked a fight with the deputy president of the KNP István Rakovszky over his chauvinistic Magyar nationalist rhetoric and defended Hodža’s unstinting criticism of the government’s policy of magyarization in his newspaper Slovenský týždenník.71 Although Skyčák initially concealed his personal admiration for Hodža, the editors of the Katolícke noviny felt no such compunction, and several of them shared a platform with him at nationalist meetings.72 Even some Social Democrats who had embraced the cause of electoral reform spoke at the huge public demonstrations in support of universal suffrage that now took place across the Slovak highlands. For example, at a meeting in Bratislava on 27 August in front of 3,000–4,000 spectators, Juriga gave an exceptionally fiery speech in which he denounced not only the non-application of Deák’s 1868

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Nationalities Law, but also the chauvinism of the KNP. The aggressive tone of the meeting was summed up by Hodža’s warning that ‘there won’t be peace’ until universal suffrage was introduced and the Slovaks were finally granted the right to use their language without restrictions.73 Then, on 1 October, at another huge meeting in Ružomberok which was addressed by among others Hodža, Juriga and Hlinka, calls for universal suffrage and Slovak language rights culminated in a denunciation of all the existing parliamentary parties including the KNP.74

The break between Skyčák and the KNP The increasingly strident tone of the Katolícke noviny and its editorial board did not go unnoticed. As early as the spring of 1905, officials in the Ministry of the Interior had described the paper as a ‘newspaper of Slovak nationalist agitators’. Then, in September, the local assembly in Pozsony County called on the prince primate of Hungary to forbid all priests from contributing to any Slovak nationalist newspaper. The local főispán also informed the Ministry of the Interior in Budapest that the paper’s editors were intent on producing a ‘unified Great Slav empire’, and that as a result of their activities the Slovak nationalist movement in his county had grown ‘noticeably stronger’.75 The KNP’s loyal newspapers, attuned to developments among Hungary’s Catholics, also expressed their alarm about the Katolícke noviny’s new direction. For example, the Magyar-language Esztergom newspaper – which served as a mouthpiece of the KNP leadership while keeping a close eye on developments in the Slovak highlands – declared on 17 September that the activities of a few Slovak priests nevertheless demonstrated that ‘panslavism in our northern counties is not a phantom … it is a terrifying reality’.76 Skyčák remained, however, reluctant to formally break from the KNP. He had, throughout the summer of 1905, refused to share a speaker’s platform with Hodža and the Katolícke noviny’s editors. When it was revealed that he was secretly funding Hodža’s paper, he even promised that he would make no further payments to the Slovenský týždenník, and would ask for his earlier contributions to be returned. He also continued to describe himself as a ‘believer in the parliamentary KNP’, and continued to attend public meetings of the party up until at least 9 October.77 There were, however, hints that Skyčák had also grown estranged from the KNP. For example, at a meeting he addressed in his constituency of Bobró on

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13 August, Skyčák did encourage those assembled to send a telegram of greeting to the KNP leader, Aladár Zichy. He also, however, gave a passionate speech that not only denounced the deleterious impact of the government’s liberal policies, but also included a series of demands that sharply differed from the KNP’s manifesto. For example, as well as repeating the usual boilerplate call for the repeal of the government’s anticlerical legislation that had been passed in 1894–5, he also called for a ‘progressive tax system’, a dramatic reduction in compulsory military service, universal manhood suffrage and the use of Slovak in the ‘schools of the people’. The impression that the entire speech marked the unveiling of a new manifesto was reinforced by the wide coverage it received in Slovak-language publications and it was even rapidly rushed into print.78 It appears, however, that the final straw for Skyčák was a provocative article by the Magyar prelate Sándor Giesswein, published in Kresťan on 21 October 1905. Giesswein was one of the leading ideologues of the KNP who repeatedly displayed a freshness of thought in his attempts to resolve the problems of contemporary society in a manner consistent with Catholic doctrine. His frustration at the KNP’s unwillingness to support universal suffrage and serious welfare provision for the poor even led him to break with the party in 1910 in protest at its ‘pseudo-liberalism’.79 Giesswein’s innovative approach to Catholic politics did not, however, extend to a rejection of magyarization. Instead, in his article for Kresťan he upheld the importance of teaching through the medium of Magyar in Slovak schools, as long as it was employed ‘in the good sense’ and actually called for the ‘widening’ of its use.80 Skyčák’s response was rapid and it was categorical. On 29 October, at another public meeting in his constituency, Skyčák declared that all of the current parties in the parliament were anti-Slovak including the KNP.81 The KNP was unprepared to tolerate such criticism and its anger was enhanced by fresh revelations that Skyčák was funding both the Katolícke noviny and the bitterly anti-KNP Slovenský týždenník.82 There was also concern that if the party did not crack down on its Slovak nationalist members it would open itself up to renewed criticism by the Liberal Party. The KNP leadership, therefore, drew up a statement for Skyčák to sign which declared that he would ‘fight together against [Slovak] nationalists’ and sever all ties with the Slovenský týždenník and the Katolícke noviny.83 In response, Skyčák both refused to sign the statement and, instead of waiting to be formally expelled, published an open letter, on 5 December, which announced his resignation on the front page of the Katolícke noviny. In this letter Skyčák declared that he had finally broken from the KNP in order ‘to create a new political group (Slovak: skupína) which will

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be fully grounded in the original program of the KNP and which will not cause Slovaks to feel ashamed’.84 Nine days later, on Thursday, 14 December 1905, Skyčák presided over the founding of the first incarnation of the SĽS in Žilina, an event which the following day the Katolícke noviny trumpeted on its front page. We have, it declared, ‘founded, thanks be to God, a new party … and under its unfurled banner we summon all Slovak voters, loyal to their God, their church, and their nation’.85

The founding impulses of the SĽS Clearly, the establishment of the SĽS was a hurried affair. The founding meeting was not advertised in the press, invitations were dispatched (and no doubt received) in a haphazard manner, although the meeting was reported by the serious Budapest papers.86 Skyčák was, however, in attendance, as was Hodža, three editors of the Katolícke noviny (Blaho, Bielek and Jehlička), Šándorfi, the former editor of the Kresťan, several persons who were connected to various people’s banks (including Július Markovič, Ľudovít Šimko, Cyril Horváth and Augustin Rath), and Ján Kubina who had unsuccessfully stood for parliament in 1901.87 As well as agreeing to establish the new party, these men also began the process of drawing up its manifesto, and dispatched a twenty-seven strong delegation to Budapest (of which sixteen were Catholic priests, including Hlinka), to bring 5,000 crowns from Skyčák to secure the future of the Slovenský týždenník, and discuss cooperation with Rumanians and Serb nationalists, as well as the SNS.88 In support of their election prospects the SĽS then published a twelve point election manifesto which was, like the party itself, inspired by a combination of pragmatism and idealism, predictable obsessions, and ambiguity. First and foremost it demanded universal suffrage and the introduction of the secret ballot, demands that the KNP had never made. At the same time, it demanded the immediate application of the 1868 Nationalities Law, an old obsession of the SNS, and the abolition of all the government’s anticlerical legislation, which had always been at the core of each KNP manifesto. However, additional demands for changes to the appointment of local officials, tax reform, curbs on the provision of tavern licences, higher salaries for teachers, and fair wages for workers were all so vague that the bulk of the party’s actual economic and social policies were indecipherable.89 This lack of clarity was primarily due to the SĽS’s inability at this point to decide whether it wanted to be a Slovak variation of the KNP, a Catholic

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variation of the SNS, or an entirely new type of party. As Skyčák had indicated in his proclamation to the Katolícke noviny readership on 5 December, his initial view was that the SĽS would be grounded in the ‘original program’ of the KNP including its old demand for the ethnic minorities to be treated properly (point 13). Essentially, therefore, Skyčák initially envisaged the creation of a distinctly Slovak Catholic party that would endeavour to realize the earlier promise of the KNP.90 Indeed, Skyčák and his supporters desperately attempted to present their break with the KNP as a regrettable consequence of its unreasonableness. They initially insisted that they had made only the most basic demands, namely that the KNP should adhere to its earlier manifesto promises about Slovak rights, such as the need for the catechism to be taught to children in their native (Slovak) language.91 At the same time Skyčák and his supporters also aspired to mobilize the entire Slovak-speaking Catholic populace. To achieve that goal required establishing not merely a ‘new political group’, but a mass party which could gather support from across the Slovak nationalist spectrum. Hence, therefore, Skyčák’s decision to hold the founding meeting of the party in a neutral, non-religious venue (a prominent restaurant in Žilina owned by a patriotic Slovak family), and his extension of invitations to Hodža (and other Protestants such as Markovič and Šimko), as well as newspaper editors and directors of various people’s banks. The fact that a number of hlasists (including Dr Pavel Blaho, Ivan Derer, and Vavro Šrobár) also offered the new party their support indicated that the initial groundswell of support for the SĽS extended beyond conservative Slovak Catholics.92 In reality, the supporters of the new SĽS were bound together solely by what they opposed – namely the liberalism of the government and the timidity of the KNP. From the moment the party was founded, a clear declaration of its objectives was avoided. Ambiguity was the bond that held the party’s disparate support together. Moreover, with new parliamentary elections expected in the new year, the uncertainties about the party’s ideology could be overlooked in favour of an immediate effort to maximize the Slovaks’ representation in parliament.

The 1906 parliamentary elections The parliamentary elections that took place in April 1906 produced an electoral earthquake as the opposition seized power with the Independence and FortyEighter Party winning 253 of the 413 seats in parliament. The Liberal Party

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dissolved itself just before the elections, and its surviving MPs now grouped together in the National Constitution Party (Magyar: Országos Alkotmány Párt), which obtained seventy-one seats in parliament. As a result, almost half of the former Liberal Party MPs in the Slovak highlands lost their seats, and a further four simply switched their allegiance to the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party to ensure re-election.93 Following from these wider political changes, the local administration was no longer intent on ensuring the victory of Liberal Party candidates, although it still used its influence to help prevent the election of Slovak nationalist candidates. Thus, although the 1906 elections were probably the fairest elections ever to be held in northern Hungary before 1918, the SĽS claimed that at least two of its candidates were defeated because of blatant electoral corruption. Nevertheless, the SĽS was still able to field thirteen candidates, of whom six were elected to parliament, while the SNS fielded a further five candidates, one of whom, Matej Metod Bella, was victorious. Among the SĽS’s victorious candidates were Skyčák, who was re-elected in his district of Bobró, two of the editors of the Katolícke noviny, Juriga and Jehlička, who were both elected in Pozsony County, as well as the paper’s former and future editors, Kollár and Dr Blaho, who were also elected to represent constituencies in the far west of the Slovak highlands. Joining them in parliament was Hodža, who was once again elected by a Slovak-populated constituency in Southern Hungary and who ran on an SĽS platform, and Bella, who was elected on a SNS manifesto to represent the town of Liptovský Mikuláš, formerly Liptovský Svätý Mikuláš (Magyar: Liptó Szent Miklós) in the far north of today’s Slovakia. In total the SĽS had won less than 2 per cent of all the seats, but it had still become the sixth largest party in the Hungarian parliament. It had, therefore, achieved greater parliamentary representation in the first six months of its existence than the SNS had managed in the previous thirty-five years.94 One explanation for the SĽS’s success was that its candidates applied the same tactics as the KNP and relied on the Catholic clergy and Catholic civic society to propel them to victory. For example, they held meetings in the squares in front of churches on Sundays, immediately after Mass had finished, so as to be sure of addressing the devout Catholics who were the core of the party’s voting base. Jehlička, for example, devoted so much time campaigning in his constituency on Sundays that he had to rely on his ordained brother to temporarily assume his clerical responsibilities for the duration of the election. At the same time, across the region priests held electoral processions, escorted

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the voters to the polls, and, in one government official’s words, strove to ‘keep alive the fanaticism of the people’.95 Hlinka’s campaign in Ružomberok, where he served as Vavro Šrobár’s campaign officer, provides a detailed example of the way the party maximized its appeal to Catholic voters. Hlinka turned his parish office into Šrobár’s ‘election offices’, focused his campaigning on Sundays, the one day that rural Catholics had time to attend weekly Mass, and the campaign meetings that were held immediately afterwards. He also enjoined his parishioners (from the pulpit, and after Mass had finished) to vote for the Slovak candidate, and added his own populist additions to the SĽS’s manifesto, when he declared that people should vote for Šrobár because ‘[Slovak] children should be taught the Slovak language in schools’.96 Skalica, the town where the Katolícke noviny was based and which contained a network of Catholic associations and institutions, including a phenomenally active Catholic club, served as the electoral nerve centre for the SĽS candidates. It was in Skalica that information on the party’s candidates was collated and published in the Katolícke noviny. The same printing press that produced the SĽS’s flagship newspaper also printed thousands of pamphlets that were published and distributed to SĽS candidates as far away as Ružomberok.97 Juriga alone distributed 4,000 pamphlets as part of his election campaign. These pamphlets not only urged voters to support his candidacy, but also to read the ‘spiritual weapons’ of the Slovak nationalist press, and to ‘pray to the Virgin … that we may obtain the laws and freedoms worthy of Slovak blood’.98 The SĽS candidates also made effective use of lists of all registered voters in the constituencies they were contesting. Due to the small number of voters, Slovak candidates could personally engage each elector.99 It was this personal level of contact that one SĽS candidate, Juriga, regarded as decisive in his victory. He lauded his campaign officer, Ivan Markovič, who, he would later recall, ‘knew all of the patriotic Slovaks, the people of the region … writing them letters, publishing articles, going through the villages, house to house’.100 There is only the occasional piece of evidence that the network of Slovak Catholic associations also assisted the SĽS’s candidates. For example, in Ružomberok, among the eleven persons who formally nominated Šrobár as their candidate, eight were members of the same local citizens’ club (Slovak: Občianský beseda). The distribution of the Katolícke noviny, which now described itself as the ‘official newspaper’ of the SĽS, and devoted every edition of the paper to popularizing the party and its candidates, was also facilitated

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by the Slovak Catholic clubs, cooperatives and other associations that made it available to Slovak voters.101 Unsurprisingly, the SĽS’s electoral successes aroused considerable joy in Slovakia, and the Czech lands, with its winning candidates being swamped with congratulatory messages. The activist branch of the Slovak national movement appeared to have been vindicated, with one writer insisting to Dr Blaho, on hearing the news of his election to parliament, that ‘chauvinism has no future’ while another writer informed the victorious candidate that with your election the passivity of ‘the politics of the nationalists in Martin [eg. the SNS] has lost its appeal’.102 There were, however, clear indications that the party faced enormous challenges. First, rather than supplanting the KNP in Slovakia, the position of the KNP actually strengthened across the country, especially in the Slovak highlands. Overall, the KNP gained nine seats, lost two, and ended up winning three times more seats than the SĽS in the Slovak highlands, while its parliamentary fraction increased to thirty-three members. Although in Pozsony County, the SĽS had won four of the eight seats, and defeated two of the sitting KNP MPs, in neighbouring Nyitra County the situation was entirely different. There, the SĽS had failed to win a single seat, and the KNP had retained its four sitting MPs and picked up two further seats previously held by the Liberal Party. Again, in Trencsén County, where there was a significant Slovak electorate, the SĽS failed to win a single one of the eight seats. In contrast, the KNP achieved its first victories in the county picking up five seats.103 In Árva County, the SĽS had maintained its grip on one of the two constituencies (Bobró), which had been held by Skyčák since 1905, but it failed to build on this success, and the second seat in the county was poached from the Liberal Party by the KNP. Even worse, in Liptó County which elected three MPs to parliament, and where the Slovak Nationalist party was able to win one seat, the chief prize of Ružomberok, which was the home to prominent SĽS supporters such as the party’s future leader Hlinka, was won by the KNP. Publicly, the SĽS blamed its rival’s success on duplicity, claiming that KNP candidates had presented themselves as nationalist Slovaks. In reality, however, the SĽS had simply failed to supplant the KNP as the first choice of party for Slovak Catholics because the KNP’s reputation as a devoutly Catholic party had, in most constituencies, trumped the SĽS’s Slovak nationalist rhetoric.104 Moreover, a close examination of the electoral results in specific districts demonstrates that the SĽS candidates failed to make inroads among key sections of the electorate including not only local officials, but also tradesmen, members of the professions, and the clergy.

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For example, in the constituency of Skalica, where Dr Blaho was elected, surviving records indicate that he won over 70 per cent of the voters whose occupation was listed as farmer, but that the vast majority of middle-class voters supported his opponent. Thus, in the village of Gajary (Magyar: Gajár), of the twenty-eight voters who were listed as tradesmen, businessmen, members of the professional classes and various officials, only two, a blacksmith and a tailor supported Dr Blaho’s candidacy. Likewise, in the village of Veľké Leváre (Magyar: Nagylévárd), of the thirty-seven members who belonged to this middle strata of voters, only the carpenter, the pitch burner, and one shopkeeper voted for Dr Blaho. Even the local Slovak-speaking clergymen in both villages opposed his candidacy.105 Skalica was, however, a small town, with a small middle class, where the majority of the electorate were small farmers whose support enabled Dr Blaho to win election to parliament in 1906 and again in 1910. Likewise, Juriga benefitted from the fact that an estimated 2,200 of the 2,600 voters in his constituency were ethnic Slovaks and most of them were, as in Skalica, also farmers.106 Other SĽS candidates who ran in constituencies with large towns and a large middle class faced, however, insurmountable obstacles. As Roman Holec has shown, in Ružomberok, a stronghold of Slovak Catholicism, although the majority of eligible Slovak peasants and factory workers voted for Vavro Šrobár, the SĽS candidate, the victorious KNP candidate was able to put together a coalition of landlords, gendarmes, soldiers, teachers, publicans, officials and businessmen to win the seat.107 Equally damaging was the unwillingness of the vast majority of the Catholic clergy to support the new party. Even Slovak-speaking clergymen tended to either abstain from politics or continue to actively support other rival parties, notably the KNP. At first glance this is surprising. The SĽS had among its leading figures young, dynamic priests and it had the support of the leading Slovak-language clerical journal, the Katolícke noviny. Nevertheless, as the example of Skalica had demonstrated, not only the Magyar element in the Catholic clergy, but also Slovak-speaking clergymen remained estranged from the SĽS. The influence of the fiercely patriotic schools and seminaries played some role, for it instilled in some of them a patriotic support for the Hungarian state, and by extension for patriotic Hungarian parties such as the KNP. Some priests may also have been motivated by a desire to avoid persecution by the Catholic hierarchy in Hungary which used every means at their disposal to penalize those priests who were regarded as ‘panslavs’. The uncertain prospects of the new party also, no doubt, encouraged some priests to keep their distance in order to avoid punishment

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by their local bishop.108 There was also a suspicion that the SĽS was infected by Slovak Lutheranism. Such doubts were exacerbated by the failure of the SĽS to make a clean break with the SNS, and by the inclusion of Protestants such as Hodža among the party’s candidates. In addition, the SĽS was also blocked by strong candidates. The one KNP MP to retain his seat in Pozsony County, Ferenc Csizmadia, was an energetic thirtyfive-year-old who had trained to be a priest and taught at the local Catholic gymnasium in Trnava where he developed excellent relations with, and could rely on the support of, the local Catholic clergy. In Nyitra County, the KNP included among its victorious candidates the fluent Slovak-speaking Catholic priest and future prince primate of Hungary János Csernoch, a seasoned politician who was a director of a local bank and a member of numerous Catholic associations Kálmán Bresztyansky, as well as two prominent members of the local elite, Count László Hunyady and the experienced diplomat Béla Rakovszky.109 A final reason for the SĽS’s failure to win more seats in the 1906 elections was that it remained centred on the western and north-western regions of today’s Slovakia and failed to penetrate further eastwards or develop a serious presence in the largest Slovak cities such as Bratislava and Košice.110 The SĽS’s regional presence was exacerbated by the fact that its flagship paper continued to be published in the far west of Slovakia, that it had no prominent figures from the eastern regions of the Slovak highlands in the party leadership, and that it failed to offer any recognition of the distinct qualities of eastern Slovak culture including the regional dialect and the popularity of the Greek Catholic (Uniate) faith in this region.111 Reviewing the SĽS’s electoral victories, and defeats, Hodža captured the blend of optimism and pessimism that would continue to fuel the party over the next decades. His and his fellow Slovaks’ victories had, he insisted, ‘shown even officialdom that the great mass of the Slovak people had awoken from their sleep’, but he still cautioned his readers ‘do not rejoice, because there is no reason for joy. We cannot even be content for we have achieved a success that is only partial.’112 The party’s painful experience of parliamentary politics over the next four years showed exactly how partial the success of its electoral breakthrough in 1906 had been.

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Purging the Party

In assessing the SĽS’s performance in parliament after 1906, it is immediately worth noting that, in spite of its electoral breakthrough, it still occupied less than 2 per cent of the 413 seats in parliament. Moreover, none of the other parties in the new three-party government coalition had offered any concessions to the minorities in their election manifestos. The dominant party in the coalition, the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party, still regarded itself as the guardian of the Magyar national interest and had busied itself in the run-up to the elections whipping up chauvinist sentiment. Although the old Liberal Party had dissolved itself in the wake of its defeat the previous year, the new coalition government remained wedded to all the dogmas of its liberal predecessors. Although it was dominated by the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party, it also included in its ranks not only the representatives of the KNP, but also a group of ex-Liberal Party MPs gathered together in the National Constitution Party led by Andrássy and Apponyi. Most of the leading figures in the coalition were also former members of the Liberal Party, including the new prime minister, Sándor Wekerle. In an earlier stint at the head of the Liberal Party, he had even shepherded through parliament in 1894 the package of anticlerical legislation that had first outraged Slovak Catholic public opinion. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the new coalition government did not repeal the earlier reforms of marriage, abandon the policy of magyarization, jettison the old laissez-faire policies, crack down on emigration, take substantive steps to bolster agriculture’s share of the economy, or impose discriminatory policies on the Jews. As Andrew Janos has noted, the new coalition ‘followed the economic policies of its predecessors to the letter, and even used the same technical personnel to execute these policies’.1 Attempts by the SĽS to resist this latest incarnation of Hungarian liberalism proved utterly ineffective. Attempts to form alliances with other parties all ended in failure and no meaningful concessions were obtained from the government. In the 1910 elections, it campaigned in only eight constituencies (as opposed to

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thirteen constituencies in 1906). Its parliamentary fraction was then reduced from six to three members and finally to a solitary MP following further resignations.2 Many of the party’s leaders were also imprisoned or forced into exile, while those who remained faced ferocious criticisms from across the political spectrum. The failed search for allies and influence can, however, be read another way. These were the years when the party purified its ideology and hardened its rhetoric. Its surviving leaders were toughened by their struggles, were able to impose their authority on what remained of the party. By 1913 the SĽS had relaunched itself as a genuinely independent party that was aggressively sectarian, resolutely nationalist and increasingly embittered by what it regarded as the continuing liberal onslaught.

Relations with the SNS Following the 1906 elections, the obvious place for the SĽS to look for an alliance was with its fellow Slovak nationalists in the SNS. The basis for future cooperation had already been laid prior to the 1906 elections. A five-member ‘agitation committee’ was established to ensure that the two parties did not undermine each other’s chances by standing for election in the same constituencies. Following the elections the leading figures in the SĽS, including Skyčák, Hodža and Juriga, attended a general meeting of the SNS leadership to formally explain why their new party was necessary. Both Skyčák and Hodža had already given a private ‘guarantee’ that the new SĽS ‘was beholden to only pure national principles’, while Július Markovič explained that the so-called SĽS ‘was founded only due to tactical considerations and serves precisely the same aims as the SNS’. In response the SNS invited all the SĽS’s MPs, as well as Hlinka and Bielek, to join the SNS’s 115 member central committee.3 Other founding members of the SĽS also insisted that any divisions with the SNS were merely superficial. Šrobár, for example, publicly insisted that ‘the platform of the SĽS is the same as the platform of the SNS. The difference is only in words not in substance.’ Ivan Markovič also argued that the use of the name ‘SĽS’ was simply adopted by SNS candidates when they sought to appeal to voters who had previously supported the KNP. Several historians who have examined the party’s activities before the First World War have also concluded that the SĽS constituted, at most, a ‘Catholic wing’ of the SNS.4 It is, however, worth noting that not everyone fully endorsed the merger of the two parties. Hlinka, for example, continued to insist to his parishioners that

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the SĽS was a new and entirely independent party.5 Moreover, assessing the precise relationship between the SĽS and the SNS is complicated by the fact that in this era smaller parties could consist of a few prominent personalities and a supportive newspaper. It is more useful to view the relationship between the SĽS and the SNS as a (temporary) alliance. As Kocourek has argued, tactical as well as ideological reasons persuaded the SĽS leadership ‘to utilize existing structures (of the SNS) in building up their own party political base’.6 The alliance was certainly strengthened by the temporary disappearance of the SĽS’s leading clergymen, whose sectarian inclinations were always likely to antagonize the SNS leadership. Both Hlinka and Juriga faced lengthy legal proceedings for ‘agitation against the state’ in the 1906 elections. They were then sent to prison in 1908 for eighteen months and one year respectively. Their fellow priest Jehlička only avoided this fate by resigning his seat in parliament. He played no further public role in the Slovak national movement until 1918. Meanwhile Bielek, who had also helped instil the populist Catholic spirit into the Katolícke noviny, fled to America to avoid imprisonment. In their place, Skyčák invited one of the party’s few MPs to have avoided prosecution, Dr Pavel Blaho to help edit the paper.7 Dr Blaho was, at first glance, an excellent choice. He came from a devout Catholic family and his uncle, Pavel Blaho, had formally served as the paper’s editor. Dr Blaho was also a prominent activist in the villages around his home town of Skalica where he had established numerous cooperatives. He had also helped establish the sizeable Catholic club in Skalica in 1897 that had provided a launch pad for his own election to parliament in 1906.8 Crucially, however, Dr Blaho had also been a founding editor of the progressive journal Hlas. Although he resigned from its editorship in 1902, in protest at its increasingly anticlerical outlook, he remained on excellent terms with his fellow hlasists. He promptly invited one of their more radical members, Anton Štefánek, to join him in editing the Katolícke noviny. Under these two men’s guidance the sectarian impulses within the SĽS were temporarily curbed, the alliance with the SNS was strengthened and a willingness to cooperate with the Social Democrats became more evident. The paper now directed its hostility at the government, the nobility, and magyarizing Catholic clergymen.9 That hostility was fuelled by the local church hierarchy’s activities during and after the 1906 elections. Even before voting had taken place, several bishops in northern Hungary had issued their own encyclicals calling on Catholics not to support Slovak nationalist candidates. In addition, the prince primate, Kolos Vaszary, demanded that no priest should run for parliament on a Slovak

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nationalist platform. Jehlička’s decision to ignore Vaszary’s instruction resulted in his immediate transfer to a remote Magyar-speaking parish. Likewise, Juriga received no support from his superiors when the authorities began judicial proceedings against him.10 The prince primate also took action against the Katolícke noviny which both Juriga and Jehlička had edited. In a circular issued at the end of 1907, he declared that the paper ‘cannot be considered Catholic’ and should be avoided by all Catholics, especially priests.11 The most active opponent of the Slovak nationalist movement in the church hierarchy was, however, the Bishop of Szepes Sándor Párvy. He was in many ways a quintessential Hungarian bishop of this period. Nevertheless, he attracted an unprecedented level of opprobrium from Slovak nationalists. Born in 1848 and ordained in 1871, Párvy was educated, cultured, eloquent and generous, frequently donating money from his own salary to various charitable causes. He was also fluent in the Slovak language and an early advocate of Catholic associations. He was, however, largely isolated from ordinary Catholics (having spent almost his entire career in administrative roles rather than actually ministering to the people). Worse, he saw himself as duty-bound to support the government with all the means at his disposal. He, therefore, enthusiastically punished those priests in his diocese who opposed the governing party’s candidates. Following the 1906 elections, Párvy marked himself out as the chief scourge of the Slovak nationalist movement. In response to the SĽS’s electoral breakthrough in the 1906 elections he disciplined dozens of priests who had supported the party. Those punished by Párvy included Hlinka, who was conveniently and dubiously accused of simony, and was suspended from his duties in Ružomberok. As a result of this suspension, Hlinka was not able to consecrate the first church to be built in his home village of Černová, even though he had played a key role in raising the funds for its construction.12 In spite of private and public warnings that the local population would be furious if Hlinka was not reinstated,13 Párvy was determined that the consecration of the new church should not become another manifestation of Slovak Catholic nationalism. He thus dispatched one of his loyal Slovak-speaking priests, Martin Pazurik, to Černová accompanied by a contingent of gendarmes. When the villagers greeted the arriving delegation with volleys of stones, the gendarmes opened fire killing fifteen and wounding about ninety. A further forty villagers were tried and imprisoned for their part in the disturbances. The ‘Černová massacre’, as it swiftly became known, attracted international condemnation. Slovak Catholic nationalists were particularly furious. Under the

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guidance of Dr Blaho and Štefánek the former Katolícke noviny, now renamed the Ľudové noviny, put the blame for the massacre directly on the ‘assassin’ Párvy. The paper then widened its critique to denounce the entire local Catholic hierarchy for supporting magyarization by ‘uniting with the liberals and the Jews’.14 Even the lower ranks of the Catholic clergy came under fire. One article in the paper, for example, asserted that the only people who voted against ‘our party’ are ‘the Jew, priest [and], mayor’.15 The Ľudové noviny also bemoaned the fact that the SĽS only got the support of only a small handful of Slovak priests. This was, the paper alleged, because ‘most of the others were of the view that our solitary Christian party was not necessary’.16 As another article put it ‘Jews, notaries, scribes will be in one camp … [and] also Catholic priests’ adding ‘in the other party will be you alone, dear Slovak people’.17 The anticlerical tone of the paper was reinforced by evidence of a new enthusiasm for ecumenicalism. Thus, the paper urged Slovak Catholics to work with their ‘brother Protestants’ who were ‘sons of a single mother Slav’. It also lauded Protestant candidates running for local elections on the grounds that it was better to vote for a ‘Lutheran Slovak’ than a ‘Catholic who is a fraud (Slovak: čvach)’. The Ľudové noviny’s new editorial board even invited prominent Slovak Protestants such as Hodža and Samuel Daxner to contribute articles.18 The paper even began to advertise in the SNS’s satirical and blatantly anticlerical monthly journal Černokňažník.19 This ecumenical rhetoric came to fruition on 15 September 1908 when 115 ‘Slovak farmers’ held a conference in Budapest. Addressing the assembly, Skyčák called for Catholics and Protestants to join forces to fight for universal suffrage. He explicitly declared that ‘our party must be primarily for the peasantry and entirely for the people … and as such for the rights of all Christians, Catholics and Protestants’. These sentiments were echoed by Bella, the SNS’s lone representative in parliament. He too informed the conference that Slovaks must not be divided on the basis of religion. Instead, he urged his fellow countrymen to be united by their ‘common language … in one single united Slovak political party’.20 Concerns about the anticlerical tone of some of the Ľudové noviny’s articles were, however, beginning to be publicly voiced by Slovak priests. Writing in the Litárne listy in the summer of 1908, an anonymous priest expressed his concerns about Catholic Slovak attacks on their ecclesiastical superiors and specifically criticized the editorial board of the Ľudové noviny. He alleged that the paper had ‘passed into the hands of the realists’ and warned that they were ‘rowing on the waters, into which the old Hlas [the notoriously anticlerical journal] had sank’. The warning had an immediate effect. Attacks on the local

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Catholic hierarchy and efforts to reach out to Protestant Slovaks, noticeably diminished by the end of 1908.21 Also poisoning relations between the SNS and the SĽS was a war of words over the pro-Czechoslovak orientation of the Ľudové noviny. As prominent hlasists, both Dr Blaho and Štefánek had long endorsed closer cooperation between the Czechs and Slovaks. Both men would also go on to hold prominent positions in the Czechoslovak government after 1918. Through their control of the paper they cautiously popularized the idea that the Czechs and Slovaks were two branches of a single Czechoslovak nation. For example, they lauded the Great Moravian Empire which had, allegedly, been the common home of the Czechs and Slovaks before the arrival of the Magyars into Europe. They also used their paper to promote the work of Czech writers and historians, and stressed the slovakophile attitudes of the Czechs as well as their support for the Slovak nationalist movement.22 By the autumn of 1908 the Czechoslovak orientation of the Ľudové noviny had become explicit. On 15 August 1908, for example, the paper published a leading article which declared that ‘our political speech and culture must march in the direction of a single Czechoslovak nation’, for ‘a nation of 9 million is stronger than one of 2.5 million’.23 Dr Blaho then followed this up with a speech in Prague in September in which he declared that ‘in heart and spirit we Slovaks are one with the Czechs. … We believe in the pride of a Czechoslovak nation unified by culture and blood.’ Hlinka then followed Dr Blaho’s talk with an article in the Ľudové noviny in which he declared that ‘Czechs and Slovaks have always constituted and will remain one Czechoslovak nation … our separation must come to an end’.24 The response from the SNS’s chief newspaper, the Národnie noviny, was, however, vitriolic. Both Dr Blaho and Štefánek were forced to backpedal in an effort to maintain cooperation with the SNS. They claimed that they had not called for the creation of a new Czechoslovak state as ‘talk of unification is not possible’. They also insisted that they were opposed not only to magyarization, but also to ‘czechification’.25 Matters were, however, once again inflamed by the SNS leader Hurban-Vajanský who, on a visit to Prague, affirmed that he placed his faith in Russia rather than the Czechs to rescue the Slovaks from their predicament. The response from the Ľudové noviny was a wave of personal abuse, hurled at Hurban-Vajanský’s ‘slavism’, ‘czarism’, ‘holy Orthodoxy’ and his enthusiasm for Russian chauvinists.26 Meanwhile, members of the SĽS continued to chafe at the SNS leadership’s domineering attitudes. Although SĽS leaders had been appointed to the general

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SNS committee, none were appointed to the five-member executive committee (Slovak: vykonný vybor) which made the key decisions including who received party funding. Juriga had hoped that a separate ‘control committee’ (Slovak: kontrolný vybor) would be established to oversee funding. As early as April 1907, however, he, along with Hlinka, complained that no such committee had been established. They also claimed that the SNS continued to allocate its funds unfairly and wastefully.27 At a meeting of the SNS leadership in April 1908 tensions again erupted over money. This time hostilities were ignited by Hodža who accused the editors of the Ľudové noviny of appropriating funds that should have been transferred to the SNS leadership. He then widened the attack on the paper by declaring that ‘for some time he had witnessed a certain separatism’ and ‘the creation of a new party in Skalica’ (the paper’s editorial home). He also demanded to know whether Dr Blaho still considered himself a member of the SNS. Dr Blaho’s response was firm. He defended the paper’s financing and insisted that the Ľudové noviny ‘is not an organ of, and not under the direction of ’ the SNS. It would take four more years for the SĽS to formally sever its ties with the SNS, but the split was already evident by the end of 1908.28

The failed alliance with the Social Democrats In the first years of its existence, the party sought to work with both the SNS and Slovak Social Democrats who were also opposed to magyarization.29 In 1905, these Slovak members of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party had broken away to form a new Slovak Social Democratic Party of Hungary (Slovak: Slovenská sociálnodemokratická strana Uhorska) in protest at the party leadership’s refusal to recognize that the Slovaks were a distinct nation. The break-away party also remained committed to the ideal of universal suffrage. Several leading Slovak Social Democrats had even shared a platform with SĽS leaders at the series of meetings that were held across the Slovak highlands in 1905 as part of the campaign for electoral reform and the immediate expansion of the franchise. Thus, after Dr Blaho and Štefánek had taken control of the Ľudové noviny they had reason to hope that a powerful alliance could be forged between the SĽS and the Slovak Social Democrats. This was something that Milan Hodža had also long argued for. He had already, in 1903, described the Social Democrats as the only other party with which Slovak nationalists could have a ‘sensible and

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favourable alliance’.30 Moreover, the anticlerical mood among Slovak nationalists in the wake of the Černová massacre bound the SĽS closer to the Social Democrats as a result of their shared contempt for the local Catholic hierarchy. In addition, the SĽS’s distinct populist ideology, which manifested itself in the claim that it represented the largely impoverished rural Slovak ‘people’ against the liberal elite, dovetailed with the Social Democrats’ own claim to represent poor Slovaks in their struggle against the exploitative upper classes.31 Through 1906 and 1907 the Ľudové noviny prepared its readership for an alliance with the Social Democrats. It ramped up its denunciations of both the old liberal governing party, and the new governing coalition, as the political representatives of the same uncaring social elite. KNP MPs were thus denounced for their love of such upper class pursuits as the opera and theatre, while the entire party was dismissed as being run by ‘Jews and lords’.32 Such men were contrasted with Slovak ‘factory workers who are independent and depend on no-one’. The working-class credentials of the SĽS leadership were also played up with Skyčák, a successful businessman, being described as the son of a ‘poor shoemaker’.33 Even Hlinka attempted to promote cooperation with the Social Democrats by making the dubious argument that they were ‘anti-clerical’ but not ‘anti-religious’. Dr Blaho and Štefánek also argued that an alliance with the MSZDP was at the least preferable to cooperation with the magyarizing KNP.34 This new and improbable alliance between Slovak Catholics and Social Democrats appeared to come to fruition with plans for a new campaign for electoral reform in the autumn of 1907. One hundred mass rallies were to be held across the Slovak highlands which would be addressed by both the Social Democrats and the leaders of the SĽS. The hope was that this wave of meetings would culminate in a general strike that would force the government to expand the franchise. The strike was, however, banned by the government as were most of the rallies. Momentum was further diminished by the government’s declaration that it would begin to draft a bill to finally enact electoral reform, although this turned out to be a lengthy and fruitless process. When the bill was finally unveiled two years later it proposed only a minor extension of the franchise. Even this concession was then shelved after the governing coalition collapsed. By that point, however, the momentum behind the campaign for electoral reform had dissipated and with it the primary reason for an alliance with the Social Democrats. The SĽS’s brief alliance with the Social Democrats also left the party open to fresh attacks by the KNP. Magyar Catholics promptly accused the Ľudové noviny of betraying the faith by aligning itself with the ‘godless’ socialists. Moreover, a

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number of Slovak priests who quietly supported the SĽS, including Jozef Buday, expressed their own concerns about Catholic-socialist cooperation. They used the short-lived but influential Naše noviny newspaper, which was launched in 1907 to promulgate Christian Social values, to ferociously denounce the social democratic movement as the primary threat to the Catholic faith.35 Furthermore, an alliance with the Social Democrats was always likely to be undermined by Slovak Catholics’ antisemitic attitudes which continued to be voiced even by the relatively progressive editors of the Ľudové noviny. Even the SĽS’s enthusiasm for electoral reform was tempered by concerns about whether this would empower the Jewish leadership of the Social Democrats. Such fears were bolstered by a succession of papal encyclicals that denounced social democracy in the strongest terms.36 With the collapse of the movement for electoral reform it appeared, therefore, more shrewd for the SĽS leadership to score points by attacking the Slovak Social Democrats rather than working with them. Neither the Slovak Social Democrats nor the MSZDP had, after all, a single representative in parliament. Both socialist parties also had minimal support in northern Hungary outside the largest cities of Bratislava and Košice. Local officials, for example, responded to the Ministry of the Interior’s request for information on the social democrat’s activities in the highlands by insisting that they were ‘undetectable’ (Magyar: nem észlelheto). One speaker at the first congress of the Slovak Social Democratic Party even informed his fellow delegates that ‘until recently’ he and his comrades in northern Slovakia ‘didn’t know about you, we didn’t even know that you existed’.37 It is, therefore, unsurprising that after 1908 the SĽS stopped sharing a platform with Social Democrats and the Ľudové noviny resumed its attacks on socialism as a threat to both the Catholic faith and Slovak identity. There would be no further cooperation between the SĽS and the Slovak Social Democrats until they once again joined forces to break away from Hungary at the end of the First World War.38

The failed alliance with the other minorities In the aftermath of the 1906 elections the SĽS also saw its efforts to work with the Romanian and Serb MPs in parliament prove equally fruitless. Initially, this alliance had appeared both eminently sensible and feasible. Together the representatives of Hungary’s various minorities occupied almost 6 per cent of the seats in parliament and were the fourth largest parliamentary fraction. The

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Romanian and Serb MPs were also bitter opponents of magyarization who had strenuously opposed the former Liberal Party’s policies. In addition, there was a legacy of cooperation between Hungary’s minorities that could be traced back to at least 1895. In that year the younger generation of Romanian, Slovak and Serb representatives had come together to condemn the non-application of the 1868 Nationalities Law. Both Hodža and Skyčák had also cooperated with their fellow MPs who represented Hungary’s minorities following their election to parliament in 1905. The opportunity to renew that cooperation following the 1906 elections was, therefore, irresistible. As a result, the seven Slovak MPs became a part of a larger fraction of twentyfive minority MPs formally referred to as the nationalities club. Thus they were theoretically able to secure representation on parliamentary committees and filibuster legislation.39 Once again, Hodža, who represented a mixed Slovak and Serb constituency in the south of Hungary took the lead in pushing for this cooperation and was rewarded by being elected as the fraction’s secretary.40 The nationalities club was, however, conflicted over whether to use its substantial presence in parliament to obstruct the government or extract concessions. It turned down the offer of seats on parliamentary committees, but then decided to debate rather than filibuster the most contentious government legislation. Neither passivity nor engagement, however, yielded concessions. For example, when the government introduced the infamous Lex Apponyi in 1907, the nationalities club decided to defeat the legislation by appealing to the other parties in the governing coalition to vote down the legislation. That was a serious tactical error.41 The Lex Apponyi, named after the new minister of education, Albert Apponyi, was the most egregious magyarizing measure passed by the government in the decade before the First World War. It dramatically increased the power of the state over the provision of schooling in Hungary. Religious schools, including Catholic schools, were offered increased funding by the government. In return, however, they had to permit the authorities to impose their own favoured curriculum, ensure almost all instruction took place in Magyar and allow government inspectors to monitor their teaching. Most schools in the Slovak region accepted this trade-off. As a result, and entirely predictably, the number of students who were taught in their native Slovak subsequently collapsed.42 To the surprise of the nationalities club, which incorrectly assumed that the government’s encroachment on Catholic schooling would attract strong Catholic opposition, Apponyi’s bill attracted cross-party support in both houses

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of parliament. The KNP, for example, was unwilling to jeopardize its place in the coalition government by blocking the legislation. The party’s support for the Lex Apponyi comprehensively refuted allegations that it was overly lenient towards Hungary’s minorities.43 Those MPs who belonged to the former Liberal Party also supported Apponyi’s bill as a means of advancing their anticlerical agenda. Even most of the Catholic prelates in the upper house did not openly oppose the bill, although they did lobby behind the scenes for some modifications to the initial draft of the legislation. Moreover, the following year the local Catholic hierarchy ramped up its own efforts to promote magyarization. The prince primate, himself, warned that any Catholic teacher committed a ‘punishable offence’ if they ‘carry out an action against the state’ and its ‘national character’ or ‘neglect the teaching of the Magyar language’.44 Thus the nationalities club’s struggle against the Lex Apponyi demonstrated that it was both isolated and impotent. Unsurprisingly, its Slovak members began to look for alternative ways of exerting influence.45 Hodža, for example, attempted to ingratiate himself with the heir to the Habsburg crown, Franz Ferdinand.46 His fellow Slovak MPs meanwhile sank into a passivity, born of both disillusionment and exhaustion. This malaise was exacerbated by the loss of their two best speakers, Jehlička who resigned his mandate in 1907 and Juriga who departed for a spell in prison from 1908 to 1909.47

The failed alliance with the KNP The Slovak MPs also undermined their alliance with their Romanian and Serbian colleagues by attempting to simultaneously cooperate with their fellow Catholics in the KNP. Initially, such cooperation appeared both principled and pragmatic. Principled because both parties’ ideologies overlapped and shared common objectives such as the repeal of earlier anticlerical legislation. Pragmatic because both parties stood to benefit if they could combine their energies against the remnants of the old Liberal Party which still retained their seats in the Slovak highlands.48 Moreover, an immediate opportunity presented itself with the parliamentary debates over the conduct of the 1906 elections which had once again been marred by significant corruption that had allegedly cost both the SĽS and the KNP electoral victories. In an attempt to refute claims that they were unpatriotic, and thus pave the way for cooperation with the KNP, SĽS MPs gave a series of speeches in parliament which they hoped would demonstrate their unbreakable loyalty to

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Hungary. Jehlička was in particularly ebullient form when he strenuously denied that his party was panslav. He employed classic Hungarus rhetoric when he insisted that both he and his fellow Slovak MPs were loyal to ‘our nation, our homeland’. Kollár also distanced himself from panslavism when he denounced the Czechs who, he claimed, were assimilating the Slovak minority in Moldavia, while Skyčák insisted he was both a Slovak and a Hungarian patriot. He even agreed that it would be ‘useful’ if everyone in the country spoke Magyar.49 Juriga also asserted his party’s Hungarus values, when he insisted, in a pamphlet he published in the wake of his electoral victory in 1906, that the party newspaper, the Katolícke noviny, ‘loves the land of the Slovaks, Hungary, and defends the indivisibility of the crown of Saint Stephen’. He went on to expropriate Magyar nationalist rhetoric, which criticized Slovak nationalists for breaking the ancient bonds between Slovaks and Magyars, when he insisted that ‘for a thousand years we have lived together, fought together … and the land was glorious’. He could not, however, resist adding that in the past ‘no one heard a word about magyarization and Christ and his love ruled’.50 The KNP, was, however, fully aware of the challenge posed by the SĽS and was determined to use its presence in the governing coalition to nip its rival in the bud. Moreover, relations between the two parties had been embittered by the closely fought election campaign and the mutual allegations of betrayal. When, therefore, the Slovak MPs turned their attention to the authorities’ electoral abuses they were immediately denounced by the KNP MPs for agitating against the state. Both Juriga and Jehlička, in the brief period he spent as an MP, gave masterful speeches in which they systematically exposed the inconsistencies that underpinned the government’s chauvinistic attitude and reminded the KNP ‘our former mother’ that the authorities’ abuses could be directed at them. Nevertheless, KNP MPs blandly declared that if Slovak nationalists wanted the protection of the law ‘they should not agitate against Hungary’.51 When Skyčák then attempted to focus on those elements of the SĽS’s manifesto which directly overlapped with the KNP’s own demands, such as a reduction in taxes, the introduction of a minimum wage and the enaction of the 1868 nationalities law, he appeared to be making policy on the hoof without the approval of the nationalities club to which he supposedly belonged. At the same time, his overtures were dismissed by the KNP leadership as further proof of his duplicity.52 Moreover, attempts to form a de facto alliance with the KNP in parliament were undermined by the bitter words that both the Ľudové noviny and the KNP’s Slovak-language Kresťan used about their rivals. From the moment the SĽS was

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established, the Kresťan newspaper declared that its rival should not be read by ‘all good Catholic Slovaks’.53 It also repeatedly attacked the SĽS for cooperating with the ‘Lutheran’ SNS and the Social Democrats. In turn, the Ľudové noviny denounced the KNP for betraying the Slovaks by joining the government coalition. It also accused the party of consisting solely of ‘counts, quasi-liberals, Jews and a few wandering priests’. Both parties further embittered relations by relying on vitriolic personal abuse, a tendency that was especially common in Hungarian politics where most parties were little more than the men who represented them in parliament.54 Enmity between the SĽS and the KNP was also fuelled by the inability of the latter party to exert any tangible influence on its coalition partners. Instead, the KNP’s reputation among Slovak Catholics was corroded by the party’s cooperation with a government coalition that appeared to be every bit as liberal as the former Liberal Party. The KNP was, therefore, indelibly stained by the coalitions’ magyarizing efforts such as its willingness to support the Lex Apponyi in spite of the curbs it placed on the autonomy of Catholic schools. The party compounded this injury by refusing to condemn the actions of the gendarmeries that resulted in the infamous Černová massacre. The rift between the two Catholic parties was then made unbridgeable by the KNP’s support for SĽS’s MPs to be stripped of their parliamentary immunity. By the time Juriga and Hlinka re-emerged from prison, even cooperation with former Liberal Party politicians appeared preferable to an alliance with the KNP.55

The failed attempt to build up a party organization As well as seeking an alliance with other parties, the SĽS leadership also sought to create a mass party organization. In the aftermath of the 1906 elections, for example, the Ľudové noviny urged its readers to ‘distribute newspapers, deliver pamphlets’ and ensure that every village had Catholic associations and cooperatives. The example of the Christian Social Party in Austria, which had created a network of local organizations and racked up a stunning series of electoral successes, was lauded as an particularly appropriate role-model to rouse Slovaks ‘from their dreams’.56 In 1908 there was also a renewed discussion by the SĽS leadership about the need for ‘sufficiently strong and structured organization’. There was also excited talk of establishing a new ‘central chancellery’ that would oversee a party ‘committee’ in every county, then in every electoral district and, ultimately,

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‘confidants of the party’ in every village.57 Such plans, however, came to nothing. By the following year the Ľudové noviny was publicly bemoaning that ‘we possess the truth, but we don’t possess an organization’. During both the 1906 and 1910 elections the paper did report that various local committees of the party had been established. There is, however, no evidence that these local branches of the party continued to function after the election fever had subsided.58 Part of the reason for this failure was that, in 1907, the KNP launched its own effort to mobilize Catholics throughout Hungary, with a new association called the Catholic Union (Magyar: Keresztény Népszövetseg, Slovak: Katolická jednota). The KNP’s aim was to establish a branch of the Catholic Union in every parish in the country in order to nullify any other party’s hopes of obtaining mass support. The Catholic Union was also intended to prepare Catholics across Hungary for the anticipated extension of the franchise to the bulk of the rural population. Members, it was hoped, would be ‘schooled in politics’ and would form ‘an almost military organization which would be indispensable in both defending the interests and realizing the ideals’ of the Catholic church and the KNP in Hungary.59 Membership was open to all Catholics who were over sixteen years of age, who were ‘always in good order’ and who paid a nominal membership fee of one crown. Each branch was encouraged to appoint a local president (Slovak: predseda) or administrator (Slovak: spravca), elect an oversight committee (Slovak: pozorný vybor) and ensure there was a treasurer (Slovak: pokladník) who would be responsible for collecting all fees and any financial outgoings.60 The Catholic Union operated with the enthusiastic support of the church hierarchy and parish priests across the region. Meetings were held throughout the Slovak region to establish new branches, with huge numbers in attendance along with a large turnout of local clergymen. In Bánovce nad Bebravou, for example, 2,000 people attended the founding meeting while in the larger town of Banská Bystrica (Magyar: Besztercebánya) thirty-nine local priests were in attendance when the local branch was established. Typically, each meeting consisted of a series of fiery speeches by local clergymen and other local Catholic notables, or visiting KNP leaders. This was followed by the election of the various officers, with a local priest invariably being appointed as president. Specific journals were also launched to promote the Catholic Union, including a Slovaklanguage version, Jednota katolíckeho ľudu.61 Although Slovak nationalists initially denounced these organizations as a front for chauvinistic Magyar Catholics who ‘exploit the faith of the people’, the Catholic Union’s growth in the Slovak highlands was dramatic. By the summer of 1909 it had an estimated

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31,116 Slovak-speaking members and had a local branch in around two-thirds of all the parishes in northern Hungary.62 In reality, the Catholic Union failed to live up to the hopes of its organizers. A major extension of the franchise was not passed until 1917 which made the organization partially redundant. Moreover, the KNP leadership proved unwilling to transform the Catholic Union into a modern nationwide party organization that could begin to shape policy from the bottom up. Instead, the initial enthusiasm that greeted its launch petered out when it became clear that membership had little practical benefit. Some branches were even infiltrated by the KNP’s critics including members of the SĽS.63 These weaknesses, however, only gradually became evident. In the first years after its foundation the Catholic Union played an important role in shoring up the support of the KNP in northern Hungary and helped persuade the SĽS that a rival Slovak Catholic organization would be futile. It would not be until 1918, when the Catholic Union was banned in Slovakia by the Czechoslovak authorities, that the SĽS would make a new, and successful, effort to transform itself into a modern mass party.

The failed alliance with the government Such was the hostility the SĽS felt towards the KNP and the wider coalition government, that it was delighted when, in 1909, the coalition collapsed even though this paved the way for the old Liberal Party to rebrand itself and return to government as the National Party of Work (Magyar: Nemzeti Munkapárt). The coalition’s collapse was due to the government’s inability to pass an army bill that would have raised Hungary’s financial contribution to the common army. As a result, the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party broke into two rival factions and lost control of the government. The new prime minister, Károly KhuenHéderváry was a wily operator who had learned how to manage discontented minorities during his earlier stint as governor of Croatia. He was also determined to get the army bill passed and return the old Liberal Party to power by holding and winning early elections in 1910. He was, therefore, able and willing to cut a deal with the Slovaks to ensure that the maximum number of Independence and Forty-Eighter Party and KNP candidates were defeated in northern Hungary. In order to lay the groundwork for a deal, Khuen-Héderváry ended the wave of fines and imprisonments that the coalition had used to curb nationalist discontent. He then authorized confidential negotiations with the leadership of the SĽS and the SNS. These negotiations culminated in a promise that the

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Slovak nationalists would be guaranteed eight seats in parliament if they agreed to support those Magyar candidates who stood the best chance of defeating the KNP.64 As a result, the főispán of Pozsony County was authorized to provide the SĽS with an injection of funds while the főispán of Turócz County purchased a large number of copies of the SĽS’s newspapers to distribute to Slovak voters. In return, some members of the SĽS publicly campaigned for liberal National Party of Work candidates against their KNP opponents. One of the SĽS’s candidates, Michal Bajor, even withdrew his candidacy in Ružomberok in favour of the government’s nominee.65 Overall, however, the pact was half-heartedly applied and unwisely kept secret. That magnified the scandal when the details began to leak out at the end of the year. Moreover, the election results were bittersweet for the SĽS and devastating for the SNS. The KNP did lose two-thirds of their seats and only a handful of the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party MPs were able to keep their seats in northern Hungary. Slovak nationalists, however, also suffered a major setback in these elections. The SĽS won only three seats while the SNS was deprived of any parliamentary representation. Moreover, the return of the Liberal Party to government, under the new name of the National Party of Work, outraged those Slovak nationalists who believed that Hungarian politics had taken a giant step backward. Skyčák once again owed his success, as the local főispán noted, to the superior resources he was able to put into his election campaign. He outspent his opponent who eventually withdraw before the vote had even taken place. Dr Blaho also secured re-election without opposition due to the close links he had forged with the local farming community that dominated the electorate. Juriga, whose spell in prison had given him a martyr’s reputation among his passionate supporters, nevertheless had to fight hard for his re-election and was returned with a majority of just 222 votes.66 Worse, Jehlička, Kollár and Hodža’s former seats were taken by representatives of the National Party of Work. Bella, running on a SNS platform, also failed in his bid for re-election. The local elections in the winter of 1910 were a further disaster for the Slovak nationalist movement. Even in Árva County, Skyčák’s stronghold, Slovak candidates failed to win a single seat. As Hlinka publicly admitted, the KNP was right to crow that the SĽS party slogan, ‘for our Slovak language’ had suffered a total defeat.67 It was Hodža who now demanded that the SĽS’s leadership should be held to account for this disaster. He was embittered by his ejection from parliament and was convinced that the SĽS had systematically undermined the SNS. In response, Hodža used the pages of his Slovenský týždenník to publicize allegations that the

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editors of the Ľudové noviny had been bribed by the government to support victorious National Party of Work candidates.68 The subsequent meeting of the SNS leadership, held on 19 October 1910, attended by Skyčák, Juriga and Hodža, brought all of the simmering tensions between the SNS and the SĽS to the surface. At this meeting, Juriga and Skyčák both insisted that they had only supported those National Party of Work candidates who had, at the very least, advocated universal suffrage. They did, however, concede that their paper had received secret funds from the authorities. In response, the most prominent Catholic priest in the SNS, Ladislav Moyš, as well as Hodža and several other SNS leaders roundly denounced the conduct of the Ľudové noviny. They also argued that the sectarian ideology of the paper had fractured the Slovak nationalist movement and directly contributed to the electoral catastrophe.69 From that point on relations between the SĽS and the SNS grew steadily worse.70 A war of words developed between Hodža and Šrobár on the one hand and the SĽS’s leaders on the other involving allegations of hypocrisy, corruption and even plagiarism which eventually ended up in court. Although some of the leading figures in the SĽS carried on attending meetings of the SNS until 1912 relations between the two parties were now irreparable.71

The relaunch of the party It was Hlinka who now took the initiative in reshaping the SĽS. After his release from prison in 1910, he used both the Ľudové noviny and the expanding network of Catholic associations and financial institutions to turn the SĽS into a genuinely independent party with himself firmly ensconced as leader. His two years in prison from 1908 to 1910 played a formative role in leading him down this path. Prior to his entry to prison, Hlinka had a reputation as a priest who enjoyed the good life including good food, expensive Tokaj wine and games of cards.72 In prison he became more ascetic and spent much of his time reading spiritual literature. Determined, as he put it, ‘to make use of my imprisonment to support the work of our redemption’ he oversaw a new translation of the Old Testament under the auspices of the Society of Saint Adalbert and carried out the lion’s share of the work himself.73 Hlinka’s encounters in prison, in Szeged with several leading Bolsheviks, including Béla Kun, led him to despise their ideology even more. His own thinking was now summed up by his assertion that ‘I am first a Catholic and

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only after that a Slovak’. His new-found sectarianism was also evident in his claim that ‘I would rather work together with a Catholic [from the KNP] than with atheists like Hodža and Šrobár’. He also had developed a profound hostility to progressive Czech thinking including the foremost proponents of CzechSlovak cooperation. He dismissed the prominent progressive Czech writer J.S. Machar as ‘in the pay of the Jews’, attacked Masaryk as a ‘liberal’, was infuriated by the prominent Czech Slovakophile Karel Kálal’s attack on Slovak clericalism, and privately insisted that even if the Czechs sought a union with the Slovaks ‘we shall not follow this path’.74 Upon his release, he immediately put his resurgent Catholicism into action by making a pilgrimage to Rome. He then visited his old nemesis bishop Párvy, who promptly reinstated him as a parish priest in Ružomberok. Hlinka was also eager to reorganize the Ľudové noviny. He arranged for the paper to relocate from Skalica to Bratislava in order to facilitate its distribution across the Slovakpopulated region and renamed it the Slovenské ľudové noviny to show that is editorial line had changed. By 1912 both Dr Blaho and Štefánek had been removed from the paper’s editorial board. They were replaced by Juriga, who was assisted by Florián Tománek, one of Hlinka’s fellow priests from the diocese of Szepes. Tománek had earned Hlinka’s trust by publicly siding with him during his clash with Párvy even though this had resulted in Tománek’s suspension from his clerical duties. This suspension also allowed Tománek to move to Bratislava and devote himself full time to the task of publishing the Slovenské ľudové noviny.75 In practical terms this put Hlinka and his personal appointees in charge of the party newspaper. They controlled, therefore, the one element that held the party and the disparate collection of Catholic and Slovak associations together. It was the Katolícke noviny later Ľudové noviny, now Slovenské ľudové noviny, whose editors had played the key role in first establishing the party. They had also passionately popularized the party’s policies, published the party leadership’s speeches from inside and outside parliament, provided reports on Slovak Catholic activities throughout Hungary and abroad, thrown their weight behind numerous fundraising projects, carefully explained how readers could register to vote in local and national elections, listed the approved candidates in all elections, and provided their readers with petitions that they could fill in to oppose government policies. For example, during the debate in parliament on the Lex Apponyi in 1907 the paper circulated a pre-prepared draft of a petition that it urged to fill in and send to their local bishop urging them to oppose the bill. Within a week

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the paper was proudly reporting that more than 125 such petitions had been sent to the local Catholic hierarchy.76 The party newspaper also worked hard to boost its circulation. As it could not be sold openly on the streets or in shops it was forced to rely on subscribers who paid for a quarter or full year. As well as struggling to keep the price of subscriptions down the paper’s editors also gradually improved its quality. For example, they added a special supplement for children, and invested in new technology that increased the number and quality of the photographs it published. In addition, the very act of subscribing to the paper was lauded as proof ‘to the whole world that Slovak Catholics live and want to live’, while a form of pyramid-selling was employed, with every subscriber regularly urged to obtain one additional subscriber to the paper.77 Such efforts paid off. By the end of 1907 the paper had about 12,000 subscribers and had become the second most popular Slovak nationalist paper after the Slovenský týždenník. Nevertheless, the bulk of the newspaper’s sales occurred in northern and western Slovakia. One source suggests that by the end of 1908, in the entirety of eastern Slovakia the paper had only obtained 675 subscribers. The growth in the number of subscribers did, however, continue so that by 1918 it had allegedly reached twenty thousand.78 The growth in the paper’s circulation not only spread the party message, but also helped keep the paper viable. It frequently got into trouble due to the fines the government levelled for the ‘seditious’ articles it occasionally published. Nevertheless, rising sales of the paper as well as the generous donations of readers, the occasional bail out from Skyčák, and the quiet support of Czechs and Slovaks in America all helped keep the paper afloat.79 Under the new editorial board overseen by Hlinka after 1910, the Slovenské ľudové noviny trumpeted both its independence and its unashamed populism. In particular, it made no attempt to foster a rapprochement with any other party and instead sought to boost its circulation by emphasizing the aggressive aspect of populist ‘ľudová’ ideology. Proclaiming that the ‘soul’ and ‘direction’ of the paper ‘will be populist’, the paper avoided criticizing the higher ranks of the church in Hungary and instead stepped up its attacks not only on ‘liberals’, but also on ‘progressives’ such as Šrobár and his mentor Masaryk. The Slovenské ľudové noviny also lashed out at more familiar targets such as Jews, and occasionally, Protestants. These attacks dispelled any hope that the SĽS would seek, once again, to forge a coalition with the more progressive and socialist Slovak politicians. Instead, Slovak Social Democrats were savaged by the Slovenské ľudové noviny for being, allegedly, controlled by the Jews, and turning ordinary Slovaks against the Catholic church. The paper also followed Hlinka’s lead and abandoned its

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earlier pro-Czech orientation and began to denounce the supposedly ‘freethinking, atheist and irreligious’ characteristics of the Czechs.80 The gradual rapprochement between the SĽS and the Catholic hierarchy in Hungary was bolstered by both the new-found sectarianism of the Slovenské ľudové noviny and the efforts of several bishops in the Slovak highlands. Párvy, for example, intervened in 1908 to ensure that the inhabitants of Černová who had been convicted for their role in instigating the massacre were granted clemency. He also allowed Hlinka, after his release from prison, to finally carry out the consecration of their local church.81 Moreover, Párvy made, along with the prince primate, several substantial donations to Slovak-language non-political Catholic publications while Fischer-Colbrie, the Bishop of Košice, contributed a Slovak-language article. Priests were also quietly permitted to use parish funds to subscribe to the SĽS’s own party newspaper without fear of sanction although most declined to do so.82 In addition, at the tenth congress of Hungarian Catholics held in Budapest in December 1910, Vilmos Batthyány, Bishop of Nyitra (Slovak: Nitra) held a Mass with Slovak hymns to welcome the visiting Slovak delegation. He received glowing praise from, among others, the influential Slovak priest and journalist Jozef Buday who urged his readers ‘not to focus on what divides us, Catholics of Hungary, but on what binds us [together]’.83 Confirming the new mood of Catholic cooperation, Párvy conducted a long postponed visit to Liptó County to carry out a series of confirmations. When he arrived at Ružomberok, Hlinka was part of a delegation of local priests who warmly greeted the bishop’s arrival and, notoriously, kissed Párvy’s episcopal ring as a sign of their obedience.84 The reaction from the SĽS’s critics was furious. Hodža’s Slovenský týždenník expressed mock astonishment that Hlinka would ‘kiss the hand’ of the bishop who bore responsibility for the infamous Černová massacre.85 One of Hlinka’s fellow residents of Ružomberok, Ondrej Janček, also took to the pages of Hodža’s paper to denounce the confirmation. He wrote that Hlinka had allowed Párvy ‘to put his tyrannical hands over innocent children’. Janček then accused Hlinka of repeatedly betraying the Slovak national movement by cooperating with the government to become one of the richest men in Ružomberok.86 This, in turn, provoked a furious response from Hlinka and his allies in the pages of the Slovenské ľudové noviny. The Slovenský týždenník was described as possessing an ‘anti-Catholic spirit’ while Šrobár, who had also criticized Hlinka’s rapprochement with Párvy was, entirely inaccurately, denounced as ‘a lewd hunchbacked Jew’.87

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In the spring of 1912, Juriga and Tománek unleashed their fury at the SNS leadership. They dispatched a lengthy letter to the party presidency on 27 May which explained why they would no longer be attending party meetings. They began by expressing their anger at the allegations of financial impropriety which had been levelled at them by some prominent members of the SNS. The main thrust of the letter was, however, a no holds barred denunciation of the systematic failures of the entire leadership in Martin. The SNS was, for example, described as being run by a prosperous elite rather than the common people. It was also accused by Juriga and Tománek of being in thrall to Lutherans and ‘followers of Masaryk’ rather than to ‘good Catholics’. In addition the SNS’s defence of the Slovak language was dismissed as ‘merely a slogan’ and it was also lambasted for being unwilling to launch a serious struggle against the Social Democrats. In contrast, the editors of the Slovenské ľudové noviny declared, ‘The [relaunched] SĽS will act according to its conscience, it will act in the long-term interests of the Catholic Slovak people, and it will work for equality for Slovak Catholics in the nation.’88 This ferocious attack was followed up by Hlinka who, with his usual populist bluster, publicly accused the SNS leadership of cooperating with Jews, promoting atheists and tolerating ‘blasphemy’.89 In the wake of these denunciations, it was only logical that on 28 November 1912, the SNS formally declared that the Slovenské ľudové noviny had been placed on a ‘national index’ (Slovak: národný index) of newspapers that no Slovak should ever read.90 That proved to be the final provocation. On 2 December 1912, the Slovenské ľudové noviny proclaimed that the SĽS had been refounded. The relaunched party did not actually hold its inaugural meeting until the summer of 1913. Hlinka, imbued with a reputation and energy that could not be rivalled, became the new leader while Skyčák effectively stepped aside to become an entirely passive deputy leader. Juriga was meanwhile appointed secretary. His obvious task was to promote the party and build up its organization through his position as editor of the Slovenské ľudové noviny. His fellow editor, Tománek, was put in charge of the party’s finances. Another one of Hlinka’s fellow priests from Szepes County, Ignác Grebáč-Orlov, was entrusted with maintaining the party’s records, and another of his close friends from Ružomberok, Vlado Kubica, was given the position of ‘advisor’ (Slovak: poradca). Although it would not be appropriate at this point to claim that all this amounted to a ‘cult of leadership’, clearly Hlinka had imposed his grip on the party. Juriga was now the only viable rival and curb on his authority.91

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The impression that the SĽS was now run by a narrow clique was strengthened by the exclusion of former supporters of the party. In particular, three of the party’s former MPs, Dr Blaho, Hodža and Milan Ivanka, as well as three of its former parliamentary candidates, Markovič, Medvecký and Šrobár, marked themselves out as the sharpest critics of the new party. Other prominent Slovak priests such as Buday, Jehlička and Kollár also kept their distance from this new incarnation of the SĽS. Moreover, the party also failed to work out a new manifesto in time for the opening meeting. Instead, it outlined some founding principles including a declaration that its Catholic faith was ‘its greatest treasure’, that the party sought ‘glory for our Slovak language’, and that it would defend Hungary’s place in the Habsburg Empire. It also promised to uphold the interests of poor Slovaks. Such statements served, however, to once again demonstrate that the SĽS would continue to eschew a serious political programme in favour of empty slogans and vague generalities. It simply lacked, for example, both the capacity and the inclination to develop a serious economic programme.92 What defined the party was, above all, its aggressive sectarianism. In a nod to the party’s first establishment in 1905, the founding meeting of the relaunched SĽS was held in Žilina, but this time the venue was the local Franciscan monastery. No non-Catholics were in attendance. Already in 1912, Juriga had listed the party’s principles as first ‘Christian’ and only secondly ‘Slovak’.93 The new party also directed its rhetorical assaults, at least until the onset of the First World War, not only at Magyar chauvinism, but also at the ‘Lutheran’ SNS. Antisemitism was another constant feature of the Slovenské ľudové noviny’s rhetoric. For example, an attempt by the Social Democrats to relaunch the campaign for universal suffrage was dismissed by listing the number of Jews in the party leadership. When the SNS endorsed the Social Democrats call for electoral reform they too were attacked for having joined a ‘Slovak-Jewishprogressive coalition’.94 The tone of the relaunched SĽS was set by its new leader, Hlinka, who devoted his energy to aggressively defending Catholic privileges in his hometown of Ružomberok. He furiously protested an attempt to hand a local Catholic school in Ružomberok over to the state and oversaw a bitter campaign to prevent the local cemetery being open to all denominations.95 It took the trauma of four years of global warfare, combined with the government’s inflexibility as it demanded an ever greater sacrifice from the Slovak minority without providing anything substantial in return, to cure the party of its narrow sectarianism in favour of cooperation with other branches of the Slovak nationalist movement.

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Figure 3  A caricature of Slovak nationalists attempting to be parliamentarians. Source: Borsszem Jankó, 15 July, 1906.

By May 1918, Hlinka, Juriga, Šrobár and Hodža had again formed a genuine ‘team of rivals’ working together to break Slovakia away from Hungary and the collapsing Habsburg Empire. That rapprochement was, however, short-lived. By the end of that year the SĽS had been relaunched to begin a new struggle against the leadership of the new Czechoslovak state. The radicalism that was already evident when the party was relaunched in 1913, rapidly reappeared after 1918.

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Turning against Hungary – Turning against Czechoslovakia

The SĽS’s attempt to use its independence to exert a significant influence on Hungarian politics was derailed by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. The party effectively stopped functioning and most of its leaders, including Hlinka, withdrew from politics. Only Juriga continued to play an active role in parliament and still strived to shape Slovak Catholic opinion through his editorship of the Slovenské ľudové noviny. By 1918 this loyalty, or apathy, had, however, given way to a profound embitterment. At the end of October 1918, all of the leading figures in the pre-war SĽS agreed with the need to break away from Hungary and join a new Czechoslovak state. The enthusiasm that was unleashed by this revolutionary act was, nevertheless, tempered by recognition that the end of Magyar rule did not mean the end of Central European liberalism. As a result, some Catholic Slovaks began to turn against the new Czechoslovak state almost immediately after they had turned against Hungary. Revolutionary change still seemed impossible when, in 1914, (Bosnian) Serbian nationalists assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne, Franz Ferdinand. In response, the Empire declared war on both Serbia and its ally Russia with the public support of all of Hungary’s parliamentary parties. The various strands of the Slovak nationalist movement, including the SĽS, lauded Hungary’s alliance with the Habsburgs and the Slovaks alliance with the Magyars. The SNS’s flagship newspaper, Národnie noviny, captured this new exaggerated loyalty towards Budapest and Vienna when, in August 1914, it used its front pages to laud ‘the thousand year tradition’ of a common state with the Magyars. With words that echoed the marriage ceremony, the paper asked ‘who would separate what God has joined together’. Leading figures in the SĽS followed suit, emulating the KNP’s own call for Slovak soldiers to be ‘true to their homeland and their king and serve in our army for glory’. There was certainly no trace of panslav solidarity. The Slovak Catholic press roundly condemned the assassination of the devout Catholic Franz Ferdinand. It then

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turned its rhetorical fire on Russia for its support of the Serbs, and France and Britain for their support of Russia.1 Slovak clergymen were initially enthusiastic about the conflict. The future leader of the party, Jozef Tiso, volunteered for military service; Ján Vojtaššák, a close friend of Hlinka and an ardent supporter of the SĽS, enthusiastically urged Slovaks to join the Imperial army; and Juriga presented the war as a sectarian rather than an ethnic conflict that would bring benefits for the Slovaks. He contrasted the House of Habsburg ‘which is uniquely in the world correctly, openly and officially Catholic’ with its non-Catholic enemies (Orthodox Russia, secular France and Protestant England). He also argued that the Empire, and by extension Hungary, was a state that in spite of its faults remained a positive homeland for the Slovaks. Most importantly, he stressed that the war would lead to a better future, because, ‘we fight for our nation, our Slovak language, because only in our [Habsburg] empire will we, as in a garden, grow and bloom.’ As he also reminded his parliamentary colleagues, Slovaks sacrificed their lives for their fatherland with the same ‘enthusiasm’ as ‘each and every member of the Magyar nation’. Such rhetoric was motivated, in part, by the widespread confidence in a speedy victory that was felt across the empire. It was also, however, encouraged by the unspoken hope that Slovak nationalists’ support for the war would refute allegations that they were unpatriotic. The sacrifices of Slovak soldiers, it was also hoped, would encourage the government to grant them, and their fellow Slovak speakers, tangible concessions.2 Even at the beginning of the war, there were, however, signs of pessimism among the party leadership. Both Skyčák and Dr Blaho resigned from parliament. The former leader of the party took up a post on a committee in his home town of Námestovo charged with facilitating the conscription of local soldiers.3 Hlinka meanwhile ensconced himself in Ružomberok, refrained from all political agitation and concentrated instead on his duties as parish priest. His primary focus during the war was not party politics, but the spiritual renewal of the clergy. In 1916 he established a new publishing house, Lev, and the following year he launched a new Slovak-language journal for the clergy, Duchovný pastier. This journal immediately established itself as the in-house journal of the Slovakspeaking Catholic clergy. At least 68 priests contributed to Duchovný pastier in its first two years of publication, and it obtained 631 subscribers: a source of contacts that Hlinka would be able to exploit when he relaunched the SĽS at the end of 1918.4 Local officials, however, appear to have been unconcerned with religious publications. They were convinced that with the outbreak of the war the Slovak nationalist movement had effectively disappeared. As one of the district officials in Árva County noted, ‘In the last few years there hasn’t been [a Slovak

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nationalist movement] in the county and if there was – it has stopped.’ Reflecting on this period, even the party’s first leader Skyčák would later concede that the party’s activities had, with the outbreak of the war, ‘ceased completely’.5 Beneath a veneer of loyalty and passivity, Slovak nationalist attitudes grew increasingly embittered as their hope for concessions from the government was proved false. István Tisza, who had become prime minister for a second time in 1913, had engendered much speculation that a deal could be made with Hungary’s minorities. As one of his generation’s most astute politicians, Tisza recognized that some kind of accommodation would have to eventually be made with the disgruntled representatives of the non-Magyar half of Hungary’s population. He also believed that their support would be useful as he tried to ensure smooth relations with the emperor in the teeth of chauvinistic Magyar hostility from the ‘Forty-Eighters’. He was also aware that representatives of the minorities in parliament, including the Slovak deputies, were willing to support the government on occasion. For example, the Slovak nationalists had cooperated with the government against their mutual enemies in the 1910 elections. Skyčák had also backed the government’s new effort to finally increase Hungary’s contribution to the funding of the joint army, in spite of denunciations from some of his fellow Slovak nationalists.6 Both Skyčák and Juriga had also ramped up their Hungarus and anti-Czech rhetoric after the 1910 elections. As Skyčák himself declared, Hungary had protected the Slovaks against the Germans, Czechs and Poles ‘who otherwise would have already ripped us apart’.7 In reality, even though Tisza opened various private lines of communication with leading Slovak nationalists, particularly Juriga, this produced only the briefest of rapprochements and the barest of concessions. The SĽS did support the government’s annual budget in 1914 and, thereby, publicly expressed its support for Tisza’s government.8 In return the Lex Apponyi of 1907 was modified to ensure that all children, in their first six years of primary school, received religious instruction in their native language. There were also new opportunities for additional instruction in this language if a number of criteria were met.9 The government also oversaw the opening of a new university in Bratislava, added faculties of medicine and philosophy to the original faculty of law, and even made positive noises about establishing a chair of the Slovak language. Tisza also invited Juriga for a private meeting. Any expectation that the SĽS would be treated as a serious negotiating partner proved, however, to be a false hope as even preliminary discussions between the two parties rapidly broke down.10 Even so, Juriga continued to cling to the hope that the sacrifices of Slovak soldiers would persuade the government that the Slovaks deserved to be

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treated better. A proposal floated by the minister of education in 1916 – which would have allowed schools to cease teaching ancient Greek in favour of a modern European language, including any of the languages spoken by Hungary’s minorities – was greeted with jubilation by Juriga ‘as the cornerstone of a new era’. In spite of his insistence that ‘the era of the law of the holy ghost will begin if this becomes law’, no such legislation actually made it on to the statute books. His own proposal to establish a Slovak language department at the new university in Bratislava was also voted down in parliament.11 Furthermore, although a series of laws designed to produce a fairer electoral system began to be placed on the statute books in 1913, and culminated in a significant expansion of the franchise in 1917, they were never actually put into practice. The government was convinced that fresh elections were impractical as long as the war continued.12 Moreover, Romania’s failed invasion of Transylvania in 1916 also ensured that the government’s attitudes towards the minorities hardened. In 1917, Tisza publicly dismissed the Slovak representatives in parliament on the grounds that they were unrepresentative of the Slovak people who were loyal to the Hungarian government. Meanwhile Apponyi, who had been reappointed as minister of education, clamped down on Romanian language teaching in Transylvania which, as Peter Pastor has observed, portended for all of Hungary’s minorities ‘a return to the policy of forced assimilation’.13 Tisza was unaware that popular support for the war among the Slovaks had been relentlessly undermined by the brutality of the conflict and was approaching a tipping point. Over half of the adult male population of the empire was drafted into military service, of whom thirteen per cent were killed, 25 per cent were wounded and 21 per cent were taken prisoner. Slovak casualties were actually above average. They made up about four per cent of the empire’s total conscripts, but almost seven per cent of those who lost their lives on the battlefield. In total, of the 3.4 million Hungarian citizens who fought in the war, 530 000 were killed, 1.4 million were wounded, 833 000 were taken prisoner, and the numbers of those who were traumatized, brutalized and radicalized can only be guessed at.14 The escalating economic crisis also exacerbated popular dissatisfaction with the war and the governing elite, even though Hungary was able to stave off food shortages for most of the war due to her surplus agricultural production. The cost of food increased during the war by almost 300 per cent, the cost of clothing by over 1000 per cent, and by 1918 rationing had been introduced. The last Habsburg emperor, Charles IV, even struggled to find enough ink to sign his own resignation.15

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It is, however, noteworthy that the vast majority of Slovak conscripts fought loyally throughout the war and displayed the same fortitude as their fellow Magyars. Their loyalty to both their homeland and their empire was even singled out for commendation by the army’s chief of general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf. He specifically lauded their ‘heroic fighting’ and their ‘patriotism and loyalty to the dynasty’.16 Some Slovaks did desert from the regular army, but Magyar soldiers were just as willing to do so. By the final year of the war, the Hungarian regiments of the common army were looking for 200,000 missing soldiers. The number of Slovaks who switched sides and joined the Czechoslovak Legions, which were fighting on behalf of the allied powers to break up the Habsburg Empire, was strikingly low.17 The Hungarus spirit, along with relentless propaganda, a loyalty to their fellow soldiers, and severe penalties for desertion, were the dominant factors shaping Slovak participation in the war. It was not until May 1918 that intelligence reports noted that some Slovak soldiers were declaring ‘let’s get rid of Hungary’.18 By that point the leaders of the SĽS, and the SNS, had also concluded that the Empire and Hungary needed to be dismantled. Their anger at the government’s failure to grant any meaningful concessions was exacerbated by the harsh punishments meted out to those few Slovak Catholics clergymen who did criticize the war. For example, Jozef Kačka became a cause celebre among Slovak clergymen after he was initially sentenced to death for criticizing the conflict.19 Juriga, the last Slovak MP left in parliament, was able to give voice to the mounting disillusionment and anger of his fellow Slovak nationalist politicians. He used his freedom of speech in parliament to demand an increasingly radical transformation of the country as the war progressed. By the last year of the war, he was demanding an immediate expansion of the suffrage, on the emotive grounds that every soldier deserved the right to select their political masters who would send them into battle, and votes for women to reward their sacrifices. Juriga also called for requisitioning from the rich, lauded Marx and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, lambasted Hungary’s ‘ruling class’ and insisted that ‘a new Hungary is needed without religious, national, language and class divisions.’20 Nevertheless, he remained committed to the maintenance of the Habsburg Empire and, by extension, the territorial integrity of Hungary until early 1918. It was only after his increasingly impassioned calls for ‘a new Hungary’ to justify the sacrifices of Slovak soldiers were ignored that he began to look favourably at the allied powers’ promise of a new Czechoslovak state. His outburst during a parliamentary debate on 19 October, 1918 that ‘the entirety of Hungarian politics

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in this parliament is nothing more than a genteel game of cards. A game played by five or six persons’ perfectly captured the extent of Juriga’s disillusionment with Hungarian politics by the end of the First World War. 21 Other Slovak politicians were also prepared by 1918 to ‘think the unthinkable’ and consider what would occur if the Habsburg empire lost the war. They were aware that their ethnic kin abroad were drawing up plans for the post-war era that involved dismantling the Habsburg Empire and Hungary. Already in 1915, self-appointed representatives of the Czechs and Slovaks in America had proclaimed, in the ‘Cleveland Declaration’, that the two peoples needed to create a new ‘Czechoslovak’ state. Outright independence for the Slovaks was, after all, seen as a practical impossibility. Some form of federation with the Czechs offered both security and liberation. The allied powers – Britain, France, Russia and later Italy, Romania and the United States – were initially reluctant to publicly countenance a post-war redrawing of the borders. The hope that the war could be shortened by turning the Slovaks and Czechs against the empire proved, however, irresistible. Both Russia and France had established regiments, known as legions, composed of Czechs and Slovaks who volunteered to fight on the allies side to liberate their countrymen. By 1918 a public promise of ‘self-determination’ for all the peoples of the Habsburg Empire had been issued by the American President Woodrow Wilson. The French and the British governments went even further and publicly committed themselves to establishing a new ‘Czechoslovak’ state. Those Slovaks who had previously rejected an alliance with the Czechs because of their faith in the Russian ‘liberator’ were disabused of this hope following the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917. In contrast to the excesses of Lenin and his comrades, even Czech liberals such as Masaryk appeared moderate, even conservative. By the spring of 1918 leading Slovak nationalists from across the political spectrum, including Hlinka, had begun to seriously consider breaking away from Hungary. Briefly putting aside old enmities, Hlinka rebuilt his friendship with Šrobár and prepared to work with the SNS. Even the leading Slovak Social Democrats were invited to join a new cross-party organization that was given the grand title of the Slovak national council (Slovak: Slovenská národná rada). Hlinka even endorsed the ‘Czechoslovak orientation’ of this council by insisting that the Czechs anti-Catholic tendencies would actually be curbed by their inclusion in a common state with the devoutly Catholic Slovaks. He declared at one point that ‘we must revitalize the faith of the Czechs and they must revitalize our national economy and culture’.22

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The first joint meeting of the various Slovak nationalist parties took place in Martin on 24 May, 1918. The meeting was foolishly permitted by the minister of the interior on the grounds that it would provide an excellent opportunity to monitor the Slovak nationalist movement. He informed the local főispán of Turócz County that ‘confidential detailed information should be gained about those preparing the meeting, those attending the meeting and the declarations made there’.23 It was a catastrophic mistake. This meeting – which was attended by members of the SNS, several Slovak Social Democrats, as well as Hlinka and Vojtaššák formally committed all the participants to the new policy of breaking-up the Kingdom of Hungary. They agreed that they favoured ‘the unconditional and complete right of self-determination of the Slovak nation … in an independent state consisting of Slovakia [and the Czech lands of] Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia’.24 It was a curious coincidence that Hlinka, who had first entered politics to oppose the imposition of civil marriage, used the metaphor of a failed marriage to persuade his fellow participants to take this decisive step. He famously declared, ‘Let us say clearly that we support the Czechoslovak orientation. The thousand year marriage with the Magyars has failed. We must separate.’25 The authorities proved, however, incapable of either squashing the Slovak nationalists or even taking their plans seriously. Officials in northern Hungary continued to be far more concerned about socialists, anarchists, returning POWs and anti-Jewish violence than they were about Slovak nationalist agitation.26 An unwillingness to recognize the scale of the crisis was, however, evident at all levels of the government. It was not, until 17 October 1918 that Tisza admitted in parliament ‘we have lost this war’. Admittedly, up to then the war seemed winnable as Russia had collapsed, the German army had prepared fresh offensives, and harsh censorship concealed the gradual tipping of the scales in the allies’ favour. Nevertheless, when Juriga informed his fellow MPs on 19 October that ‘the Slovak nation does not recognize the legitimacy and the representative character of this parliament and this government any more’ and that ‘at the [forthcoming] Peace Conference, the Slovak people will take care of the representation of their interest by themselves’, his speech was greeted with a blend of bemused incredulity and incessant heckling. As Zsolt Nagy has observed, Hungary’s political elite still believed in October 1918 that ‘Hungary would retain its place within the European community with its territorial integrity untouched.’27 Juriga was, however, merely being prescient when he concluded his speech by declaring that ‘in the past, federalism might have resolved the problem of

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Hungary. Now, however, it is too late.’ The next gathering of prominent Slovak nationalists which took place in Martin at the very end of October 1918 merely put into action the course of action they had already agreed upon in May. The last Habsburg emperor, Charles IV, had already issued a manifesto that promised the reorganization of his empire on national lines, and self-proclaimed national ‘councils’ formed throughout the empire to enforce their claims for independence. The 105 Slovak nationalists, including Hlinka and Juriga, the leadership of the SNS and several Slovak Social Democrats, who met under the auspices of the Slovak national council on 29–30 October, seized their chance. They proceeded to draft and sign a resolution which declared that they ‘alone’ were ‘entitled to speak in the name of the Slovak Nation in Slovakia’ and that ‘the Slovak Nation is part of the Czecho-Slovak nation’.28 They were aware, as their deliberations drew to a close, that another national council (Slovak: Národný výbor), which claimed to represent both the Czech and the Slovaks, had seized power in Prague on 28 October and proclaimed the establishment of a new Czechoslovak Republic.29 The decision by the SĽS leadership to join their fellow Slovak nationalists’ attempt to break away from Hungary was reinforced by events in Budapest. Leading Hungarian Social Democrats had joined with progressive figures led by Mihály Károlyi to form a national council (Magyar: Magyar nemzeti tanács). This council then claimed the right to assume the government of Hungary, and in fact seized power in Budapest on the night of 31 October. This coup ensured that the Slovaks now had to confront a blend of Magyar nationalism and progressive idealism that Slovak Catholics were always likely to find doubly disconcerting. Hostility to the Károlyi government was reinforced by its failure to appoint a single Slovak to any cabinet position. Károlyi’s decision to entrust responsibility for ‘minority’ (Magyar: nemzetiségi) policy to a Jewish convert to Calvinism, Oszkár Jászi, was also unlikely to appeal to Slovak Catholics. Jászi had a deserved reputation as an enlightened and tolerant figure who had no time for Magyar chauvinism, but his anticlerical instincts, Marxist leanings, Jewish ancestry and Calvinist faith, ensured he would be viewed with suspicion. His subsequent efforts to appeal to the minorities were easily dismissed as a ruse by which the Magyars, and the Jews, could maintain their grip on the country. Károlyi, another fundamentally decent man, was also burdened by a lack of charisma. He had the additional stigma of being one of the richest members of Hungary’s landowning class. He also laboured under the naive belief that Slovak dissatisfaction could be ameliorated by the promise of future federalization. Hungary’s decision to declare independence from the Habsburg Empire on

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16 November reinforced the Slovak nationalist argument that the old bonds that had held the empire and Hungary together had been broken. As John Swanson has pointed out, the fact that not a single Slovak representative was present when Hungary formally proclaimed its independence, also suggested that the split between the Slovaks and the Magyars was now irrevocable.30 In the wake of the Slovak national council’s own declaration of independence, hundreds of branches of the Slovak national council were founded across Slovakia. Rival councils, usually Magyar and or workers councils, also took over the responsibility for governance from the Hungarian authorities. The result was chaos and minimal resistance to a Czech military invasion. In November, the new Czechoslovak government in Prague sent its representatives to western Slovakia to form a ‘provisional government’. This government, accompanied by the newly formed ‘Czechoslovak army’, then extended its control over the entirety of the Slovak highlands by the end of January. Although the new borders were not formally demarcated by the victorious Great Powers, Great Britain, France and Italy until the signing of the ‘Treaty of Trianon’ on 4 June, 1920. In reality, wherever the Czechoslovak army ended its advance into Hungary became the northern and southern borders of interwar Slovakia. Only two villages, Somoskő and Somoskőújfalu, were handed over to Hungary by Czechoslovakia after the end of hostilities in 1919. Thus, as the Habsburg Empire and Hungary imploded, the new Czechoslovakia took shape. It contained, just over two million Slovaks and almost seven million Czechs. It also had sizeable minorities including over three million ethnic Germans, around 600,000 Magyars, mostly residing along Slovakia’s southern border, almost 500,000 Rusyns concentrated in the far east of the country and substantial populations of Jews and Roma.31 Simultaneously, almost the entirety of the old Hungarian governing class in the Slovak regions either fled into exile or were purged from positions of influence. They were replaced by ethnic Slovaks and Czechs including former members of the SĽS. The ancient regime of Habsburg emperors, aristocratic politicians, gentry bureaucrats, and liberal policies, appeared to have gone forever. The Károlyi government meanwhile proved incapable of resisting the collapse of its authority everywhere in Hungary. Transylvania and the south of the country were rapidly conquered by the Romanian and Serbian armies. Then, by March 1919, Károlyi had resigned from office. He was replaced first by a social democratic government and then, almost immediately, by a brutal Bolshevik dictatorship, headed by Béla Kun. The Bolsheviks launched a belated and unsuccessful attempt to forcibly reconquer northern Hungary that achieved

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some initial successes. The brutality that accompanied the Bolshevik advance, which targeted clergymen as well as Czechoslovak patriots, also added to the fear of Bolshevism. As many of Kun’s commissars were Jews, antisemitism, entwined with a fear of bolshevism, bolstered Slovak Catholic support for the new Czechoslovak state.32 Many Slovak Catholics were not only horrified by events in Hungary, but initially enthused by the creation of Czechoslovakia. In particular, they were confident that the revolutionary fervour, including national self-determination and the introduction of universal suffrage, opened up limitless possibilities for Slovak Catholics to shape the Czechoslovak state. For example, Hlinka in January 1919 publicly rejoiced that ‘under the slogan “for our Slovak language” we began the struggle decades ago. … It is now clear that we have been victorious.’33 Even one of the most vociferous critics of the Czechoslovak government in the interwar period, Jehlička, who had kept his distance from the Slovak nationalist movement since 1907, was initially caught up on the idealism that engulfed Slovak Catholics in the winter of 1918. Abandoning his teaching post at the University of Budapest, Jehlička rushed back to Slovakia and proclaimed his loyalty to the Czechoslovak state. In his explanation for this about-turn that he provided in the pages of Juriga’s Slovenské ľudové noviny, Jehlička did warn his readers that they would have to resist some of the ‘ideas of Prague’, their new capital. Nevertheless, he insisted, this would be an easier task than having to defend themselves against the ‘ideas of Budapest’. For good measure he also dismissed the Habsburg Empire as a state that had only benefitted the Jews. Doubts about how the Slovaks would cooperate with the Czechs were also dismissed by Jehlička with the claim that ‘the Czech nation … loves the Slovak language like its own language’. He rousingly finished his article with the declaration, ‘Let this be our slogan: To hell with old Hungary, let it be only for the Magyars. Long live the Czechoslovak state!’34 Confidence was also bolstered by the new regime’s willingness to give the SĽS leaders a serious role in shaping the country. Dr Pavel Blaho, the first head of the provisional government of Slovakia, was a former SĽS MP.35 Hlinka, Juriga and Jehlička were also appointed to the new Czechoslovak National Assembly and Jehlička was entrusted with reordering the university in Bratislava. There was even some talk of Hlinka being appointed as a ‘metropole’ who would preside over a reformed Catholic church in Slovakia. Moreover, Slovak Catholics now had the freedom to use their own language in church services and religious instruction and all the opportunities for advancement that flowed from the creation of a new Catholic hierarchy in Czechoslovakia. They could legitimately

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hope that in the new era, the rejuvenated Catholic faith would triumph over its secular enemies.36 Slovak Catholics could also look forward to shaping the policies that would govern the new state. For the first time they would be proportionally represented in the highest organs of the state and, as Bartlová has emphasized, would now ‘assume … the shared responsibility for the mutual development and destiny of the republic’.37 The Czechoslovak state was, after all, specifically created, as its name suggests, to serve the interests of its two ‘state-founding nations’, the Czechs and the Slovaks. The rhetorical empowerment of the Slovaks was also backed up by practical measures such as the introduction of universal suffrage, the secret ballot, and equal constituencies. These reforms were intended to ensure that the Slovaks had an influence on decision-making commensurate with their share of the total population. MPs from Slovakia always had, for example, one-fifth of the seats in the new Czechoslovak parliament and Slovaks were included in every Czechoslovak government that was formed from 1918 onwards.38 This empowerment helped ensure that the SĽS was throughout the entirety of the interwar period, from the creation of the Czechoslovak First Republic in 1918 to its dissolution in 1938, formally loyal to the state and played a generally constructive role at both the national and the local level. For example, its representatives in the Czechoslovak National Assembly supported the election to the presidency of Masaryk and his successor Eduard Beneš, voted for the new Czechoslovak constitution in 1920, served in the government from 1927-1929, and never boycotted a single election throughout the entire interwar period. An excellent example of the SĽS’s willingness to play a constructive role came, following the its entry into the government in 1927 and a nationwide reform of the local administration. The Ministry with Full Power for the Administration of Slovakia, and the six supersized counties were all replaced by a new Provincial Office (Slovak: Krajinský úrad). This new Slovak government was supervised by a largely elected ‘assembly’ modelled on the regional governments that had governed the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia since 1923. These were the first nationwide Slovak institutions that were directly accountable to Slovak voters and they provided Slovakia with genuine albeit limited autonomy. This reform also gave the SĽS an importance in these bodies that it only rarely achieved at the nationwide level. The party always occupied one-third of the elected seats in the Provincial Assembly and even nominated the first President of the Provincial Office, Jozef Drobný, who served from 1928-1929. The SĽS had, therefore, the capacity to either sabotage or ensure the smooth working of the Provincial Office. It repeatedly chose the second option and

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ensured that this autonomous Slovak government was a model of cross-party agreements and consensus decision-making. For example, the SĽS refused to support the Provincial Office’s annual budget on only one occasion, in 1933. This unusual protest resulted from a short-lived government crackdown on Slovak nationalist agitation after Hlinka and his supporters disrupted an official celebration in Nitra. Even then the party chose to abstain from the vote on the budget so that its opposition could be registered without actually jeopardizing the workings of the Provincial Office.39 Furthermore, as Ján Mlynárik has argued, until 1939 the SĽS ‘always put their demands within a Czechoslovak framework; they never sought to destroy the country or achieve autonomy under the aegis of a foreign power’.40 Those members of the party who openly challenged Czechoslovakia’s legitimacy were expelled from the party’s ranks. For example, Jehlička was, from 1919 onwards condemned to wage a vociferous campaign from exile against Czechoslovakia without the obvious support of any of his erstwhile party colleagues. Even Hlinka, who in the summer of 1919 made a surprise trip to the Paris peace conferences to lobby the great powers to grant Slovakia autonomy, provoked incredulous anger even among his fellow SĽS MPs. They agreed that he should be stripped of his parliamentary mandate. Jozef Buday, one of the party’s leading figures throughout the interwar period, also declared in parliament that the SĽS would throw out anyone who is ‘opposed to our republic’. A meeting of what remained of the party leadership in November 1919 was even more explicit. It promised that ‘we will work for the unity of the Czechoslovak Republic and for everything which supports, gives life to, and strengthens the unity of the Czechoslovak people’.41 An element of pragmatism also encouraged Slovak support for the Czechoslovak state. As R.W. Seton-Watson (1879–1951) noted in 1924, ‘it is admitted on all sides … what indeed no sane man could deny that the Slovaks could not unaided provide Slovakia with a government and administration capable of maintaining itself against the Magyars, and that only the Czechs can supply the gaps in personnel [sic] and equipment’.42 The SĽS’s outward show of loyalty to the new state was also influenced by a recognition that most Slovaks evinced little nostalgia for the old Kingdom of Hungary. As even some foreign diplomats who were critical of Slovakia recognized, most Slovaks accepted the legitimacy of the Czechoslovak state. They also enthusiastically welcomed the policies of slovakization, democratization, de-centralization, and large-scale land reform that were enacted by the central government.43

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Moreover, as a result of this enduring loyalty, the SĽS was able to secure significant concessions. That was especially the case when, as Elisabeth Bakke has noted, it cooperated with rival parties.44 The SĽS blocked the legalization of abortion, curtailed efforts to set up colonies of Czech immigrants in Slovakia, forced the Czechoslovak State Railways to begin using the Slovak names of localities in its signage in Slovakia, prevented the transfer of the minting of currency from Slovakia, and ensured that the Austrian civil law code, which had been adopted in the Czech lands after 1918, was not imposed upon Slovakia.45 The party also used its influence to obtain concessions for the Catholic church from the land reform, to increase the salaries of priests and to bolster government funding for the electrification of rural communities throughout Slovakia. In addition, it successfully lobbied the government to maintain substantial tariffs on agricultural products, which protected Slovak farming interests and even obtained a bailout of ten million crowns for the people’s bank in Ružomberok, whose president happened to be the leader of the SĽS, Hlinka.46 Nevertheless, broad-based support for the new Czechoslovak state among Slovak Catholics coincided with a growing conviction among the leadership of the SĽS that the new Czechoslovak government was actually guided by the same liberal ideology as the old Hungarian government. This view was later summed up by Hlinka himself when he insisted that the government in Prague ‘on the whole…pursue[d] the same path which was followed by the Magyar politicians’.47 That was a blatant exaggeration. Under close examination each strand of Czechoslovak ‘liberalism’ was markedly different from its Hungarian predecessor. Nevertheless, the two ideologies shared enough in common, to convince some Slovaks that, in spite of all the benefits that they had accrued from their incorporation into the new Czechoslovak republic, the struggle to defend the Slovak nation and the Catholic faith needed to be relaunched.48

Czechoslovak liberalism At first glance, pre-1918 Hungarian liberalism and post-1918 Czechoslovak liberalism had nothing in common. Indeed, Czechoslovakia was created by Czechs and Slovaks who rejected the governing ideologies in pre-1918 Hungary and Austria. There was also no obvious links between the parties that governed Czechoslovakia after 1918 and the parties that governed Hungary before 1918. To take one example, the MSZDP was bitterly opposed to the Hungarian

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governing class and failed to win a single seat in parliament before 1918, whereas the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers Party (Slovak: Československá sociálnodemokratická strana robotnícka, hereafter ČSSR) was a member of the various governing coalitions for most of the interwar period. Nevertheless, there were striking similarities between post-Ausgleich Hungary and the Czechoslovak First Republic. As was the case with postAusgleich Hungary after 1867, Czechoslovakia was also born out of nationalist sentiment and was convinced of both its inherent fragility and the limitless possibilities for progress. As was the case in pre-war Hungary, it was also determined to overcome its own impoverishment, assert its authority over its truculent minorities, fend off its enemies both real and imagined and, according to its more messianic statesmen, fulfil its ‘national mission’.49 Thus, although Patrick Crowhurst has, for example, asserted that Czechoslovakia, in the interwar period, ‘was orientated towards western liberalism’, the ideology of the governing elite shared much in common with the Central European variant of liberalism which had been promoted by Hungary’s governing class before 1918.50 Moreover, as Robert Evans has keenly observed, the challenges that Czechoslovakia confronted, along with the other successor states to the Habsburg Empire, instilled in her leaders ‘many aspects of a backward looking mentality, broadly conservative, exclusive and immobile’. As a result the men who governed Czechoslovakia in the interwar period preserved substantial parts of the old Habsburg and Hungarian legacy. This legacy was evident at the most general level in, for example, the dominance of the middle classes and the enduring vices and virtues of overweening bureaucratization. These continuities were given concrete form by the continued use of essentially unreformed Habsburg and Hungarian law codes in the two halves of Czechoslovakia throughout the interwar period. Both the progressive instincts and the ingrained conservatism of the interwar Czechoslovak governing class inspired some Slovak Catholics to draw parallels between the governing ideology of pre-1918 Hungary and post1918 Czechoslovakia.51

Centralization Just as in post-Ausgleich Hungary, interwar Czechoslovak governments believed, at least initially, that centralization was a prerequisite for the successful transformation of the state. The scale of this centralization was exaggerated by

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contemporary critics and later historians. As was noted above, by 1927 a genuine measure of autonomy had been granted to Slovakia. Nevertheless, in the wake of Czechoslovakia’s creation, the new government in Prague imposed its authority upon all of its disparate peoples, including the Slovaks. For example, all of Slovakia’s quasi-autonomous political institutions, including all of the Slovak national councils, were rapidly abolished. In their place came direct rule from Prague and a stint of martial law that gave Vavro Šrobár, the first Minister with Full Power for the Administration of Slovakia (Slovak: Minister s plnou mocou pre správu Slovenska), a long-standing reputation as a ‘dictator of Slovakia’. The county system initially survived, although each county was presided over government-appointed Župans whose authority mirrored that of the former Hungarian főispáns. By 1923, however, the counties had been merged into 6 large districts, and in 1927 those too were abolished.52

Anticlericalism The government’s policies towards the Catholic church also angered some Slovaks. Concerns about the anticlerical character of the new regime were always likely to emerge due to the pre-war reputations of the leading personalities in the Republic. For example, the new head of state, Tomáš Masaryk, had acquired a reputation prior to the war as a relentless critic of the Catholic church. These concerns were then heightened by the outpouring of anticlerical sentiment that accompanied the creation of Czechoslovakia. While Cynthia Paces and Nancy Wingfield have questioned the characterization of interwar Czechoslovakia as ‘progressive, modern and secular’, they recognize that some ‘Czech nationalists associated Roman Catholic religious symbols with autocratic Austrian power’. This assault on the symbols of the Catholic faith was encapsulated by the notorious demolition of the Marian Column in the old town square of Prague on 3 November, 1918. As Bruce Berglund has observed, ‘the toppled column became a defining symbol of the republic: its destruction revealed the depth of anti-Catholic hostility among Czech nationalists, and it was a signal that committed Catholics would be marginalized in their own country.’53 Those Czechoslovak soldiers, most of whom were in fact Czechs, who ‘liberated’ the Slovak highlands in the winter of 1918 also engaged in an orgy of destruction of the public symbols of the old regime. Many of these symbols contained Catholic symbolism, such as the ‘holy crown’ of Saint Stephen that sat atop the Hungarian coat of arms.54

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Moreover, the new civil law code, passed in 1920 in spite of furious opposition by Catholic clergymen, once again permitted civil marriage, removed all prohibitions on interfaith marriages and permitted all married couples to divorce irrespective of their religious affiliation. In short, as Melissa Feinberg has noted, the new code represented the ‘rejection of religious dogma in favour of a more modern sensibility’. Cremations, which were condemned as sacrilegious by the Catholic church, were also for the first time permitted in Slovakia. In addition, Catholics had to wage a lengthy and concerted campaign to prevent the National Assembly legalizing abortion. Catholics were also buffeted by the creation of a schismatic ‘Czechoslovak church’ that was founded on the principles of the Czech national hero Jan Hus, who had been executed by the Catholic church in 1415. This break-away church ultimately claimed only few adherents in Slovakia. Nevertheless, its establishment, along with the blessing it received from the new government in Prague, provoked concerns among Slovak Catholic clergymen that revolutionary upheaval had mutated into the threat of heresy and even schism.55 The state also confiscated a large chunk of the church’s land holdings in Slovakia and placed a number of Catholic schools under direct state control.56 Even those schools that remained formally Catholic underwent a purge of their teaching staffs who were unable or unwilling to teach in Slovak. As Šrobár’s referent for Catholic affairs explained, the only alternatives were ‘to close them altogether or to leave them in Magyar hands’. Nevertheless, as Dorothea El Mallakh has wryly noted, ‘that many Slovaks might see this act as anti-Catholic instead of antiMagyar seems not to have influenced this decision.’57 The secularization of these schools went hand in hand with a reduction in the hours devoted to religious education. Furthermore, in the first year of Czechoslovakia’s existence, dozens of clergymen were arrested, including Hlinka and five of the six Catholic bishops who oversaw dioceses that were now contained within Slovakia were expelled. It is, therefore, unsurprising that, as Berglund has concluded, ‘from the first days of the new republic, many of these Catholic writers and intellectuals felt themselves thrust into a “culture war,” in which they had to defend their rightful place in the nation.58 The wave of anticlericalism that spread across Czechoslovakia in the first years of the republic’s existence did not, as Roman Holec has persuasively argued, find much of an echo among ordinary Slovaks. He notes that in spite of the radical changes that had occurred, most Slovaks remained faithful to the Catholic church; as late as 1948 only 2 per cent of Slovaks declared that they did not attend any form of religious service. There was, therefore, an obvious tension

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between the anticlerical tendencies of the Czech-dominated government and the steadfast Catholicism of many Slovaks. This division appeared to mirror the tension between the Slovaks and the governing Liberal Party before 1918, and could easily be viewed by the Slovak Catholics as further proof that the decadeslong culture war had not ended in their part of central Europe.59 As early as February 1919 leading Slovak Catholics were already complaining to the Papal Nuncio in Czechoslovakia about their inability to resist the spread of ‘atheist and anti-Catholic’ ideas emanating from the government in Prague. As Hlinka melodramatically put it, using the rhetoric that had always animated Catholic participation in the culture wars across Europe, ‘a battle is raging against the church’.60

Czechification Judged solely on its outcome, the creation of Czechoslovakia did at least result in a renaissance of the Slovak language and culture. In fact, Slovak nationalists – in spite of their earlier denunciations of magyarization – were generally enthusiastic about the equally unpleasant policy of slovakization’. The aggressive promotion of the Slovak language by the Czechoslovak authorities resulted in it becoming the language of instruction in most schools and the language of officialdom in most government institutions. All public signs, including shop signs, and the names of every town, village, street, and square also had to be provided in Slovak. Official bilingualism was only required in those localities where more than 20 per cent of the population spoke a ‘minority’ language. In addition, Slovak culture was revitalized by the re-opening of the leading Slovak cultural institution, the Matica Slovenska, as well as the establishment of numerous Slovak cultural institutions including a Slovak national theatre, a Slovak national orchestra, and eventually Slovak-language radio broadcasts. In total, Elena Mannová has estimated that, during the life of the republic, some 16,000 new associations were established in Slovakia, the majority of which used the Slovak language. In addition, the total number of Slovak-language publications in Slovakia increased from 24 at the turn of the century to 173 by 1930.61 Formally, however, each successive Czechoslovak government reiterated the official Hungarian position before 1918 that there was no distinct Slovak nation and no distinct Slovak language. The census records lumped Czechs and Slovaks together as ‘Czechoslovaks’, the preamble to the new constitution of the state, passed into law in 1920 declared that the Slovaks belonged to the

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single Czechoslovak nation (Slovak: národ československý), while the so-called language law of the same year stated that only ‘the Czechoslovak language is the state, official language of Czechoslovakia’.62 The ‘Czechification’ of Slovakia also manifested itself in the arrival, from 1918 onwards, of a large number of Czech soldiers, civil servants and state employees, such as teachers and railway workers, who assisted in the post-war reconstruction of Slovakia. In the absence of sufficient qualified ethnic Slovaks, these Czech migrants filled many administrative positions that the Magyars had to vacate because of their presumed unreliability and inability to speak Slovak. In contrast, their Czech replacements spoke a language that the Slovaks had little difficulty understanding. Slovak critics of the government insisted, however, that these immigrants stole Slovak jobs and imposed their native Czech culture upon the Slovaks. C.A. Macartney’s claim that these Czech arrivals ‘were crude, they were ill mannered, they were aggressively egalitarian, and they were fanatically anti-clerical’ is a gross generalization. Nevertheless, Macartney perfectly captures the caricature that was ruthlessly exploited by Slovak nationalists in the interwar period who compared the new arrivals to ignorant and uncaring Magyar officials.63 For Slovaks who were acutely sensitive to any threat to the Slovak language, Czechification could be presented as a new incarnation of magyarization. As Hlinka’s chief advisor, Jehlička, put it in the summer of 1919 ‘what the Magyars had failed to do in one thousand years, our “brother” Czechs were carrying out immediately’.64 Revealingly, less than a year after Hlinka in 1919 had proclaimed the victory of the party’s pre-war slogan ‘for our Slovak language’ the SĽS once again declared that ‘this is our slogan for which we struggle’.65

The economic crisis As had been the case in pre-war Hungary, the government’s economic policies ensured that it was held responsible for the impoverishment that still afflicted Slovakia in the interwar period. It is, however, important to note that interwar Czechoslovakia was certainly not an economic basket case. In fact, it was the most prosperous state in Central Europe. For much of the interwar period the economy maintained a rate of growth which ensured that most Slovaks were far better off in 1938 than they had been in 1918. The actual economic policies of the new Czechoslovak government should also have been warmly welcomed by every strata of Slovak society. They marked a serious attempt to

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deal with ingrained poverty, inequality and economic backwardness through a broad-based programme that provided the basics of a welfare state, major investments in infrastructure, and a substantive land reform. Specific measures trumpeted in government propaganda included the introduction of the eighthour working day; the provision of a guaranteed pension and basic health care for all those in work; the redistribution of over half of the agricultural land in Slovakia to almost 200,000 families; new efforts to regulate all the major rivers in Slovakia; a major effort to expand Slovakia’s canal, road and rail network; and the launch of a programme to provide electricity to every community in Slovakia.66 Some of these policies took time, however, to come to fruition. Others were undermined by the economic depression that savaged the Czechoslovak economy for much of the 1930s. Moreover, immediate anger was generated by the central government’s decision in the first years of the new state’s existence to adopt a policy of austerity to head off the threat of hyper-inflation. As a result wages were initially curbed and a wave of strikes spread across Slovakia. The economy was also buffeted by new border controls, tariff barriers and the transition from a wartime to peacetime economy.67 In addition, the industrially more advanced economy in the Czech lands ensured that Czech industrial and financial institutions were in a prime position to replace their Magyar counterparts as the dominant economic force in Slovakia. That induced fresh complaints about ‘Czechification’. Particular hostility was directed at the large Czech banks that promptly extended their operations into Slovakia, but still demanded that their new customers repay their loans irrespective of the challenging economic climate. As a result, each economic downturn produced a surge of populist and xenophobic anger that tapped into the pre-war tradition of blaming non-Slovak, often Jewish, bankers for their (Slovak) customers’ bankruptcy. As early as 1922, the SĽS insisted that the ‘invasion’ of Czech capital was the reason that ‘many thousands of Slovak families have thus lost their bread’.68 Land reform also proved to be a gradual process that could not provide a comprehensive panacea for Slovak economic ailments. This was because agriculture remained in a slump for much of the interwar period. In addition, this reform was also mired in allegations of corruption, favouritism and mismanagement, and was burdened by the cumbersome and pedantic bureaucracy. Vital infrastructure investment in, for example, new railway lines, road building, electrification and hydropower also proved to be a lengthy process that was always dependent on broader economic growth. The fruits of

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this investment only began to become tangible in the late-1920s and were then partially derailed by the onset of the Great Depression. Another cause of considerable ire was the central government’s insistence that Slovakia should contribute a share of its revenue that roughly corresponded to its share of the population. Thus, Slovakia provided between 15-18 per cent of the government’s total tax revenue in spite of its relative impoverishment compared to the Czech lands. In Slovakia, for example, sixty per cent of the population continued to derive their income from agriculture whereas in the Czech lands this low-paid sector of the economy employed less than a third of the population. Slovaks also complained that they paid higher rates of tax, higher duties on alcohol, and higher fees for railway freight than the Czechs. In return they allegedly received lower agricultural subsidies, less generous pensions and no more than five per cent of all of the contracts awarded by the central government.69 As a result, large numbers of rural Slovak Catholics remained mired in poverty and susceptible to the scapegoating that had been pioneered by the SĽS before 1918. Ominously, this critique also overlapped with the anticapitalist, anti-industrial, anti-urban, xenophobic and antisemitic ideologies that were promulgated by other radical right-wing parties across Europe in the interwar period with increasing success.70

Emigration Although emigration from the Slovak lands diminished after 1918, this was primarily due to the new restrictions that the United States of America imposed on immigration from Europe. Thus, as soon as the war ended and the Atlantic Ocean was reopened to commercial shipping, Slovak emigration resumed. As a result, the SĽS continued throughout the interwar period to continually bemoan the departure of around 200,000 Slovaks from Czechoslovakia between 1920 and 1937.71 SĽS spokesmen repeatedly gave inflated numbers of emigrants, ignored those émigrés who subsequently returned to Slovakia, and surreptitiously included in the figures a sizeable number of Magyars and Jews. They also discounted all of the other more prosaic reasons why people chose to emigrate.72 Nevertheless, those Slovaks who worried about the emigration of their countrymen had always put the blame squarely on the government for this population outflow. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the SĽS did likewise in the interwar period.

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As the SĽS paper Slovák týždenník cuttingly pointed out, if emigration prior to 1918 was caused by the ‘Budapest regime’ then continued emigration after 1918 was also a direct consequence of government policy.73 That the per capita rate of emigration was five times greater from Slovakia than from the Czech lands bolstered the allegation that the Slovaks were victims of discrimination. The SĽS leadership repeatedly insisted that the economic and political situation favoured the Czechs in the interwar period just as it had favoured the Magyars before 1918. As early as 1920 even Juriga, a staunch supporter of Czechoslovakia’s creation, had specifically put the blame for Slovak emigration on the economic policies of the government in Prague. Government policies, he asserted, had turned Slovakia into ‘the Ireland of Central Europe’.74 The party’s rhetoric became even more heated at its congress in Žilina in 1922. The public declaration issued by this congress declared that the authorities in Prague were deliberately encouraging Slovak emigration because ‘in this way the Government systematically expels the whole autochthone Slovak population from the country, to have done with her once and for all’. Likewise, the party leadership insisted in 1925 that even seasonal workers were ‘forced to leave their dear fatherland’ as a result of the government’s policies.75 Similar scaremongering continued to be voiced by the party’s leaders throughout the interwar period. It was often infused with an emotive language that, for example, bemoaned the government’s supposed willingness to ‘allow our blood to flow away to foreign lands’ and compared ‘Slovak workers… [who] return with bloody feet’ with Czechs who travel ‘with feathers and fat stomachs.’76 Unsurprisingly, in the crucial days leading up to Slovakia’s declaration of independence in March, 1939, those Slovaks who favoured the final destruction of the Czechoslovak state latched onto these enduring concerns about emigration. SĽS activists proclaimed in covert radio broadcasts from Vienna that Slovaks had been ‘expelled’ from their ‘historic lands’ and had been forced to ‘wander from country to country without employment’. Independence, they insisted, would mean, among other things, ‘the right of Slovaks to return to their own country from which they had been driven by unwanted fate’.77

Urbanization The ‘flight to the cities’, which had provoked considerable alarm among Slovak Catholic writers before 1918, also continued throughout the interwar period. The fact that Slovakia was, once again after 1918, governed by a distant capital

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city (Prague), that was about the same size as Budapest, provoked obvious comparisons about the renewed dominance of grand capital cities over rural villages. It, therefore, encouraged comparisons between the ‘ideas of Prague’ and the ‘ideas of Budapest’. Moreover, the new Czechoslovak government just like the old Hungarian government naturally favoured the largest cities as its administrative centres. As Bratislava was the largest city in Slovakia it became the seat of the most important local governmental institutions including the various sub-branches of the central government in Prague. Bratislava was also where the solitary Slovak university was located, the Slovak national theatre, the first Slovak philharmonic orchestra, and the first Slovak radio station. Unsurprisingly, the concentration of government offices in Bratislava encouraged a simultaneous concentration of associations, banks and other businesses and an inflow of immigrants. One of its suburbs, Petržalka, grew in population by 400 per cent growth in the interwar period. Even the SĽS’s flagship newspaper, Slovak, which was initially published in Ružomberok, relocated to Bratislava. The party elite continued, however, to regard Bratislava with suspicion. Hlinka, for example, refused to relocate there and remained until his death in Ružomberok. Party conferences continued to be held in Žilina. Bratislava was, after all, situated on the very edge of Slovak territory far removed from the traditional heartlands of the Slovak nationalist movement. It also had a large Magyar and German population, attracted the largest number of Czech immigrants, had Slovakia’s largest Jewish population and remained dominated by a non-Slovak business elite. Unsurprisingly, it remained a frequent target of the interwar Slovak Catholic press, who repeatedly demanded that it should be transformed into a ‘Slovak Bratislava’.78

Alcoholism and the fear of moral collapse Renewed concerns also emerged about the crisis of morals that was engulfing Slovak society as a result of both the war and the violent break from Hungary. Evidence of this alleged collapse could be easily found in the breakdown of law and order and the orgy of looting that occurred in the autumn of 1918 as the central government’s authority collapsed. Earlier concerns about public drunkenness also re-emerged as Czech distillers ramped up their distribution networks in Slovakia to compensate for the difficulty transporting mass-produced alcohol from Hungary’s remaining urban centres to the Slovak countryside. There was

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even talk among Slovak government officials of introducing prohibition although they were ultimately dissuaded by the failure of the United States’ own effort to ban alcohol consumption.79 The SĽS continued to hammer home the argument that Czechoslovak liberalism was undermining Slovak Catholic faith and morals throughout the interwar period. As one of its senators, Karol Dembovský, put it ‘education without Catholic morality is not satisfactory. Children graduating from public instead of Catholic schools have no souls and become murderers and other depraved beings’.80 The party frequently put these concerns at the centre of its campaign rhetoric. In 1938, for example, it condemned its opponents who were ‘destroying the Christian family’, ‘repudiating sacramental marriage’ and ‘bring about the moral decay of our society’.81 This also dovetailed with the papacy’s insistence that the war itself had been caused by the ongoing moral crisis. In particular, the papacy blamed the spread of materialism and secularism across Europe on the liberal ideology that had emerged in the nineteenth century. In response, papal encyclicals inspired Catholic parties across Europe, (including the relaunched SĽS), to dedicate itself to the Christian ‘reconquest’ of society. As John Pollard has argued, this ensured that Catholics were, along with the fascists, ‘engaged in “palingenetic” projects … seeking a moral and spiritual rebirth of European society’.82 Moreover, just as had occurred before 1918, Catholic concerns about a moral collapse were exacerbated by the rise of left-wing parties such as the Communists and the Social Democrats. As Rebecca Haynes has pointed out a fear of communism in Central Europe was not irrational. The communists seizure of power in the Soviet Union ‘was followed little more than a year later by the Russian invasion of Poland and the destruction of the emerging independent Ukrainian state’, both of which were Czechoslovakia’s new neighbours. In addition, as discussed above, Béla Kun’s Bolshevik party had briefly seized power in Hungary and invaded Slovakia in the summer of 1919.83 Slovak Catholics’ fear of socialism was exacerbated by the fact that Czechoslovakia marked itself out as the only country in Central Europe which permitted a Communist Party to operate openly throughout the interwar period. Both the Communists and the Social Democrats also attracted significant support among Slovak agricultural workers. In each set of national elections held from 1925 onwards the Czechoslovak Communist Party was either the third or the fourth most popular party in Slovakia invariably gaining the support of almost ten per cent of the entire Slovak electorate. Even more dramatically, the Social Democrats, who had at most a single representative in the pre-1918 Hungarian parliament, became, in the 1920 elections, the most popular party

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throughout the country with the support of almost forty per cent of the Slovak electorate. They were subsequently included in every government coalition that was established throughout the interwar period with the exception of the period 1925-1929. In fact it was the electoral triumph of the ČSSR which Hlinka was referring to when in 1920 he told his supporters that he would ‘work day and night so long as red Slovakia has not become white Slovakia, Slovak Slovakia and Christian’.84

Philosemitism Hlinka’s desire to make Slovakia ‘Christian’ was, like so many of his pet phrases, utterly ambiguous. Plausibly, he simply wanted Slovaks to behave in a ‘Christian’ manner, reiterating a long-standing desire for religious and moral renewal by the Slovak Catholic clergy. It is also, however, possible that he was expressing his concern about the continuing presence and influence of Jews in Slovakia. Certainly, the new Czechoslovak state rejected any form of discrimination towards its Jewish minority and even, in a nod to Zionism, permitted Jews to describe themselves as a distinct nationality on the official census. The new head of state, Masaryk had, with questionable accuracy, acquired a reputation as a philosemite. He certainly admired the Zionist movement which he described as ‘striving for the moral rebirth of its people’. He had also incurred the criticism of antisemites when he successfully defended a Jew in court who had been accused of the ritual murder of a Christian, the so-called blood libel.85 The Jewish population of Slovakia, which made up less than five per cent of the total population, actually increased in some parts of Slovakia after 1918 and again in the late 1930s. This growth was fuelled by refugees fleeing persecution in other parts of Central Europe. The number of Jews in the eastern Slovak city of Košice, for example, increased by almost a quarter between 1921 and 1931. Jews also retained their leading role in business and the professions, comprising, for example, some forty per cent of all Slovak doctors. In addition, interwar Slovakia witnessed a building boom of synagogues and other Jewish religious and social institutions; tangible evidence of a flourishing and self-confident community.86 The vibrancy of Slovakia’s Jewish community was, however, confronted by widespread antisemitism that had been exacerbated rather than diminished by the destruction of the Hungarian liberal regime. Allegations that Jews had avoided military service, controlled the wartime black market, informed on their Slovak neighbours, assisted the Hungarian Bolshevik regime, and constituted

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either a pro-Magyar or a pro-Czech ‘fifth column’ poisoned relations between Slovak Catholics and their Jewish compatriots.87 As George Kennan, secretary of the American legation in Czechoslovakia in 1938-1939 and an exceptionally astute observer of Slovak nationalism, noted in one of his dispatches, ‘the Slovaks feel that the local Jews have always aligned themselves with Slovakia’s enemies’. He continued, ‘When the country was under Hungary the Jews, according to the Slovaks, made common cause with the [Magyars] in exploiting the Slovaks; when the country fell to Czechoslovakia the Jews joined with the more liberal Czechs in opposing Slovak autonomy.’88 James Felak has also fleshed out some of the impulses driving Slovak Catholic antisemitism in the interwar period. He notes that, although some Slovak Jews were lauded by the SĽS leadership, ‘the great majority’ of their fellow Jewish countrymen were regarded as an alien presence’. They continued, he notes, to be accused of refusing ‘to embrace the language and culture of their Slovak neighbours’, of having ‘subordinated morality to their material interests’ and were frequently ‘equated … with Bolsheviks’.89 Those Slovak Catholics who assumed, however, that the new Czechoslovak government would curb Jewish influence were rapidly disappointed. As Jozef Tiso, wrote ‘we always imagined freedom thus, that there would not be in the villages any Jewish tavern owners or shopkeepers, those tenants of the last sinful [Hungarian] government and herders to the devil…. [but] the Jews are still on our backs. Away with them!’90 The new Czechoslovak government’s decision to continue the Habsburg and Hungarian government’s tolerant policies towards the Jews reinforced, therefore, the broader allegation that in 1918 the Slovaks had broken away from liberal Hungary only to find themselves in another liberal state. It should come, therefore, as no surprise that the SĽS had, within months of the founding of Czechoslovakia, resumed its familiar opposition role and had begun to denounce the new government in Prague with the same vehemence that it had denounced the old government in Budapest.

The first response: The clerical council Hlinka’s first attempt to counter this new liberal ‘onslaught’ was to organize his fellow priests into a Slovak clerical council (Slovak: Kňazská rada). This council had the double goal of acting both as a lobbying group in defence of the Catholic church, and as a forum to bypass the Magyar hierarchy in Slovakia in order to bolster Slovak Catholic support for the new Czechoslovak state. Thus, when Hlinka wrote to seventy-one of his fellow priests inviting them to form a new

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clerical council ‘to manage internal Catholic affairs’, he justified the move on the grounds that all the episcopal sees were ‘occupied by the non-Slovaks of the hierarchy’. He also insisted that the new council would be loyal to what he termed ‘the single legitimate government in the territory of the Slovak state,’ the Slovak national council.91 Initially Hlinka had grounds for believing that the clerical council would also act as a highly effective political lobbying group. In November 1918 no independent political parties existed in Slovakia, and due to the chaotic situation there was no prospect of national elections in the immediate future. Thus influence had to be exerted by pressure groups. Hlinka could, therefore, assume that the clerical council, which claimed to represent the entire Slovak clergy and, thereby, all Slovak Catholics, would become an influential player in Czechoslovak politics. He also assumed that if Slovak Catholics worked closely with the new Czechoslovak authorities than the authorities would also take into account the interests of Slovak Catholics.92 To preserve the clerical council’s legitimacy in the eyes of his nationalist countrymen, Hlinka excluded all Magyar and German priests. He also included in the council the most prominent Slovak priests including thirty-three of the forty-six priests that the Hungarian authorities had identified as Slovak nationalists. In addition, he sought to maximize the council’s size and popularity by invited former clergymen who had distanced themselves from the pre-war Slovak nationalist movement, including Jehlička and the former supporter of Giesswein’s Christian Social Party, Arnold Bobok.93 Hlinka’s Slovak clerical council proved, however, to be riddled by divisions and devoid of influence. Already by December 1918 Hlinka had come to the conclusion that the clerical council was redundant, a point he made privately to the authorities and publicly in an open letter article in the semi-official Slovenský denník.94 Hlinka’s loss of faith in the clerical council was reinforced by a concern that some of its members were calling for potentially schismatic reforms of the church including the expulsion of all Magyar priests, the democratization of church governance in Slovakia, the introduction of the vernacular into the Mass, and the abolition of clerical celibacy. The first and only: full meeting of the council in January 1919 was marred by vicious arguments and a walkout by a sizeable group of priests led by Juriga.95 Moreover, the meeting’s demands for the Catholic church to retain control of its money, property, and schools in Slovakia were firmly rejected by Šrobár as outside his competence. He also ended up appointing only ten of the twentyseven persons the council proposed to be appointed to the new Czechoslovak

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National Assembly and paid no attention to the council’s nominees to become the new Slovak bishops. In addition, Šrobár privately dismissed the council’s unanimous call for the church in Slovakia to be granted ‘autonomy’ from the state on the grounds that it represented ‘not even 5% of Catholic clerics in Slovakia’. He was also convinced that its magyarone element would only cause trouble for the new state if they were exempted from state supervision. As a result, the Slovak Catholic clergy remained throughout the interwar period dependent on the government to pay its salaries and supervise its promotions.96

The second response: A new/old party Having lost faith in his Clerical Council, and increasingly concerned about the liberal policies emanating from the government, Hlinka’s decided to relaunch the SĽS. His obvious intention was to transform it into a mass party that would use the enaction of universal suffrage and the promised free and fair voting system to defend Slovak culture and the Catholic faith via the ballot box. He immediately set out to recruit Slovak Catholics who were both loyal to him, could appeal to every strand of Catholic Slovak opinion, and were committed to creating a mass party. Historians of the party in the interwar period have, for example, identified within its ranks ‘moderates’ who were loyal to the Czechoslovak state, ‘activists’ who favoured cooperation with the central government for tactical reasons, as well as ‘radicals’, ‘separatists’ and ‘magyarones’ who rejected the legitimacy of the new state. They have even identified a group of ‘polonophiles’ within the party who favoured an alliance with their fellow Catholics, the Poles. Attention has also been paid to the various regional cliques within the party such as those members who hailed from Hlinka’s home base of Ružomberok and Juriga’s home base in south-western Slovakia. Exponents of various schools of Catholic theology were also active within the party such as the ‘Christian Socials’ the ‘Christian Democrats’ and a more conservative clerical faction.97 This disparate coalition was already evident at the actual founding of the party, which took place in Žilina on 19 December 1918. Although plans for the meeting were only announced in the papers six days before 300 persons managed to attend from across the Slovak highlands.98 As had been the case before 1918 clergymen continued to play a key role within the party. The founding meeting, after all, appointed Hlinka as the party’s leader. It also entrusted his fellow clergymen Štefan Mnohel with the key post of editor of the party’s new flagship

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newspaper called Slovák. Two other clergymen, Jozef Kačka and Karol Kmetko, were entrusted with drawing up the party manifesto. In addition, following the meeting Buday, who had masterfully avoided committing himself to any political movement before 1918, became the acting head of the new party’s fraction in the Czechoslovak National Assembly and Jehlička, who was still fending off accusations about his own magyarone sensibilities, became one of Hlinka’s key advisors. Moreover, the clergy’s influence on the party was also evident in the central role it played in forming and leading the local branches of the party. Thus five of the first eight localities where a branch of the party was founded were headed by the local priest. Clergymen also comprised eight of the first thirteen heads of the party organization at the county level. At the national level only Catholic clergymen occupied the position of party leader from 1913 onwards, they also occupied about half the leadership positions in the party from 1918-1939, about a third of the two hundred strong executive committee that helped draft the party’s ideology, and about a quarter of the parliamentary fraction both in the interwar Czechoslovak state and the independent wartime Slovak parliament.99 Former members of the defunct KNP were also shown a warm welcome. The first three secretaries of the party, František Unger and his successors Jozef Hamaj and Pavel Macháček who oversaw the organization of the party throughout the 1920s were all former members of the now defunct KNP. They were clearly expected to use their personal contacts and prominent presence in the party to attract former members of the KNP into the SĽS.100 As the KNP had been disbanded in Slovakia in 1918, its former Slovak-speaking supporters gravitated to the SĽS as the party that was most welcoming and ideologically compatible for them. Former KNP activists were immediately given important positions at the local level. Jozef Tiso, for example, was entrusted with organizing the party in his homebase of Nitra even though he had not been trusted with membership of the Clerical Council. He was then granted a place in the parliamentary fraction from 1925 onwards, served as deputy president of the party from 1930 until 1938 and then, after Hlinka’s death, became the new party leader. Another sign that the party was reaching out to its former opponents was the welcome accorded to Jehlička when he offered his services to Hlinka in the autumn of 1918. He immediately became a trusted advisor until he went into exile in 1919. The rapid promotion through the party of Vojtech Tuka, who had also kept his distance from the pre-war SĽS and was regularly accused of being a closet magyarone, further demonstrated that the party welcomed and promoted

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Slovak Catholics regardless of their pre-war political affiliations. By 1921 Tuka had been appointed as the acting editor-in-chief of the Slovák newspaper in 1921, became one of the four deputy leaders of the party in 1923, and was granted a place in the parliamentary fraction in 1925. At the same time, the SĽS also sought to include in its leadership Slovak Catholics who were unquestionably loyal to the Czechoslovak state. These members could refute allegations that the party had been hijacked by magyarones. Thus, the Žilina meeting appointed Martin Mičura as deputy head of the party. He had never obviously cooperated with the Hungarian authorities, had attended the crucial meeting of the Slovak national council in Martin, and was regarded by the government in Prague as so reliable that in 1920 he was appointed as the most senior government official in Slovakia. He became the second Minister with Full Power for the Administration of Slovakia, but also permanently severed his links with the SĽS. Both Hlinka and the editor of the new Slovák newspaper Mnohel had also attended the decisive meeting of the Slovak national council in Martin that proclaimed that the Slovaks had broken away from Hungary. Their presence in the party also refuted the allegation that the SĽS secretly opposed the break-up of Hungary in 1918 and the creation of Czechoslovakia.101 At the same time a younger generation of Slovaks born around the turn of the century who had no political experience were also welcomed into the party and rapidly promoted through the party’s ranks. A number of these young men, including Karol Sidor, Milo Urban and Alexander Mach, were appointed to the editorial board of the Slovák newspaper with the responsibility for both developing and popularizing the party’s incipient ideology. It is, however, noticeable that Hlinka’s balancing act ensured that he did not permit any of them to take one of the party’s seats in parliament until the 1930s. Instead, he filled the party’s parliamentary fraction with reliable allies from the pre-war era and technical experts who were happy to toe the party line.102 It is also noteworthy that the effort to create a mass party did not, however, extend to including women in any leadership positions. Nor did the party make a noticeable effort to recruit women as party members. No women appears to have been included among the speakers at the Žilina meeting, no women was included in either the national or regional leadership of the party, no women were included in the parliamentary fraction or on any of the party newspapers’ editorial boards, and only a smattering of women’s names crop up as members of the local party organizations.103

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It is true that the party included in its first manifesto the demand for both men and women to be granted the vote. It even included in the list of thirty-five demands issued by the party congress in 1920 ‘complete equality for women’. In practical terms, however, the party hewed to the Catholic church’s teachings on women which opposed the simplification of divorce proceedings, the legalization of abortion and the mass entry of women into the workplace. The party also abandoned its demand for ‘equality’ for women in its manifestos from at least 1925 onwards.104 Nevertheless, the SĽS was still able to appeal to a sizeable proportion of Catholic women and men as evidenced by its impressive results in each set of elections throughout the interwar period. By 1923 it was already the most popular party in Slovakia, a position it retained throughout the interwar period, and it continued to attract the support of about a third of the entire Slovak electorate and about half of the ethnic Slovak Catholic vote. The popularity of the party derived not only from the diverse range of groups that were accommodated within the party, but also from its establishment, for the first time, of a genuinely nationwide network of party organizations. Hlinka himself took the lead in the first years of Czechoslovakia’s existence, crisscrossing the country to celebrate the establishment of new branches of the party. The energy he displayed in this effort also emanated down to the lowest ranks of the party. As one contemporary observer noted, party activists went into the villages and explained the aims of the party ‘under the trees in front of the church or if the weather was bad – in the tavern’.105 Following Hlinka’s lead, the party’s flagship newspaper Slovák under Mnohel and his successors’ also placed a constant stress on the need to create a mass party organization. From the moment it began publishing in 1919, it placed enormous emphasis on organizing the party. Its ambition to create a mass party was summed up by its insistence that ‘there must not be a single village or town’ without a branch of the party or associate organization. It also immediately published plans for a new party structure that included local, regional and a national organization, and provided specific instructions on how to found local branches of the party.106 Working outwards from its pre-war base in north and northwest Slovakia through the summer of 1919 the party began to develop branches in central and western Slovakia. By the end of the summer it had even begun to organize in eastern Slovakia where the party had never had a viable presence before 1918. Hlinka also ensured that the SĽS would seek to mobilize the urban population, arranging for the Slovák newspaper to be published in Bratislava from 1920.

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The party also established organizations in twenty of the largest towns in Slovakia prior to the 1920 elections.107 By the end of 1920, the SL’S had branches in every one of Slovakia’s thirteen counties, a quarter of her largest towns, and a total of 876 branches of the party across Slovakia run by almost twelve thousand paying members. It also published a daily paper as well as a number of periodicals that appealed to specific trades and industries. The number of local organizations and the membership of the party continued to increase throughout the interwar period, so that by the mid-1930s the party had over 40,000 members and over 2,000 local branches.108 The party also continued to benefit from the network of Catholic publications, parochial sodalities, banks, and associations to help mobilize the population. Their activities were also now generally viewed benignly by the Czechoslovak authorities. Even those Catholic clubs that initially kept their distance from the SĽS after 1918, became, as one reporter explained to his readers in the 1930s, ‘the centre of the political and social life’ of the party.109 Fundraising drives by the party’s newspapers also provided an additional means of motivating the party’s supporters between elections. Before 1918 the party’s newspapers had, for example, repeatedly exhorted their readers to help fund their publishing activities and rewarded its donors by regularly publishing their names. The party had also launched specific appeals such as its campaign to build a church in Černová and then to assist the victims of the ‘massacre’ that had been perpetrated there in 1907. After 1918, the Slovák and other party newspapers continued to build on this tradition. They solicited and published the names of donors and launched a series of additional fundraising drives. One such campaign, for the ‘Catholic Press Fund’, obtained over three million crowns. Another campaign, for the ‘To our own nation’ fund, launched in 1926, received the support of the local Catholic hierarchy in Slovakia.110 The party could not rely, however, on an efficient party secretariat to hold together this extensive network of party organizations and disparate supporters. The central administration of the party was woefully understaffed and underfunded. It was rapidly reduced to appealing through the pages of the Slovak newspaper for local branches of the party to submit reports on their activities. Instead, the party leadership relied on two factors to hold the party together. The first was the cult of the leader, Hlinka, whose mercurial character convinced each faction within the party that he represented their interests. The second unifying factor was an ambiguous ideology embodied by the call for autonomy that could appeal to those who were loyal to the new Czechoslovak state and those who yearned for its destruction.

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The cult of the mercurial leader From the relaunch of the party onwards, Hlinka imposed his authority on the party, rewarding those who he could trust and excluding those who clashed with him over any aspect of policy. Having briefly fallen out with Juriga at the end of 1918, who wanted radical reforms of the Catholic church in Slovakia, Hlinka ensured that the former deputy leader of the party was not included in the new party leadership. Hlinka also bypassed Juriga’s Slovenské ľudové noviny, which had been the party’s flagship paper since 1905. Instead he launched a completely new paper, Slovák, which was always overseen by men who were absolutely loyal to the party leader.111 Moreover, Hlinka had a reputation and a charisma that no other member of the party could match. He had, after all, been the subject of a cult of personality since his imprisonment in 1906 and the massacre of his parishioners in Černová in 1907. Both Slovak and foreign writers saw in him the embodiment of all the virtues (and faults) of the pre-war Slovak nationalist movement. He also knew how to use his tremendous rhetorical skills to appeal to rural Catholic Slovaks and effortlessly blended together, in his speeches and his writings, the moral clarity of a priest, the demagoguery of a politician, and the simplicity of a caricature Slovak peasant. Even Hlinka’s scandalous trip to Paris in 1919 to lobby for Slovak autonomy, and his temporary expulsion from the party, ultimately failed to diminish his popularity. Although the leading figures in the SĽS who remained in Slovakia initially criticized his misadventure, by 10 December the party leadership had formally called for his release from prison. Party pamphlets insisted that Hlinka had been imprisoned, ‘only because as a true son of the Slovak nation, he had to struggle for the Slovak language and his faith in Christ’.112 Party meetings were also transformed into mutual displays of affection for the imprisoned leader, with participants urged to show their support for Hlinka by signing a petition demanding his release from prison. Such meetings invariably concluded with a rousing call for the release of ‘our leader, a true patriot and good Slovak Andrej Hlinka.’113 The cult of personality that pervaded these party meetings endured throughout the interwar period. Frequently, when Hlinka was not present, a fellow clergyman, who could imbue the message with clerical solemnity, would read out a telegram from the party leader. Alternatively, a message of loyalty would be ‘composed’ by the meeting’s participants that would be sent to Hlinka and enthusiastically published in the party’s various press organs. Such meetings

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also invariably ended with the cry of ‘long live Andrej Hlinka’. It should come, therefore, as no surprise that by 1924 Hlinka was being formally referred to by his admirers as the ‘leader of the Slovak nation’ (Slovak: Vodca slovenského národa) and that in 1925 the party was renamed in his honour as the Hlinka Slovak People’s Party (Slovak: Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana).114 As Jörg Hoensch has also perceptively observed, the cult of personality that surrounded Hlinka was also evident in the way that his ‘emotional’ and ‘impulsive’ character shaped party policy. For example, his rapprochement with Šrobár during the First World War played a role in encouraging him to support the creation of Czechoslovakia. Likewise, his subsequent feud with Šrobár played an equally important role in driving the SĽS into near-permanent opposition. His unbreakable friendship with the leading fascists within the SĽS, such as Tuka and Mach, also had to be endorsed by all those who wished to remain within the party. Any open criticism of Hlinka or his allies, by any member of the party, irrespective of their seniority, invariably led to their expulsion from the party.115

Ideological ambiguity Moreover, in his public utterances Hlinka personally embodied and thereby deepened the party’s ambiguous attitudes towards Czechoslovakia that ultimately culminated in the party’s decision to break up the state in 1938-39. On the one hand, Hlinka repeatedly insisted that he was loyal to the government, had no desire for Slovak independence let alone a reunion with Hungary. On his seventieth birthday he proclaimed that the break-up of Hungary in 1918 was ‘the happiest moment of my life. The creation of Czechoslovakia fulfilled my yearnings and brought to life the hopes of the nation.’116 On the other hand, his critique of the central government was, in its demagoguery, often indistinguishable from an attack on the very legitimacy of the entire Czechoslovak state. Thus Hlinka repeatedly drew an unpleasant comparison between the actions of the Czechoslovak government after 1918 and the Hungarian government before 1918. As early as October 1919, he insisted that ‘Slovakia is currently in the same bondage as during the times of the greatest Magyar terror.’ He also remained fond of comparing his struggles against the central government in Prague to his earlier struggle before Magyar chauvinism declaring, for example, ‘Hlinka held out under the Magyars, he will hold out also under the Czechs. Nobody can overthrow us.’117

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Moreover, Hlinka compared supporters of the central government to the pre1918 magyarones ‘who cease to be Slovaks’, insisted that alleged electoral abuses by Czechoslovak officials were comparable to ‘the comedy of the Hungarian elections’, endorsed a party memorandum in 1922 which declared that Slovakia was ‘a country doomed to death. A nation in her last agonies’, and promised in March 1938 that ‘the year…will have the same importance for us as the year 1918’.118 In addition, under Hlinka’s leadership the party kept using its pre-war slogans throughout the interwar period, including its claim that it was ‘for our Slovak language’, and officially lauded each prominent personality within the party who died in this period as ‘our martyrs’.119 As government officials were quick to note, Hlinka constantly used his public speeches to obscure rather than clarify his precise attitude to Czechoslovakia. He frequently declared his loyalty to ‘our state’ without spelling out what state he meant. Instead, he peppered his speeches with talk of a distinct ‘Slovak nation’ and ‘Slovak people’ or simply ‘my people’. Following Hlinka’s lead, similarly ambiguous language was also used by the various publications that operated under the party’s auspices. For example, as Sabine Witt has noted, the leading Catholic Slovak student journal Rozvoj rejoiced in 1928 that, for the past ten years, ‘the Slovaks have their own land’ without spelling out whether this ‘land’ was Slovakia or Czechoslovakia.120 A clear example of Hlinka’s, and the wider party’s, ambiguous attitude towards Czechoslovakia came with its entry into the coalition government in 1927. Superficially, the SĽS’s inclusion in the new government appeared to comprehensively refute allegations that the Slovaks were an oppressed minority within Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, the manner in which the SĽS entered the coalition, and its behaviour for the two years it remained in the government, muddled this message. Hlinka himself played no part in the negotiations that paved the way for the party to enter the coalition. Instead he chose to make a lengthy visit to America. Upon his return he also refused an offer of a seat in the cabinet. Meanwhile, as Carol Skalnik Leff has noted, even after the party entered the governing coalition, the party’s MPs ‘moved uncomfortably to criticize government budgetary proposals’. As the vote on the budget was regarded as a vote of confidence in the entire government, this was, she points out, ‘highly unorthodox behaviour for coalition party members’.121 Another, almost comic, example of the SĽS’s ambiguous stance towards Czechoslovakia came at the end of 1933 when all of the Czech and Slovak members of the Czechoslovak parliament were asked to sign a public protest against Jehlička’s ongoing attempts to challenge the republic’s legitimacy. Initially

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the entire SĽS fraction, including Hlinka, signed the protest on 20 December 1933, which was sent to various European capitals and declared that ‘the Slovak people … welcomed with joy and satisfaction the disruption of [the Habsburg Empire] and left its jurisdiction of their own free will in order to establish their future once more in union with the Czech territories and their Czech brethren’. The following day, however, the party leadership decided to rescind its signatures, insisting that the signatures of their MPs had been improperly attached to the protest. Finally, on 18 January 1934, following a wave of condemnation from their fellow parliamentarians, the party leadership again changed its mind and published a ‘rectification’ which expressed their support for the original protest.122

Ambiguous antisemitism Similar ambiguity was also evident in the party’s official stance on the Jewish question. Formally the party never contested a single election in the First Czechoslovak Republic on an antisemitic platform. Hlinka even felt able to insist in the mid-1930s that ‘I am not an enemy of the Jews [and] the political party which I lead is not anti-Semitic’.123 Even Tiso, whose ingrained antisemitism had brutally manifested itself during the break-up of Hungary in 1918, when he attempted to expel the Jews from the town of Nitra while charging them for the privilege, adopted a more tolerant approach in the early 1930s. For example, in 1934 he even implied in a speech that Jews could be Slovaks, although as Ward points out ‘Tiso’s wording, as usual, was ambiguous’.124 Nevertheless, signs of a more moderate attitude towards the Jews did not prevent the party continuing to use carefully chosen phrases to appeal to the antisemitic instincts of the electorate. Rebecca Haynes is quite right to assert that ‘too often allusions to Christianity among the Central and East European Right have been understood merely as an anti-Semitic code’. Indeed, the SĽS’s decision to initially included the word ‘Christian’ in its official name, and its repeated declarations that it stood ‘on a Christian basis’, may have pointed to the party’s larger ‘moral’ purpose. Nevertheless, such phrases can also be read as a sign that Jews were not welcome in the party. There is, for example, no evidence that Jews were ever permitted to become party members.125 Moreover, even Hlinka occasionally engaged in antisemitic myth-making. For example, he popularized the allegation by Jehlička that Masaryk was of Jewish descent. The party’s newspapers always made sure to highlight the fact that some of their opponents were Jews, heaped praise on the various antisemitic movements that

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emerged in interwar Europe, and no one was ever expelled from the party for being antisemitic.126

Embracing political autonomy The SĽS’s ambiguity towards Czechoslovakia also manifested itself in its demand for Slovak ‘autonomy’. The leaders of the SĽS were already flirting with the idea of Slovak autonomy at the very moment that the Czechoslovak state was being created. Juriga made his first call for autonomy as early as 14 November 1918 while Hlinka allegedly privately spoke in favour of autonomy at the decisive meeting of the Slovak national council in Martin at on 30-31 October. He certainly had endorsed a declaration passed at meeting in November 1918 in Ružomberok which called for an ‘independent Slovak state within the borders of the people’s republic of the Czech-Slovak lands’, and by the spring of 1919 the demand for Slovak autonomy was being put forward regularly by SĽS supporting newspapers.127 Some contemporary observers and later historians have concluded that Hlinka was hoodwinked into favouring autonomy by the magyarones, who were looking to diminish the Prague government’s power in order to engineer the re-unification of Slovakia with Hungary.128 In reality there were a whole series of factors that persuaded the SĽS to embrace the cause of Slovak autonomy. Most obviously, it was inspired by an awareness that Slovak Catholics could never expect to dominate the Czechoslovak parliament. As the Slovaks made up only sixteen per cent of the entire population, simple demographics suggested that a Slovak nationalist party would always remain a minor party in the Czechoslovak parliament. Autonomy, in contrast, would give the Slovaks in general, and the SLS in particular, more power in Slovakia.129 Also reinforcing the attraction of autonomy was a new awareness of the agreements which had been signed by Czech (and Slovak) émigrés during the war concerning the governance of the future Czechoslovak state. The Cleveland Agreement of October 1915 promised that Czechoslovakia would be a federal state, that Slovakia would have its own parliament, government and administration, and that Slovak would be the sole official language in Slovakia. The more famous Pittsburgh Agreement of May 1918, bore Masaryk’s signature and included almost identical promises. That agreement, in particular, became the Slovak nationalists’ totemic proof of the central government’s dishonesty. When the original document finally arrived in Slovakia in 1938 it was treated with the sanctity normally accorded to a religious relic.130

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Moreover, the call for Slovak autonomy in interwar Czechoslovakia harked back to earlier calls for Slovak autonomy in pre-1918 Hungary. As such, it allowed the SĽS to present itself as the continuation of a Slovak nationalist struggle that stretched directly back to at least the famous call for Slovak autonomy in 1861. The struggle for autonomy had, therefore, defined the aspirations of generations of Slovak politicians and had, Tiso claimed, been part of a ‘thousand year quest for national self-determination’.131 At the same time the demand for autonomy had always enjoyed, in the old Hungarian context, an appeal not only to radical Slovak nationalists, but also to moderate Slovaks who opposed complete independence. Before 1918, autonomy could be placed within the Hungarus tradition; after 1918 it could appeal to those who were loyal, but nevertheless critical of the new Czechoslovak state.132 To ensure, however, that the party’s demand for autonomy appealed to the largest possible number of Slovaks, the leadership either avoided spelling out precisely what autonomy meant, or repeatedly recalibrated its demands after it obtained actual concessions from the government. The various party manifestos continued, therefore, (just as they had been before the First World War), to consist of either a laundry list of petty demands or vague calls for Slovak autonomy. As František Vnuk – who always sought to portray the SĽS in the most sympathetic light – recognized, the party’s programme ‘was more a collection of slogans than a systematic plan’ which invariably manifested itself in ‘spontaneous meetings, unexpected conclusions and sporadic outbursts’.133 It was not until 1921 that the SĽS even published its first detailed plans for regional autonomy and when that was rejected by the government, it swiftly returned to its usual vagaries. Alternatively, when in 1928 the government actually established the Slovak Provincial Office and gradually expanded its authority, the SĽS welcomed the development, but insisted that this was just the first step on the path to genuine autonomy. Then, in 1934, it adopted the classic diversionary tactic of setting up a ‘commission’ to compile yet another set of proposals for how Slovak autonomy might actually work in practice.134 Crucially, as Kocourek has perceptively pointed out, the deliberately vague and ambiguous nature of the party’s demand for autonomy ultimately ‘left the idea open to redefinition by more radical elements within the party’. As a result, a part of the SĽS membership believed that the party’s call for Slovak autonomy was merely the first step towards the elimination of the ‘liberal’, democratic, Czechoslovak state. They too sensed that the party was turning against Czechoslovakia just as it had earlier turned against Hungary.135

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A Path to Fascism?

Astute scholars have long recognized that the SĽS underwent a process of radicalization that turned it into an ally of Nazi Germany and a willing participant in the destruction of Czechoslovakia. Attention has, however, been focused on seeking to identify a particular moment in the interwar period when the party lurched to the right.1 In reality, the chief characteristics of its radicalism, its antisemitism, its authoritarianism, its disdain for democracy, and even its cult of youth were already evident prior to 1918. It was not, therefore, surprising that as radical right-wing and fascist movements emerged across Europe, these tendencies again become evident in the party from the early 1920s onwards; the SĽS had been undergoing a process of radicalization ever since its founding in 1905. It is, nevertheless, the case that the claim that the SĽS was ‘fascist’ or ‘clerical fascist’, first promulgated by doctrinaire Slovak Marxists, is equally wide of the mark.2 It is true that the party, after it seized power in 1939, participated in the orgy of violence that permanently marred Europe during the Second World War. It participated in the German invasions of Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union in 1941, declared war on the United States and Great Britain, deported the bulk of Slovakia’s Jewish minority and thousands of Gypsies/Roma to their deaths in 1942 and, in 1944, invited German forces to occupy the entire country. It is also true that Tiso was happy to be referred to as the ‘leader’ (vodca or fuhrer) of Slovakia. He also occasionally used classic fascist rhetoric as when he spoke of his desire to ‘create a brave, heroic Slovak man, a sacrificing and faithful Slovak woman, a healthy and satisfied Slovak family’.3 Nevertheless, Tiso presided over a state that was markedly different from Nazi Germany. It retained a theoretical adherence to democracy, parliamentary government, and the rule of law, occasionally paid heed to the strictures of the Vatican, and treated its domestic political opponents (though not the Jews or the Gypsies/Roma) with relative tolerance. Tatjana Tönsmeyer’s assertion that

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the Tiso government ‘tried to shelter Slovak society from what they saw as Nazi ideological infiltration because as Slovak “patriots” they thought that was their duty’ is a necessary corrective to simplistic assessments of Slovakia as a ‘vassal’ or ‘satellite’ state of Nazi Germany.4 Moreover, although the party was willing to endorse thuggery, it showed no interest in world conquest or the redemptive value of violence epitomized by the ‘cult of death’ which most scholars regard as hallmarks of the classic interwar fascist movements.5 There was, however, overlap. Even though the party was not fascist it contained men who were eager to drag the party in that direction. Their radicalization of the party, which accelerated in the 1930s, placed it on a path to fascism even though it never reached that destination.

The influence of Tuka It seems at first glance implausible that the spiritus movens of the right-radical wing of the party was not one of the younger generation of party activists or a disillusioned war veteran, but a middle-aged university professor turned Hungarian spy. Vojtech ‘Béla’ Tuka was equipped with an owlish demeanour, a thick Magyar accent and a contempt for the ‘new Europe’ which the victorious powers had created in the aftermath of the First World War.6 That contempt ensured that he remained a Hungarus Slovak even after 1918 until his nostalgia for Hungary mutated into an admiration for first fascist Italy and later Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, his growing influence on the party was only temporarily halted when he was imprisoned from 1929 for almost a decade on a charge of espionage. Appointed as a senior editor of the party’s flagship Slovák newspaper from 1921, Tuka also served as one of the party’s four deputy presidents from 1923–1929, represented the party in the Czechoslovak parliament from 1925– 1928, and following his release from prison in 1938 was rapidly reappointed to the party’s presidium. On 14 March 1939, the day Slovakia proclaimed its independence, he became deputy head of state, a post he retained until September 1944, when he resigned due to ill-health. His influence, and in particular the crucial role he played in radicalizing the party, requires, therefore, a detailed examination of his background and ideology.7 Tuka was born in 1880 in the central Slovak village of Štiavnické Bane (Magyar: Hegybánya) in Zólyom County which lay outside the Slovak nationalist parties’ strongholds.. He was of mixed Slovak and Magyar parentage and was, as a result, fluent in both languages. He also owed to his parents (particularly his father, who served as the local schoolteacher and church organist) a dedication to the Catholic

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faith and an enthusiasm for education that remained with him throughout his life. After reading law at university in Budapest he travelled to Paris and Berlin for further studies, where he perfected his knowledge of French and German. He also worked for a time as a legal advisor to the Budapest police department before being appointed as a lecturer first at the University of Pécs in south-western Hungary and then, from 1914, at the newly established university in Bratislava.8 As well as marking himself out as a serious scholar and a charismatic teacher he had also thrown himself into Catholic associational life in Hungary. He was personally convinced that Hungary was in the midst of a culture war and that it was his duty to ‘fortify our souls against assaults’.9 As a university student in Budapest he had become deputy president of a nationalist student organization. Then, as a lecturer in Pécs, he established a new ‘circle’ of young Christian law students and a sodality connected to the nationwide Congregacio Mariana (Magyar: Mária Kongregáció), a Jesuit-led sodality for young Catholics. His antisemitism was also evident in his private criticism of his ‘philosemitic’ opponents and his public demand that the (Jewish) ethnicity of applicants should be taken into account in all university appointments.10 Tuka was, therefore, predisposed to oppose Czechoslovak liberalism by his enthusiasm for Hungary and his aggressively anti-liberal and anti-Jewish Catholicism. His hostility to the new republic was then deepened when, along with the rest of his faculty, he was dismissed from his post by the Czechoslovak authorities at the beginning of 1919 because of his suspected magyarone instincts. He was then reappointed due to his fluency in Slovak, before being dismissed again (and briefly interned) on a charge of espionage. Finally he was offered a position in the Czechoslovak civil service which he declined because it required moving to Prague and giving up the possibility of being reappointed as a university professor. In response to these tribulations Tuka offered his services to both the Hungarian government and the SĽS, and rapidly became one of the party’s most prominent and controversial figures. Tuka was, in fact, a magyarone by intellectual conviction rather than Magyar sentiment. Prior to the war he had always kept his distance from the Slovak nationalist movement but he remained a Hungarus Slovak who saw no contradiction between his own Slovak identity and his loyalty to the Regnum Marianum of Hungary. After 1918 Tuka’s hatred of the Czechoslovak state was also exacerbated by his long-standing conviction that small nations like the Slovaks would always be dependent on a larger nation to protect them. Initially, that had led him to privately conclude that the Slovaks should once again align themselves with Budapest. The fact that, from 1919, Hungary was governed

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by a counter-revolutionary regime that loudly proclaimed its ‘Christian basis’ also appealed to Tuka whose devotion to the Catholic faith was lifelong and unwavering.11 By the late 1930s the intensity of Tuka’s anti-Czechoslovak and antiBolshevik attitudes had mutated into an admiration for Nazi Germany, which he now concluded was the Slovaks’ natural ally. The growing animosity between Hungary and the Slovaks, fuelled by Hungary’s obsession with reclaiming its lost territories and its brutal annexation of southern Slovakia in November 1939, also convinced Tuka that Nazi Germany was an ideologically more compatible, more powerful and more popular protector of the Slovaks.12 Tuka’s pro-German orientation was also inspired by his own virulent brand of antisemitism that distinguished him from his moderate colleagues in the SĽS. He not only regarded Jews as an alien presence in Slovakia that undermined Catholic Slovaks’ economic and moral well-being, but was also convinced that they posed an immediate and mortal threat to Slovak faith and culture. The large number of (non-practising) Jews in Béla Kun’s short-lived Bolshevik regime, which had seized power in Hungary in spring 1919, contributed to Tuka’s equation of Jews and Bolshevism. His own residual Hungarus sentiment also made him susceptible to the ‘stab in the back’ theory propagated by some Magyars, which claimed that the Jews, notably Kun, were ultimately responsible for the break-up of Hungary. Tuka’s antisemitism was also fuelled by his interest in the fascist parties that emerged across Europe, including Hitler’s Nazis. He conducted several study trips to Italy and Germany in the early 1920s, was impressed by Mussolini and apparently witnessed Hitler’s abortive ‘beer hall putsch’ in Munich in 1923.13 Tuka also had an ingrained antipathy to democracy throughout the interwar period. This was rooted in his conviction that all of the changes that had taken place in Central Europe after 1918, including the redrawing of the borders and the spread of democracy, were interlinked. As John Pollard has argued, Tuka was not alone among Central European Catholics in regarding democracy as an ‘alien’ concept. He provocatively asserted that ‘it was a largely Anglo-Saxon, or at best French, import and imposition in the aftermath of the war’ and ‘the result of [American] President Woodrow Wilson’s crusading spirit embodied in his famous “Fourteen Points”’. The intensity of Tuka’s hostility to the changes that Wilson had unleashed, including the destruction of Hungary, the creation of Czechoslovakia, and his own dismissal from the university, informed his contempt for democracy and his belief in a new form of populist dictatorship pioneered by Mussolini and later Adolf Hitler.14

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Eager to speed-up the destruction of Czechoslovakia, Tuka offered to spy for Hungary and placed himself at the service of the SĽS. He regarded Hlinka’s party as the only force capable of mobilizing the Slovaks against the new regime in Prague. His rise within the party was aided by his intellect and his work ethic. He also obtained the protection of Hlinka, who was particularly pleased to have at his disposal one of the few Slovak academics who could add an intellectual heft to the party that had lost its brightest mind when Jehlička went into permanent exile in Vienna in the autumn of 1919. Tuka’s ability to flourish within the SĽS also stemmed from the fact that his radicalism was either cleverly concealed or compatible with the vague and ambiguous attitudes of his fellow party members. He was a fanatically devout Catholic in a party that always proclaimed itself to be the home of all Slovak Catholics. Likewise, his hatred of the Jews was initially unremarkable in a party where no one in the party leadership was entirely immune from antisemitism. His hostility to the central government in Prague also neatly dovetailed with the party’s advocacy of autonomy. Furthermore, his insistence that all the Slovaks’ social ills could be blamed on ‘foreign elements’ tapped into the party’s longstanding willingness to blame its opponents for every problem that afflicted the Slovaks. Finally, his unshakeable optimism that what he and his allies regarded as the ‘regenerative power’ of fascism presaged the eventual triumph of the SĽS had an obvious appeal to his fellow party members who were increasingly disillusioned by their failure to achieve an electoral breakthrough in successive parliamentary elections.15 Moreover, Tuka also masked the full extent of his radicalism. He understood, for example, that an open attack on the creation of the Czechoslovak state in 1918 would make the frequent allegation that he was a ‘magyarone’ irrefutable. Thus, in 1928, he claimed that the Slovaks’ decision to join the Czechoslovak Republic ten years earlier was no longer valid. He also insisted, however, that the Slovaks’ incorporation into Czechoslovakia had been welcomed by ‘the whole nation’ to ensure that he could not be accused of opposing the break-up of Hungary. Tuka was, therefore, able to exploit the ambiguity of the party’s demand for Slovak autonomy to conceal his own ambition to destroy Czechoslovakia from the party leadership, including Hlinka. As one of his disciples, Mach would later explain, ‘we spoke about “autonomy” but we thought about a “state”’.16 Likewise, Tuka’s public lauding of Italian fascism was also qualified by an insistence that circumstances in Czechoslovakia were distinct from those in Italy. His private contempt for democracy was also masked by the enthusiasm with which he greeted each fresh election and his own willingness to serve

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in the Czechoslovak parliament. Only after Slovakia obtained autonomy in October 1938 did he reveal his distaste for parliamentary government. At that point, he insisted that even the autonomous Slovak parliament, the fruit of a rigged election and dominated by the SĽS, had a ‘style and tempo’ which were inappropriate for the Slovak nation in ‘this historic epoch’.17 Tuka’s influence on the party for most of the interwar period should not be exaggerated. He did draft a formal party declaration in 1922 which described Slovakia as ‘condemned to death’. Nevertheless, he failed to prevent the SĽS entering the government coalition in 1927, and he failed to force the party to withdraw from the government in 1928, when he scandalously claimed that the Martin Declaration, on the basis of a supposedly secret clause, had now expired. Moreover, his attempt to form a self-described ‘radical wing’ in the latter 1920s, represented by a new newspaper Autonómia, was foiled by the imprisonment of both himself and the editor of the paper, Anton Snaczký, on charges of espionage in 1929.18 It is also worth noting that Tuka was never regarded as a viable leader of the party. He was an uninspiring speaker and a poor organizer. Even some of his colleagues regarded him as too controversial, too ambitious, and too much of a caricature magyarone to ever be trusted with the party leadership.19 On a personal level, however, he inspired remarkable loyalty. Hlinka, for example, simply refused to believe that Tuka was a spy irrespective of the evidence that was presented at his trial in 1929. A number of younger party members regarded Tuka as a father figure. In particular, he played a key role in mentoring a number of the young men he worked with, and promoted up to, the editorial board of Slovák. Notable examples were Karol Sidor, Alexander Mach and Anton Snaczký, who, like Tuka, also spied for Hungary. After Tuka and Snaczký were sentenced to lengthy prison terms in 1929 for espionage, Sidor and Mach became the leaders of the radical wing of the party in the 1930s and the chief exponents of Tuka’s radical, fascist ideology.20

The young radicals Although Tuka’s own path to fascism was initially inspired by his Hungarus attitude, Sidor never exhibited any nostalgia for Hungary and whereas Tuka’s loyalty to Hlinka was tactical, Sidor’s was heartfelt. Born in 1901, Sidor had grown up in Hlinka’s homebase of Ružomberok, mobilized his fellow high school students in protest at Hlinka’s arrest in 1919, published a glowing biography of

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Hlinka in 1924, and was regarded by Hlinka as his rightful successor. It should not be surprising, therefore, that Sidor was, like Hlinka, both an ardent supporter of the Czechoslovak state and a ferocious critic. Misreading this ambiguity, the government in Prague even appointed Sidor as prime minister of Slovakia on 10 March 1939 in the belief that he would persuade his party to stay loyal to the rump Czecho-Slovak state. In reality, Sidor was also animated by a desire for radical change even though he personally favoured an alliance with Poland over an alliance with Germany. His distaste for democracy can only have been reinforced by his admiration for Jozef Pilsudski, who had seized power in Poland in a coup d’état in 1926. Sidor even placed a picture of the dictator on the front cover of a glowing portrait of Poland he published in 1927.21 Throughout the 1930s Sidor was also insistent that Slovakia deserved ever more autonomy, opposed the party’s participation in any government coalition, and dismissed democracy as offering nothing to the Slovaks. His hostility to Czechoslovak liberalism had reached a point by 1937 whereby, in the words of a British observer, he offered ‘the supreme insult to the Czechs…that in certain respects Slovakia had fared better under the Hungarian than under the Czech regime’.22 Sidor also repeatedly denounced Judaeo-Bolshevism as the greatest menace facing the Slovaks and the whole of Europe. By the end of 1938 his antisemitism had escalated to a point where he had begun to publicly call for Slovakia to be ‘swept clean of Jews’. In particular, he demanded a ‘policy of collaboration with all nations which oppose Judaeo-Bolshevism’. He also insisted on wearing a jet-black paramilitary uniform at all public events so that, he explained, he could ‘look like an honest young Slovak and not like the local gentlemen who prefer full-dress and silk hats’. He was even initially lauded by Nazi Germany propagandists as a suitable leader for Slovakia until it became clear that he was unenthusiastic about placing his country under Hitler’s protection.23 The other leading radicals within the SĽS, Alexander Mach and the Ďurčanský brothers, Ján and Ferdinand, were even more closely wedded to Tuka’s fascist vision for Slovakia. Mach, for example, was so enamoured of Tuka that he asked him to serve as the godfather to his children. Born in 1901 in the village of Palárikovo, formerly Slovenský Meder (Magyar: Tótmegyer) in Nyitra County, Mach had been too young to join the Slovak nationalist movement before 1918. Nevertheless, he eagerly followed the progress of the pre-war SĽS. His personal response to the break-up of Hungary at the end of the First World War was, however, ambivalent. Intent at that point on becoming a priest, he had to steal across the new international border to continue his

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studies, an elite secondary school in Esztergom, which remained in the rump Kingdom of Hungary. He reached the eighth and final year of his studies there in 1921 having marked himself out as a fairly average student who claimed to be of ‘Magyar mother tongue’. He failed, however, to take his final exams.24 Possibly this was because crossing the border had become too problematic; more likely his decision to drop out was because he had decided on a career in politics rather than the Catholic church. He immediately joined the SĽS and proved himself a dedicated and effective party official who struck even sceptical British diplomats as ‘a forceful, energetic and in some ways able young man’.25 Crucially, however, Mach’s zealous efforts to bolster the popularity of the SĽS went hand in hand with a contempt for democracy that he shared with his mentor Tuka. As he later explained in the straightforward terms that were one of his hallmarks, ‘under a system where many parties competed with one another the state lacked the necessary authority’. Even after the SĽS seized absolute power in Slovakia by proclaiming independence in March 1939 Mach continued to speak out forcefully against those who, in his words, were ‘endeavouring to keep alive the spirit of democracy’.26 Mach was also, like Tuka, a fanatical antisemite. He was, for example, convinced that the prevalence of alcoholism in Slovakia, and by extension the poverty and immorality that afflicted the country, was the fault of the Jews. He later claimed that he had come to this conclusion by his own upbringing in a village where a ‘circus’ took place every evening outside the Jewish-owned taverns and his fellow villagers returned home ‘more often on four legs than on two’. In one particularly unpleasant speech to his fellow parliamentarians in 1939, Mach claimed that the proof that the Jews were one of the ‘greatest enemies and misfortunes of our nation’ was that they ‘annihilated the people with brandy’ in order to ‘take the fruits of their labour’. Only after the war did he finally realize that Slovak alcoholism was not the result of Jewish influence, admitting his surprise that ‘there are no Jews among us, but still we carry on drinking’.27 His antisemitism and anti-Czech attitudes were matched by his hatred of the Social Democrats. This attitude stemmed not only from his fervent Catholicism, but also from his experience as a student at the gymnasium in Esztergom in 1919 when the Bolsheviks had seized power in Hungary and maltreated his schoolteachers. He was, in fact, the only senior member of the SĽS who had endured the deprivations of Bolshevik rule. His anti-Czechoslovak attitudes may also have owed something to the fact that his school was also caught up in 1919

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in the conflict between the Bolsheviks and Czechoslovak forces and was struck by artillery fire in clashes that wounded a number of his fellow students.28 Tuka proved adept at fuelling these prejudices and saw in Mach a kindred spirit whose life had been thrown into turmoil by the revolutionary changes of 1918–1919 and who found in the SĽS a new community and a new purpose. Alongside his work organizing the party at the local level, Mach was invited by Tuka to help found a short-lived paramilitary organization within the party called the Rodobrana, roughly translated as ‘Racial Defence’, that was modelled on fascist paramilitary units elsewhere in Europe.29 Mach was also imprisoned for two months in 1926 for agitation against the state, was put on trial along with Tuka in 1929 on charges of spying for Hungary (but was exonerated), and received a further prison sentence in 1933 for his role in disrupting a state celebration in Nitra. By that point Mach was consumed by two convictions. First, that Slovakia must become an independent state or, as he put it, ‘to have one’s own state means life’. National independence, he excitedly proclaimed, would initiate a ‘Slovak revolution’ and ensure the economic, spiritual and moral regeneration of Slovakia. Secondly, Mach was also convinced that to achieve independence, the SĽS needed to align itself with Nazi Germany. By 1939 he was publicly voicing his admiration for Adolf Hitler.30 None of this, however, prevented his rise through the ranks of the party. By 1936 he had been appointed senior editor of the Slovák newspaper and was granted a place on the fourteen-member presidency of the party. Then, in 1938, he became the press secretary of the autonomous Slovak government with a seat at the cabinet table.31 One of Mach’s closest allies who also insisted that Slovakia must achieve independence through an alliance with Nazi Germany was Ferdinand Ďurčanský. He was a brilliant student of both law and politics who was born in 1906 and had already studied at universities in Bratislava, Paris and the Hague before rising to become a professor of international law. In 1939 he became the independent Slovak state’s first foreign minister at the age of just 32. His meteoric rise through the ranks of the party was partly due to what Jozef Kirschbaum describes as his ‘élan and inexhaustible energy’. It also owed much to Hlinka’s long-standing admiration for anyone who was willing to give the party an intellectual heft, as well as the patronage of his father, who served as one of the party’s senators in the upper house of the Czechoslovak National Assembly. Nevertheless, throughout the 1930s Ďurčanský was clearly in the same radical wing of the party as Tuka and Mach.32 He repeatedly insisted, for example, ‘that he wanted to have nothing to do with the Czechs’. He was equally ferocious in his denunciations of

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‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’, but slavish in his enthusiasm for the Nazi Germany, insisting that the Slovaks needed ‘an unconditional friendly collaboration with Germany’. Along with his older brother Ján, born in 1902, Ferdinand Ďurčanský became one of the leading figures among the younger generation of party activists. The Ďurčanský brothers promulgated their ideas through their journal entitled Nástup which they launched in 1933 and which predictably enjoyed the (unofficial) patronage of Tuka.33 By 1938, Ferdinand was collaborating with German agents in Slovakia. Nevertheless, he was still promoted to the sixmember party leadership in 1939, along with Tuka and another contributor to nástup Jozef Kirschbaum, who became the party’s new general secretary. Their entry into the party leadership was another indication that their hostility to Czechoslovakia and admiration for Nazi Germany was in the ascendancy within the SĽS.34

The cult of youth That Ďurčanský, Kirschbaum, Mach and Sidor were all relatively young men suggests that one factor driving the radicalization of the party was the cult of youth. In fact, the party’s appeal to the youth and reliance on young men had a pedigree that stretched back before the First World War. As the leaders of the SĽS were well aware, student organizations had always played a key role in the development of Slovak literature, culture and politics. Students had also served as one of the driving forces of the Slovak national movement throughout the nineteenth century.35 In addition, Catholic youth clubs had been an important part of the network of associations that had helped launch the first incarnation of the party in 1905 and the party had also sought to appeal to young Slovaks by including a monthly children’s supplement, Priateľ deti, in its flagship newspaper, the Ľudové noviny. A number of the party’s most prominent figures in the pre-war period were also very young men. Juriga, for example, was only thirty-one when he was first elected to parliament, and Jehlička was only twentyseven.36 There is also some evidence that school students were mobilized by the creation of the SĽS in 1905. Alexander Mach, for example, later reminisced about the eagerness he felt to read about the party’s activities as a schoolboy. More concretely, around twenty gymnasium students were expelled by the authorities for supporting the party’s electoral campaign in the 1906 elections

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in Ružomberok and for demonstrating against Hlinka’s subsequent suspension from his clerical duties.37 With the relaunch of the party in 1918 a new effort was made by the party to appeal to young Slovaks. Eight hundred Catholic students gathered in Ružomberok in June 1919 to protest the anticlerical policies of the new Czechoslovak government. Gymnasium students even went on strike in the same town to protest the arrest of Hlinka following his return from the Paris peace conference in 1919. The first years of the interwar period also saw Slovak university students form new Catholic associations. Whereas previously they had gathered in nationalist rather than sectarian clubs, in 1921 a Federation of Slovak Catholic Students (Ústredie slovenského katolíckeho študenstva) was founded as an affiliate organization of the SĽS. It published its own journal Vatra and then (after it was shut down by the authorities) Rozvoj. Leading figures in the organization of Slovak Catholic students were then rewarded with editorial positions on the party’s new flagship newspaper, Slovák. This ensured that the paper retained an appeal to the younger generation of party activists and potential voters. Among the Slovák’s editors were Karol Sidor, born in 1901, who became one of the party’s leading figures in the 1930s, Vojtech Straka, born in 1902, who remained in the editorial board until 1945, and the brilliant writer Milo Urban, born in 1904.38 The party also promoted from 1919 onwards the formation of Slovak Catholic scout groups and the Catholic gymnastics organization, Orol. The Orol had initially been established by Catholics in Moravia as a rival to the secular Sokol gymnastics organizations that had achieved great popularity in the Czech lands in the second half of the nineteenth century. From 1919 onwards both the Sokol and the Orol were permitted to establish branches in Slovakia until both organizations were banned by the Tiso government in 1938. Prior to that point, the Orol enjoyed close links with the SĽS. In 1923 Hlinka was formally appointed as the honorary president of the Slovak branch of the Orol, a position he retained until his death in 1938.39 Only practising Catholics were permitted to be members of the Orol, all its public displays began with a Mass, and members often performed their gymnastic feats in traditional Slovak costumes. On occasion, mass rallies were held with up to 20,000 participants and by the end of the 1920s the organization already possessed 162 branches across Slovakia.40 Although the Orol was formally a non-political national gymnastics organization, it was accused of being infected with an ultra-nationalist and anti-Czech culture. Its emphasis on physicality,

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for example, could be found in all right-radical interwar organizations as they strived to prepare the next generation for a new round of global warfare. Certainly, members of Orol formed a core part of the membership of the party’s paramilitary Rodobrana organization in the 1920s, the right-radical nástup student movement in the 1930s, and the thuggish Hlinka Garda that was founded in 1938.41 Hlinka and his successor Tiso not only eagerly promoted young Slovaks to influential positions, but also frequently lauded the ‘young Slovak generation’ as the future of both the party and the nation. Hlinka was, for example, always keen to draw a stark contrast between the constant ‘rejuvenation’ of his own ‘young party’ and the ‘careerists’ who joined rival parties. His assertion that ‘in the field of politics we await regeneration from the youth’, and his enthusiastic reiteration of Mussolini’s claim that ‘we are opposed to the comfortable life’ specifically appealed to those young Slovaks who, Sabine Witt argues, were inspired by the pre-war sacrifices of the SĽS leadership. The younger generation of party activists, she observes, saw Catholic nationalist politics as a noble and exciting endeavour, and were captivated by the idea of helping to resurrect the Slovak nation and defend it against its supposed enemies.42 The rhetoric of a party run by and for the youth was not, however, reflected in the composition of the party leadership. Although Skyčák was only thirty-five years old when he founded the SĽS in 1905, Hlinka was already forty-nine when he took control of the party in 1913 and fifty-four when he relaunched the party in 1918. Likewise, Tiso was also over fifty years of age when he took over the party leadership in 1938. Moreover, the average age of the party’s ‘presidency’, which included not only the leader of the party, but also the deputy leaders and other senior figures, was around forty in 1918 and rose to over fifty by 1930. It was not until 1936 that the first Slovaks born in the twentieth century, Sidor and Mach, were appointed to the highest ranking body within the SĽS. By 1939 the average age of the six-member presidency of the party was still forty-five years of age.43

The fascist influence and the Rodobrana As both the radicals and the younger members of the party remained in the minority in the party leadership throughout the interwar period, they relied instead on a series of pressure groups to exert their influence. Each one appealed primarily to young men who were frustrated by their party’s lack of electoral

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success, the invariable deal-making that came with the party’s participation in state-wide and regional assemblies, and the failure to immediately achieve autonomy for Slovakia. Each of these pressure groups also openly echoed Tuka and the other leading radicals by equated Jews with Bolsheviks and attacking them as a mortal threat to the survival of the nation. All of these pressure groups also found inspiration in fascist examples elsewhere in Europe. Most importantly, each pressure group helped alienate some moderate members of the party and popularized the right-radical ideology within the SĽS. The first of these pressure groups was the Rodobrana, which was initially founded in January 1923 as an offshoot of the Orol. The Rodobrana was originally tasked with providing security at party meetings in response to attacks by rival parties and an assassination attempt on Hlinka. Under Tuka’s leadership it was, however, re-modelled on Mussolini’s Fasci die Combattimento and Hitler’s S.A. In spite of its formal prohibition by the government, the Rodobrana ultimately recruited around 20,000–30,000 young Catholic men as members before being permanently dissolved in 1929 following Tuka’s own arrest for espionage.44 It is important to recognize that the Rodobrana’s fascist inclinations were partially obscured by ambiguity. Although it was modelled on other paramilitary movements it did not engage in systematic violence. It also included among its ‘ten commandments’, the requirement of all its members to ‘uphold the laws and public order’.45 Its leadership also insisted that they be loyal to the Czechoslovak Republic. The formal statement of the Rodobrana’s ideology, described by its author Tuka as a Catechism, declared that the movement ‘wanted to preserve the state of Czechs and Slovaks’ and ‘would defend [both] the state and the nation to the last drop of blood’. The first issue of the Rodobrana newspaper even proclaimed its support for the democratic and republican character of the Czechoslovak state.46 The Rodobrana’s leadership also included some of the most enthusiastic participants in the creation of Czechoslovakia such as Juriga and Štefan Onderčo. Both of these priests had consistently denounced anything they saw as an attack on Czechoslovakia’s legitimacy. Moreover, other Czechoslovak parties including the Republican Party of Agrarians and Small Farmers (Slovak: Republikánska strana zemedelského a maloroľnického ľudu, hereafter Republican party) and the Czechoslovak Communist Party (Slovak: Komunistická strana Československej) had their own paramilitary organizations.47 Nevertheless, the Rodobrana did possess many of the hall marks of a classic fascist movement. It is, for example, no coincidence that its initial launch in 1923 occurred in the wake of Mussolini’s seizure of power in Italy. Its establishment

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also coincided with the emergence of the Czech fascist movement that began to spread into Slovakia from 1923 onwards and attracted a few thousand supporters, mostly Czech immigrants.48 The day-to-day leadership of the Rodobrana was also handpicked by Tuka from young men who presumably shared his own fascist ideology. These included former army officers such as Karol Belanský and Anton Snaczký, who had also worked with Tuka on the editorial board of Slovák; Vojtech Hudec, born in 1902 in Tuka’s home village of Štiavnické Bane, who, like him, began to spy for Hungary in the 1920s; and the journalists and SĽS activists Alexander Mach and Peter Prídavok, both of whom were also born in 1902. Guided by Tuka and assisted by a network of sympathetic priests these men proceeded to mobilize and radicalize the Rodobrana’s membership. Compulsory uniforms, militarist rhetoric and a penchant for public demonstrations and disciplined marching all explicitly aped the fascist style of politics.49 For example, the uniform of all Rodobrana members was a blend of Italian fascist imagery and traditional Slovak Catholic symbolism. It consisted of a plain, jet-black shirt embossed with the Slovak symbol of the double cross in light blue which was then surmounted by a crown of thorns. Like fascist movements elsewhere in interwar Europe the Rodobrana also appears to have been dominated by young men who were veterans of the First World War. Recruits were drawn from those Slovak veterans who were disillusioned by the post-war regime’s inability to create a state that fully justified their wartime sacrifices. Slovak (and Czech) ex-soldiers were particularly susceptible to this disillusionment because of the government’s veneration of the ‘Czechoslovak legions’. These legions had been formed during the war by prisoners and deserters who agreed to fight for the victorious allies in order to create Czechoslovakia. This ‘cult of the legions’ meant that most veterans, who had remained loyal to the empire during the war, were, as Mark Cornwall has pointed out, ‘marginalized’ and encouraged ‘to seek meaning for the mass carnage in a parallel war discourse that could challenge the very legitimacy of the new state’.50 It should not, therefore, be surprising that Igor Strisko’s statistics on the local branch of the Rodobrana in the town of Levice near Nitra, shows that over half of the members had served in the army during the First World War.51 The militarist character of the Rodobrana was reinforced by the fact that its ultra-hierarchical organization was modelled on the regular army, and that its members were supposedly ‘trained for combat’.52 Rodobrana members greeted each other with salutes and were divided into ‘platoons’ (Slovak: čata), each headed by a ‘captain’ (Slovak: kapitán). At the county level the Rodobrana

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was overseen by ‘commanders’ (Slovak: župný práporník) who were in turn subordinated to the ‘leader’ (Slovak: krajinský velitel), Tuka.53 The militarist character of the Rodobrana was also evident in Mach’s insistence that its members were ‘all soldiers’ who were occasionally described in Rodobrana propaganda as a ‘national army’. Tuka also argued that the Rodobrana was formed in a ‘global clash of nations’ and was now engaged in a ‘struggle for self-defence’ against both ‘internal and external enemies’.54 The Rodobrana also sought to cultivate, in common with many other paramilitary fascist movements, a sense of mysticism among its members. All of its members had to be practising Christians, meetings were generally held in monasteries and other sites of pilgrimage, and invariably began with a solemn Mass celebrated by a local clergymen sympathetic to the SĽS.55 Tuka even claimed that the Rodobrana was a new form of religious sodality, clad in its own uniform and obedient to its own rules. This mysticism was also evident in his first name for the Rodobrana, which he initially called ‘The Society of Believers in the Holy Blood of Christ’ (Slovak: Sdrženie Ctiteľov Sv. Krvi Kristovej). All Rodobrana members were also tasked by Tuka with propagating the claim that Slovakia possessed its own reliquary that held the blood of Jesus. As with the parochial sodalities, only Catholic Slovaks were permitted to be members of the Rodobrana, they had to recite a daily litany of prayers, and were required to be obedient to a ‘disciplinary board’ presided over by Tuka himself.56 The Rodobrana was also, in common with many other fascist movements, outspoken in its hostility to ‘foreigners’ (in this case Czechs and Jews) and leftists. As F. Körper, one of its leaders declared, ‘The Rodobrana was created because the red warriors of our enemy worker’s organizations turned on us.’57 Likewise, other Rodobrana leaders denounced everyone who did not belong to the ethnic (Slovak) nation and thus ‘does not belong in Slovakia’. Czech immigrants to Slovakia, for example, were singled out for criticism, accused of having ‘the morality of dogs’ and ‘taking the bread’ from the Slovaks. Italian fascism, in contrast, was repeatedly described in positive terms and praised for having ‘regenerated’ the country that had become ‘strong, healthy and wealthy’. The eponymous newspaper of the Rodobrana even serialized a Slovak translation of Mussolini’s autobiography.58 ‘The purpose of fascism’ the paper explained, was ‘to put the nation and state on healthy national foundations and a religious basis.’ Individual speakers at Rodobrana rallies also declared that fascism was the solution to all Slovakia’s problems as it would ‘restore order and security’, ‘block the reds’ road to power’, and ‘secure the rights of nations’.59 In one particularly exuberant article in the Slovák, Tuka even openly glorified the

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fascist character of the Rodobrana. He wrote that ‘the brilliant example of Italy lights up the road for us. It calls us to action. … Our gallant Rodobrana, the Slovak fascists, are fired with enthusiasm, their muscles are straining with selfassurance. They are animated by your phenomenal fascist firmness, resolution, and fearlessness.’60 The Rodobrana was, therefore, the first serious effort in Slovakia to popularize fascism and to have attracted significant support. On occasion, it could mobilize 3,000 members to attend a single meeting. As well as operating a network of local branches across Slovakia it possessed its own distinct organizational hierarchy, raised its own funds, published its own newspaper and formulated its own set of rules and principles.61 Nevertheless, the authorities do not appear to take the movement particularly serious and had to ban it twice, first in 1923 and again in 1928. It was finally dissolved in 1929 after Tuka, Snaczký and Mach were put on trial for espionage.62 Even after the imprisonment of Tuka and Snaczký it continued to exist as an underground movement, operating within local organizations of the SĽS and the Orol, while Mach appears to have served as its unofficial leader and the chief proponent of its ideology in the upper echelons of the party.63

The Nástupists Following the formal dissolution of the Rodobrana, the next right-radical pressure group to emerge within the SĽS were the nástupists. These were a group of young Slovak Catholic students who were partially radicalized by the onslaught of the great depression. They gathered around a new journal Nástup in which they expressed their dissatisfaction with Czechoslovakia and their enthusiasm for the radical right-wing movements that emerged across Europe in the 1930s. The nástupists’s anger was specifically fuelled by the economic crisis as, between 1929 and 1933, Slovak industrial production collapsed by forty per cent and agricultural production by twenty per cent. GDP growth, which had averaged a fairly impressive six per cent a year in the 1920s, plummeted to an average of −3.6 per cent per annum between 1929 and 1932 and never recovered. Between 1932 and 1937 Czechoslovakia managed only a paltry 3.7 per cent rate of GDP growth. This dismal performance was partly the government’s fault. It raised tariffs to protect domestic producers and thereby escalated a ‘beggar my neighbour’ tariff war with its neighbours that reduced both imports and exports. It then

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artificially weakened the currency to boost exports which punished savers and rewarded spendthrifts.64 Moreover, the government desperately sought to reduce its expenditures in line with the drying up of tax revenue as the economy contracted. Austerity reduced economic growth even further. It also infuriated Slovak nationalists as it reduced the amount of money that was transferred each year to the Slovak Provincial Office. As a result vital transport, electrification and hydropower projects in Slovakia were postponed indefinitely while the number of Slovak government employees began to shrink for the first time since 1918. Of course, most countries in Europe adopted similar policies. Nevertheless, the Czechoslovak government’s hapless response to the economic crisis appeared to bolster claims by Tuka and his followers that rule by Prague was increasingly destructive for the Slovaks. Moreover, observant Slovaks noticed that fascist Italy was not afflicted by the recession as severely as its democratic neighbours and that Germany staged a remarkably rapid economic recovery after Hitler’s rise to power. The turn to the right in 1930s Slovakia was reinforced by the fact that many of the Slovaks’ neighbours had moved in a similar direction including Austria, Hungary and Poland who were all busy in this period dismantling their own variants of Central European liberalism.65 As was the case elsewhere in Europe, ambitious Slovak students were particularly prone to succumb to the appeal of the radical right. They too were infuriated by the central government’s policy of austerity that resulted in poor accommodation and meagre job prospects. Their experience of the Great Depression was made worse by the comparison with the 1920s when there had been ‘extraordinarily favourable conditions for professionals’. This was because in the first decade of Czechoslovakia’s existence, the new state was desperate for Slovak-speaking professionals to replace the Hungarians who had fled or been dismissed from their posts. By the 1930s this bubble had burst as the number of professional jobs failed to keep pace with the growth in the student body. Arguably, the intensifying competition for jobs with ‘foreigners’ was even more dramatic in Slovakia than in Germany, where the radicalization of the student body has been identified as an important reason for the popularity of the Nazi party.66 For example, Slovak students had to compete for jobs not only with the Jews and other minorities, but also with an influx of ‘foreign’ Czech migrants who had assumed positions in the administration and professions in Slovakia after 1918. Hostility to Czech migrants had been a recurring theme of SĽS rhetoric from 1918 onwards on the grounds that this was another manifestation of ‘Czechification’. It was however, privately acknowledged throughout the 1920s

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that such criticism should not be taken too seriously and that Czech immigrants were necessary to help administer Slovakia. As a result of the pre-war policy of magyarization, after 1918 there were too few Slovak officials, teachers and professionals. Those Slovaks who graduated in the 1920s from the various higher education institutions, such as the renamed and expanded Commenius University in Bratislava, were eagerly recruited by the authorities. They also had plenty of opportunities to flourish in private business. As the number of these graduates increased, however, employment opportunities began to dry up and resentment at ‘foreign’ competition increased. From 1918 to 1932 the number of annual graduates of Slovak-language elite schools increased from 112 to 1177. As a result, by the end of that period supply exceeded demand and graduate poverty and graduate unemployment had become commonplace.67 With government jobs in short supply, the party’s demand that Czechs should be replaced by Slovaks suddenly acquired a new appeal among Slovak students. Moreover, hostility to Czech ‘migrants’ easily mutated into a broader hostility to all ‘foreigners’ in influential positions in Slovakia. The Jews were another target because they were disproportionately represented in the professions relative to their presence in the total population. These factors propelled a new generation of SĽS student activists to launch a new journal in 1933 called Nástup that became the primary vehicle for the promulgation of fascist ideas within the party after the dissolution of the Rodobrana. Nástup was owned and edited by Ján Ďurčanský, and included numerous contributions by his more ambitious brother Ferdinand. It also published the occasional article by Sidor, Mach and other former members of the Rodobrana. It rapidly attracted a sizeable readership among disillusioned young Catholic Slovak students who found in its monthly polemics, a refreshing simplicity and a new idealism. In particular, Nástup argued that Slovakia could and should emulate the ultra-nationalist social revolution that was underway in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.68 The contributors to Nástup concealed their radicalism by claiming that they only sought autonomy for Slovakia within a ‘federal’ Czechoslovakia. They also cloaked their admiration for Nazi Germany with an insistence that Slovakia had to develop in its own way. In reality, however, they constantly implied that Slovakia’s inclusion into the new Czechoslovak state in 1918 was not a genuine ‘liberation’. They also denounced ‘destructive’ laissez-faire capitalism as well as, predictably, social democracy, and communism as undesirable by-products of Czechoslovakia’s ‘moral anarchy’. The nástupists, as the contributors to the journal came to be known, also offered an unrelenting critique of Czechoslovak democracy by contrasting its failings with the success of the various right-

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wing authoritarian regimes. They asserted that Slovakia had the right to full independence if it so desired, irrespective of the SĽS’s share of the nationwide vote. Ominously, they also questioned whether elections, parliamentary politics and participation in another government coalition could ever produce the desired level of autonomy for Slovakia.69 Typical of the Nástup’s hostility towards Czechoslovakia was its support for the Sudeten German movement, led by Konrad Henlein, which pressed for autonomy for Czechoslovakia’s western border provinces. A typical contribution asserted that ‘Henlein is not dangerous for us Slovaks…let him fight against Czechs, Bolsheviks and Jews’.70 Notably, from the very first issue onwards, Nástup confidently predicted that Hitler’s variant of fascism would soon spread across Europe.71 Moreover, the Nástup continued to espouse a vituperative form of antisemitism which asserted that the Jews constituted a separate race of people, irrevocably alienated from their Slovak neighbours. Jews were also accused of being the primary vehicle for the penetration of liberalism, socialism, immoral capitalism, and bolshevism into Slovakia. According to one fairly representative article in Nástup the Jewish character sought ‘to subvert what is steadfast, to devalue what is valuable, to disrupt what is harmonizing, and to corrupt what is beautiful’. Nástup’s contributors were also keen to draw a parallel between the philosemitic policies of the Hungarian government before 1918 and the Czechoslovak government’s tolerant attitude towards the Jews in the interwar period. For example, an anonymous writer insisted in 1939 that ‘Hungary’s liberal and freemason government made [Jewish] immigration possible in precisely the same way that our centralist government helps them rule us economically’.72 Indeed, from the very first edition of the journal onwards the nástupists urged their fellow Slovaks to join their anti-Jewish boycott and ‘shop only in Slovaks shops…advertise only in Slovak newspapers…give jobs only to Slovaks’.73 Sabine Witt has argued that the Nástup did wrestle with the anticlerical character of the Nazi ideology and wanted ‘neither socialism nor fascism’ in Slovakia. Attempts to distinguish their ideology from fascism came across, however, as either a perfunctory afterthought or merely another example of the ambiguity that characterized SĽS rhetoric throughout the interwar period.74 That ambiguity was also evident in the relationship between the journal and the party. Hlinka on occasion publicly denied that the Nástup was affiliated with the SĽS, insisting, for example, that ‘the Nástup is the Nástup and the party is the party’. In reality, however, all of the contributors to the journal were party members who were able to exert a growing influence on the wider party and even on Hlinka himself.75

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Both the extremism and the influence of the nástupists were put on full display at the congress of the SĽS in the Slovak spa town of Pieštany in 1936 which was attended by a correspondent of one of Nazi Germany’s leading newspapers, the Volkische Beobachter. The younger delegates to the congress gave a series of ferociously anti-Bolshevik, antisemitic and anti-Czech speeches. They also drew up their own manifesto and with the help of Mach were able to persuade Hlinka to read it out in public. He thereby appeared to endorse, for example, its denunciation of ‘those political currents that want to bring about a destruction of the national community and the ruin of European culture…[including] international representatives of a materialistic ideology and Judaeo-Bolshevik anarchy’.76 The extent to which the nástupists’ rhetoric had penetrated into the wider party was graphically demonstrated during the 1938 local elections. According to the SĽS, these elections were a new opportunity to ‘get rid of the power and influence of Judaeo-Bolsheviks in our communities, towns, province and state’. Jews, Czechs and atheists were also denounced as ‘subverters of human society, enemies of Christ, His church, and the Slovak nation’. Meanwhile the nástupists adopted ever more aggressive rhetoric towards the Jews. By January 1939, for example, they had begun to use quotes from the notorious German antisemitic film, ‘The Eternal Jew’ as they pressed for harsher antisemitic measures.77 The nástupists were not, however, merely an influential intellectual pressure group. They also embraced physical force as a means of bolstering their influence within the party. For example, they played a key role in disrupting the state celebration in Nitra in 1933 which commemorated the eleven hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Saints Cyril and Methodius among the Slovaks. Hlinka was not included among the official list of speakers at this commemoration. Nevertheless, the nástupists and other right-radicals in the party forced the organizers to allow Hlinka to give an impromptu speech. This incurred the wrath of the central government, which dished out a series of prison sentences and temporarily banned the Nástup. Then in 1936 the nástupists helped organize a series of antisemitic riots in Bratislava superficially intended to force cinemas to not show the supposedly philosemitic French film ‘Golem’. In conjunction with the Federation of Slovak Catholic Students they also launched a xenophobic campaign under the slogan ‘In Slovakia speak Slovak!’ (Slovak: Na Slovensku po slovensky). A number of contributors to Nástup were also founding members of the third fascist movement to emerge within the SĽS, the Hlinka Guard (Slovak: Hlinková Garda), an openly paramilitary and thuggish force, whose first branches were founded at the end of July 1938.78

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The Hlinka Guard Although Sidor was the first man to be appointed as commander in chief of this new formation, it was Mach who persuaded the party leadership that the time was right in 1938 to re-establish a paramilitary force in Slovakia akin to the former Rodobrana. Another important figure in the Hlinka Guard was Karol Murgaš who had served as the secretary of the SĽS in Slovakia’s second city of Košice. Born in 1899, Murgaš had written an admiring book about Mussolini’s Italy, and publicly described Hitler as ‘the great Saviour of national Europe’. He had also collaborated with Tuka and Snaczký to publish the right-radical Autonómia newspaper in the 1920s and with the Ďurčanský brothers to publish Nástup in the 1930s. Mach and Murgaš were joined in the Hlinka Guard leadership by leading nástupists such as Ferdinand Ďurčanský and Jozef Kirschbaum. The shared debt that all of these men owed to Tuka was highlighted when they appointed him as their honorary commander. Under them, it is unsurprising that the Hlinka Guard rapidly acquired a reputation as the ‘outspoken propagator of national socialism in Slovakia’.79 Although the Hlinka Guard formally operated under the auspices of the SĽS, and every one of its members was required to be a member of the party, it was in reality an autonomous paramilitary formation. As had been the case with the Rodobrana, its membership had their own black uniforms, their own salutes, and their own chain of command, headed first by Sidor and then by Mach. The Hlinka Guard also possessed its own sources of revenue, its own newspaper, and its own distinct view of how Slovakia should develop, concisely expressed in its slogan ‘Slovakia for the Slovaks’ (Slovak: Slovensko slovákom).80 As was the case with the Rodobrana, and rhetorically with Nástup, it also effortlessly blended fascist imagery with Catholic symbolism. Its members, for example, wore black uniforms which were emblazoned with the Slovak Catholic symbol of the double cross. They were also required to attend Mass on Sundays as if on a military parade. These outward manifestations of Catholicism allowed Tiso to insist that the Hlinka Guard was ‘not a [carbon] copy of the German [brown shirts]’. The Catholic imagery of the Hlinka Guard has even allowed some historians to argue that it was a potential force for good undermined by the entry of ‘unsavoury’ elements.81 It is certainly noteworthy that unlike more conventional fascist paramilitary organizations, the Hlinka Guard was neither obviously bloodthirsty nor particularly gruesome. Even though it was named after the dead leader of the SĽS its members were not imbued with the cult of death that was evident in, for

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example, the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael and the Croatian UstašaCroatian Revolutionary Movement.82 The Hlinka Guard did take the leading role in the round up of Slovakia’s Jews and Roma that were deported to the death camps in Poland. Nevertheless, the Hlinka Guard did not actively engage in the killing of other Slovaks until some of its units participated in the suppression of the Slovak national uprising in 1944. The astute American diplomat George Kennan’s observation that its greetings was ‘symbolically enough …a halfhearted compromise between a friendly wave and a full-fledged fascist salute’ captures the ambiguous character of the Hlinka Guard (and ultimately the wider party), which both emulated and sought to distance itself from the Nazi German model.83

The alienation of progressive Slovak Catholics While the right-radical wing of the SĽS gradually expanded its influence within the party the moderate wing was diminished by the loss of a number of its leading figures. Dr Blaho, Hodža, Markovič, Medvecký, Moyš, Okánik and Šrobár had already left the party before the war and never returned.84 They were subsequently joined by others in the immediate post-war years. Mičura, who had briefly been appointed to the party leadership in 1918, resigned from the party within months. Some of Slovakia’s most respected Catholic clergymen such as Richard Osvald, Pavel Žiska and Ján Donoval were also forcefully criticizing the policies of the SĽS by 1919. The resignation of moderate figures from the party then continued throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, often explicitly in protest at the influence of Tuka and his fascist allies.85 Among the most notable figures to abandon the party as a response to its growing influence of Tuka and his allies on the party, were the SĽS’s first leader Skyčák. He was later joined by another of its leading personalities, Juriga and a further seven of the party’s MPs, including Marko Gažík, who had served as one of the party’s two cabinet ministers from 1927–1929, Viktor Ravasz, a former deputy president of the party from 1923–1930, Pavel Macháček, who had served as the secretary of the party from 1922–1929, Ján Hvodzík, Robert Kubiš, Florián Tománek and Jozef Vrabec.86 There were also repeated defections at the local level. For example, around 100 members resigned in Košice in 1938 in protest at the party’s enthusiasm for Nazi Germany which ‘is dangerous to the state’. The majority of the party’s supporters, nevertheless, remained loyal. When Juriga attempted to create a new, moderate version of

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the Slovak People’s Party in 1929 he obtained the support of only 0.38 per cent of the Slovak electorate.87 Other members of the moderate wing remained in the party but were purged from positions of influence (Štefan Polyák, Ignác Grebáč-Orlov) or left active politics to take up a position in the local Catholic hierarchy, including Karol Kmeťko and Ján Vojtaššák. The moderates were further weakened by the death of prominent party members who opposed the radicalization of the party. These included Štefan Onderčo, and the Protestant pastor Martin Razus, who had formed an alliance with Hlinka in 1935, but who remained a firm believer in Slovakia’s inclusion in Czechoslovakia. Most importantly, in 1938, Hlinka himself died.88 The death of Hlinka played a key role in shifting the party further to the right. It is true, as noted above, that Hlinka allowed Slovak fascists to flourish within the party. He showed no willingness to crack down on the idealization of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany by his chief lieutenants, and even occasionally inserted the rhetoric of the nástupists into his own speeches. Nevertheless, Hlinka retained his faith in the democratic process as a means of curbing the liberal inclinations of Czechoslovakia’s governing elite, feared the spread of Germany’s influence on Central Europe, and remained up until his death convinced that the Slovaks could flourish in a common state with the Czechs. Revealingly, he was eulogized at his funeral by none other than his long-standing opponent, Hodža, as fundamentally loyal to Czechoslovakia.89 As Tido Gašpar, Mach’s successor as propaganda chief of the independent Slovak state, conceded in his memoir, ‘as long as Hlinka lived it was difficult to popularize [Slovak: udomáčňovať] foreign unchristian values (eg. fascism)’ in Slovakia.90

Moderates into radicals At the same time that moderate figures led by Hlinka disappeared from the party, other members of the SĽS underwent a process of personal radicalization. This phenomenon of radicalization was evident throughout the interwar period. For example, Jehlička had rushed back to Slovakia from his teaching position at the University of Budapest in 1918 to help construct the new state. He was appointed as commissar of the University of Bratislava and a member of the first National Assembly. Nevertheless, he became such a ferocious opponent of Czechoslovakia that the party was forced to sever all contact with him from 1919 onwards. His long-standing antisemitism and hostility to the Left subsequently

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mutated into a paranoia about Judeo-Bolshevism and an enthusiasm for fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. By 1939, when he died, he was convinced that Hitler would rescue the Slovaks from both Czech rule and the threat of invasion by the Soviet Union.91 His fellow priest Mnohel, who signed the Martin declaration of October 1918 also briefly went into exile in 1919 to seek foreign support to break-up the Czechoslovak state as did František Unger, who had been appointed party secretary when the SĽS was refounded in 1918. Likewise the head of the party in the Trenčín region, Eugene Tvrdý, had to be expelled from the party in 1921 for openly advocating an alliance with parties representing the Magyar minority in order to undermine the Czechoslovak state.92 Another of the party’s prominent radicals, Ľudovít Bazovský, had even served as one of Šrobár’s officials in 1918 before he turned against the government. He then joined the SĽS, and helped sabotage the official ceremony in Nitra in 1933. Ultimately, Bazovský’s own hostility to the Czechoslovak state grew so intense that he endorsed Hungary’s annexation of a swathe of Slovak territory in 1938 and spent the Second World War working as an official of the government in Budapest.93 Crucially, the leader of the party from 1938 onwards, Jozef Tiso, also went through a process of radicalization. Throughout much of the interwar period Tiso had marked himself out as a moderate. Although he was sentenced to two months in prison, commuted to two weeks, for his public criticism of the state, he kept his distance from the Hlinka Guard, the nástupists and the Rodobrana. On occasion he also quietly criticized Tuka and was happy to serve in the Czechoslovak government from 1927–1929. By the later 1930s he had, however, begun to expropriate the rhetoric of the fascist wing of the party. For example, he denounced ‘Jewish Marxism’ and openly contemplated whether the Slovaks should remain within the Czechoslovak state.94 One factor fuelling Tiso’s radicalization in the latter half of the 1930s was the outbreak of the Spanish civil war in 1936. The atrocities committed against Catholics by Spanish republicans provoked outrage across Europe. Moreover, the ability of Communists and Anarchists to obtain support in what had always been a bastion of European Catholicism provoked renewed fears about the influence of the Left in Slovakia.95 Moreover, the willingness of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and other fascist movements to provide support for Franco’s anti-republic forces boosted the prestige of fascism among Slovak Catholics and implied that fascism and Catholicism had, at the very least, common enemies.96

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A second reason for Tiso’s radicalization is that he was always captivated by the same messianic aspirations, the same palingenetic vision, as the fascist wing of the party. Their belief that Slovak independence would lead to the rejuvenation of the nation overlapped with Tiso’s own desire to rejuvenate the faith of his Catholic countrymen, which he mythologized as the core of Slovak identity. His use of grandiose rhetoric, such as his claim that the Slovaks had been waging a ‘holy struggle’ for the entirety of the past millennium, ultimately precluded the politics of negotiation and compromise in favour of grandiose actions such as his party’s seizure of power in 1938 and the declaration of independence in 1939.97 The final and decisive reason for Tiso’s radicalization was that, in Ward’s words, he ‘moved away from parliamentary democracy’ after he convinced himself that it could never produce the rejuvenation of Slovak Catholicism that he and his party desired. In his post-war trial he explained that his experience as an MP and minister in the interwar period was actually a key reason for his later radicalization because it had left him ‘shocked and disgusted’ with ‘the multiparty system…[which] did not serve the healthy development of the nation’. Convinced that the SĽS was the only party that had the right to represent the Slovak nation, he had already hinted at what the party would do to its opponents when he promised in his speeches to cleanse Slovakia of ‘trash’.98 This growing disillusionment with democracy, which radicalized Tiso and his fellow party members, stemmed primarily from the disconnect between their bombastic claim to represent the entire Slovak nation and the reality of their electoral performances. Although the SĽS became the most popular party in Slovakia from 1923 onwards it only managed to earn a place in the government for two years and remained one of the smallest parties in the National Assembly.99 This was because the SĽS after 1920 confined its appeal to Slovak voters and refused to field candidates in either the Czech lands or Ruthenia. This meant that the SĽS did not even campaign in those parts of Czechoslovakia which elected around 240 of the deputies to the 300 member lower house of the Czechoslovak National Assembly. Only one solitary Czech MP, Antonín Čuřík, briefly affiliated himself with the party from 1929–1932 although a handful of Czech MPs occasionally offered their support to the SĽS’s demand for greater Slovak autonomy.100 In addition, the slice of the electorate that the party appealed to was trimmed further by its ethnic Slovak nationalism which alienated at least that third of the population of Slovakia who dared to identify themselves on the censuses as Magyars, Germans, Rusyns, and Jews. Furthermore, the party’s

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sectarian ideology also alienated Protestants who made up about a fifth of the ethnic Slovak electorate. Thus, the party effectively only sought to appeal to just over half the population of Slovakia. Moreover, as ethnic Slovaks made up only 16 per cent of the entire republic’s population, the party’s maximum potential electoral support was no more than 11 per cent of the entire Czechoslovak electorate. As a result, the SĽS never managed to be included among the six largest parties in the national assembly unless it was willing to forge an alliance with other parties.101 On two occasions, in the 1920 and 1935 elections, it did attempt to break out of the electoral straitjacket woven from its blend of ethnic nationalist and sectarian principles. In 1920 it aligned with the Czechoslovak People’s Party (Czech: Československá strana lidová), which primarily appealed to Czech Catholics. The alliance did achieve the second largest share of the vote in the elections. Nevertheless, as sixteen parties won seats in the election, the coalition gained only eleven per cent of the total seats in parliament and was dissolved immediately after the elections were concluded. Then, in 1935, the SĽS formed a four-party alliance with the SNS and minority parties which represented the Poles and Rusyns in Slovakia. All of these parties had embraced the cause of autonomy. The results were, however, again disappointing as the autonomist coalition’s support was again surpassed by six other parties. It obtained only twenty-two seats or just over seven per cent of all the seats in the National Assembly. As a result the coalition rapidly fell apart due to infighting over who was to blame for the disappointing result.102 The SĽS was, however, incapable of accepting that its particular brand of Slovak nationalism had only limited popularity in Slovakia. Instead the leadership initially blamed its electoral failure on a failure to create a mass party organization and supposed electoral abuses by the authorities. As Juriga explained in parliament in 1920, after the SĽS had obtained only thirteen of the possible sixty MPs elected in Slovakia, ‘we do not consider the elections … as a free expression of the Slovak people. They involved non-Slovak soldiers, non-Slovak officials and other nonSlovak factors. A terrifying censorship of the press, an arbitrary imprisoning of our people and leaders prevented this act from being an expression of the free will of our population.’103 Such excuses became, however, less tenable following the massive expansion of the party’s organization, the creation of a flourishing network of party newspapers, and the generally tolerant approach by the authorities that was adopted after martial law was ended in Slovakia in 1920. An alternative explanation was, therefore, required to explain why a party that claimed to represent the entire Slovak nation only managed to obtain

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twenty-three of fifty-six possible MPs in the 1925 elections, eighteen of fifty-four MPs in the 1929 elections and twenty of fifty-nine MPs in the 1935 elections.104 In the wake of these electoral disappointments, the party increasingly argued that the entire Czechoslovak democratic system was fundamentally unfair because it ensured that an exclusively Slovak party such as the SĽS would always be in a minority in the national assembly. The 1925 elections were, in this regard, particularly disheartening. Even after the party won more seats than any other party in Slovakia, it still controlled less than 8 per cent of the seats in the national assembly and was subsequently awarded only two seats in the seventeen-member coalition cabinet.105 For the most part the party had to content itself with a place on the opposition benches picking up whatever morsels had fallen from the democratic table. Its ability to attract concessions and block legislation was substantial, particularly when it cooperated with other opposition parties. Nevertheless, the fruits of cross-party cooperation were not sufficient to satisfy the ambitions of a growing number of its idealistic supporters, particularly the younger generation of party activists, who yearned for a radical transformation of society. Ward’s astute comments about Tiso that ‘the long years of frustration [as an opposition politician] ….cured him…of idealism’ can also be applied to the wider party that gradually lost its faith in the ability of parliamentary democracy to produce the ‘new Slovakia’.106 Or as Jozef Kirschbaum, the general secretary of the SĽS, bluntly put it in 1939 when he explained why Slovakia had become a one-party state. The ‘values of democracy were discredited’ he insisted ‘the authoritarian principle shows the way.’107 This disillusionment with the electoral process was exacerbated by the leadership’s tendency to launch demagogic attacks on even the principle of democracy whenever they were confronted by an electoral setback. Hlinka, for example, responded to the party’s electoral failure in 1920 by declaring that ‘Slovakia is ours and only we are Slovaks’. He also endorsed the party’s memorandum, issued in 1922, which denounced the Czechoslovak constitution on the grounds that it had been imposed by a ‘majority’ and dismissed the electoral process as ‘sham-elections’.108 The use of such rhetoric may have been intended to brush over the party’s electoral limitations. Nevertheless, it also allowed more radical members of the party to openly disparage democracy as a mere mechanism that maintained the supremacy of the Czechs over the Slovaks in the same way that the Hungary’s electoral system had maintained the supremacy of the Magyars. Tiso, for example, justified the party’s coup d’état in 1938 on the grounds that elected governments had ‘for the last twenty years

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decided our fate without our participation or consent’. Likewise, Alexander Mach insisted in his radio speech, which proclaimed the creation of an independent Slovak state, that the party’s seizure of power had been carried out ‘in the spirit of Andrej Hlinka’.109

From autonomy to independence The SĽS was, therefore, incapable of shaping government policy while it remained in opposition and lacked the electoral clout to force its inclusion in the government. The party’s only viable option was to wait for an external force to change the internal dynamic. That moment came in the autumn of 1938 when Hitler demanded that the western borderland of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland and largely populated by German speakers, should be transferred to Nazi Germany. This was the moment, Yeshayahu Jelinek has argued, when the new party leader Tiso revealed his new-found radicalism and turned his party ‘into voluntary assistants of Hitler’. Certainly, from that point on prominent members of the SĽS began to meet with representatives of Nazi Germany and the Sudeten Germans. They also began receiving a steady flow of funds from various German sources and publicly supported the demands of the Sudeten Germans for self-government. Tiso also made clear that German pressure on Czechoslovakia would help advance the party’s objectives. He declared in June 1938 that ‘If we should squander this moment…the Slovak nation might have to wait centuries for the wheel of fate to spin again.’110 Nevertheless, the SĽS’s actions in this period continued to be informed by the ambiguous attitude that it had adopted throughout the interwar period. In March 1938, for example, the party secretary Martin Sokol declared in parliament that the party ‘stands firmly on the principles of this state: it considers the borders of the Czechoslovak Republic as permanent and sovereign’. The party also supported the mobilization of the Czechoslovak army in September 1938 in the vain hope that this would deter Hitler’s aggression.111 In reality it was the Munich agreement, which was signed at the end of the month and stripped Czechoslovakia of much of its border territories, which ensured that the SĽS succumbed to what Mary Heimann has called ‘the fascist appeal.’112 Most obviously, the mutilation of Czechoslovakia produced a power vacuum as the demoralized Prime Minister Milan Hodža and President Eduard Beneš resigned. They were replaced by a hastily assembled government of national unity presided over by the hapless Emil Hácha, a distinguished lawyer and

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fervent Catholic whose chief qualification for the job was that he bore no obvious responsibility for the catastrophe that had befallen his country. Intent on taking advantage of this turmoil, the SĽS first demanded home rule as the price for their continued loyalty towards the rump Czecho-Slovak state and then seized it for themselves. On 6 October 1938, with the Munich agreement only a week old, the party mounted its coup. A meeting of the party leadership in Žilina proclaimed the elimination of the autonomous Provincial Office. Its replacement was a new Slovak government, headed by Tiso, which claimed to be ‘the supreme legal authority’ in Slovakia. It was a putsch that the hapless central government in Prague was in no position to put down.113 Empowered by this success, the new Slovak government set about creating a ‘new Slovakia’ that, in the assessment of British diplomats, ‘showed no hesitation in copying fascist methods’.114 The autonomous Slovak state that the SĽS created between October 1938 until March 1939 certainly gave full vent to the radicalization that the party had undergone in the preceding period. It was authoritarian, xenophobic and antisemitic. In his first proclamation issued after the party had seized power in October 1938, Mach, in his position as the new government’s spokesman, announced on Slovak radio that ‘we have declared war on every internationalist Judaeo-Marxist current. We have made the German Reich’s view of this our own’. Tiso was, however, more cautious and more conciliatory. In his follow-up speech he declared that ‘I call upon our Magyar, Rusyn, and other minority brothers who live on the territory of Slovakia to stand firm with us because the Slovak nation does not want to oppress you.’115 Nevertheless, the new government immediately began the wholesale dismissal of Czech and Jewish civil servants, launched a programme to repatriate thousands of Czech ‘immigrants’, and attempted a botched deportation of around 7500 ‘dangerous’ Jews who lacked proof of residency. Various ambitious albeit vague plans to ‘slovakize’ the economy by curbing the financial power of Jews, Czechs, and Magyars were also promised. The ethnic minorities were also permitted to vote at specially designated and supervised polling stations.116 Meanwhile, the SĽS’s own paramilitary organization, the Hlinka Guard, was empowered to serve as ‘the moral auxiliary organ of all government offices’. In practical terms this made the Hlinka Guard the chief instrument of law and order in the autonomous Slovak state. As its members paraded across Slovakia, harassing Jews and other opponents of the new regime, the British minister in Prague noted that ‘fascist ideals and practices seem clearly to be the order of the day in the new Slovakia’.117

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Within weeks of taking power the SĽS had closed down all rival parties that had refused to agree to a merger with the SĽS, which added the phrase ‘Party of Slovak Unity’ to its official title. Only two other parties, which represented what remained of the Magyar and German minorities, were permitted to continue operating. The most prominent associations that lay outside the party’s control were also closed down. These included the independent trades unions, the freemasons and even the Catholic gymnastics society Orol. Most opposition newspapers were also banned and government commissars were placed on the editorial boards of the remaining publications to ensure that they were ‘put on the right track’.118 In addition, municipal autonomy was trampled upon, civil liberties and the principle of equality before the law were eviscerated, and Slovak women were ordered to ‘cease filling men’s jobs and return to the hearth’. As Josette Baer has noted, women’s lives were now expected to ‘centre on the three C’s, that is, cooking, children and Catholicism’.119 With all viable opposition parties eliminated and checks and balances on the government’s authority eviscerated, the elections to the new ‘Slovak national parliament’ (Snem Slovenskej krajiny), which were held in December 1938, produced a comprehensive victory for the SĽS. Only a single party list drawn up by the party leadership was presented for approval, along with the question ‘Do you want a new, free Slovakia’ which was endorsed by over 97 per cent of the 1,200,000 who voted. Of the sixty-three persons who were, thereby, elected to the new parliament, around fifty were long-standing members of the party.120 The formal opening of the new Slovak parliament on 18 January 1939 provided further clues to the radicalism of the new regime. It is true that the occasion was celebrated with pomp and ceremony (a ceremonial medal was even distributed to commemorate the event), which implied that Slovakia would continue to be administered by a parliamentary system and constitutional governance. On the other hand, the ceremonial medal was itself emblazoned with the fasces, a bundle of rods that had been a symbol of the ancient Roman republic and was appropriated by, among others, Mussolini as a symbol of his own fascist movement. Moreover, the Hlinka Guard organized a mass parade outside parliament to celebrate its opening and many of the newly elected deputies also wore the paramilitary uniform of the Hlinka Guard. Moreover, the array of priests in attendance, dressed in clerical attire, including Tiso who, along with his fellow ministers, oversaw proceedings from a raised platform at one end of the chamber flanked by huge banners emblazoned with double cross. All this helped imbue deliberations with an atmosphere that was part authoritarian political rally, part clerical concave.121

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Even the parliament’s declaration of independence just after midday on 14 March 1939 had authoritarian overtones. There had been no debate and no vote prior to this momentous decision. Karol Sidor, the leader of the Hlinka Guard who President Hácha had appointed as acting head of the Slovak government four days earlier, resigned. Then Tiso gave the assembled fifty-seven MPs an account of his visit to Berlin during which Hitler had ordered him to declare Slovak independence and complete the destruction of Czechoslovakia. Finally, Martin Sokol, a deputy president of the SĽS who also served as speaker of the parliament and was, as usual dressed in his black Hlinka Guard uniform, ordered ‘those in favour of an independent Slovak state, rise!’ Then, with a theatrical gesture the deputies rose to their feet in unison to sing the unofficial national anthem, ‘Hail to the Slovaks’ (Slovak: Hej Slovaci).122 Their enthusiasm should come as no surprise. It is true that the assembled deputies were afraid that the only alternative to Slovak independence was the annexation of the country by revisionist Hungary or Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, the mood in the parliament on 14 March, as the spontaneous singing of the old nationalist anthem demonstrated, was imbued not with fear, but with excitement. The radicalization of the party in the 1930s, its contempt for the government in Prague, its admiration for fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and its proven willing to seize power when given the chance (evidenced by its coup d’état in October 1938) were all clear indications that the party leadership would have few qualms about aligning with Adolf Hitler. For a party initially founded in opposition to liberalism thirty-four years before, the opportunity to assume complete control of Slovakia and bring the culture war to a victorious conclusion had proved irresistible.

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In his insightful study of the clash between Catholics and the state in Komárno over civil marriage (Magyar: Komárom), a town that eventually ended up on the southern border of interwar Slovakia, Robert Nemes concluded that ‘the culture war in Hungary came to a close in 1894-5’. In the strictest sense he was absolutely correct. The requirement, for example, that all marriages in Hungary had to be authorized by a state official remained in force and the Catholic People’s Party, which was explicitly founded to overturn this reform, proved to be, in Nemes’s words, ‘a paper tiger’.1 At the peak of the agitation against the marriage reform, the government had been forced to call fresh elections to maintain its authority. After the reform became law, however, the governing Liberal Party remained comfortably ensconced in power for a further decade. Even after an opposition coalition took power in 1906 no attempt was made to repeal the reforms that had provoked such fury in the late 1890s. Then, in 1910, the old governing Liberal Party, operating under the new name of the National Party of Work, but with the same ideology, won yet another round of parliamentary elections. It remained in power until 1918 while the marriage reform itself has remained, in amended form, on the Hungarian statute books down to today. Nevertheless, as this book has demonstrated, for one group of Slovak Catholics the failed effort to block the introduction of civil marriage was only one battle in a much larger and longer war. These men, and it was a movement led exclusively by men, were convinced that it was not simply a handful of laws passed by a single government that needed to be resisted. Instead, they regarded the policies of first the Hungarian and then the Czechoslovak government as a direct threat to both their faith and their national identity. They, therefore, continued to wage their own regional culture war until, on 14 March, 1939, they finally seized complete control of the government and established an independent Slovak state. It was as a direct result of this culture war that successive generations of Catholic clergy and laity were politicized and radicalized and that the Slovak People’s Party was repeatedly relaunched to become the most popular Slovak party in Hungary and the most popular party in Czechoslovak Slovakia. Moreover, it was their antipathy to the liberalism of the governing regime this book has argued that

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persuaded these Slovak Catholics to support the destruction of Hungary in 1918 and the destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The intensity with which this culture war was waged explains both its duration and its outcome. For a growing number of Slovak Catholics, the struggle to create a network of associations that spread across northern Hungary, their determination to establish a new political force rather than rely on existing parties, the frenetic struggle to maximize support for their own political party, the SĽS, and ultimately the decision to break away first from Hungary and then from Czechoslovakia all derived from an intoxicating blend of religious conviction and ethnic nationalism. It was this combination of nationalism and religion which ensured that the culture war in Slovakia did not peter out in 1895 as it appeared to have done elsewhere in Hungary in the years before 1918. Whereas, for example, Catholic Magyars’ criticisms of the Budapest government were always tempered by their (at least, partial) enthusiasm for its nationalist policies, Slovak Catholic hostility to the government’s anticlerical policies was intensified by the energy and the anger that animated the Slovak nationalist movement. For example, the policy of magyarization, which accelerated after 1895, intensified Slovak Catholic hostility to the government in ways which Catholic Magyars found incomprehensible. The government’s ambition to turn ever more Slovaks into Magyars not only exacerbated longstanding fears about ‘the death of the nation’, but also terrified those Catholics who believed that it would break the bonds that had always preserved the faith in Hungary’s rural parishes. In particular, the attempt to magyarize Slovak Catholic parishes was accused of estranging the lethargic and elitist Magyar-speaking clergy from their Slovak-speaking parishioners. It could, therefore, be presented as a threat to both the Slovak culture and the Catholic faith. The same twofold criticism could also be directed at other places where magyarization took place, such as schools and government offices. For example, the educational prospects of Slovak speakers, and their chances for self-improvement which were assumed to be dependent on a sound education, were allegedly undermined when Magyar-speaking teachers became linguistically estranged from Slovak-speaking students. Likewise, good governance and public order were allegedly jeopardized when Magyar-speaking officials became estranged from their Slovak-speaking subjects. Hostility to magyarization was, therefore, driven not only by the threat that it posed to the future of the Slovak language and national identity, but also by the moral danger posed when figures of authority were linguistically alienated from those for whom they were responsible. The fear was that ambitious and educated Slovaks would become magyarized, while uneducated Slovaks would

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become second-class citizens, who received no moral guidance from their Magyar-speaking priests, teachers, and officials. In the same way, the government’s enthusiasm for economic modernization, including urbanization and (internal) migration, was condemned by the leaders of the SĽS as another threat to both the Slovaks’ language and their faith and morals. The not unjustified fear that Slovaks were more likely to switch to Magyar if they moved from their native villages to the larger towns and cities (where the proportion of Magyar speakers was generally far higher) was intensified by the widespread belief among Catholics across Europe that urban life corrupted the faithful. The plethora of vices that were associated with urban life, combined with the rapid assimilation of the Slovaks that occurred in Hungary’s larger cities, thus reinforced the conviction of Slovak Catholic critics of liberalism that magyarization was a threat to their faith and their culture. Poisonously, the government’s philosemitism, which looked favourably on Jewish in-migration as a driver of economic modernization, magyarization and electoral support, was savaged by these Slovak Catholics, who were similarly convinced that the Jewish minority was not only alienated from Christian/ Catholic traditions, but also from Slovak culture and morality. This double hostility towards the Jews, grounded in both religious prejudice and nationalist xenophobia, encouraged their depiction as a fifth column among the Slovaks. Throughout its existence, the SĽS depicted the Jews as the spearhead of liberalism among the Slovaks. They were accused of ruthlessly undermining public morals with their enthusiasm for capitalism in all its destructive forms, from usurious banks to intoxicating taverns. Prior to the mid-1890s, however, the existing opposition parties were incapable of mounting a serious challenge to the Liberal Party’s electoral dominance. That dominance was partly due to the fact that many of discontented inhabitants of Hungary, including almost all of the impoverished rural Catholic Slovaks, were disenfranchised. The primary reasons for the Liberal Party’s electoral success were that it had the support of the bureaucracy, which had been thoroughly politicized. At the same time, some of the opposition parties, such as the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party, broadly endorsed the government’s variant of liberalism. The other opposition parties were incapable of harnessing growing public dissatisfaction with the government’s policies. Their activities were constrained by both a lack of ambition and by officials at all levels of the bureaucracy who were empowered to restrict any organization that was suspected of agitating against the state. It is not, therefore, surprising that the first Slovak political party, the SNS, sidestepped these obstacles by embarking

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on an electoral boycott. In the decades before 1905, it essentially confided its organizational activities to the regional backwater of Martin, for that was precisely what a Slovak party was expected and permitted to do. It was only when the KNP first appeared in 1895 that a party posed a serious challenge to the Liberal Party’s hegemony in northern Hungary. The KNP dared to employ unashamedly populist rhetoric and appealed to both voters and non-voters, men and women, who attended its meetings and read its papers in huge numbers. The KNP also made a serious effort to develop a nationwide network of Catholic associations. This effort was inspired by the Vatican’s calls for a new effort to organize and mobilize the faithful. In northern Hungary it also dovetailed with Slovak nationalist efforts to create a network of institutions (cultural, educational, and economic) and periodicals that saw themselves as the guardians of Slovak language and culture. As a result, a network of Catholic and Slovak associations was constructed from the bottom up across the highlands, embracing humble parish sodalities, clubs, cooperatives, banks, and a growing number of supportive and persuasive publications. By 1905, however, the KNP appeared increasingly unwilling to challenge the full range of the Liberal Party’s policies. For example, its earlier criticisms of magyarization were jettisoned. More broadly, its efforts to attract the support of Hungary’s Catholic minorities visibly diminished. At the same time, the SNS remained unable to mount a serious challenge to the government’s liberal policies due to the deficiencies of its leadership. The expanding network of Slovak Catholic associations provided, therefore, a springboard for a group of charismatic, ambitious and well-financed businessmen, writers and clergymen to launch their own political party, the SĽS. Even then it was a curious hybrid, whose purpose and even existence remained uncertain. In part, it was created by the ambition of František Skyčák alongside the efforts of the editorial board of the Katolícke noviny. It was also, however, forced into existence by the KNP’s inflexibility. It was partly independent, (with its own name, manifesto and leadership), but it was also a pressure group working with and within the SNS leadership. It constituted a new political force eager to create a mass movement, but was simultaneously an amateurish party which lacked a proper nationwide, or even region-wide organization. When we consider, in addition, the constraints that were placed upon the party by the skewed electoral system, the hostility of the authorities, and the inchoate nature of Slovak identity, the success of the SĽS was remarkable. Charismatic candidates, populist policies, impassioned supporters, and the collapse of the Liberal Party all helped it become the sixth largest party in

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parliament. There was even a half-hearted attempt by the government to strike some form of electoral deal in the 1910 elections and to come to some form of accommodation in 1913–1914. It is also, however, vital to recognize the embitterment and radicalization that also took place before 1918. The imprisonment of many of the party’s leading figures, a wave of fines imposed on its publications, along with the government’s failure to offer a single significant concession was demoralizing. So also was the party’s inability to find a constructive ally among any of the other political parties. In addition, internecine disputes, fuelled by personal antagonism and ideological inflexibility, reduced the party to a rump group of sectarian Catholics. These thirteen years of fruitless opposition and political persecution purged the SĽS of both its Protestant and progressive members. It also purged the party of any residual Slovak Catholic Hungarus loyalty to Hungary. That loyalty, which had already been frayed by the rise of ethnic nationalism in Central Europe, was finally broken not only by four years of debilitating warfare, and eventual military defeat in 1918, but also by the de-legitimization of the entire regime. The decision by Skyčák and Dr Blaho to resign from parliament, by Hlinka to withdraw from active politics, and by Juriga to risk increasingly harsh condemnations of the government as the war progressed, revealed that the party leadership had lost its faith in Hungarian democracy by 1918, just as it subsequently lost its faith in Czechoslovak democracy by 1938. By 1918, it was also clear that the war had sapped the confidence, and ultimately the authority, of the imperial government in Vienna, as surely as it had sapped the confidence and authority of the Hungarian government in Budapest. The resignation of the Hungarian government in October and the emperor in November were only the most obvious symptoms of the crisis that had engulfed the entire regime in both halves of the Habsburg Empire. In contrast, those opposition politicians, who had always been excluded from power, including the leadership of the SĽS, appeared untarnished by military failure. Their demand for national self-determination brilliantly distilled their sweeping condemnations of government policy into a single comprehensible slogan. The appeal of self-determination was reinforced by the endorsement of the victors in Paris, London and Washington. Slovak nationalists in northern Hungary, just like the Magyar nationalists in Budapest had, therefore, the means, the motive, and the opportunity to exploit the power vacuum. By creating a new state they believed they could achieve their political objectives and win their own local culture war.

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As this book has argued the party’s trajectory before 1918 was replicated in interwar Czechoslovakia. Once again, nationalist Slovak Catholics became convinced that the government had succumbed to a liberal ideology that threatened their faith and their culture. Once again they placed their faith in a new separate Slovak party (the relaunched SĽS), whose popularity was boosted by a network of publications, associations, and institutions and whose membership derived from a disparate range of disaffected currents in interwar Slovak society bound together by a cult of leadership and deliberate ideological ambiguity. Once again they achieved remarkable electoral success and forced the government to offer negotiations and concessions. Once again, the moderates were driven out of the party or radicalized by years spent in apparently fruitless opposition. And once again a corrosive disillusionment with the electoral/ political system persuaded the party leadership to place its faith in revolutionary change and the destruction of the existing state. That disillusionment stemmed, primarily, from a misunderstanding of the party’s limited electoral success prior to 1918. As Hungary’s governing Liberal Party was elitist, corrupt, and reliant on the power of the administration to win elections, the men who founded the SĽS were convinced that a new, dynamic party and a genuinely democratic system would empower Catholic, conservative Slovak voters to defeat their liberal opponents. The extension of the franchise, it was assumed, would tilt the electoral balance away from the Magyar elite in favour of Catholics in general and Slovak Catholics in particular. After 1918, universal suffrage and proportional representation did indeed dramatically expand the SĽS’s parliamentary presence. At the same time, however, it also ruthlessly exposed the limits of its electoral appeal, which had previously been concealed by the narrow franchise, rigged elections, and hostile administration. The fact that even after 1918 Slovak Catholics still comprised little more than half of the electorate in Slovakia, and less than twelve per cent of the total Czechoslovak electorate, ensured that the SĽS would always remain one of the smaller parties in the new Czechoslovak national assembly. Even when it finally entered the government from 1927 to 1929 it was only a junior coalition partner, controlling just two of the sixteen government ministries. The party’s engagement in democratic politics did, nevertheless, secure significant concessions from the Czechoslovak government after 1918. Interwar Slovakia eventually possessed not only its own legal system and education system, but also its own increasingly vigorous administration and (largely) elected assembly. In fact, the party’s ability to influence decision-making and wield a de facto veto, especially when it cooperated with rival parties, was a remarkable

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testament to an interwar Czechoslovak regime that sought to accommodate the SĽS within a system that is best described in modern terms as ‘consociational’.2 Moreover, the differences between pre-war Hungary and interwar Czechoslovakia matter. Hungary, at least after 1867, explicitly served the interests of the Magyars, whereas Czechoslovakia was founded purposely to liberate both the Slovaks and the Czechs from the ‘yoke’ of Magyar and Habsburg rule. The enfranchisement of all Slovaks, men and women alike, the proportional representation of Slovaks in every parliament and every cabinet, the government’s support for the ‘re-slovakization of public life, education and culture’, the provision of a measure of autonomy for Slovakia, and even the entry of the SĽS into the government, marked a dramatic break from the situation before 1918. Moreover, the SĽS’s initial enthusiasm for the new Czechoslovak republic was motivated by a very different vision of the future, and occurred within an utterly different context, than that of its decision twenty years later to seek national independence for Slovakia. In 1918, Slovak nationalists were understandably embittered by four years of relentless warfare, economic impoverishment, and the intransigence of the Hungarian government, which was prepared to offer only paltry concessions and dubious promises. In 1939 there was no bloodshed, the economy was not in meltdown and the government had granted Slovakia significant autonomy. Nevertheless, the similarities between the ideology that the Hungarian political elite embraced before 1918 and that which the Czechoslovak political elite embraced after 1918 need also to be noted. As Robert Evans has pointed out, there were obvious parallels between the ‘Czechoslovak idea’ post-1918 and the pre-1918 claim that there was only one ‘indivisible, unitary Hungarian political nation’. He notes that ‘in the minds of ordinary Slovaks there seems to have been a good deal of overlap between these two abstractions.’3 As a result, the Czechoslovak government’s formal refusal to recognize the existence of a separate Slovak nation and Slovak language, and the arrival of a large numbers of Czechs to occupy administrative positions in Slovakia, convinced the SĽS that the old threat of magyarization had been replaced by the new policy of czechification. That the new Czechoslovak regime maintained the anticlerical reforms of Hungary’s liberal government, such as civil marriage, was an outrage for many Slovak Catholics. The government’s reliance on Czech migrants, many of whom were imbued with anticlerical instincts, to make up much of the new administrative class in Slovakia, only exacerbated this discontent. It appeared to replicate the policy pursued by the Budapest government before 1918 of dispatching Magyar officials to administer the Slovak inhabitants of northern

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Hungary. When the new Czechoslovak government also imposed additional curbs on the Catholic church in Slovakia (by, for example, expropriating some of its schools and its landholding), it ensured that Slovak Catholics’ fear of secularization once again became enmeshed with nationalist hostility to centralization. The central government in Prague after 1918, just like the central government in Budapest before 1918, was also persistently lambasted for being either unable or unwilling to curb the vagaries of laissez-faire economics that manifested itself in high rates of unemployment and continuing migration. Renewed fear of moral collapse was provoked by outbreaks of looting and criminality during the chaos that accompanied the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, and the continual prevalence of public drunkenness. The brief seizure of power by the Hungarian Bolsheviks in 1919, the proximity of the Soviet Union (which lay immediately across Czechoslovakia’s eastern border), and above all, the popularity of the Social Democratic and Communist parties in Slovakia further exacerbated concerns that the revolutionary changes that had taken place at the end of the First World War had produced new and greater dangers to Slovak national and religious identity. Likewise, the new Czechoslovak government’s philosemitic policies and the continuing influence of the Jewish minority in economic, professional and cultural life in Slovakia highlighted another continuity with the pre-1918 liberal system. Antisemites could be found in other Slovak parties, and for much of the interwar period, the SĽS leadership sought to play down its own hostility to the Jews. Nevertheless, the right-radical wing of the party remained obsessed with the Jews. This obsession was always likely to be tolerated, and ultimately flourished, in a party that stressed its ‘Christian’ and Slovak character. It is revealing that when Jozef Tiso took to the radio on 14 March 1939, to announce the creation of an independent Slovak state, the only concrete measure he promised was new antisemitic legislation. There was also a certain overlap in the men who led the party before and after 1918. Hlinka, for example, had played a key role in popularizing the party in its early years, took control of the party in 1913 and remained its leader until 1938. Likewise Juriga, who had been in the party’s first cohort of MPs in 1906, remained an influential force within the party throughout the 1920s, while his fellow pre-war MP Jehlička played a critical role in relaunching and redefining the party in 1918–1919. Other prominent figures within the party, notably Tiso and Tuka, clearly possessed a mind-set that had already been firmly moulded

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in pre-1918 Hungary. These men were always likely after 1918 to draw parallels and discern continuities with their formative experiences in pre-1918 Hungary. A further continuity between the SĽS in the pre-1918 and post-1918 periods was the continuing tendency to purge those supporters who did not completely adhere to the tactics and ideology espoused by its mercurial leader. Although Hlinka used his charisma, his growing national and international reputation, and his rhetorical skills to maximize the party’s appeal, he also drove out of the party those Slovaks who fell afoul of his authoritarian tendencies, sectarian instincts, and personal feuds. The inability to build cross-party alliances, the removal of moderates from the party, and the emerging cult of the leader were all evident within the party before 1914; however, these party characteristics grew increasingly evident during the interwar period. By recognizing these ideological and personal continuities, the SĽS’s tendency to denounce the central government in Prague with the same ferocity that had previously been levelled at the previous regime in Budapest becomes more intelligible. So also does its decision to employ similar tactics in its struggle against Czechoslovak liberalism to those that it had employed against Hungarian liberalism. There were also certain continuities in the process of radicalization that the party underwent before and after 1918. Mary Heimann’s description of the ‘fascistic outlook’ of the party in the late 1930s ‘with its high-minded disdain for compromise and politicking, its self-image as a repository of Christian culture and Christian values, and its notion of politics, not as a means of resolving conflict, but rather as a vehicle through which to express the united “will” of the “nation”’ can, as earlier chapters of this book have demonstrated, just as well serve as an accurate, albeit overly-narrow, description of what the party had already become in the years before 1918.4 It is also the case that the party’s long-standing determination to become a mass party also played a role in the party’s radicalization. Notably, after 1918, the party achieved this by appealing to not only those Slovak Catholics who welcomed the break from Hungary and the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic, but also to those who rejected the legitimacy of Czechoslovakia. In particular, The SĽS widened its support by basing its entire political programme on the ambiguous call for autonomy. As a result of this, it appealed not only to those Slovaks who favoured Czechoslovakia’s decentralization, but also to those Slovaks who believed that autonomy was the first step towards the destruction of the state. The predictable result was that a wing of the SĽS emerged and flourished that was animated by a hatred of the Czechoslovak Republic.

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As the example of Tuka affirms, this hatred may initially have been inspired by a desire to be reincorporated into Hungary. Eventually, however, it mutated into a desire to emulate some variant of European fascism, and into a willingness to align Slovakia with Nazi Germany. The party leadership’s disillusionment with the electoral process also helped make the party a natural home for those Slovaks who regarded democracy as a foreign, ‘western’ import and lauded the ‘ideal’ of an authoritarian state free of ‘petty’ party politics. The seizure of power by fascist movements elsewhere in Europe, notably Italy and Nazi Germany, also radicalized the SĽS. Mussolini and Hitler both appeared to provide a triumphant alternative to liberalism, a dynamic alternative to socialism and an idealistic alternative to the pessimism that afflicted so much of Central Europe in the interwar period. Their examples inspired ever more members of the SĽS to believe that only the ruthless seizure of power and the elimination of democracy would propel their own party into power. It is also, however, the case that in a party which had always been shaped by a handful of dominant personalities, and reshaped by a series of personal feuds, personalities mattered. The shift, in 1913, from Skyčák, who welcomed collaboration with all of the branches of the Slovak nationalist movement, to Hlinka, who always found it difficult to work with anyone he disagreed with, transformed the party. So also did the shift in 1938 from Hlinka to Tiso, whose loyalty to the Czechoslovak state was much less deep-rooted than that of his predecessor. Each of the three leaders did much to shape the party in their own image. Changes in the lower ranks of the leadership also mattered. The party would not have been founded without the spurt of energy provided by Bielek, Dr Blaho, Hlinka, Hodža, Jehlička, Juriga, and Šrobár who helped shake the Slovak nationalist movement out of its lethargy. Equally, the party would not have veered ever further to the right in the interwar period without the charisma of the Ďurčanský brothers, Mach, Sidor and, above all, Tuka. In conclusion, the SĽS’s path to power needs to be traced back through both the personalities who shaped the party and the ambiguities that made the party malleable. The path leads back to the end of the nineteenth century, and to the decision by a group of impassioned and inspiring Slovak Catholics to wage their own culture war, fuelled by a complex and volatile compound of Catholicism and nationalism. To win this culture war these Slovak Catholics had to create new publications, new associations, a new party, and ultimately a new state. They also persuaded a significant number of Slovak-speakers that they were

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neither Hungarians or Czechoslovaks but simply Slovaks who deserved their own representatives in parliament, their own government, and ultimately their own country. The price of that victory was high, even for those Slovak Catholics who had rejoiced as the church bells rang to herald the birth of an independent Slovakia on 14 March, 1939. Within six years, the alliance with Nazi Germany had led to military defeat and the conquest of the country by the Soviet Union. Slovakia was then reincorporated into Czechoslovakia, the SĽS was banned, and the entire party leadership was either executed, imprisoned or driven into exile. The SĽS had finally won the culture war against Central European liberalism in 1939, but it was Soviet Communism that would actually create the new Slovakia after 1945, and post-communist liberal democracy that, in 1993, created a new and permanent Slovak state, securely situated within the European Union.

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Notes Introduction 1 František Vnuk, Mať svoj štát znamená život: Politická biografia Alexandra Macha, Bratislava, 1991 (hereafter Vnuk, Mať svoj štát znamená život), p. 192; for the text of the speech, see Slovák tyždennik, 19 March 1939; for one account of the popular reaction to Mach’s speech, see Lenka Eramiašová, ‘Slovákom chýba odvaha’, Extraplus, 30 November 2016; see also the brief description of Mach’s speech in Jozef Kirschbaum, ‘Poznámky k memoárom. Štyri historické dni, ktoré položili Slovensko na mapu’, in Valerián Bystrický, Robert Letz and Ondrej Podolec (eds), Vznik Slovenského štátu, Bratislava, 2007, Vol. I (hereafter Bystrický, Letz and Podolec, Vznik Slovenského štátu), p. 113. The proclamation of independence by the Slovak parliament had actually taken place shortly after midday. 2 E. Woodward, Rohan Butler and Margaret Lambert (eds), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, Third Series, London, 1950 (hereafter Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, Third Series), Vol. III, p. 217 and Vol. IV, pp. 96 and 238; see also František Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months (October 1938–March 1939)’, in Slovak Studies IV, Rome-Cleveland, 1964 (hereafter Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months’), pp. 82–3. 3 Miroslav Fabricus and Katarína Hradská (eds), Jozef Tiso. Prjejavy a články (1938–1944), Bratislava, 2007 (hereafter Fabricus and Hradská, Jozef Tiso. Prjejavy a články), pp. 100–2. 4 See, in particular, Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, pp. 182–90 and Valerián Bystrický, ‘The Munich Conference to the declaration of independence’, in M. Teich, D. Kováč and M. Brown (eds), Slovakia in History (hereafter Teich, Slovakia in History), p. 164. 5 Danusá Serafínová, ‘K jubilee Katolíckych novín’, Otázky žurnalistiky, 2009/3–4 (hereafter Serafínová, ‘K jubilee Katolíckych novín’), p. 140; see also Karol Sidor, Takto vznikol Slovenský štát, Bratislava, 1991, p. 60. 6 Miroslav Fabricus and Katarína Hradská (eds), Jozef Tiso. Prjejavy a články, p. 101. 7 Milan Zemko and Valerián Bystrický (eds), Slovensko v Československu (1918–1939), Bratislava, 2004 (hereafter Slovensko v Československu), pp. 553–70. 8 Ibid., p. 106. 9 See, for example, Roman Holec’s concise discussion of the Catholic character of the SĽS in ‘Úloha katolíckej cirkvi pri formovaní občianskej spoločnosti na Slovensku’, in Česko-slovenská historická ročenka, 2006.

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10 For a partially successful attempt to take the party’s Catholic ideology seriously, see Róbert Letz, Peter Mulík and Alena Bartlová (eds), Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách 1905–1945, Martin, 2006. 11 For an up-to-date introduction to the papal encyclicals and the transformation of Catholic social teaching in the nineteenth century, see David O’Brien and Thomas Shannon, Catholic Social Thought: Encyclicals and Documents from Pope Leo XIII to Pope Frances, Maryknoll, 2016. 12 For a rare exception that pays attention to the ambiguity of the party’s rhetoric, see Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator. 13 Carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia, Princeton, 1988, p. 80. 14 For an excellent study of some of the personalities involved in the making of the party before 1918, see Roman Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnost, Martin, 1997 (hereafter Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť).

Chapter 1 1 Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, ‘The European culture wars’, in Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds), Culture Wars. Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge, 2003 (hereafter Clark and Kaiser, Culture Wars), p. 1. 2 Ibid. 3 Gabriel Adriányi, ‘Catholic nationalism in Greater Hungary and Poland’, in Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. VIII: World Christianities c. 1815–c. 1914, Cambridge, 2008 (hereafter Adriányi, ‘Catholic nationalism in Greater Hungary and Poland’), pp. 261–3. 4 The most substantial study on the ‘culture war’ in Hungary remains Moritz Csáky, Der Kulturkampf in Ungarn. Die kirchenpolitische Gesetzburg der Jahre 1894/95, Graz, 1967; See also Katalin Ibolya Koncz, ‘A polgári házasságról szóló törvényjavaslat vitája a képviselőház előtt’, in Publicationes Universitatis Miskolcinensis Sectio Juridica et Politica, Tomus XXXI (2013), pp. 55–65; and C.A. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire 1790–1918, London, 1971 (hereafter Macartney, The Habsburg Empire), pp. 698–700. 5 For a fine overview of these challenges to Christianity see Diarmaid MacCullock, A History of Christianity, London, 2009, pp. 855–65. 6 Article 44 of Pope Pius IX, The Syllabus of Errors, 1864. 7 Article 5 of Pope Leo XII, Constanti Hungarorum, 1893; See also Robert Nemes, ‘The Uncivil Origins of Civil Marriage: Hungary’ (hereafter Nemes, ‘The Uncivil Origins of Civil Marriage: Hungary’), in Clark and Kaiser, Culture Wars, p. 318. 8 Pšiak, ‘Meštianstvo a občianska spoločnost na Slovensku’, p. 21.

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9 Erika Maliniaková, ‘Zákon o manželskom práve a parlamentné rozpravy v Uhorsku v roku 1894’, Forum historeae, 9/1, 2015, p. 108; see also Rezső Markovics, A nyitrai politikai bünpér. Politikai tanulmány, Vágujhely, 1903 (hereafter Markovics, A nyitrai politikai bünpér) and József Galántai, Egyház és politika 1890–1918, Budapest, 1960 (hereafter Galántai, Egyház és politika), p. 61. 10 Katolícke noviny, 20 April 1894. 11 See, for example, Katolícke noviny, 20 April, 20 July, 5 August and 20 September 1894. 12 Katolícke noviny, 20 February 1895. 13 László Szarka, Szlovák nemzeti fejlődés, magyar nemzetiségi politika, 1867–1918, Pozsony, 1999 (hereafter Szarka, Szlovák nemzeti fejlődés), pp. 80–2. 14 Oszkár Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, Chicago, 1957, p. 318. 15 László Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, 1867–1914, Highland Lakes, 2008 (hereafter Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy), pp. 389–91. 16 Michael B. Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Ann Arbor, 2004 (Gross, The War against Catholicism), pp. 22–3. For a review of the historiography on German liberalism which shared much in common with Hungarian liberalism see, by the same author, pp. 10–22. 17 H.R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Phenomenon of Fascism’, in S.J. Woolf (ed.), European Fascism, Oxford, 1968; for a contemporary discussion of whether post-Ausgleich Hungary was actually governed on liberal principles, see Eighty Club, London, Hungary, Its People, Places and Politics, the Visit of the Eighty Club in 1906, London, 1907, pp. 395–401. 18 Péter Kiss (ed.), Magyar kormányprogramok, 1867–2002, 2 vols, Budapest, 2004, Vol. I, p. 193; for a good overview of the intellectual foundations of Hungarian liberalism in this period, see János Gyurgyák, Ezzé lett magyar hazátok. A magyar nemzeteszme és nacionalizmus története, Budapest, 2007 (hereafter Gyurgyák, Ezzé lett magyar hazátok), pp. 54–90. 19 Béla Grünwald, Roman Holec, Michal Mudroň and Ignác Romsics, A Felvidék. Politikai tanulmány, Pozsony, 2011 (hereafter Grünwald et al., A Felvidék. Politikai tanulmány), p. 12. 20 Joseph Stasko, ‘Slovenská národná ideológia v hre politiky Česko-Slovenska’, in Jozef Staško (ed.), Tvorcovia nového slovenska. The Shaping of Modern Slovakia, Cambridge, Ontario, 1982 (hereafter Stasko, ‘Slovenská národná ideológia v hre politiky Česko-Slovenska’), pp. 96–7. 21 Edita Bosak, ‘The Slovak National Movement, 1848–1918’, in Stanislav J. Kirschbaum and Anne C. Roman (eds), Toronto: Slovak World Congress, 1987, pp. 59–72. 22 Thomas Lorman, ‘The Christian Social roots of Jozef Tiso’s Radicalism, 1887–1939’, in Rebecca Haynes and Martyn Rady (eds), In the Shadow of Hitler. Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe, London, 2014 (hereafter In the Shadow of Hitler), p. 251.

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23 Alexander Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language and accidental nationalism, London, 2009 (hereafter Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia); see also Ambrus Miskolczy, ‘Povedomie Hungarus v 19. Storočí’, Historický časopis, 59/2, 2011 and Zoltán Zilizi, Pechány Adolf és a Slovák-Magyar együttélés, Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudomány Kar, unpublished dissertacion, 2013 (hereafter Zilizi, Pechány Adolf és a Slovák-Magyar együttélés), especially pp. 38–43; Stasko, ‘Slovenská národná ideológia v hre politiky Česko-Slovenska’, pp. 85–90; Eliška Hegenscheidt-Nozdrovická, “Die Slowakei den Slowaken!” Die separatischen Strömungen in der Slowakei zwischen 1918 und 1939, Hamburg, 2012 (hereafter Hegenscheidt-Nozdrovická, “Die Slowakei den Slowaken!”), p. 11 and Gábor Kemény, Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez Magyarországon a dualizmus korában, 6 vols, Budapest, 1952 (hereafter Kemény, Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez), Vol. III, pp. 501–2. 24 Stasko, ‘Slovenská národná ideológia v hre politiky Česko-Slovenska’, p. 90. 25 Martyn Rady, The Habsburg Empire. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2017 (hereafter Rady, The Habsburg Empire), pp. 86–7. See also John Swanson, Tangible Belonging, Pittsburgh, 2017 and James Bjork, Neither German nor Pole, Ann Arbor, 2008. 26 For the text of this memorandum see Mikus, Slovakia, pp. 320–30; see also Karol Holly, ‘The Historical Nation as a Political Programme. Analysis of Images of the Past in the Texts of the Slovak National Movement’s Programmes from 1848 to 1861’, in Adam Hudek et al., Overcoming the Old Borders. Beyond the Paradigm of Slovak National History, Bratislava, 2013, pp. 45–58. 27 For an example of one SĽS MP’s attempts to negotiate these different categories, see Thomas Lorman, ‘For God and which nation? The Ideology of František Jehlička, Priest, Politician and Pariah of the Slovak National Movement’, Slavonic and East European Review, July, 2018. 28 For a discussion of these competing attempts to shape Slovak identity, see Miloslav Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, Die slowakische Nationalbewegung und der Antisemitismus 1875–1922, Berlin, 2014 (hereafter Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”), pp. 26–34. 29 For a comprehensive discussion of the Hungarian veneration of customary law see Martyn Rady, Customary Law in Hungary. Court, Texts and the ‘Tripartitum’, Oxford, 2015. 30 József Pap, ‘Problems in the Career Analyisis of Hungarian Representatives in the Age of Dualism’, in Judit Pál and Vlad Popovici (eds), Elites and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe (1848–1918), Frankfurt am Main, 2014 (hereafter Pap, ‘Problems in the Career Analyisis of Hungarian Representatives in the Age of Dualism’), pp. 175–90. 31 Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, p. 133.

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32 A notable exception was József Takács, who was an ardent Hungarian patriot but, on occasion, insisted that ‘I am also a Slovak’. See, for example, Képviselőházi napló, 1910–1915, Vol. XLI, p. 349. 33 See Robert Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1765–1918, Basingstoke, 2001, p. 320. 34 Andrew Janos, The Politics of Backwardness, 1825–1945, Princeton, 1982 (hereafter Janos, The Politics of Backwardness), pp. 122–3. 35 For a concise yet balanced overview of the transformation of Hungary in this period, see Kontler, A History of Hungary, pp. 302–18. 36 Dániel Szabó, ‘The Crisis of Dualism’, in Hungary. Governments and Politics, pp. 112–23. 37 Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, pp. 690–7. 38 For a still unparalleled study of the Hungarian administration in this period and its similarities to the French model see Zoltán Magyary, Magyar közigazgatás, Budapest, 1942. 39 Piroska Balogh, ‘The Kálmán Tisza Epoch’, in Hungary. Governments and Politics, pp. 80–3. 40 For detailed figures on the growth of state employees in this period, see Dániel Szabó, ‘The Crisis of Dualism’, in Hungary. Governments and Politics, p. 109. 41 Macartney, October 15th, a History of Modern Hungary, p. 11. 42 Zsuzsanna Boros and Dániel Szabó, Parlamentarizmus Magyarországon 1867–1944, Budapest, 1999 (hereafter Boros and Szabó, Parlamentarizmus Magyarországon), pp. 124–35; R.W. Seton-Watson, Corruption and Reform in Hungary, A Study of Electoral Practice, London, 1911 (hereafter Seton-Watson, Corruption and Reform in Hungary), pp. 3–5. 43 József Pap, Tanulmányok a dualizmus kori Magyar parlamentarizmus történetéből, Budapest, 2014 (hereafter Pap, Tanulmányok a dualizmus kori Magyar parlamentarizmus történetéből), pp. 167–8. 44 Michal Potemra lists eighty-four constituences in ‘Slovakia’ before 1918 but includes Balassagyarmat, Nógrád and Salgótarján which he notes are still (mostly) in Hungary. See his article, from which the statistics on the electorate provided above are primarily taken, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, in Historický časopis, 1975/2 (hereafter Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’), pp. 206 and 230–9; see also Boros and Szabó, Parlamentarizmus Magyarországon, p. 34; Roman Holec, ‘Ferdinand Juriga ako poslanec v uhorskom parlamente (1906–1918)’ (hereafter Holec, ‘Ferdinand Juriga ako poslanec v uhorskom parlamente’), in Miroslav Pekník et al. (eds), Ferdinand Juriga ľudový smer slovenskej politiky, Bratislava, 2009 (hereafter Pekník et al., Ferdinand Juriga ľudový smer slovenskej politiky), p. 106. 45 Albert Apponyi, ‘The History of the Hungarian Constitution’ (hereafter Apponyi, ‘The History of the Hungarian Constitution’), in Percy Alden (ed.), Hungary of To-Day, London, 1909 (hereafter Alden, Hungary of To-Day), p. 164.

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46 See, for example, József Ruszoly, A választási bíraskodás szabályozásának története hazánkban a reformkortól az 1945. évi VIII. tc. megalkotásáig, Szeged, 1979 (hereafter Ruszoly, A választási bíraskodás); see also András Gerő, The Hungarian parliament 1867–1918: A Mirage of Power, New York, 1997 (hereafter Gerő, The Hungarian parliament), pp. 57–105. 47 Ferenc Pölöskei, A szabadelvű párt fényei és árnya, 1875–1906, Budapest, 2010 (hereafter Pölöskei, A szabadelvű párt fényei és árnya), p. 220. 48 Gerő, The Hungarian parliament, pp. 82–105; Pölöskei, A szabadelvű párt fényei és árnyai, pp. 14–15. 49 Pap, ‘Problems in the Career Analyisis of Hungarian Representatives in the Age of Dualism’, p. 190; see also Gerő, The Hungarian parliament, p. 189 and Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, p. 221. 50 Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, pp. 235–9. 51 The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1910, Vol. VII. 52 Paul Hanebrink, ‘Christianity, Nation, State, The Case of Christian Hungary’, in Bruce Berglunk and Brian Porter-Szűcs (eds), Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe, Budapest-New York, 2010 (hereafter Hanebrink, ‘Christianity, Nation, State, The Case of Christian Hungary’), pp. 65–7. 53 László Péter, ‘The Aristocracy, the Gentry and Their Parliamentary tradition in Nineteenth-Century Hungary’, The Slavonic and East European review, 1992/1, pp. 99–100; see also Piroska Balogh, ‘The Kálmán Tisza Epoch’, in Hungary. Governments and Politics, p. 79. 54 Catholic Encyclopedia, 1910, Vol. VII, pp. 557–8. See also R.W. Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary, London, 1908 (hereafter Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary), p. 179. 55 Alan Sked, ‘Belle Époque: Europe before 1914’, in Nicholas Doumanis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945, Oxford, 2016 (hereafter Doumanis, The Oxford Handbook of European History), Oxford, 2016, p. 26. 56 Hanebrink, ‘Christianity, Nation, State, The Case of Christian Hungary’, pp. 65–7; see also Nemes, ‘The Uncivil Origins of Civil Marriage: Hungary’, in Clark and Kaiser, Culture Wars, p. 317. 57 John Stuart Mill, On Government, chapter 16. 58 R.W. Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and Slovaks, London, 1943 (hereafter Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and Slovaks), p. 272. See also Bryan Cartledge’s useful overview of the ‘utilitarian’ justifications for magyarization in Cartledge, The will to survive, pp. 280–1 and the superb overview of magyarization in Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, pp. 721–9. See also the short but perceptive discussion of Magyar attitudes towards the Slovaks in the post-Ausgleich period in László Kiss, ‘Magyar-Szlovák kapcsolatok és konfliktusok a hosszú 19. Században’

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(hereafter Kiss, ‘Magyar-Szlovák kapcsolatok és konfliktusok’), in László Szarka, A Modern Szlovák nacionalizmus évszázada, pp. 167–71. 59 Cartledge, The will to survive, pp. 268–9. 60 See Roman Holec’s astute comments in this regard in Grünwald et al., A Felvidék. Politikai tanulmány, pp. 241–2. 61 Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, p. 428. 62 R.J.W. Evans, ‘Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks: Some Mutual Perceptions, 1900–1950’, in Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe (hereafter Evans, ‘Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks’), pp. 110–11. 63 Dejiny slovenska IV, p. 272. 64 Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, p. 102. 65 Hegenscheidt-Nozdrovická, “Die Slowakei den Slowaken!”, pp. 17–18. 66 The first time the Diet had demanded the wider use of the Magyar language was 1790. See C.A. Macartney, Hungary, A Short History, Edinburgh, 1968, p. 130. 67 Kemény, Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez, Vol. III, pp. 501–2. 68 Hugh and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe, London, 1981, p. 49. 69 Michal Potemra, ‘Otázky verejnej správy Uhorska v politike Slovenskej národnej strany v rokoch 1901–1918’, in Historické Stúdie, XXVI, 1982 (hereafter Potemra, ‘Otázky verejnej správy’), p. 98. 70 See, for example, László Kiss, ‘Magyar-Szlovák kapcsolatok és konfliktusok’, in Szarka, A Modern Szlovák nacionalizmus évszázada, pp. 172–6. 71 See Bálint Varga’s excellent account of these celebrations in The Monumental Nation. Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-siècle Hungary, New York and Oxford, 2016. 72 See, for example, Képviselőházi napló, 1910–1915, XIV, pp. 27–36. 73 See, Dejiny slovenska, IV, pp. 272–3; Mésároš, Uhorsko a spoluzitie jeho narodov, pp. 36–7. 74 Elena Mannová (ed.), A Concise History of Slovakia, Bratislava, 2000 (hereafter Mannová, A Concise History of Slovakia), pp. 202–24; see also Emil Stodola, Štatistika Slovenska, Martin, 1912, p. 51. Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and Slovaks, p. 268 and Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, pp. 432–3; see also Roman Holec, Polnohospodarstvo na Slovensku v poslednej tretine 19. Storočia, Bratislava, 1991 (hereafter Holec, Polnohospodarstvo na Slovensku), pp. 143–4. 75 Képviselőházi napló, 1906–1911, Vol. I, pp. 235–41. 76 František Bokes, Dokumenty k slovenskému národnému hnutiu v rokoch 1848–1914, 4 vols, Bratislava, 1962–72 (hereafter Bokes, Dokumenty k slovenskému národnému hnutiu), Vol. III, pp. 341–8. 77 Katolícke noviny, 24 November 1905 and 9 March 1906.

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78 The Political Criminal Trial: Against the Rev. Father Andrew Hlinka, the Rev. Father Joseph Tomik, Dr Srobar, and others in Ruzomberk, Liptov Comitat, Hungary, November 26th to December 6th in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and six, New York, 1906 (hereafter The Political Criminal Trial: Against the Rev. Father Andrew Hlinka), p. 46. 79 Pieter C. Van Duin, Central European Crossroads. Social Democracy and National Revolution in Bratislava (Pressburg), 1867–1921, Oxford, 2009 (hereafter Van Duin, Central European Crossroads), p. 144. 80 Seton-Watson, A History of the Czechs and Slovaks, p. 272. 81 František Jehlička was, for example, threatened with expulsion from the Pazmaneum theological college in Vienna if he continued to speak with his fellow seminarians in his mother tongue. 82 For local studies of the changing language of the Catholic church in northern Hungary before 1918 see Béla Bartok, ‘Az also-szepesség vallási és nemzetiségi viszonyai 1873–1913 között’, in Szarka, A Modern Szlovák nacionalizmus évszázada, pp. 89–90 and Frank Henschel, ‘Religions and the Nation in Kassa before World War 1’, Hungarian Historical Review, 3–4, 2014 (hereafter Henschel, ‘Religions and the Nation in Kassa before World War 1’). 83 James Bjork, ‘Inadvertent Allies: Catholicism and Regionalism in a GermanPolish Borderland’, in Joost Augusteijn and Eric Storm (eds), Region and State in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Chippenham and Eastbourne, 2012, p. 246. 84 Henschel, ‘Religions and the Nation in Kassa before World War 1’, pp. 860–1. 85 Robert Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, in Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách 1905–1945 (hereafter Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’), p. 21. 86 Adriányi, ‘Catholic nationalism in Greater Hungary and Poland’, p. 265. 87 For an exhaustive albeit tendentious account of the attempt to magyarize the Catholic church in the Slovak highlands, see Karol Medvecký, Cirkevné pomery katolíckych slovákov v niekdajšom Uhorsku, Ružomberok, 1920; see also Michal Slávik, Slovenskí národovci do 30. Októbra 1918, Trenčín, 1945 (hereafter Slávik, Slovenskí národovci), pp. 353–74; see also Viliam Ries, Fr. Richard Osvald, Trnava, 1939, pp. 143–8. 88 Katolícke noviny, 20 September 1895. 89 Alojz Kolísek, Slovaci do štátu československého, Bratislava, 1927, p. 21. 90 Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary, pp. 484–93. 91 Ján Pöstényi, Dejiny Spolok Sv. Vojtecha, Trnava, 1929 (hereafter Pöstényi, Dejiny Spolok Sv. Vojtecha), p. 51. 92 Slávik, Slovenskí národovci, p. 373. 93 Slovak National Archive (hereafter SNA), fond Uhorské kráľovské ministerstvo vnútra v Budapešti, 1877–1918 (hereafter UMV), 12.76 and 14.80; for a clear and

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balanced summary of the events leading up to the Černová massacre, see Szarka, Szlovák nemzeti fejlődés, pp. 108–11. 94 Between 1880 and 1900, the number of people in Hungary who described themselves on the census as Magyars increased from 41.2 per cent to 45.4 per cent. In the period, 1880–1910 the number of people who described themselves as Slovak in the census actually increased, from 1,855,451 to 1,946,357 and in the territory composed of modern day Slovakia from 1,489,707 in 1880 to 1,684,681 in 1910. See Dejiny slovenska, IV, pp. 176–7. 95 See the overview of contemporaries attitudes to magyarization in Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, pp. 452–6; see also Cartledge, The will to survive, p. 282; Imre Polányi, A szlovak társadalom és polgári nemzeti mozgalom a század fordulón, Budapest, 1987, p. 91. 96 Mésároš, Uhorsko a spoluzitie jeho narodov, pp. 36–7. 97 Andrew György, ‘The State and Agriculture’, in Alden (ed.), Hungary of To-Day, p. 259. 98 Piroska Balogh, ‘The Kálmán Tisza Epoch’, in Hungary. Governments and Politics, pp. 85–7; Scott M. Eddie, ‘The Changing Pattern of Landownership in Hungary, 1867–1914’, in The Economic History Review, 20/2, 1967, pp. 293–4. 99 Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, pp. 279–83. 100 Bryan Cartledge, The will to survive. A history of Hungary, London, 2011 (hereafter Cartledge, The will to survive), p. 264. 101 For government efforts to ameliorate conditions in the countryside, see Pölöskei, A szabadelvű párt fényei és árnya, pp. 56–8; Macartney, October 15th, a History of Modern Hungary, p. 10; see also Janos, The Politics of Backwardness, pp. 129–33. 102 Péter, ‘The Aristocracy, the Gentry and Their Parliamentary tradition in Nineteenth-Century Hungary’, p. 89. 103 Ján Pšiak, ‘Meštianstvo a občianska spoločnost na Slovensku v kontexte sidelného vývoja 1900–1989’, in Elena Mannová (ed.), Meštianstvo a občianska spoločnosť na Slovensku, 1900–1989, Bratislava, 1998 (hereafter Pšiak, ‘Meštianstvo a občianska spoločnost na Slovensku’), p. 19; Július Mésároš, Uhorsko a spoluzitie jeho narodov, Bratislava, 1996 (hereafter Mésároš, Uhorsko a spoluzitie jeho narodov), pp. 39. Owen Johnson, Slovakia 1918–1938: Education and the making of a nation, New York, 1985 (hereafter Johnson, Slovakia 1918–1938), p. 28. Dejiny slovenska, Vol. IV, p. 186. Elena Mannová, ‘Podmienky vývoja meštianskych vrstiev na Slovensku v 20. Storočí’, in Mannová (ed.), Meštianstvo a občianska spoločnosť na Slovensku, p. 9. 104 Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, pp. 208–9; see also Viliam Plezia, ‘The Agrarian Question in Slovakia in the Czechoslovak Republic prior to the Munich Agreement’, in Studia Historica Slovaca, Vol. II, 1964, p. 215.

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105 Gyula Borbándi, A Magyar népi mozgalom: A harmadik reformnemzedék, New York, 1983 (hereafter Borbándi, A Magyar népi mozgalom), pp. 16–18; see also Ladislav Tajták, ‘Slovak emigration and migration in the years 1900–1914’, Studia Historica Slovaca, 10, 1978 (hereafter Tajták, ‘Slovak emigration and migration’), pp. 65–70. 106 See Julianna Puskás, ‘Emigration from Hungary’, in Ferenc Glatz (ed.), Hungarians and Their Neighbors in Modern Times, New York, 1995, pp. 63–6. See also the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. XIII, Washington DC, 2002, p. 221. 107 Balázs Pálvölgyi, ‘A Magyar kivándorlási politika kezdetei (1881–1903) – Kivándorlási törvények és az amerikai kivándorlás’, Jogtörténti Szemle, 2010, 4 (hereafter Pálvölgyi, ‘A Magyar kivándorlási politika kezdetei’), pp. 28–33. 108 Mannová, A Concise History of Slovakia, pp. 191–2. 109 See, for example, Štátny Archív v Bytči (hereafter ŠAB), Liptó County, Hlavnožupanské dôverné písomnosti (hereafter LŽ), 1512. See also Tajták, ‘Slovak emigration and migration’, pp. 65–70. 110 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 24 November 1899. 111 Pokrok, 30 March 1906. 112 Lajos Steier, ‘A Csehtót egységet előkészitó egy epizód’, Magyar Szemle, 1931, pp. 196–7. 113 See Pálvölgyi, ‘A Magyar kivándorlási politika kezdetei’, p. 28; Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, pp. 175–81; see also Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, pp. 704–5. 114 See Ján Podolák, ‘Život na slovenskej dedine na žačiatku 20. Storočia’, Historický časopis, 29/1, 1981, p. 35; Tajták, ‘Slovak emigration and migration’, p. 55 and Borbándi, A Magyar népi mozgalom, pp. 14–15. 115 See, for example, Hlas Ľudu, 15 October 1902. 116 Roderick Stackelberg, Idealism Debased. From Volkisch ideology to national socialism, Kent, 1981, pp. 6–7. 117 George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, London, 1964 (hereafter Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology), pp. 15–23. 118 See, in this respect, the illuminating discussion presented by Andreas Kossert, ‘Religion in Urban Everyday Life’, in Berglunk and Porter-Szűcs (eds), Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe, pp. 35–7. 119 Carl H.E. Zangerl, ‘Courting the Catholic Vote: The Center Party in Baden, 1903–1913’, Central European History, 10/3, 1977 (hereafter Zangerl, ‘Courting the Catholic Vote’), p. 224. 120 Gwen Jones, Chicago of the Balkans. Budapest in Hungarian Literature 1900–1939, Leeds, 2011 (hereafter Jones, Chicago of the Balkans), pp. 4 and 29–30; Péter Hanák, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the cultural history of Vienna and Budapest, Princeton, 2014, p. 53.

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121 On the Jewish presence in Hungary’s cities, especially Budapest, see Don Jehuda and George Magos, ‘A magyarországi zsidósag fejlődése’, in Don Jehuda (ed.), A Mgyarországi zsidóság társadalom- és gazdaságtörténete a 19–20. Században, Budapest, 2006, pp. 20–6. 122 Svetozár Hurban-Vajanský, ‘Slovak popular poetry’, in Seton-Watson (ed.), Slovak Peasant Art and Melodies, London, 1911, p. 13. 123 László Szarka, ‘Közigazgatás és namzetiségi kérdés a felső-magyarországi szlovák régióban’, in László Szarka, A Modern Szlovák nacionalizmus évszázada, 1780–1918, Budapest, 2011 (hereafter Szarka, ‘Közigazgatás és namzetiségi kérdés a felső-magyarországi szlovák régióban’), p. 186. 124 Henschel, ‘Religions and the Nation in Kassa before World War 1’, p. 854. 125 Dejiny slovenska, IV, pp. 179–84; see also Szarka, ‘Közigazgatás és namzetiségi kérdés a felső-magyarországi szlovák régióban’, pp. 185–8; Mésároš, Uhorsko a spoluzitie jeho narodov, p. 39. 126 Jones, Chicago of the Balkans, pp. 2–6. 127 Gábor Gyáni, Identity and the Urban Experience: Fin-de-siècle Budapest, New York, 2004 (hereafter Gyáni, Identity and the Urban Experience), p. 174; Borbándi, A Magyar népi mozgalom, pp. 14–15. 128 Ferenc Jehlicska, ‘A modern érkölcsi válságnak társadalmo okai’, in Katholikus Szemle, 1910, 24; Ferenc Jehlicska, ‘az urbanizmus’, Katholikus Szemle, 1911, 25; see also Sv. Adalbert (Vojetch), December 1910. 129 Anna Kovács, A szlovákok élete és kultúrája a dualizmus korában (1867–1918), Piliscsaba-Esztergom, 2006 (hereafter Kovács, A szlovákok élete és kultúrája a dualizmus korában), pp. 114–15. 130 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 11 August 1899. 131 Tajták, ‘Slovak emigration and migration’, pp. 52–4. 132 Josette Baer, A Life Dedicated to the Republic, Vavro Šrobár’s Slovak Czechoslovakism, Stuttgart, 2014 (hereafter Baer, A Life Dedicated to the Republic), pp. 50–1. 133 James S. Roberts, Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Boston, 1984 (hereafter Roberts, Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Germany), pp. 2–3. 134 There are few published studies of the role of the tavern in Central Europe but an excellent exception is Glenn Dyner, Yankel’s Tavern. Jews, Liquor and Life in Poland, New York, 2013; See also Kinga Sebestyén, ‘Az égetettszesz-ipar fejlődése hazánkban’, Köztes-Európa, 8/1–2, 2016. 135 Quoted in Alexander Maxwell, ‘National Alcohol in Hungary’s Reform Era: Wine, Spirits and the Patriotic Imagination’, in Central Europe, 12/2, 2014 (hereafter Maxwell, ‘National Alcohol in Hungary’s Reform Era’), p. 133. See also Gabriela

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Dudeková, Dobrovoľné združovanie na Slovensku v minulosti (hereafter Dudeková, Dobrovoľné združovanie na Slovensku v minulosti), pp. 7–8. 136 Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 29. 137 Maxwell, ‘National Alcohol in Hungary’s Reform Era’, pp. 133–4. 138 József Vetesi, ‘Az alkoholizmusrol’, Katholikus Szemle, 1900/14, pp. 548–9. 139 Esztergom, 19 April 1896; see also Klein-Pejšova, Mapping Jewish Loyalties, p. 11. 140 Katolícke noviny, 5 February 1898. 141 Jednota Katolíckeho ľudu, 1911/1, p. 42. See also Hlinka’s complaints about the prevalence of Jewish tavern keepers in Robert Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, Bratislava, 2014 (hereafter Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov), p. 38. 142 Christopher Long, ‘“The Works of Our People”. Dušan Jurkovič and the Slovak Art Revival’, in Studies in the Decorative Arts, 12/1, pp. 23–4. 143 See Anton Bielek, Za tu našu slovenčinu. Volebné obrazky, Skalica, Undated. 144 Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 29. 145 See, for example, Alkotmány, 22 April 1899 and Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, pp. 59–60. 146 Roland Perényi, ‘Urban Places, Criminal Spaces: Police and Crime in Fin de Siecle Budapest’, Hungarian Historical Review, 1, 2012, pp. 139–42; see also, for example, Katolícke noviny, 5 July 1901. 147 Perényi, ‘Urban Places, Criminal Spaces’, pp. 147–8. 148 Gyáni, Identity and the Urban Experience, p. 164. 149 Kazateľňa, 1900, pp. 196–7; see also Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, pp. 105–7. 150 Galántai, Egyház és politika, pp. 39 and 102; Katolícke noviny, 20 March 1897. 151 Holec, Polnohospodarstvo na Slovensku, pp. 137–8; Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, pp. 379–85. 152 Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, p. 36; Dejiny slovenska, IV, pp. 232–62. 153 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 18. 154 František Jehlička, Cteni Voličia, Nagytapolcsany, 1907 (hereafter Jehlička, Cteni Voličia). 155 Katolícke noviny, 24 November 1905; see also, Slávik, Slovenskí národovci, p. 375. 156 János Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon, Budapest, 2001 (hereafter Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés), pp. 55–87; see also Don Jehuda and George Magos, ‘A magyarországi zsidósag fejlődése’, in Jehuda (ed.), A Magyarországi zsidóság társadalom- és gazdaságtörténete a 19–20. században, pp. 13–14. 157 Macartney, October 15th, a History of Modern Hungary, pp. 18–21; Iván Berend and Miklós Szuhay, A tökés gazdaság története Magyarországon, Budapest, 1989, pp. 140–1. 158 Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés, pp. 263–89; Macartney, October 15th, a History of Modern Hungary, p. 20. 159 See the extended discussion in Szabó,“Von Worten zu Taten”, pp. 52–104.

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160 Miloslav Szabó, ‘Obvinenia z “rituálnych vrážd” v Hornom Uhorsku. Antisemitská propaganda, politický katolicizmus a národnostná otázka na prelome 19. A 20. Storočia’, Historický časopis, 2012/4 (hereafter Szabó, ‘Obvinenia z “rituálnych vrážd” v Hornom Uhorsku’), p. 634; see also Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 24 November 1899. 161 Rebekah Klein-Pejšova, Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia, Bloomington, 2015 (hereafter Klein-Pejšova, Mapping Jewish Loyalties), p. 4. 162 Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 29. 163 See, for example, Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, pp. 41–52. 164 Klein-Pejšova, Mapping Jewish Loyalties pp. 7–8. 165 See, for example, István Vermes, István Tisza, The Liberal Vision and Conservative Statescraft of a Magyar Nationalist, Boulder, 1995, p. 154; McCagg, Jewish nobles and geniuses, p. 126. 166 Seton-Watson, Corruption and Reform in Hungary, p. 95. 167 K.A. Medvecký, Detva. Monografia, Detva, 1905, p. 111. 168 Hlas, 1 August 1900, pp. 9–13; Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, p. 150; for a discussion of progressive Slovak antisemitism see Baer, A Life Dedicated to the Republic, pp. 47–50. 169 Katya Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades: Andrej Hlinka and Rudolf Medek as case studies of right wing Czechoslovakism, Unpublished Dissertation, London, 2009 (hereafter Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades), p. 150; see also Františka Čechová, ‘Ľudová strana a život slovenských katolíkov v procesoch sekularizácie’, in Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách, particularly pp. 344–8. 170 Bokes, Dokumenty k slovenskému národnému hnutiu, Vol. III, pp. 334–6. 171 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 18.

Chapter 2 1 For a clear overview of the various parties and factions that stood in opposition to the governing Liberal Party, see Pölöskei, A szabadelvű párt fényei és árnya, pp. 16–35. 2 Jörg Hoensch, A History of Modern Hungary, 1867–1994, London, 1996, p. 60. 3 Janos, The Politics of Backwardness, pp. 135–41; Katus, Hungary in the Dual Monarchy, p. 401. 4 See, for example, Magyarország, 12 December 1905. 5 Wolfram Kaiser, ‘Clericalism- that is our enemy!: European anticlericalism anhd the culture wars’ in Clark and Kaiser, Culture Wars, pp.58-59; See also Hlinka’s criticisms of the Independence and Forty-Eighter Party in Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 36.

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6 Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, pp. 235–9. Lubomír Lipták, Politické strany na Slovensku, 1860–1989, Bratislava, 1992 (hereafter Lipták, Politické strany na Slovensku), p. 74; For examples of Slovak activists within the party see Angelika Dončová, ‘Politické activity Ľudovíta Bazovského v Lučenci a okoí’, Historický časopis, 2011/2, pp. 335–40 and Szepesi Lapok, 29 November 1904. 7 See, for example, Attila Kovács and Viktor Soós (eds), Gróf Apponyi Albert: Emlékirataim, Budapest, 2016, p. 206; See also Albert Apponyi, ‘Elementary Education in Hungary’, in Alden (ed.), Hungary of To-Day), p. 299. 8 See the discussion of the conservative opposition in Macartney, The Habsburg Empire pp. 694–6 and 700–2. 9 Dušan Kováč, ‘The Slovak political programme: From Hungarian patriotism to the Czecho-Slovak state’, in Slovakia in History, p. 131. See also Dejiny slovenska, IV, pp. 196–9; Szarka, Szlovák nemzeti fejlődés, p. 53. 10 Ľudovít Haraksim, ‘Slovak Slavism and Panslavism’, in Slovakia in History, pp. 117–20; Kemény, Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez, Vol. I, pp. 690–1, 737 and 820–1 and Vol. II, pp. 499–501; Daniela Kodajová, ‘Slovenské narodné hnutie a náboženská otázka na prelome 19. a 20. Storočia’ (hereafter Kodajová, ‘Slovenské narodné hnutie a náboženská otázka’), in Milan Podrimavský a Dušan Kovač, Slovensko na začiatku 20. Storočia, Bratislava, 1999 (hereafter Slovensko na začiatku 20. Storočia), p. 206. 11 Stanley Pech, ‘Political Parties in Eastern Europe, 1848–1939. Comparisons and Continuities’, East Central Europe, 5/1, 1978, pp. 13–14 and Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, p. 163; See also Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, p. 15. 12 Polányi, A szlovak társadalom és polgári nemzeti mozgalom a század fordulón, pp. 97–9; Kemény, Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez, Vol. II, pp. 152–5. 13 Anton Bielek, Obrázky z hôr, Bratislava, 1957 (hereafter Bielek, Obrázky z hôr), p. 12. 14 Polányi, A szlovak társadalom és polgári nemzeti mozgalom a század fordulón, pp. 134–5. 15 Lajos Steier, A tót nemzetiségi mozgalom fejlődésének története, Liptószentmiklós, 1912 (hereafter Steier, A tót nemzetiségi mozgalom fejlődésének története), pp. 61–2. 16 For a good overview of the hlasists activities see Baer, A Life Dedicated to the Republic, particularly pp. 44–5; see also Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, pp. 141–6. 17 Jozef Butvin, ‘Hlasisti, vznik slovenského klerikalného a maloagrárného hnutia v rokoch 1898–1905’, Historický časopis, 31, 1983, 5 (hereafter Butvin, ‘Hlasisti, vznik slovenského klerikalného a maloagrárného hnutia v rokoch 1898–1905’), pp. 727–9; See also Štefan Janšák, Život Dr. Pavla Blahu, 2 vols, Trnave, 1947

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(hereafter Janšák, Život Dr. Pavla Blahu), Vol. I, pp. 205–10; Bokes, Dokumenty k slovenskému národnému hnutiu, Vol. III, pp. 305–10; Baer, A Life Dedicated to that the Slovak the Republic, pp. 45–62. 18 Rudolf Chmel, Hlasy v prúdoch času, Bratislava, 1983 (hereafter Chmel, Hlasy v prúdoch času), p. 7. 19 Butvin, ‘Hlasisti, vznik slovenského klerikalného a maloagrárného hnutia v rokoch 1898–1905’, p. 733. 20 Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, pp. 144–5. 21 See Evans, ‘Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks’, p. 112 and Zdenĕk Urban, ‘On the beginning of the Publicist and Political Activity of Milan Hodža’ (hereafter Urban, ‘On the beginning of the Publicist and Political Activity of Milan Hodža’), in Miroslav Pekník (ed.), Milan Hodža. Statesman and Politician, Bratislava, 2007 (hereafter Pekník, Milan Hodža), pp. 31–8; See also Butvin, ‘Hlasisti, vznik slovenského klerikalného a maloagrárného hnutia v rokoch 1898–1905’, pp. 732–3. 22 Károly Vigh, A tizenkilencedik század szlovák hirlaptörténete, Budapest, 1945, pp. 65–6. 23 See Urban, ‘On the beginning of the Publicist and Political Activity of Milan Hodža’, pp. 31–48. 24 Baer, A Life Dedicated to the Republic, pp. 53–60; Machala, ‘Milan Hodža in the Slovenský Týždenník’, pp. 39–40. 25 Lipták, Politické strany na Slovensku, pp. 41–2; See also Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, pp. 216–31. 26 Gyula Merei and Ferenc Pölöskei (eds), Magyarországi Pártprogramok, 2 vols, Budapest, 2003 (hereafter Merei and Pölöskei, Magyarországi Pártprogramok), Vol. I, pp. 164–6. See also Galántai, Egyház és politika, pp. 75–6. 27 Merei and Pölöskei, Magyarországi Pártprogramok, pp. 164–6; Gyula Merei, A Magyar polgári pártok programjai, 1867–1918, Budapest, 1971 (hereafter Merei, A Magyar polgári pártok programjai), pp. 149–54; Mit akar a néppárt, 1895; Július Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie na Slovensku v rokoch 1895–1905’, in Historický časopis, 20/4, 1978 (hereafter Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’), pp. 582–5. 28 Képviselőházi napló, 1906–1911, Vol. I, pp. 117–18 and 137–40; Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’, pp. 582–95; See also Čo chce ľudová strana? Budapest, 1895 and Esztergom, 23 August 1896 and 19 September 1897. 29 Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés, pp. 289–95; Miloslav Szabó, ‘“Because words are not deeds”. Antisemitic Practice and Nationality Policies in Upper Hungary around 1900’, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, July 2012 (hereafter Szabó, ‘“Because words are not deeds”’), pp. 165–7; See also the extended discussion of turn of the century Slovak Catholic antisemitism in Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, pp. 107–28.

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30 Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, p. 128. 31 For a concise yet insightful overview of populist intellectual currents in Hungary, including the népi ideology, both before and after 1918, see Zsolt Nagy, Great Expectation and Interwar Realities. Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy, 1918–1941, Budapest-New York, 2017 (hereafter Nagy, Great Expectation and Interwar Realities), pp. 73–106. See also the discussion of the term nép, and by extension ľud, in central European political rhetoric, in Gábor Gyani, Nép, nemzet, zsidó, Pozsony, 2013. 32 Képviselőházi napló, 1906–1911, Vol. I, pp. 137–42, 6 June 1906. 33 Lipták, Politické strany na Slovensku, pp. 89–90; See also Miloslav Szabó, ‘Populist Antisemitism. On the Theory and Methodology of Research into Modern Antisemitism’, Judaica Bohemia, 2/2014 (hereafter Szabó, ‘Populist Antisemitism’), pp. 73–4. 34 See, for example, Alkotmány, 22, 23 and 28 January 1898. 35 Bokes, Dokumenty k slovenskému národnému hnutiu, Vol. III, pp. 210–12; Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, pp. 15–16; See also Galántai, Egyház és politika, p. 61. 36 Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’, p. 598; Seton-Watson, Corruption and Reform in Hungary, p. 52. 37 Károly Grecsák, A választási biráskodás a gyakorlatban. Az 1899: XV törvénycikk magyarázata, Budapest, 1903 (hereafter Grecsák, A választási biráskodás a gyakorlatban), p. 106. 38 Podrimavský, Slovenská Narodná Strána v druhej polovici XIX storočia, pp. 137–8; See also Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, pp. 16–17; Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’, pp. 586–91; Dejiny slovenska, IV, p. 198; Vladimír Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, Nitra, 2007 (hereafter Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany), pp. 80–1; Képviselőházi napló, 1906–1911, Vol. I, pp. 117–18, 5 June 1905. 39 Bokes, Dokumenty k slovenskému národnému hnutiu, Vol. III, pp. 391–6. 40 Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, pp. 217 and 235; Galántai, Egyház és politika, p. 77. 41 Markovics, A nyitrai politikai bünpér, pp. 7–18. 42 Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’, p. 585. 43 Nemes, ‘The Uncivil Origins of Civil Marriage: Hungary’, pp. 326–7. 44 Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’, pp. 582–5; Péter Miklós, ‘A politikai katolicizmus mint a társadami modernitás szimptómja Magyarországon a XIX–XX század fordulóján’, in Erzsébet Bodnár and Gábor Demeter (eds), Tradíció és modernizáció a XVIII-XX században, Budapest, 2008 (hereafter Miklós, ‘A politikai katolicizmus’), pp. 168–70. 45 Nemes, ‘The Uncivil Origins of Civil Marriage: Hungary’, pp. 327–9. 46 See, for example, Kresťan, 8 October 1904 and 2 December 1905.

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47 Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’, pp. 582–5. 48 See, for example, Esztergom, 16 December 1906. 49 See Ábrahám Barna, ‘Szlovák sajtó és nemzetépítés a dualizmus korában’, 2014, pp. 51–67; Ladislav Tajták, ‘Aktivity provládnej orientácie v slovenskom prostredí v kontexte slovenských emancipačných úsilí’ (hereafter Tajták, ‘Aktivity provládnej orientácie v slovenskom prostred’), in Slovensko na začiatku 20. Storočia, p. 120; Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, p. 18. 50 See Michal Potemra (ed.), Slovenská Národná Bibliografia. Séria C. Bibliografia článkov. Bibliografia článkov zo slovenských novín a časopisov 1901–1918, Vol. III, Robotnícke hnutie na Slovensku, Martin, 1969 (hereafter Bibliografia článkov zo slovenských novín a časopisov 1901–1918, Vol. III, Robotnícke hnutie na Slovensku), pp. 137–45; See also Szabó, ‘Obvinenia z “rituálnych vrážd” v Hornom Uhorsku’, p. 636 and Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, pp. 111–12. 51 For a superb overview of the spread of associations throughout the western world in this era see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, ‘Democracy and Associations in the Long Nineteenth Century: Towards a Transnational Perspective’, Journal of Modern History, 75/2, 2003 (hereafter Hoffman, ‘Democracy and Associations’). 52 Roberts, Drink, Temperance and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Germany, p. 7; See also Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, pp. 16–21. 53 See, in this respect, E. San Juan’s delightful overview of Victorian activism ‘Toward a Definition of Victorian Activism’, in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 4/4, 1964. 54 Elena Mannová, ‘Associations in Bratislava in the Nineteenth Century: MiddleClass Identity in a Multiethnic City’, in G. Morton, B. de vries and R.J. Morris (eds), Civil Society, Associations and Urban Places. Class, Nation and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Hampshire, England, 2006 (hereafter Mannová, ‘Associations in Bratislava in the Nineteenth Century’), pp. 77–9; See also Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer, Proper Peasants. Traditional Life in a Hungarian Village, Chicago, 1969 (Fél and Hofer, Proper Peasants), pp. 320–4. 55 Robert Nemes, ‘The Politics of the Dance Floor: Culture and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Hungary’, Slavic Review, 60/4, 2001, pp. 806–7; Géza Fülöp, A Magyar olvasóközönség a felvilágasodás idején és a reformkorban, Budapest, 1978, pp. 13–14. 56 Mannová, ‘Associations in Bratislava in the Nineteenth Century’, 2006, pp. 77–9; Elena Mannová, ‘Spolky a ich miesto v živote spoločnosti na slovensku v 19. stor. stav a problémy výskumu’, in Historický časopis, 38, 1990/1 (hereafter Mannová, ‘Spolky a ich miesto v živote spoločnosti na slovensku’), p. 19; Gábor Gyani, Az urbanizacio társadalom története, Kolozsvár, 2012, pp. 219–20. 57 Mannová, ‘Spolky a ich miesto v živote spoločnosti na slovensku’, p. 21. 58 Fél and Hofer, Proper Peasants, pp. 320–4.

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59 Brock, The Slovak National Awakening, pp. 50–1. 60 Michal Potemra, Kultúrna a ostvetová práca na Slovenskuy v rokoch 1901–1918, 4 vols, Košice, 1983 (hereafter Potemra, Kultúrna a ostvetová práca na Slovensku v rokoch 1901–1918), Vol. I, pp. 27–40. 61 See Pope Leo XIII, The Condition of the Working Classes, London, 1910, pp. 37–8; See also See also Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman’s argument that the formation of associations was not necessarily a liberal project. Hoffman, ‘Democracy and Associations’, pp. 291–4. 62 http:​//www​.papa​lency​clica​ls.ne​t/Leo​13/l1​3reru​m.htm​. 63 http:​//www​.papa​lency​clica​ls.ne​t/Leo​13/l1​3grco​m.htm​. 64 William Callahan, ‘The Spanish Parish Clergy, 1874–1930’, The Catholic Historical Review, 75/3, 1989, p. 409. 65 Zangerl, ‘Courting the Catholic Vote’, pp. 224–6. 66 Ronald J. Cunsolo, ‘Nationalists and Catholics in Giolittian Italy: An Uneasy Colaboration’, The Catholic Historical Review, 79/1, p. 23; Frank J. Coppa, ‘From Liberalism to Fascism. The Church-State conflict over Italy’s Schools’, The History Teacher, 28/2, 1995, pp. 135–42. 67 Victor Day, ‘The Catholic Church in Belgium, 1919–1931’, The Catholic Historical Review, 18/3, 1932, pp. 305–6. 68 Thomas W. Simons, ‘Vienna’s First Catholic Political Movement: The Guntherians, 1848–1857’, Catholic Historical Review, 55/4, 1970, p. 611. 69 See John Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848–1897, Chicago, 1981. 70 Július Popély, ‘Vzt’ah medzi štátom a cirkvou v poslednej tretine 19. Storočia a korene politického klerikalizmu v Uhorsku’, Historické Studie, XXIV, 1980, pp. 78–9. 71 Galántai, Egyház és politika, pp. 39–44. 72 See Sándor Párvy, ‘XIII Leo pápa és a munkaügy’, Katholikus Szemle, 1891/5; Ágoston Fischer-Colbrie, ‘A Katholicizmus jövője’, Katholikus Szemle, 1893/7. 73 Ferencz Csippék, ‘Az ipáros munka szervezése’, Katholikus Szemle, 1897/11, pp. 289–3. 74 Ágoston Fischer-Colbrie, ‘Magyar agrárpolitika’, Katholikus Szemle, 1895/9, pp. 644–55. 75 Ödön Gyürky (ed.), A magyarországi katholikus egyesületek első országos kongresszusa, Budapest, 1896. 76 Ödön Gyürky, Útmutatás katholikus egyesületek alakitására, Budapest, 1902. 77 Jörg Hoensch, ‘Tschechoslowakismis oder Autonomie’, in Hans Lemberg et al. (eds), Studia Slovaca: Studien zur Geschichte der Slowaken und der Slowake von Jörg K Hoensch. Festgabe zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, Munich, 2000 (hereafter Studia Slovaca), p. 72; See also Béla Miticzi, Panszlávizmus és ellenszerei, Nyitra, 1902

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(hereafter Miticzi, Panszlávizmus és ellenszerei), p. 19; Titusz Dugovich, A tót nemzetiségi mozgalom fejlődésének története, Turócz Szent Marton, 1903 (hereafter Dugovich, A tót nemzetiségi mozgalom), pp. 95–7. 78 Jozef Škultéty, Sketches from Slovak history, Middletown, PA, 1930, pp. 199–203. 79 Bokes, Dokumenty k slovenskému národnému hnutiu, Vol. III, pp. 196–9. 80 Ibid., pp. 543. 81 Ibid., pp. 336–40. 82 Ibid., pp. 389–90. 83 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 1 January 1897. 84 Hlas, 1/1, 1898, pp. 161–7. 85 Fraňo Ruttkay, Dejiny slovenského novinárstva do roku 1918, Trnave, 1999 (hereafter Ruttkay, Dejiny slovenského novinárstva do roku 1918), pp. 188–90. 86 Serafínová, ‘K jubilee Katolíckych novín’, pp. 133–7. 87 See M. Mark Stolarik, ‘The Slovak press in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the Slovak-American press, 1885–1918’, in Dve domovini – Two Homelands, 2–3, 1992, pp. 148–50; See also Ferencz Schmiedt (ed.), Magyarországi Rom-Görög katholikus és szerzetes papság egyetemes névtára, Budapest, 1907, pp. 19–20; Mannová, A concise history of Slovakia, pp. 225–6; Čaplovič et al. (eds), Dejiny slovenska, Bratislava, 2000, p. 207. 88 Slovák tyždennik, 17 December 1939. 89 Pavol Stano, ‘Náš kruh a jeho nábožensko-kultúrna činnost’, in Pamätnica 100. Výročia Ružomberského Katolíckeho kruhu, Ružomberok, 2004, p. 43; Slávik, Slovenskí národovci, p. 359. 90 Mannová, A Concise History of Slovakia, p. 226. 91 Štátny Archív v Nitre (hereafter ŠAN), Nyitra County Hlavnožupanské dôverné písomnosti (hereafter NŽ), 18, 1906. 92 Pöstényi, Dejiny Spolku Sv. Vojtecha, pp. 47–51. 93 Michal Potemra (ed.), Bibliografia slovenských novín a časopisov do roku 1918, Martin, 1958 (hereafter Bibliografia slovenských novín a časopisov do roku 1918), pp. 73–4. 94 Ruttkay, Dejiny slovenského novinárstva do roku 1918, p. 189; See also Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 1 September 1899. 95 Ibid., p. 189. 96 Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, pp. 123–4. 97 Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades pp. 60–1. 98 Michael Schwartz, ‘Die Entwicklung der slowakischen Presse (1785–1941)’, in Südost Forschungen, 9, 212 (hereafter Schwartz, ‘Die Entwicklung der slowakischen Presse (1785–1941)’), p. 232. 99 See, for example, Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 3 June 1898 and 10 November 1899.

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100 Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, p. 149. See also Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 1 April 1897. 101 Szabó, ‘Obvinenia z “rituálnych vrážd” v Hornom Uhorsku’, pp. 633–4. 102 Emma Hvozdovič, ‘History and accomplishments of the Society of Saint Adalbert, Trnava, Slovakia’, in Slovak Studies, no. 5, 1965 (hereafter Hvozdovič, ‘History and accomplishments of the Society of Saint Adalbert’), p. 215; Milan Katuninec, ‘Spolok svätého Vojtecha v prvom období svojho pôsobenia (1870–1918)’, in Historický časopis, 51, 1, 2003 (hereafter Katuninec, ‘Spolok svätého Vojtecha v prvom období svojho pôsobenia’), pp. 41–57; See also Potemra, Kultúrna a ostvetová práca na Slovensku v rokoch 1901–1918, Vol. I, pp. 121–3. 103 Potemra, Kultúrna a ostvetová práca na Slovensku v rokoch 1901–1918, Vol. I, pp. 123–6; See also SNA, UMV, 14, 81 and Ján Pöstényi, Dejiny Spolku Sv. Vojtecha, pp. 47–51. 104 Vojtech Strelka (ed.), Odborný seminár 125 rokov Spolku sv. Vojtecha, Trnava, 1995; See also Roman Holec, ‘Úloha katolíckej cirkvi pri formovaní občianskej spoločnosti na Slovensku’, in Česko-slovenská historická ročenka, 2006 (hereafter Holec, ‘Úloha katolíckej cirkvi pri formovaní občianskej spoločnosti na Slovensku’), p. 159. 105 Martin Kollár (ed.), Putnik svatovojtessky, Trnava, 1907. 106 Katolícke noviny, 5 September 1895. 107 Ibid., 5 September 1901. 108 http:​//www​.papa​lency​clica​ls.ne​t/Leo​13/l1​3augu​s.htm​. 109 Constanti Hungarorum, 1893. 110 Gábor Barna, Az élő rozsafüzer társulata, Budapest, 2011, pp. 76–7. 111 See Fr. Richard Oswald, Živy Ruženec na čest Matky Božej Panny Marie a k spasenu veriacich, B. Štiavnica, 1909. 112 See Oswald, Živy Ruženec na čest Matky Božej Panny Marie a k spasenu veriacich, pp. 7–9; See also István Fülöpp, Az élőrozsafüzer társulat kézikönyve, Budapest, 1911. 113 Katolícke noviny, 20 September and 5 October 1900. 114 Kazateľňa, 1900, pp. 196–202. 115 Katolícke noviny, 5 November 1894 and 20 January 1895. 116 See Kráľovnna sv. ruženca, September and October 1908; December 1909. 117 Grecsák, A választási biráskodás a gyakorlatban, p. 105. 118 Sv, Adalbert (Vojtech), Mesičnik na obranu katolickej viery, May 1914; Galántai, Egyház és politika, p. 99. 119 SNA, Osobný Fond Ľudevít Okánik (hereafter OFLO), 2/86. 120 Primási Levéltár, Esztergom (hereafter PL), Esztergom Főegyházmegye (hereafter EF) látogatási jegyzőkönyvek, 1908-1909, 1089–93; See also the membership statistics for Slovak rosary sodalities given in Kráľovnna sv. ruženca, July 1907.

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121 Bokes, Dokumenty k slovenskému národnému hnutiu, Vol. III, p. 202. 122 Potemra, Kultúrna a ostvetová práca na Slovensku v rokoch 1901–1918, Vol. I, pp. 184–6; See also Galántai, Egyház és politika, p. 45; Péter Miklós, ‘A politikai katolicizmus’, pp. 172–3. 123 Katolícke noviny, 5 January 1901. 124 PL, EF, látogatási jegyzőkönyvek, 1908-1909, 1089–93. See also Edit Pór (ed.), A magyarországi egyesületek címtára a reformkortól 1945–ig, Budapest, 1988, 3 vols (hereafter A magyarországi egyesületek címtára a reformkortól 1945–ig), Vol. I, pp. 13–29; Potemra, Kultúrna a ostvetová práca na Slovensku v rokoch 1901–1918, Vol. I, pp. 189–91. 125 Katolícke noviny, 20 March and 5 April 1896; Galántai, Egyház és politika, p. 100. 126 SNA, OFLO, 2/85; See also Országos Széchenyi Könyvtár, Kisnyomtatványok tára (hereafter OSZK, Kny), A pozsonyi katholikus kör alapszabalyai, Pozsony, 1895; OSZK, Kny, A rajeci kath. Ifjusági kör alapszabalyai, 1907. 127 OSZK, Kny, A rajeci kath. Ifjusági kör alapszabalyai, 1907; PL, EF, látogatási jegyzőkönyvek, 1908-1909, 1089–93; Janšák, Život Dr. Pavla Blahu, i, pp. 377–84. 128 See, for example, Scepusia; Az Iglói katholikus kör irodalmi és ismeretterjestő szakosztályának évkönyve, Igló, 1912. 129 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 14 November 1902. 130 Ladislav Kniha, ‘Zástoj Ružomberského Katolíckeho kruhu v národnom zivote’, in Pamätnica 110. Výročia Ružomberského Katolíckeho kruhu, Ružomberok, 2004 (hereafter Kniha, ‘Zástoj Ružomberského Katolíckeho kruhu v národnom’), p. 62; Janšák, Život Dr. Pavla Blahu, i, pp. 377–84. 131 Loránt Tilkovszky, ‘K dejinam budapeštianskych slovenských a českých spolkov’, in Historický časopis, 45, 3, 1997, pp. 512–13; Kovács, A szlovákok élete és kultúrája a dualizmus korában, pp. 104–8; See also Ede Sándorfi, ‘A Budapesti szocialistakrol’, in Uj Magyar Sion, 1902, pp. 419–36. 132 OSZK, Kny, A Pozsonyi katholikus kör alapszabalyai, Pozsony, 1895. 133 KALAUZ, 1914, January 5/2, pp. 152–6. 134 SNA, UMV, Rezervalt Iratok, C.524, 1913. 135 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 16 February 1903. 136 Markovics, A nyitrai politikai bünpér, p. 27. 137 Roman Holec, ‘Economic aspects of Slovak national development in the twentieth century’, in Alice Teichova, Herbert Matis and Jaroslav Pátek (eds), Economic Change and the National Question in Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, 2000 (hereafter Holec, ‘Economic aspects, of Slovak national development in the twentieth century’), p. 278. 138 Marián Tkáč, ‘The Ľudová Banka in Nové Mesto nad Váhom’, BIATEC, 12/2004, pp. 26–7. 139 Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary, p. 186.

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140 Alkotmány, 4 December 1904. 141 Mária Kačkovičová, ‘Trnavská Ludová Banka’, BIATEC, 1/2005, pp. 28–9. 142 Holec, ‘Economic aspects of Slovak national development in the twentieth century’, p. 278; see also Adolf Pechány, A tótokról, A Magyarországi tótok, Budapest, 1913 (hereafter Pechány, A tótokról), p. 168. 143 Catherine Albrecht, ‘Rural Banks and Czech Nationalism in Bohemia, 1848–1914’, Agricultural History, 78/3, 2004 (hereafter Albrecht, ‘Rural Banks and Czech Nationalism’), p. 324. 144 ŠAB, Trencsén County Hlavnožupanské dôverné písomnosti (hereafter TŽ), 5, 1909; See also Marián Tkáč, ‘Zvolenská Ludová Banka’, BIATEC, 4/2005 (hereafter Tkáč, ‘Zvolenská Ludová Banka’), pp. 37–8. 145 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 26 August 1898. 146 Albrecht, ‘Rural Banks and Czech Nationalism’, pp. 324–5. 147 ŠAB, TŽ, 5, 1909; See also Tkáč, ‘Zvolenská Ludová Banka’, pp. 37–8. 148 Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary, p. 469. 149 Pechány, A tótokról, pp. 169–73. 150 SNA, UMV, 13, 79; See also Tkáč, ‘Zvolenská Ludová Banka’, pp. 37–8; Marián Tkáč, ‘The Ľudová Banka in Ružomberok’, BIATEC, 10/2005, pp. 28–9; Vladimir Fajnor, ‘Judicial Problems’, in Seton-Watson (ed.), Slovakia Then and Now, A Political Survey, London, 1931, p. 236. 151 Miloš Mazúr, ‘The Ľudová Banka Joint Stock Company of Námestovo’, BIATEC, 5/2005 (hereafter Mazúr, ‘The Ľudová Banka Joint Stock Company of Námestovo’), pp. 33–4. 152 Tkáč, ‘The Ľudová Banka in Ružomberok’, in BIATAC, Vol. XIII, 10/2005, pp. 28–9. 153 Tkáč, ‘Zvolenská Ludová Banka’, pp. 37–8. 154 ŠAB, TŽ, 5, 1909; Pechány, A tótokról, pp. 169–73. 155 Tkáč, ‘Zvolenská Ludová Banka’, pp. 37–8. 156 Dániel Szabó, ‘The Crisis of Dualism’, in Hungary. Governments and Politics, pp. 107–9; László Valko, ‘Hungary’s Agrarian Policy before the War’, The Hungarian Quarterly, 1936, Vol. II, p. 349; See also Gróf József Majlath, ‘A kivandorlásról’, Katholikus Szemle, 1907/21 and Kálmán Brazovay (ed.), Szővetkezeti naptár az 1911–ik közönséges évre, Budapest, 1911, p. 117. 157 Miroslav Fabricus et al. (eds), 150 rokov slovenského družstevníctva. Víťazstvá a prehry, Bratislava, 1995 (hereafter Fabricus et al., 150 rokov slovenského družstevníctva), pp. 49–65; See also Albrecht, ‘Rural Banks and Czech Nationalism’, pp. 318–39. 158 Holec, Polnohospodarstvo na Slovensku, pp. 163–4. 159 István Gaucsík, ‘A magyarországi szövetkezeti rendszer a felvidéki (szlovák) régióba (1898–1918)’, Fórum Társadalomtudományi Szemle, 1 (hereafter

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Gaucsík, ‘A magyarországi szövetkezeti rendszer a felvidéki (szlovák) régióban’), pp. 8–9. 160 Fabricus et al., 150 rokov slovenského družstevníctva, pp. 54–65; See also Výročná zpráva o činnosti zemedelskej rady pre slovensko za rok 1927, Bratislava, 1928, pp. 9–10 and Martin Fajmon, ‘ThDr. Ferdinand (Ferdiš) Juriga ako družstevník a bankár’, in Pekník et al., Ferdinand Juriga ľudový smer slovenskej politiky), pp. 412–17. 161 PL, EF, látogatási jegyzőkönyvek, 1908-1909, 1089–93. 162 Esztergom, 15 April 1906. 163 Ibid., 20 June 1897. 164 Pechány, A tótokról, p. 169. 165 SNA, UMV, 11, 67; See also Markovics, A nyitrai politikai bünpér, pp. 212–13. 166 Markovics, A nyitrai politikai bünpér, p. 53. 167 János Kokovay, ‘Mire nevel a szövetkezet’, in Kálmán Brazovay (ed.), Szővetkezeti naptár az 1911–ik közönséges évre, Budapest, 1911, pp. 61–4. 168 Dugovich, A tót nemzetiségi mozgalom, p. 92. 169 Szabó, ‘Populist Antisemitism’, p. 74; See also Holec, Polnohospodarstvo na Slovensku, pp. 157–63. 170 Esztergom, 15 April 1906. 171 Ibid., 20 June 1897; Szabó, ‘“Because words are not deeds”’, p. 176; See also Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 29. 172 Andrej Hlinka, Ako založime gazdovsko-potravný a uverný spolok, Ružomberok, 1895; See also Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 305. 173 John K. Zeender, ‘The German Center Party, 1890–1906’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 66/1 (1976), p. 13. 174 ŠAB, TŽ, 3–5, 1904–9. 175 See, for example, ŠAB, TŽ, 5, 1908. 176 Dugovich, A tót nemzetiségi mozgalom, p. 89; See also SNA, UMV, 12, 74. 177 Markovics, A nyitrai politikai bünpér, p. 22. 178 Peter Brock, The Slovak National Awakening: An essay in the intellectual history of east central Europe, Toronto, 1976 (hereafter Brock, The Slovak National Awakening), pp. 5–6. 179 Gross, The war against Catholicism, pp. 35–56. 180 Katolícke noviny, 5 September 1901. 181 Ibid., 5 June 1901. 182 Pútnik Sv. Vojtešsky, 1907, pp. 143–4. 183 Katolícke noviny, 5 September 1898 and 5 June 1901. 184 Esztergom, 15 April 1906. 185 Ibid., 20 June 1897.

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186 Károly Kmety, ‘Közjogünk és a nemzetségi pártok’, Jogtudományi Közlöny, 6 March 1914; Guido Gundisch, ‘Nemzetiségi pártszervezetek közjogi szempontbol’, Jogtudományi közlemények, 3 April 1914. 187 Szarka, Szlovák nemzeti fejlődés, p. 57; See also Polányi, A szlovak társadalom és polgári nemzet mozgalom a századfordulón, pp. 95–6; Potemra, ‘Otázky verejnej správy’, p. 179. See also Ľubomír Lipták’s comments on political parties among the Slovaks before 1914 in Ľubomír Lipták, Changes of Changes, Society and Politics in Slovakia in the 20th Century, Bratislava, 2002 (hereafter Lipták, Changes of Changes), pp. 128–30. 188 SNA, UMV, 11, 67; For a brief account of Czambel’s activities on behalf of the Hungarian government, see Kovács, A szlovákok élete és kultúrája a dualizmus korában, pp. 53–4 and Zilizi, Pechány Adolf és a Slovák-Magyar együttélés. 189 ŠAN, NŽ, 21, 1907. 190 See, for example, SNA, UMV, 11, 71. The government provided a subsidy to the patriotic Slovenské noviny newspaper and was urged in 1907 to do likewise for the patriotic Krajan newspaper. 191 ŠAB, Árva County Hlavnožupanské dôverné písomnosti (hereafter ÁŽ), 63, 1910 and 1911. 192 Szarka, Szlovák nemzeti fejlődés, p. 86. 193 Ibid., p. 112. 194 Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’, p. 586. 195 See, for example, Kovács, A szlovákok élete és kultúrája a dualizmus korában, pp. 109–13. 196 SNA, UMV, 12, 73; See also Pécsi katholikus kör alapszabályai, Pécs, 1894, p. 3 and, for an overview of government attemps to curb the Slovak cooperative movement, Fabricus et al., 150 rokov slovenského družstevníctva, pp. 66–8. 197 ŠAB, TŽ, 5, 1908. 198 Árva Megyei Hirlap, 30 April 1905. 199 Kniha, ‘Zástoj Ružomberského Katolíckeho kruhu v národnom’, pp. 61–8; Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 306. 200 Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’, p. 587. 201 Potemra, Kultúrna a ostvetová práca na Slovensku v rokoch 1901–1918, Vol. I, pp. 186–7; Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 2 and 9 March 1900. 202 Szarka, Szlovák nemzeti fejlődés, p. 82. 203 Marián Tkáč, ‘The Ľudová Banka in Nove Mesto nad Vahom’, BIATEC, 12/2004, pp. 26–7. 204 SNA, UMV, 13, unnumbered. 205 Ibid., 13, 79. 206 Ibid., 14, 80; Árva Megyei Hirlap, 8 October 1905. 207 Gaucsík, ‘A magyarországi szövetkezeti rendszer a felvidéki (szlovák) régióban’, p. 4.

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ŠAB, TŽ, 3, 1904; Markovics, A nyitrai politikai bünpér, pp. 48–52. Ibid., 3, 1903. Ibid., 5, 1908. Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 1 January and 3 November 1899. Dezider Smidák, ‘Niektoré problémy hornouhorského maďarského vzdelávajúceho spolku (1882–1919)’, in Alexander Csanda (ed.), Kapitoly z dejín Nitry, Bratislava, 1963, pp. 125–36. 213 ŠAB, LŽ, 1515 and ÁŽ, 62, 1909; ŠAN, NŽ, 21, 1907; See also Kemény, Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez, Vol. II, pp. 138–40. 214 ŠAB, LŽ, 1515, unnumbered. 215 OSZK, Kny, A pozsonyi polgári Magyar kör alapszabalyai, 1897 and OSZK, Kny, A pozsonyi katholikus kör alapszabalyai, Pozsony, 1895. 216 ŠAB, LŽ, 1515. 217 PL, Csernoch János magánlevéltár, Box 20, 105 and Box 21, 180. 218 See, for example, Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 7 October 1898. See also Kemény, Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez, Vol. II, pp. 636–7 and PL, Csernoch János magánlevéltár, Box 20, 105 and Box 21, 180. 219 SNA, UMV, Rezervalt Iratok, C.524, April 1911. 220 PL, EF, látogatási jegyzőkönyvek, 1908-1909, 1089–93. 221 ŠAB, LŽ, 1915, 7, 321. 222 Grünwald et al., A Felvidék. Politikai tanulmány, pp. 77–80. 223 Szarka, Szlovák nemzeti fejlődés, p. 55. 224 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 21 October 1898. 225 Ibid., 9 February 1900. 226 Kovács, A szlovákok élete és kultúrája a dualizmus korában, p. 103. 227 Kresťan, 1 February 1908; See also Potemra, Kultúrna a ostvetová práca na Slovensku v rokoch 1901–1918, Vol. I, pp. 188–9. 228 Katolícke noviny, 20 March 1899. 229 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 29 August 1902. 230 Esztergom, 20 June 1897. 231 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 18 November 1898. 232 OSZK, Kny, A hitelszövetkezetek Magyarországon az 1915 évben nemzeti jellegük szerint. 233 Vavro Šrobár, ‘Vliv Masarykov na Slovakov’, in Masarykův sborník IV, T.G. Masarykovi k šedesátým narozeninám, Prague, 1930, p. 254; See also Pechány, A tótokról, p. 169. 234 Quoted in Holec, ‘Economic aspects of Slovak national development in the twentieth century’, pp. 278–9. 235 SNA, UMV, 14, 80. 236 Kovács, A szlovákok élete és kultúrája a dualizmus korában, p. 105. 208 209 210 211 212

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237 Pieter M. Judson, ‘Rethinking the Liberal Legacy’, in Steven Beller, Rethinking Vienna 1900, New York, 2001. 238 Grünwald et al., A Felvidék. Politikai tanulmány, p. 40. 239 SNA, UMV, 13. 240 Ibid., 12, 73. 241 Ibid., 12, 76. 242 Ibid., 11, 71. 243 Ibid., 13, 79 and 14, 82. 244 Ibid., 14, 82. 245 See, for example, Budapesti Hirlap, 23 December 1905 and 5 October 1912. 246 Miklós, ‘A politikai katolicizmus’, pp. 172–3; Dániel Szabó, ‘The Crisis of Dualism’, in Hungary. Governments and Politics, p. 109. 247 Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, pp. 304–5. 248 Dušan Kováč et al. (eds), Slováci po rakúsko-uhorskom vyrovnaní, Bratislava, 2012 (hereafter Kováč et al. (eds), Slováci po rakúsko-uhorskom vyrovnaní), pp. 64–5; Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, pp. 30–1. 249 Esztergom, 15 April 1906. 250 Szabó, ‘“Because words are not deeds”’, pp. 176–7.

Chapter 3 1 Merei, A Magyar polgári pártok programjai, pp. 149–54. 2 SNA, Slovenská národná strana 1896–1914, Kniha zápisníc (hereafter SNS, Kniha zápisníc), p. 8; Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’, p. 602.; Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 26; Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, p. 18. 3 Dejiny slovenska IV, pp. 210–11; See also Albert Sturm (ed.), Országgyülési almanach 1901–1906, Budapest, 1901 (hereafter Országgyülési almanach 1901–1906); See also Képviselőházi napló, 1906–1911, 1, pp. 117–18, 5 June 1906; See also Jozef Butvin, ‘Slovenské narodnopolitické hnutie’, Československý časopis historickej, 1983 (hereafter Butvin, ‘Slovenské narodnopolitické hnutie’), p. 704. 4 SNA, SNS, Kniha zápisníc, p. 9. Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, pp. 60–2 and Milan Katuninec a kolektív, ‘Stručný pohľad na sociálne učenie rímskokatolíckej cirkvi a jej vplyv na politický vývoj na Slovensku’, in Niekoľko pohľadov na kresťanskú sociálnu etiku a jej vplyv na Slovensku, Trnava, 2016, p. 37; See, for example, Katolícke noviny, 20 April 1897 and 20 April 1899. 5 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 12 December 1902. 6 Galántai, Egyház és politika, p. 85.

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7 SNA, SNS, Kniha zápisníc, pp. 1–7; Képviselőházi napló, 1906–1911, Vol. VI, pp. 420–54; Ľudové noviny 18 February 1907. 8 Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, p. 19. 9 Zoltán Vásárhelyi, A népárt jövő hivatása és a nemzetiségek, Budapest, 1906, pp. 5–14. 10 Galántai, Egyház és politika, p. 77. 11 Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, p. 17. 12 Tibor Klestenitz, ‘A pártpolitika a dualizmus korának katolikus nagygyűlésein’, Egyháztörténeti Szemle, XV/3, 2014, pp. 44–9. 13 Katolícke noviny, 15 December 1905; See also Pölöskei, A szabadelvű párt fényei és árnya, p. 14 and Gyurgyák, Ezzé lett magyar hazátok, pp. 84–5. 14 Markovics, A nyitrai politikai bünpér. 15 Butvin, ‘Hlasisti, vznik slovenského klerikalného a maloagrárného hnutia v rokoch 1898–1905’, p. 740; See also Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, pp. 88–9. 16 Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, pp. 88–9. 17 ŠAB, LŽ, 1446, pp. 1–108. 18 Chmel, Hlasy v prúdoch času, p. 45. 19 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 27 September 1901; Képviselőházi napló, 1906–1911, Vol. I, pp. 117–18 and 137–40. See also SNA, SNS, Kniha zápisníc, pp. 1–18 and Bartlová, Andrej Hlinka, p. 14. 20 Képviselőházi napló, 1906–11, Vol. VI, pp. 420–54; Popély, ‘Zichyho strana a nacionálno-klerikálne hnutie’, p. 601; Dejiny slovenska IV, p. 214. 21 Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, p. 19; Ľudové noviny, 15 March 1907. 22 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 2 June 1899. 23 SNA, SNS, Kniha zápisníc, pp. 7– 9; Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud, 21 June 1901 and 13 September 1901; See also Butvin, ‘Hlasisti, vznik slovenského klerikalného a maloagrárného hnutia v rokoch 1898–1905’, p. 740. 24 Miticzi, Panszlávizmus és ellenszerei, pp. 19–20. 25 On the SNS’s quasi-electoral passivity, see Butvin, ‘Slovenské narodnopolitické hnutie’, pp. 700–7. 26 Ruttkay, Dejiny slovenského novinárstva do roku 1918, p. 188. 27 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 69. 28 Jozef Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky v rokoch 1905–1907’, Historický časopis, 32/4, 1984 (hereafter Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’), pp. 560–1. 29 Képviselőházi napló, 1906–11, Vol. VIII, pp. 111–16. 30 Árvavarmegye Kis Tukör, 1905, pp. 18–32. 31 Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary, p. 468.

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32 Szabó, ‘Obvinenia z “rituálnych vrážd” v Hornom Uhorsku’, p. 635; Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, pp. 66–70; Országgyülési almanach 1901–1906, p. 400. 33 Árva Megyei Hirlap, 1 May 1904. 34 SNA, UMV, 13, 79; Fabro and Ujlaki (eds), Sturm-féle Országgyülési almanach, 1906–1911, Budapest, 1906 (hereafter Sturm-féle Országgyülési almanach, 1906–1911), p. 235; A ‘Magyar Tudósitó’ szerkesztősége (ed.), A Magyar országgyülés, Budapest, 1906 (hereafter A ‘Magyar Tudósitó’ szerkesztősége, A Magyar országgyülés), p. 249; Mazúr, ‘The Ludová Banka Joint Stock Company of Námestovo’, pp. 33–4. 35 See the regular section of the Kráľovnna sv. ruženca entitled Naš život. 36 Orava, 1 October 1905, 1 November 1905 and 1 March 1906; A magyarországi egyesületek címtára a reformkortól 1945–ig, pp. 49–51. 37 Árva Megyei Hirlap, 19 November 1905. 38 SNA, UMV, 13, 79. 39 Zvolenské noviny, 1 February 1905. 40 Kresťan, 21 January 1905. 41 Nemzetgyülési Napló, 1906–11, Vol. VI, pp. 420–54. 42 See Kresťan, 28 January 1905 and Fabro and Ujlaki (eds), Sturm-féle Országgyülési almanach, 1905–1910, Budapest, 1905 (hereafter Sturm-féle Országgyülési almanach, 1905–1910), p. 399. 43 Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, p. 91. 44 Ruttkay, Dejiny slovenského novinárstva do roku 1918, p. 189; Marián Hronský, ‘Ferdinand Juriga do roku 1918’ (hereafter Hronský, ‘Ferdinand Juriga do roku 1918’), in Ferdiš Juriga, zborník referátov zo seminára “život a dielo Ferdiša Jurigu”, Bratislava, 1992 (hereafter Ferdiš Juriga, zborník referátov), pp. 13–14. While the sale of the paper was public knowledge, the identity of the new owner remained a secret. See, Litárne listy, 1904, p. 11 and Képviselőházi napló, 1906–11, Vol. II, pp. 177–82. 45 Janšák, Život Dr. Pavla Blahu, Vol. I, pp. 16–18 and 49. 46 Litárne listy, 1903, pp. 6–7. 47 Bibliografia slovenských novín a časopisov do roku 1918, pp. 40–1 and 73–4; See also ŠAN, NŽ, 1908, 23; Katolícke noviny, 20 December 1904; Sturm-féle Országgyülési almanach, 1910–1915, p. 244; Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, p. 28. 48 Katolícke noviny, 20 December 1904; See also Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, p. 89 and Škultéty, Sketches from Slovak History, p. 173. 49 Bartlová, Andrej Hlinka, p. 13; Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 22. 50 Bielek, Obrázky z hôr, pp. 28–32.

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51 Janšák, Život Dr. Pavla Blahu, i, pp. 292–6. 52 Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, p. 90. 53 Quoted in Hronský, ‘Ferdinand Juriga do roku 1918’, in Ferdiš Juriga, zborník referátov, p. 7; See also Alexander Mach. Z ďalekých ciest, pp. 286–91. 54 NA, FO, 371, 1929, 13580, pp. 219–27. 55 A Szakolczai kir. kath. algimnasium értesítője az 1890/91 iskolai tanévről, Szakolcza, 1891, pp. 24–5; A Szakolczai kir. kath. algimnasium értesítője az 1891/92 iskolai tanévről, Szakolcza, 1892, pp. 26–9; A Szakolczai kir. kath. algimnasium értesítője az 1892/93 iskolai tanévről, Szakolcza, 1893, pp. 24–9; A Szakolczai kir. kath. algimnasium értesítője az 1893/94 iskolai tanévről, Szakolcza, 1894, pp. 26–35; A Pozsonyi kir. kath. főgimnasium értesítője az 1894/95 iskolai évről, Pozsony, 1895, p. 62; See also István Fazekas, A Bécsi Pazmaneum Magyarországi hallgatói, 1623–1918, Budapest, 2003, p. 419. 56 Dr. F. Jehlička, Kto on je a čo chce. 1920, pp. 4–5; See also SNA, UMV, Rezervalt Iratok, C.521. 57 On Jehlička’s early infatuation with the hlasists, see Janšák, Život Dr. Pavla Blahu, i, pp. 292–6; On his later criticism of the hlasists, see, for example, Hlas, Vol. VI, 1904, pp. 121–4 and Rudolf Margin, Novoveká filosofia a Slovaci, T. Sv. Martin, 1903. 58 Alena Bartlová, ‘Programová linia klerikalizmu na Slovensku (1905–1938)’, Historické Štúdie, XXII, 1977 (hereafter Bartlová, ‘Programová linia klerikalizmu’), p. 70; See also Katolícke noviny, 10 June 1905. 59 Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, p. 558. 60 Katolícke noviny, 1 January 1905. 61 Janšák, Život Dr. Pavla Blahu, i, p. 49; See also Ľudové noviny, 7 June and 22 March 1907, and 28 February 1908. 62 Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, pp. 558–9. 63 Képviselőházi napló, 1906–11, Vol. II, pp. 177–82; See also Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, pp. 559–60. 64 Boros and Szabó, Parlamentarizmus Magyarországon, pp. 144–6. 65 Pap, Tanulmányok a dualizmus kori Magyar parlamentarizmus történetéből, pp. 198–203. 66 Gerő, The Hungarian parliament, p. 189. Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, p. 221. 67 Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, p. 559. See also the insightful comments on the popularity of electoral reform across Europe in Sked, ‘Belle Époque: Europe before 1914’, p. 25. 68 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, pp. 45–6. 69 See Bibliografia článkov zo slovenských novín a časopisov 1901–1918, Vol. III, Robotnícke hnutie na Slovensku, pp. 504–5. 70 Katolícke noviny, 3 February 1905.

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71 Ibid., 19 May 1905; Kresťan, September 1905. 72 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 31. 73 Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, pp. 92–4; See also Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, p. 562. 74 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 71. 75 SNA, UMV, Rezervalt Iratok, C.521; ŠAN, NŽ, 18, 1906; Esztergom, 17 September 1905. 76 Esztergom, 17 September 1905. 77 SNA, C.521, UMV, Rezervalt Iratok; Kresťan, 14 October 1905. 78 For the full text of the speech see Reč Františka Skyčáka. Povedaná dňa, 13 augusta 1905 na ľudovom shromaždeni v Trstenej, Uh. Skalica, 1905; See also Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, p. 91. Árva Megyei Hirlap, 1 October 1905; Kresťan, 26 August 1905. 79 Géza Szebeni, Giesswein Sándor keresztényszocializmusa, Budapest, 2016, pp. 137–60. 80 Kresťan, 21 October 1905. 81 SNA, UMV, Rezervalt Iratok, C.521. 82 Ľudové noviny, 1 March 1907. 83 Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, p. 96. 84 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 47; Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, pp. 558–9. 85 Katolícke noviny, 15 December 1905. 86 Notable absentees were Juriga and Hlinka, although the precise reasons for their absence can only be guessed at. See Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, pp. 563–4; See also Budapesti Hirlap, 18 December 1905. 87 Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, p. 563. 88 Dejiny slovenska IV, pp. 267–38; See also Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, p. 564. 89 Natália Rolková, ‘Smerovanie Slovenskej ľudovej strany v rokoch 1905–1939 na podklade jej programových dokumentov’, in Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách (hereafter Rolková, ‘Smerovanie Slovenskej ľudovej strany v rokoch 1905–1939’), pp. 163–4. 90 Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, pp. 563–4. 91 Képviselőházi napló, 1906–11, Vol. VI, pp. 420–54; Alena Bartlová, ‘Ferdiš Juriga a Slovenská Ľudová Strana’, in Ferdiš Juriga, zborník referátov, pp. 28–9; Ferdiš Juriga, Blahozvest kriesenie, Bratislava, 1932, pp. 90–2 and Ľudové noviny, 1 March 1907. 92 Vavro Šrobár, Boj o novy život, Ružomberok, 1920, pp. 430–41; See also Vavro Šrobár (ed.), Hlas. Mesačník pre literatúru, politiku a otázku sociálnu, Vol. VI, 1904, pp. 121–4 and 155–8; see also Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, pp. 563–4.

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93 Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, pp. 236–9. 94 Ibid., p. 222; Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, p. 566; Lipták, Politické strany na Slovensku, p. 93. 95 SNA, UMV, Rezervalt Iratok, C.521; SNA, Osobný Fond Pavel Blaho (hereafter OFPB) 39, 1504; See also Primási Levéltár Esztergom, VK, 9/2301 and 4213, 1906. 96 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 79; The Political Criminal Trial: Against the Rev. Father Andrew Hlinka. 97 The Political Criminal Trial: Against the Rev. Father Andrew Hlinka, p. 15. 98 SNA, UMV, 11, 67. 99 See, for example, SNA, OFPB, 39, 1499. 100 Xénia Šuchová, Idea Českoslovensého štátu na Slovensku 1918–1939, Bratislava, 2011, p. 19. 101 SNA, Osoby Fond Vavro Šrobár (hereafter OFVŠ), 8/546; Katolícke noviny, 15 December 1905. 102 SNA, OFPB, 39, 1502. 103 Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, pp. 236–9. 104 Képviselőházi napló, 1906–11, Vol. I, pp. 1137–40 and 235–41. 105 Of the 264 voters in the village of Gajor, 135 were listed as farmers, and 97 of them were listed a supporters of Dr Blaho. See SNA, OFPB, 39, 1449. 106 Holec, ‘Ferdinand Juriga ako poslanec v uhorskom parlamente’, in Pekník et al. (eds), Ferdinand Juriga ľudový smer slovenskej politiky, p. 105. 107 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 80. 108 See the cogent summary of the range of factors encouraging Slovaks to downplay their Slovak nationalism in Holec, ‘Úloha katolíckej cirkvi pri formovaní občianskej spoločnosti na Slovensku’, pp. 162–5. See also Esztergom, 11 February 1906 and 22 April 1906. 109 See the biographies listed in Sturm-féle Országgyülési almanach, 1906–1911. 110 The SĽS ran six candidates in the Western Slovak regions of Bratislava, Nitra, and Trenčín, two candidates in the central region of Banská Bystrica, and three candidates in the northern region. The SNS ran one candidate in the western region of Trnava, three candidates in the northern region and one candidate in the eastern region of Prešov. See Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, p. 110; Dejiny slovenska IV, pp. 268–71 and Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, pp. 236–9. 111 Ladislav Tajták, ‘Aktivity provládnej orientácie v slovenskom prostredí’, in Slovensko na začiatku 20. Storočia, pp. 121–6. 112 Kováč et al. (eds), Slováci po rakúsko-uhorskom vyrovnaní, pp. 306–7.

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Chapter 4 1 Janos, The Politics of Backwardness, p. 140. 2 Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, pp. 225–6. 3 SNA, SNS, Kniha zápisníc, pp. 57–64; SNA, OFPB, 39, 1494; See also Dejiny slovenska IV, p. 268; Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, pp. 564–5. 4 The Political Criminal Trial: Against the Rev. Father Andrew Hlinka, p. 21; Ivan Markovič, Slovensko pred prevratom, Bratislava, 1924, p. 25; Lipták, Politické strany na Slovensku, p. 92. 5 The Political Criminal Trial: Against the Rev. Father Andrew Hlinka, p. 21. 6 Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, p. 62. 7 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 102; Butvin, ‘Podnety a vzostup slovenskej buržoáznej politiky’, p. 570. 8 Sturm-féle Országgyülési almanach, 1910–1915, p. 244; For a comprehensive overview of Dr Pavol Blaho’s life and work see Janšák, Život Dr. Pavla Blahu, i. For his role in the acquisition of the Katolícke noviny see Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 15–51. 9 Hronský, ‘Ferdinand Juriga do roku 1918’, in Ferdiš Juriga, zborník referátov, p. 12; See also Bibliografia slovenských novín a časopisov do roku 1918, pp. 47–8 and 80. 10 ŠAN, NŽ, 18, 1906; Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, pp. 81–101. 11 PL, Püspöki Ertekezletek Jegyzőkönyvei es Nyomtatvanyai 1892–1908, 24–25 October 1907, pp. 10–12. 12 See Katolicke noviny, 22 June 1906; Ľudové noviny, 11 January and 22 February 1907. See also Baer, A Life Dedicated to the Republic, p. 39. 13 Esztergom, 29 July 1906. 14 Katolicke noviny, 22 June 1906; Ľudové noviny, 11 January, 1 and 8 February, 1 March and 21 June 1907. Dejiny slovenska, IV, pp. 270–1. 15 Ľudové noviny, 22 April 1907. 16 Ibid., 1 March 1907. 17 Ibid., 15 March 1907. 18 Dejiny slovenska, IV, p. 271. See also Ľudové noviny, 15 and 22 March, 12 and 19 April, 22 and 29 November, 20 December 1907 and 26 June 1908. 19 See Černokňažník, April 1907–January 1908. 20 Fabricus et al. (eds), 150 rokov slovenského družstevníctva, pp. 70–1; See also Ľudové noviny, 25 September 1908. 21 Litárne listy, 6/7, 1908; Bibliografia slovenských novín a časopisov do roku 1918, p. 41. 22 See, for example, Ľudové noviny, 18 January, 8 February and 17 May 1907.

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Ľudové noviny, 15 August 1908. Quoted in Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, pp. 166–7. Ľudové noviny, 28 August 1908. Ibid., 16 October 1908; On the anti-Czech tendencies within the SNS leadership, see Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, p. 160. 27 SNA, SNS, Kniha zápisníc, pp. 57–78. 28 Ibid., pp. 79–87; See also Lipták, Politické strany na slovensku, pp. 93–4. 29 Ladislav Tajták, ‘Vznik oblastných organizácií sociálnodemokratickej strany uhorska na slovensku a jej organizačný vývin’, Historický časopis, 34, 1986/6, pp. 857–60. 30 Chmel, Hlasy v prúdoch času, p. 45. 31 Owen Johnson, ‘Losing Faith: The Slovak-Hungarian Constitutional Struggle, 1906–1914’, in Harvard Ukranian Studies, 22/1998 (hereafter Johnson, ‘Losing Faith’), p. 297. 32 Ľudové noviny, 1 January and 26 July 1907. 33 Ibid., 15 May and 7 June 1908. 34 See Bibliografia článkov zo slovenských novín a časopisov 1901–1918, Vol. III, Robotnícke hnutie na Slovensku, pp. 135–7; See also Ľudové noviny, 13 September 1907 and 29 May 1908 and Kresťan, 5 and 12 October 1907. 35 Bibliografia článkov zo slovenských novín a čas opisov 1901–1918, Vol. III, Robotnícke hnutie na Slovensku, pp. 135–7 and 145–6; See also Johnson, ‘Losing Faith’, p. 298. 36 Ľudové noviny, 31 May 1907. 37 ŠAB, LŽ, 1446 and 1515; Kemény, Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez, Vol. IV, pp. 658–62. 38 Budapesti Hirlap, 6 November 1908. 39 Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, pp. 222–4. 40 Kemény, Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez, Vol. IV, pp. 655–7. See also Johnson, ‘Losing Faith’, p. 298. 41 Johnson, ‘Losing Faith’, p. 296. 42 For a balanced assessment of the Lex Apponyi, see Egyed Hermann, A katolikus egyház története, Munchen, 1973 (hereafter Hermann, A katolikus egyház története), p. 477. 43 See, for example, Ľudové noviny, 12 and 19 April 1907. 44 PL, Püspöki Ertekezletek Jegyzőkönyvei es Nyomtatvanyai 1892–1908, 1908, 15 March 1908. 45 Johnson, ‘Losing Faith’, p. 296. 46 Ruszoly, A választási bíraskodás, pp. 383–6. Johnson, ‘Losing Faith’, p. 298. 47 Johnson, ‘Losing Faith’, pp. 299–300. 48 Lipták, Changes of Changes, p. 128. 23 24 25 26

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49 Képviselőházi napló, 1906–11, Vol. I, pp. 235–41 and 332–5; VI, pp. 420–54 and VIII, pp. 146–8. 50 Ferdiš Juriga, Blaho zvestovanie, Skalica, 1906, p. 85. 51 Képviselőházi napló, 1906–11, Vol. I, pp. 49–53 and 332–5. 52 Ibid., 1906–11, Vol. I, pp. 235–41. 53 See also Kresťan, 30 December 1906. 54 Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, pp. 219–20; See also, for example Kresťan, 16 December 1905 and 13 January 1906, and 28 September, 4 and 12 October and 16 November 1907 and Ľudové noviny, 25 January, 1 March, 10 and 31 May and 5 July 1907. 55 See, for example, Képviselőházi napló, 1906–11, Vol. XIII, pp. 104–7. 56 See, for example, Ľudové noviny, 1 January, 15 March, 22 March 1907, 6 March 1908 and 18 March 1910. 57 Ľudové noviny, 25 September 1908. 58 See, for example, Katolícke noviny, 13 April 1906; S. Rohacek (ed.), Za tu našu slovenčinu, Modra, 1906; Jehlička, Cteni Voličia; Vladimir Daniš argues that there were other local Catholic associations that ‘quietly’ broke away from the KNP and began to work for the SĽS. Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, p. 105. Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 47; Ján Beňko (ed.), Dokumenty slovenskej národnej identity a štátnosti, Vol. II, Bratislava, 1998 (hereafter Dokumenty slovenskej národnej identity), p. 387. Milan Podrimavský, ‘Organizácia Slovenskej národnej strany v rokoch 1900–1914’, in Historické Štúdie, XXII, 1977, pp. 177–89; See also Ľudové noviny, 1 March 1907, 18 October 1907, and 25 June 1909. 59 Galántai, Egyház és politika, pp. 101–3. 60 See, for example, Kresťan, 25 January 1908. 61 Kresťan, 14 March 1908, 20 March 1909 and 22 May 1909. 62 PL, EF, látogatási jegyzőkönyvek, 1908-1909, 1089–93; See also See also Kresťan, 22 May 1909 and 3 July 1909 and Galántai, Egyház és politika, p. 102. 63 See, for example, PL, Püspöki Ertekezletek Jegyzőkönyvei es Nyomtatvanyai 1892–1908, 1909–27, 7 April 1910, p. 6. 64 Antal Stefánek, ‘A klerikalizmus elleni küzdelem a tótok közt’, in Huszadik Század, 1911, 2/2 (hereafter Stefánek, ‘A klerikalizmus elleni küzdelem’), p. 469. 65 Esztergom, 19 June 1910; See also Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, pp. 225–8. 66 ŠAB, ÁŽ, 63, 1910; Ľudové noviny, 3 June 1910. 67 Slovenské ľudové noviny, 25 November 1910 and 27 January 1911. 68 Bibliografia slovenských novín a časopisov do roku 1918, p. 43; See also Slovenský týždennik, 13 October 1911; See also Slovenské ľudové noviny, 13 and 20 October 1911. Johnson, ‘Losing Faith’, p. 299. Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská

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spoločnosť, pp. 237–8; See also Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, p. 123; Dejiny slovenska IV, pp. 292–4. 69 SNA, SNS, Kniha zápisníc, pp. 137–45. 70 Bartlová, Andrej Hlinka, pp. 28–9; Hronský, ‘Ferdinand Juriga do roku 1918’, p. 16. 71 SNA, SNS, Kniha zápisníc, pp. 146–55; Kemény, Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez, Vol. V, pp. 498–9; See also Slovenské ľudové noviny, 27 October, 3 November 1911 and 8 and 15 March, 12 April and 22 November 1912; Slovenský týždennik, 20 October, 3 November 1911. See also Stefánek, ‘A klerikalizmus elleni küzdelem’, pp. 469–70; Bibliografia slovenských novín a časopisov do roku 1918, p. 42. 72 Vavro Šrobár, Oslobodené Slovensko, Bratislava, 2004, p. 73. 73 Hvozdovič, ‘History and accomplishments of the Society of Saint Adalbert’, p. 219. 74 Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, p. 170; See also Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, p. 163 and the short but insightful comparison of Hlinka and Šrobár in Sabine Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei 1918–1945. Kulturelle Praxis Zwischen Sakralisierung und Säkularisierung, Berlin, 2015 (hereafter Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei), p. 90. 75 SNA, UMV, Rezervalt Iratok, C.523 and 524; Bokes, Dokumenty k slovenskému národnému hnutiu, Vol. III, pp. 307–10; See also Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, pp. 124–6; Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 235. See also Slovenské ľudové noviny, 15 March 1912; Bibliografia slovenských novín a časopisov do roku 1918, pp. 41–2. 76 Ľudové noviny, 19 April, 10 May, 16 August, 13 September, 11 October, 5 and 8 November 1907. 77 See, for example, Ľudové noviny, 25 January and 30 August 1907. 78 See, SNA, UMV, 12, 78; Ľudové noviny, 3 January 1908 and 18 December 1908; See also Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, p. 163. See also the more cautious discussion of Slovak-language publications in Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 118–19. 79 SNA, Hlavné štátne zastupietelstvo, 30/321/247; Trial of Father Hlinka, p. 15; Ľudové noviny, 21 June 1907. 80 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, p. 233; See also Slovenské ľudové ňoviny, 15 April 1910 and 12 April, 7 June 1911. 81 Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 309. Szarka, Szlovák nemzeti fejlődés, p. 111. 82 See the reports on individual parishes’ subscriptions to the press which were carried out from 1909 onwards in PL, EF, látogatási jegyzőkönyvek, 1908-1909, 1089–93; See also Sv, Adalbert (Vojtech), Mesiačnik na obranu katolickej viery, March and July 1910 and February 1911. 83 Sv. Adalbert (Vojtech), Mesiačnik na obranu katolickej viery, December 1910.

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84 Hodža, himself, declared that he suspected Hlinka had becme ‘Párvy’s priest’ but kept quiet until the mass confirmation, see Slovenský týždennik, 15 September 1911. 85 Slovenský týždennik, 18 August and 1 September 1911. 86 Ibid., 15 September 1911. 87 Slovenské ľudové noviny, 22 September and 6 October 1911. 88 SNA, Osobný fond Andrej Hlinka (hereafter OFAH), 20, 932. 89 Kováč et al. (eds), Slováci po rakúsko-uhorskom vyrovnaní, pp. 247–8. 90 Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 309. 91 Bartlová, Andrej Hlinka, p. 29; Konstantin Čulen, Boj slovakov o svobodu, Bratislava, 1944, p. 134. 92 Rolková, ‘Smerovanie Slovenskej ľudovej strany v rokoch 1905–1939’, pp. 166–7; See also Bartlová, Andrej Hlinka, pp. 29–30. 93 See Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, pp. 129–30. 94 See Rolková, ‘Smerovanie Slovenskej ľudovej strany v rokoch 1905–1939’, pp. 166–7. Bibliografia článkov zo slovenských novín a časopisov 1901–1918, Vol. III, Robotnícke hnutie na Slovensku, pp. 135–7; See also Slovenské ľudové noviny, 2 January, 28 February and 19 December 1913 and Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, p. 161. 95 Holec, Tragédia v Černovej a slovenská spoločnosť, pp. 241–2; See also Népszava, 8 March 1914.

Chapter 5 1 Dušan Kovač (ed.), Prvá svetová vojna 1914–1918, Bratislava, 2008 (hereafter Kovač, Prvá svetová vojna 1914–1918), p. 43; Kresťan, 22 August 1914. 2 Quoted in Jörg Hoensch, Dokumente zur Autonmiepolitik der Slowakischen Volkspartei Hlinkas, Munich and Vienna, 1984 (hereafter Hoensch, Dokumente zur Autonmiepolitik der Slowakischen Volkspartei Hlinkas), p. 106; See also Hronský, ‘Ferdinand Juriga do roku 1918’, p. 17. Ferdiš Juriga, Písma ktoré počas krvavej sveta potopy, Bratislava, undated, p. 3; Vörös, ‘Prememy obrazu slovákov v maďarskej horouhorskej regionálnej tlači v období rokov 1914–1918’, pp. 431–2. See also Barna Ábrahám, ‘A szlovákkérdés nemzetközi dimenziói az I. világháború éveben’, Világtörténet, 2015/2 (hereafter Ábrahám, ‘A szlovákkérdés nemzetközi dimenziói’), pp. 264–7. 3 ŠAB, ÁŽ, 64, 1914. See also Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, p. 229. 4 Duchovný pastier, 1917–18; See also Elena Mannová, ‘Zmeny vo vedomi slovenskej spoločnosti za prvej svetovej vojny’, in M. Podrimavsky and D. Kovač (eds), Slovensko na začiatku 20. Storica, Bratislava, Slovakia, 1999, p. 355; Kovač, Prvá svetová vojna 1914–1918, p. 24; Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, pp. 63–4 and SNA, OFVŠ, 15, 807.

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5 ŠAB, LŽ, 7, 321; ŠAB, LŽ, 1446, 1915; ŠAB, ÁŽ, 64, 1916; ŠAB, ÁŽ, 64, 1916; Imrich Stanek, Zrada a pád, Bratislava, 1958 (Stanek, Zrada a pád), p. 54. 6 Slovenský týždennik, 22 and 29 September 1911; Slovenské ľudové noviny, 29 September 1911. 7 Lajos Steier, ‘A tót harakiri’, in Magyar Szemle, 1930, p. 369. 8 Képviselőházi napló, 1910–1915, Vol. XXIV, pp. 285–6; See also Dušan Kováč (ed.), Prvá svetová vojna 1914–1918, Bratislava, 2008, p. 23. 9 Magyarországi Rendeletek Tára, Budapest, 1914, Vol. I, pp. 1399–1400; Igor Marks and Daniel Lajčin, ‘Prvá svetová vojna, slovenské skolštvo a vznik Československej republiky’, Paidagogos, 2017/2. 10 Daniš, Začiatky Slovenskj Ľudovej Strany, pp. 133–4; Lajos Steier, ‘A “felszabaditott” Szlovensko’, in Magyar Szemle, 1929, p. 397. 11 Képviselőházi napló, 1910–1915, Vol. XXX, p. 80. 12 Potemra, ‘Uhorské volebné právo’, p. 202. 13 Holec, ‘Ferdinand Juriga ako poslanec v uhorskom parlamente’, pp. 127–8; Peter Pastor, ‘Hungary in World War 1: The End of Historic Hungary’, Hungarian Studies Review, Vol. XXVIII, 1–2, 2001 (hereafter Pastor, ‘Hungary in World War 1’), pp. 168–9. 14 Róbert Letz, Slovenské dejiny, IV, 1914–1938, Bratislava, 2010 (hereafter Letz, Slovenské dejiny), pp. 19–24; See also Pastor, ‘Hungary in World War 1’, pp. 166–7. 15 Pastor, ‘Hungary in World War 1’, pp. 172–4. 16 Letz, Slovenské dejiny, p. 21. 17 Mark Cornwall, ‘A Conflicted and Divided Habsburg Monarchy’, in Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman (eds), Sacrifice and Rebirth. The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War, New York and Oxford, 2016 (hereafter Cornwall, ‘A Conflicted and Divided Habsburg Monarchy’), p. 2. See also Rady, The Habsburg Empire, p. 101. 18 Letz, Slovenské dejiny, pp. 21–2. 19 Jozef Butvin, ‘Domaci národno-oslobodovací boj slovákov za prvej svetovej vojny’, Historický časopis, 32, 1984, 6, pp. 866–7; Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 310; Ľudové noviny, 11 January 1917 and SNA, UMV, 13, 79. 20 Nemzetgyülési Napló, 1910–1918, Vol. XXVI, pp. 300–1 and Vol. XXVII, pp. 457–9, Vol. XXXIV, pp. 4–9; Vol. XL, pp. 277–85; Vol. XLI, pp. 139–45. 21 Képviselőházi napló, 1910–1915, Vol. XLI, p. 354; See also Holec, ‘Ferdinand Juriga ako poslanec v uhorskom parlamente’, pp. 130–1; and Marián Hronský, ‘Ferdinand Juriga a Andrej Hlinka v čase prvej svetovej vojny (1914–1918)’, in Pekník et al. (eds), Ferdinand Juriga ľudový smer slovenskej politiky, pp. 143–5. 22 Quoted in Hronský, ‘Ferdinand Juriga a Andrej Hlinka v čase prvej svetovej vojny (1914–1918)’, pp. 141–2.

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23 ŠAB, ÁŽ, 64, 1918. 24 Joseph Mikuš, Slovakia. A Political and Constitutional History (with documents), 1995 (hereafter Mikuš, Slovakia. A Political and Constitutional History), p. 156. 25 Kováč, ‘The Slovak Political Programme’, pp. 135–6. 26 ŠAB, ÁŽ, 64, 1918. 27 Nagy, Great Expectation and Interwar Realities, pp. 23–4; See also Hronský, ‘Ferdinand Juriga do roku 1918’, pp. 20–1; For the text of Juriga’s speech in English see Mikuš, Slovakia. A Political and Constitutional History, pp. 157–8. 28 Mikuš, Slovakia. A Political and Constitutional History, p. 161; Dokumenty slovenskej národnej identity, pp. 476–7. Bartlová, ‘Programová linia klerikalizmu’, p. 75; Ľudovít Holotik, Socialne a narodne hnutie na Slovensku od Oktobrovej revolucie do vzniku ceskoslovenseho statu, Bratislava, 1979, pp. 201– 223. 29 For a clear and readable account of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, see John Swanson, The Remanants of the Habsburg Monarchy: The Shaping of Modern Austria and Hungary, 1918–1922, New York, 2001 (hereafter Swanson, The Remanants of the Habsburg Monarchy), pp. 1–81. 30 Swanson, The Remanants of the Habsburg Monarchy, p. 50. 31 Slovensko v Československu, p. 494. 32 See, for example, Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, pp. 294–5. 33 Quoted in Rolková, ‘Smerovanie Slovenskej ľudovej strany v rokoch 1905–1939’, p. 170. 34 Slovenské ľudové noviny, 15 November and 5 December 1918; See also Karol Sidor, Andrej Hlinka, 1864–1924, Bratislava, 1934 (hereafter Sidor, Andrej Hlinka), pp. 339–40. 35 Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, p. 238. 36 Slovenské ľudové noviny, 5 December 1918; See also Sidor, Andrej Hlinka, pp. 339–40. 37 Alena Bartlová, ‘Slovenská otázka a slovensé štátoprávne snahy v rokoch 1918–1938’, in Jaroslav Valenta, Emil Voráček and Jozef Harna (eds), Československo 1918–1938: Osudy demokracie ve střední Evropĕ, 2 vols, Prague, 1999, Vol. I, pp. 170–8. 38 Milan Zemko, ‘Politický system a politické strany’, in Bohumila Ferenčuhová and Milan Zemko (eds), V medzivojnovom Čskoslovensku 1918–1939, Bratislava, 2012, p. 244. 39 Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, p. 19. 40 Jan Mlynárik, ‘The Nationality Question in Czechoslovakia and the 1938 Munich Agreement’, in Norman Stone and Eduard Strouhal (eds), Czechoslovakia: Crossroads and Crises, 1918–1988, Houndmills and London, 1989, p. 92. See also the detailed summary of the interwar political programs of the SNS and HSĽS in Lipták, Politické strany na slovensku, pp. 105–21.

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41 Karol Sidor, Slovenská politika na pôde pražského snemu, 1918–1938, Bratislava, 1943, 2 vols, Vol. I, pp. 95–6; Sidor, Andrej Hlinka, pp. 402–4; Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, p. 175. 42 Seton-Watson, The New Slovakia, 8. 43 NA, FO, 371, 15900, pp. 97–113. 44 Bakke, Doomed to Failure, 519. 45 NA, FO, 371, 19495, pp. 11–32 and 16660, pp. 127–46; Attila Simon, Telepesek és telepesfalvak Dél-Szlovákiában a két világháború között, Somorja, 2008, pp. 153–6; Ján Rychlík, Česi a Slováci ve 20. Století: Česko-slovenské vztahy 1914–1945, Bratislava, 1997 (hereafter Rychlík, Česi a Slováci ve 20. Století), p. 82; Bakke, Doomed to Failure, pp. 397–8; Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, pp. 178–9; See also Béla Angyal, ‘A csehszlovákiai Magyar partok viszonya a prágai kormányzatokhoz és a szlovák autonomista törekvésekhez’, in Nándor Bárdi and Attila Simon (eds), Integrációs stratégiak a Magyar kisebbségek történetében, Somorja-Šamorín, 2006, p. 340; For an examination of the process of legal unification, see Katarína Zavacká, ‘Právne systémy a tradície na slovensku v období vzniku ČSR’, Historický časopis, 42/2, 1994, pp. 215–5 and Martin Mičura, ‘Judicial Problems in Slovakia’, in Slovakia, Then and Now, p. 251. 46 NA, FO, 371, 19495, pp. 136–7. See also František Vnuk, ‘Krizavo vzťahoch Praha– Vatikán v roku 1925’, Historický zborník, 1999/9, pp. 59–71; Natália Krajčovičová, ‘Začiatky pozemkovej reform na Slovensku v dvadsiatych rokoch’, Historický časopis, 1984/32, pp. 576–7. See also Slovák, 13 July and 27 July and 27 October 1926 and Alena Bartlova, ‘Česko-Slovensky štat–katolicka cirkev–HSĽS’, in Slovenska ludová strana v dejinách, pp. 145–6 as well as Tkáč, ‘The Ľudová Banka in Ružomberok’, pp. 28–9. 47 See Ján Rychlík, R.W. Seton-Watson and His Relations with the Czechs and Slovaks: Documents 1906–1951, 2 vols, Prague, 1995–6; Vol. I (hereafter Rychlík, R.W. Seton-Watson and His Relations with the Czechs and Slovaks), p. 348. 48 See Alexander Mach. Z ďalekých ciest, pp. 107–8; Polakovič, ‘Slovenský národný socializmus’, p. 30 and Ábrahám, ‘A szlovákkérdés nemzetközi dimenziói’, p. 260. For a summary of the Slovak grievances in interwar Czechoslovakia, see Joseph A. Mikuš, Slovakia: A Political History: 1918–1950, Milwaukee, 1963, pp. 6–43. See also the cogent analysis of Slovak grievances in Rychlík, Česi a Slováci ve 20. Století, pp. 75–135; and R.W. Seton-Watson’s exhaustive discussion of the same topic in The New Slovakia, Prague, 1924. 49 For a sharp assessment of Masaryk’s own belief in a ‘national mission’ see Robert Pynsent, Questions of Identity. Czech and Slovak Ideas of Nationality and Personality, London, 1994 (hereafter Pynsent, Questions of Identity), pp. 21–3.

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50 Patrick Crowhurst, A History of Czechoslovakia between the Wars. From Versailles to Hitler’s Invasion, London, 2015, p. 9. 51 See R.J.W. Evans, ‘The Successor States’, in Robert Gerwath (ed.), Twisted Paths. Europe 1914–1945, Oxford, 2007, pp. 211–16. 52 Stanislav Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival, Basingstoke, 1995 (hereafter Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia), p. 160; For a more positive assessment see Baer, A Life Dedicated to the Republic, pp. 73–94. 53 Bruce Berglund, Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague: Longing for the Sacred in a Sceptical Age, Budapest-New York, 2017 (hereafter Berglund, Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague), p. 204; See also Cynthia Pace and Nancy Wingfield, ‘The Sacred and the Profane’, in Pieter Judson and Marsha Rozenblit (eds), Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, New York and Oxford, 2005, p. 107. 54 Nancy Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints. How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech, London, 2007, p. 136. 55 Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality. Gender, Citizenship and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950, Pittsburg, 2006, pp. 43–50 and 131–54. 56 Sidor, Andrej Hlinka, p. 361; See also Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, p. 67. 57 Dorothy El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939: A study in unrelenting nationalism, Boulder, 1979 (hereafter El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939), p. 42. 58 Berglund, Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague, p. 204; See also Rychlík, Česi a Slováci ve 20. Století, p. 297; Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 132; Natalia Krajčovičová, Slovakia in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938, p. 141. 59 Holec, ‘Úloha katolíckej cirkvi pri formovaní občianskej spoločnosti na Slovensku’, p. 171. 60 Elena Hrabovcová, ‘Obsadenie nitranskeho biskupského stolca v cirkevnopolitickom kontexte rokov 1918–1920’, in Richard Marsina (ed.), Nitra v slovenských dejinách, Martin, 2002, p. 327. 61 Schwartz, ‘Die Entwicklung der slowakischen Presse (1785–1941)’, pp. 231–41. See also Elena Mannová, ‘Spolky a ich miesto v živote spoločnosti na slovensku’, pp. 15–16. 62 Michal Barnovský et al. (eds), Dokumenty slovenskej národnej identity a statnosti, Bratislava, 1998, p. 110; See also Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia, pp. 169–72; Natália Krajčovičová, ‘Slovakia in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938’, in Slovakia in History, pp. 141–2. 63 Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, p. 126; Seton-Watson, The New Slovakia, pp. 36–7; James Ramon Felak, At the Price of the Republic, Pittsburgh, 1994 (hereafter Felak, At the Price of the Republic), p. 20.

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64 Rychlík, Česi a Slováci ve 20. Století, p. 296. 65 Rolková, ‘Smerovanie Slovenskej ľudovej strany v rokoch 1905–1939’, pp. 170–1. 66 See, for example, the pamphlet Slovensko v Československej Republike, Prague, 1933 (hereafter Slovensko v Československej Republike), pp. 8–29. 67 Rychlík, Česi a Slováci ve 20. Století, p. 296. 68 Rychlík, R.W. Seton-Watson and His Relations with the Czechs and Slovaks, pp. 323–4; See also Stanek, Zrada a pád, pp. 31–9. Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, p. 176. 69 For a good summary of these complaints see C.A. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, 1918–1937, London, 1937 (hereafter Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors), p. 131; See also Rychlík, Česi a Slováci ve 20. Století, p. 96; and Milan Hodža et al., Nationality Policy in Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovak Sources and Documents, no. 22, Prague, 1938, pp. 27–8 and 73 and Holec, ‘Economic aspects of Slovak national development in the twentieth century’, pp. 283–5. 70 John Pollard, ‘“Clerical Fasicsm”: Context, Overview and Conclusion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 8/2, 2007 (hereafter Pollard, ‘“Clerical Fascism”’), p. 436. 71 El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939, p. 219. 72 Ibid., p. 63. 73 Slovák týždenník, 2 November 1923; See, for example, A Slepicka and E Hoskova, ‘Historical Background’, in Rural Czechoslovakia. Patterns of Change under Socialism, Stockholm, 1989, p. 19; Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors, p. 128. 74 Rolková, ‘Smerovanie Slovenskej ľudovej strany v rokoch 1905–1939’, p. 175. 75 Rychlík, R.W. Seton-Watson and His Relations with the Czechs and Slovaks, p. 324; Mikuš, Slovakia. A Political and Constitutional History, p. 208; Stanek, Zrada a pád, p. 40 and Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, p. 176. 76 Quoted in El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939, p. 78. 77 Henry Delfiner, Vienna Broadcasts to Slovakia 1938–1939. A Case Study in Subersion, New York and London, 1974 (hereafter Delfiner, Vienna Broadcasts to Slovakia), pp. 128–9; See also Felak, At the Price of the Republic, p. 187. 78 Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 156–9. 79 Baer, A Life Dedicated to the Republic, pp. 95–6. 80 Quoted in El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939, p. 78. 81 Felak, At the Price of the Republic, pp. 186–7. 82 Pollard, ‘“Clerical Fascism”’, p. 435. 83 Rebecca Haynes, ‘Introduction’, in In the Shadow of Hitler, p. 7. 84 Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 313 and Slovensko v Československu, pp. 553–70. 85 See Szabó, ‘Populist Antisemitism’, p. 73; See also Hillel Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, Oxford, 1988, p. 188; Baer, A Life Dedicated to the Republic, p. 48.

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86 Katarina Hradská, ‘Postavenie Židov na Slovensku v prvej československej republike’, in Jőrg Hoensch, Stanislav Biman and Ľubomír Lipták (eds), Emancipácia Židov – antisemitizmus – prenasledovanie v Nemecku, RakúskoUhorsku, v českých zemiach a na Slovensku, Bratislava, 1999, pp. 132–3; KleinPejšova, Mapping Jewish Loyalties, pp. 12–13 and 38–9. 87 For a detailed account of the upsurge of Slovak antisemitism during the wsr and its immediate aftermath, see Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, pp. 266–88. 88 George Kennan, From Prague after Munich. Diplomatic Papers, 1938–1940, Princeton, 1968, p. 23. 89 Felak, At the Price of the Republic, pp. 44–5. 90 Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, pp. 52–3; See also, on the reasons for athe endurance of Slovak antisemitism in the interwar period, Klein-Pejšova, Mapping Jewish Loyalties pp. 23–9. 91 SNA, OFAH, 21, 976. Jenő Gergely, A politikai katolicizmus Magyarországon, 1890–1950, Budapest, 1977, pp. 107–10; Marek, České schism, pp. 25–8; Sidor, Andrej Hlinka, p. 319. 92 A useful background to the Czech Political Parties is given in Daniel Miller, Forging Political Compromise, Antonín Svehla and the Czechoslovak Republican Party 1918–1933, pp. 6–60. On the activities of Czech and Slovak parties in Slovakia in 1918–1919 see Lipták, Politické strany na Slovensku, pp. 122, 146–7, 172, 178, 189. 93 See, SNA, OFAH, 21, 978; Medvecký, Cirkevné pomery, p. 28. For additional information on Hlinka’s nominees to the council, see Sidor, Andrej Hlinka, p. 321: Vavro Šrobár, Osvobodené slovensko. Pamäti z rokov 1918–1920, Prague, 1928 (hereafter Šrobár, Osvobodené slovensko), pp. 161–81. 94 Slovenský denník, 28 December 1918, p. 2; Šrobár, Osvobodené slovensko, pp. 458–60. 95 Mulík, ‘Emancipácia Slovákov na pôde katolíckej cirkvi’, p. 154. 96 SNA, OFVŠ, 10, 612–3 and 10, 978; See also Šrobár, Oslobedené Slovensko, pp. 90–4 and Juraj Kramer, Slovenské autonomistické hnutie v rokoch 1918–1929, Bratislava, 1962 (hereafter Kramer, Slovenské autonomistické hnutie), pp. 21–5; See Šrobár, Osvobodené Slovensko, p. 283. 97 Yeshayahu Jelinek, ‘The Slovak Right: Conservative or Radical? A Reappraisal’, East Central Europe, 1977/1, p. 26. 98 Valerián Bystrický and Štefan Fano (eds), Pokus o politický a osobný profil Jozefa Tisu, Bratislava, 1992, p. 76. 99 Vladamír Daniš, ‘K organizačnému a štrukturálnemu vývoja Hlinkovej Slovenskej Ľudovej strany v obdobi Československej republiky’, in Studia Historica Nitrensia, VI/1997, pp. 13–14; See also Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 92–3; Róbert Letz, ‘Príloha’, in Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách, pp. 369–76.

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See also Kramer Slovenské autonomistické hnutie, p. 124; See also Trenčianské noviny, 23 February 1919. 100 Sidor, Slovenská politika, p. 238. 101 Ibid., pp. 238 and 296. See also Kramer, Slovenské autonomistické hnutie, p. 122; Vavro Šrobár, Osvobodené Slovensko, Prague, 1920, p. 402; Karol Medvecky, Slovenský prevrat, 4 vols, Bratislava, 1930, Vol. III, pp. 199. 102 Sidor, Andrej Hlinka, pp. 340–1; See also Kramer, Slovenské autonomistické hnutie, p. 122; Peter Sokolovič, Hlinkova Garda 1938–1945, Bratislava, 2009 (hereafter Sokolovič, Hlinkova Garda), p. 25. 103 See, for example, the report on attendees to and demands of the congress of the party, in Slovák, 21 November 1920. See also, Slovenské ľudové noviny, 28 March and 18 April 1919 and Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách, pp. 369–88. 104 Melissa Feinberg, ‘The New “Woman Question”: Gender, Nation, and Citizenship in the First Czechoslovak Republic’, in Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe, pp. 47–9; Hoensch, Dokumente zur Autonmiepolitik der Slowakischen Volkspartei Hlinkas, pp. 175–94. 105 Daniš, ‘K organizačnému a štrukturálnemu vývoja Hlinkovej Slovenskej Ľudovej strany v obdobi Československej republiky’, p. 13; See also Trenčianské noviny, 23 February 1919. 106 Slovák, 22 March, and 1 June 1919. 107 Daniš, ‘K organizačnému a štrukturálnemu vývoja Hlinkovej Slovenskej Ľudovej strany v obdobi Československej republiky’, pp. 15–18; Letz, ‘Príloha’, in Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách, pp. 375–99. 108 Róbert Letz, ‘Príloha’, in Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách, pp. 374–9. 109 Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 160. 110 El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939, pp. 52 and 222. 111 Róbert Letz, ‘Andrej Hlinka – Ferdinand Juriga, spojenci a rivali v slovenskej politike 1918–1938’ (hereafter Letz, ‘Andrej Hlinka – Ferdinand Juriga, spojenci a rivali v slovenskej politike’), in Pekník et al. (eds), Ferdinand Juriga ľudový smer slovenskej politiky), p. 200. 112 SNA, OFVŠ, 13, 691. 113 SNA, OFVŠ, 10/5 and 11/403; See also Slovák, 20 December 1919 and 3 January 1920. 114 Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 315. 115 Jörg Hoensch, ‘Die Slowakische Volkspartei Hlinkas’, in Studia Slovaca, pp. 205–6. 116 Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 277. 117 Karol Sidor (ed.), Andrej Hlinka, Zápisky z Mírova, 1991, p. 12. 118 Mikus, Slovakia, pp. 47–8; See also SNA, OFVŠ, 13, 691 and Rychlík, R.W. SetonWatson and His Relations with the Czechs and Slovaks, p. 351.

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119 See, for example, Gejza Medrický (ed.), Kalendar Hlinkovej Slovenskj Ludovej Strany na rok 1938, pp. 116–18. 120 Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, p. 126; See also SNA, OFVŠ, 10, 657. See also Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, p. 246. 121 Carol Skalnik Leff, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia, Princeton, 1988, p. 80. 122 Rychlík, R.W. Seton-Watson and His Relations with the Czechs and Slovaks, pp. 457–69. 123 See Arvéd L. Gréber, ‘Andrej Hlinka a židia’, in František Bielek and Štefan Borovský (eds), Andrej Hlinka a jeho miesto v slovenských dejinách, Bratislava, 1991, pp. 134–44; See also Rolková, ‘Smerovanie Slovenskej ľudovej strany v rokoch 1905–1939’, pp. 168–80. 124 Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, pp. 135–6. 125 Hoensch, ‘Die Slowakische Volkspartei Hlinkas’, p. 205; See also Natália Rolková, ‘Smerovanie Slovenskej ľudovej strany v rokoch 1905–1939’, p. 168; Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, p. 175; Felak, At the Price of the Republic, pp. 44–5 and Rebecca Haynes, ‘Introduction’, in In the Shadow of Hitler, p. 12. 126 Szabó, “Von Worten zu Taten”, pp. 337–8; Felak, At the Price of the Republic, p. 166; Stanek, Zrada a pád, p. 90. 127 Slovenský dennik, 19 November 1918; Kramer, Slovenské autonomistické hnutie, pp. 62–3; Bartlova, HLS in Pavel Marek (ed.), Prehled, P.219. Sidor, Slovenská politika, p. 29. 128 Kramer, Slovenské autonomistické hnutie, pp. 62–3. See also Yelinek and SNA, OFVŠ, 10, 612–13. 129 See Šuchová, comp., ‘Prílohy II–Politický systém’, pp. 550–2. 130 Felak, At the Price of the Republic, pp. 39–42; See also Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia, pp. 150–1; Dokumenty slovenskej národnej identity, pp. 444–7. Lipták, Politické strany na Slovensku, p. 105. 131 Felak, At the Price of the Republic, p. 42. 132 Ibid., p. 110. 133 Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months’, pp. 78–9. 134 SNA, OFVŠ, prez, 10, 657; Hoensch, Dokumente zur Autonmiepolitik der Slowakischen Volkspartei Hlinkas, p. 200. 135 Kocourek, Patriots and Renegades, p. 246.

Chapter 6 1 See, for example, the periodization in Felak, At the Price of the Republic, especially pp. 142–76.

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2 See, for example, Ladislav Lipscher, ‘Vývin a characteristicke črty fašizmu na Slovensku’, in Prispevky k dejinám fašizmu v Československu a Maďarsku, Bratislava, 1969, pp. 11–12. Dejiny slovenska, 6 vols, Bratislava, 1985 (hereafter Dejiny slovenska), Vol. V, pp. 288–9; Ľubomír Lipták, Slovensko v 20. Storočí, Bratislava, 2000 (hereafter Lipták, Slovensko v 20. Storočí), pp. 211–14; Ivan Kamenec, ‘The Slovak State, 1939–1945’ (hereafter Kamenec, ‘The Slovak State’), in Slovakia in History, p. 182. 3 Quoted in Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 170. 4 See Tönsmeyer, ‘German Advisors in Slovakia’, in Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe, p. 183. See also Kirschbaum, A History of Slovakia, pp. 199–200; Mannová, A Concise History of Slovakia, p. 261 and Karen Henderson, Slovakia. The Escape from Invisibility, London, 2002, p. 13. 5 No most compellingly argued explanation of the fascist ideology remains Noel O’Sullivan, Fascism, London, 1983. See also Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, London, 2003 as well as the contributions by George Mosse and Stanley Payne in Roger Griffin (ed.), International Fascism. Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, London, 1998 and the dated but still valuable contributions in Walter Laquer and George Mosse (eds), International Fascism, 1920–1945, New York, 1966. For a recent overview of scholarship on fascism as it applies to interwar Czechoslovakia, see Anton Hruboň, ‘Fašistický mýtus novuzrodenia v kontexte ideológie Národnej obce fašistickej a Rodobrany’, Česky časopis historický, 113/2015 (hereafter Hruboň, ‘Fašistický mýtus novuzrodenia’). 6 See Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months’, p. 81. 7 Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách, pp. 369–71. 8 For the best study of Tuka’s activities prior to his entry into the SĽS see Maroš Hertel, ‘Činnost Profesora Vojtecha Tuku pred jeho vstupom do slovenskej ľudovej strany roku 1922’, in Historický časopis, 50, no. 2, 2002 (hereafter Hertel, ‘Činnost Profesora Vojtecha Tuku’) and Gábor Schweitzer, ‘“A perzsa határon”. Tuka Béla 1907–1914 között a Pécsi jogakadémián’, Pécsi Szemle, 2003, 2–4 (hereafter Schweitzer, ‘“A perzsa határon”’); See also K. Goldbach, ‘Dr. Adalbert Tuka’, Zeitschrift für Politik, Vol. XXX (1940), pp. 315–16. 9 Schweitzer, ‘“A perzsa határon”’, p. 63. 10 Ibid., pp. 61–3; Alkotmány, 5 September 1900. 11 For an overview of Tuka’s world view before 1918 see Hertel, ‘Činnost Profesora Vojtecha Tuku’, pp. 258–9. 12 Maroš Hertel, ‘Rozpory v HSĽS v 20. Rokoch 20. Storočia’, in Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách (hereafter Hertel, ‘Rozpory v HSĽS v 20. Rokoch 20. Storočia’), pp. 190–1. 13 For a solid assessment of Tuka’s ideology see Hertel, ‘Činnost Profesora Vojtecha Tuku’; See also Kramer, Slovenske autonomistické hnutie, pp. 312–14.

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14 Pollard, ‘“Clerical Fascism”’, p. 435; See also Jörg Hoensch, ‘Die Grundlagen des Programms der Slowakischen Volkspartei vor 1938’, in Studia Slovaca, pp. 186–91. 15 Vojtech Tuka, ‘Rodobranecký katechizmus’, in Pavol Demjanič (ed.), Dokumenty k ideológii slovenských národcov v prvej polovici 20. Storočia, Stropkov, 2013 (hereafter Tuka, ‘Rodobranecký katechizmus’), p. 10; See also Hoensch, ‘Die Slowakische Volkspartei Hlinkas’, p. 211; Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months’, pp. 94–5; Vlado Hlôška (ed.), Kam viedla Slovensko politika slovenského štátu v r. 1939–1945? Bratislava, 1997 (hereafter Hlôška, Kam viedla Slovensko politika slovenského štátu), p. 14. See also Roger Griffin’s discussion of the parralells between Christian theology and the palingenetic claims of German national socialism in Griffin, ‘The “Holy Storm”’, pp. 9–10. 16 Alexander Mach. Z ďalekých ciest, p. 42; Vojtech Tuka, V desiatom roku Martinskej deklarácie. Trenčin, p. 7. 17 Quoted in Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months’, p. 71: See also Hlôška, Kam viedla Slovensko politika slovenského štátu, p. 12. 18 Hertel, ‘Rozpory v HSĽS v 20. Rokoch 20. Storočia’, pp. 190–1. 19 Ivan Kamenec, Tragédia politika, kňaza a človeka, Bratsslava, 1998 (hereafter Kamenec, Tragédia politika, kňaza a človeka), pp. 35–6. 20 On Tuka’s role in mentoring the younger generation of party activists, see Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 96–8 and 131. 21 Michal Katuninec, ‘Karol Sidor – úprimný priateľ poľského národa’, in Ľubica Kázmerová, Ewa Orlof et al. (eds), Slovensko-poľské vzťahy 1918–1945 očami diplomatov, Bratislava, 2008, p. 83. 22 FO, 470, 13. Czechoslovakia. Annual Report, 1937, p. 34. 23 El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939, pp. 138–9; See also Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, Third Series, Vol. III, p. 217; FO, 470, 13. Czechoslovakia. Annual Report, 1938, p. 52. 24 Szulpic Molnár, Az Esztergomi Szentbenedekrendi Kath. főgimnasium értesítője az 1918–1919, 1919–1920 iskolai évről, Esztergom, 1920 (hereafter Molnár, Az Esztergomi Szentbenedekrendi Kath. főgimnasium értesítője az 1918–1919, 1919–1920 iskolai évről), p. 14; Szulpic Molnár, Az Esztergomi Szentbenedekrendi Kath. főgimnasium értesítője az 1920–1921 iskolai évről, Esztergom, 1920, p. 13; Szulpic Molnár, Az Esztergomi Szentbenedekrendi Kath. főgimnasium értesítője az 1921–1922 iskolai évről, Esztergom, 1920, p. 21. 25 NA, FO, 371, 22896, 134. 26 NA, FO, 371, 22898, 95 and 194–5. 27 Alexander Mach. Z ďalekých ciest, p. 208; Nižňanský (ed.), Holokaust na Slovensku, Vol. II, pp. 28–30. 28 Molnár, Az Esztergomi Szentbenedekrendi Kath. főgimnasium értesítője az 1918–1919, 1919–1920 iskolai évről, pp. 2–3. 29 Lettrich, History of Modern Slovakia, p. 75.

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30 Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, p. 74. 31 Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách, p. 370; See also Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 133–4. 32 See J.M. Kirschbaum, ‘Prof. Dr. F. Ďurčanský – Politician, Scholar and Fighter for Slovakia’s Independence’, in Štefan Baranovič (ed.), Ferdinand Ďurčanský (1906–1974), Martin, 1998; pp. 83–4 and in the same volume Peter Maruniak, ‘Prof. Judr. Ferdinand Ďurčanský’, pp. 11–13. 33 Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 127–9. 34 Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months’, pp. 94–5; See also Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách, p. 371 and Vladimír Mináč et al. (eds), Slovenský biografický slovník, 5 vols, Martin, 1986, Vol. I, pp. 525–6. 35 J.M. Kirschbaum, ‘Zástoj študenstva v slovenskom národnom vývoji medzi dvoma vojnami’, in Jozef Staško (ed.), Tvorcovia nového slovenska. The Shaping of Modern Slovakia, Cambridge, Ontario, 1982 (hereafter Kirschbaum, ‘Zástoj študenstva v slovenskom národnom vývoji medzi dvoma vojnami’), pp. 139–43. 36 See, for example, Ľudové noviny, 30 August 1907. 37 Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, pp. 136 and 306. 38 Kirschbaum, ‘Zástoj študenstva v slovenskom národnom vývoji medzi dvoma vojnami’, pp. 150–1. 39 Miloslav Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939 (so zreteľom na Slovensko), Bratislava, 2001 (hereafter Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939), pp. 24–5; See also Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 314. 40 Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939, p. 25. 41 Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, pp. 67–8; See also HegenscheidtNozdrovická, “Die Slowakei den Slowaken!”, pp. 49–50. 42 Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 113–18; Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, pp. 176–80. 43 Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách, pp. 369–71. 44 Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939, p. 93; See also Hoensch, ‘Die Slowakische Volkspartei Hlinkas’, p. 210. 45 Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939, p. 95. 46 Tuka, ‘Rodobranecký katechizmus’, p. 16; See also Vnuk, Mať svoj štát znamená život, p. 45. 47 Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939, pp. 25–7 and 93–107. 48 David Kelly, The Czech fascist movement 1922–1942, New York, 1995, pp. 76–9; Sokolovič, Hlinkova Garda, pp. 22–6. 49 Jelinek, ‘Storm-Troopers in Slovakia’, p. 100; Igor Strnisko, ‘Slovenská rodobrana v druhej faze pôsobenia (September 1923–December 1925)’, Kultúrne dejiny, 2016 (hereafter Strnisko, ‘Slovenská rodobrana v druhej faze pôsobenia’), pp. 104–11; See also Josef Smida, Der Prozess Tuka, Bratislava, 1930, pp. 5–31.

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50 Cornwall, ‘A Conflicted and Divided Habsburg Monarchy’, pp. 5–6. 51 Strnisko, ‘Slovenská rodobrana v druhej faze pôsobenia’, pp. 109–10. 52 Jelinek, ‘Storm-Troopers in Slovakia’, p. 99. 53 Kramer, Slovenske autonomistické hnutie, p. 353. 54 Rodobrana, 25 July and 1 August 1926; See also Tuka, ‘Rodobranecký katechizmus’, p. 8. 55 Rodobrana, 25 July and 1 August 1926; See also El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939, pp. 51–2 and 210–14. 56 Hruboň, ‘Fašistický mýtus nzovuzrodenia’, pp. 475–6. 57 Ivan Kamenec, ‘Vznik, vývoj a špecifické črty slovenského fašizmu v medzivojnom období’, in Karel Herman and Alexandr Klevanskij (eds), Sborník k problematice dějin imperializmu, Prague, 1978, p. 285; See also Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939, p. 92. 58 Hruboň, ‘Fašistický mýtus nzovuzrodenia’, pp. 478–9; Sokolovič, Hlinkova Garda, pp. 28–30; Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939, p. 92. 59 Rodobrana, 25 July 1926; See also the detailed account of a Rodobrana meeting in Napi Hirek, 26 May 1926 and the same newspaper’s reportage on 5 August 1929. Kramer, Slovenske autonomistické hnutie, p. 314; See also Sokolovič, Hlinkova Garda, pp. 26–31. 60 Quoted in Lettrich, History of Modern Slovakia, p. 75; See also Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939, p. 92. 61 Jelinek, ‘Storm-Troopers in Slovakia’, p. 100; Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, pp. 42–3; Sokolovič, Hlinkova Garda, pp. 22–5. 62 Dejiny slovenska, Vol. V, pp. 140–6. 63 Sokolovič, Hlinkova Garda, p. 34. 64 Roger Middleton, ‘The Great Depression in Europe’, in Doumanis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European History, pp. 186–9; Yeshayahu Jelinek, The Parish Republic. Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, 1939–1945, Boulder, 1976 (hereafter Jelinek, The Parish Republic), p. 10. 65 Letz, ‘Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana’, pp. 55–6. 66 See, for example, Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation. The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, Madison, 2009, pp. 40–2. 67 Slovensko v Československej Republike, p. 13. 68 Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, p. 128. 69 Sokolovič, Hlinkova Garda, pp. 35–6. 70 Quoted in Valerián Bystrický, ‘Andrej Hlinka a HSĽS v druhej polovici 30. Rokov’ (hereafter Bystrický, ‘Andrej Hlinka a HSĽS v druhej polovici 30. rokov’), in Pekník et al. (eds), Ferdinand Juriga ľudový smer slovenskej politiky, p. 368. 71 See, for example, Nástup, 1, 1933. 72 Nástup, no. 6, 1938, p. 61.

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73 Quoted in Felak, At the Price of the Republic, p. 126; See also Nástup, 1, 1933, p. 11 and Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 128–9. 74 Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 273–5. 75 Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 176. 76 Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, pp. 145–6; Jelinek, ‘Storm-Troopers in Slovakia’, p. 102; Felak, At the Price of the Republic, pp. 98 and 166–7. 77 Felak, At the Price of the Republic, pp. 186–7; Nástup, 1, 1939, p. 13; See also Ján Hlavinka and Ivan Kamenec, The Burden of the Past, pp. 11–14. 78 Kirschbaum, ‘Zástoj študenstva v slovenskom národnom vývoji medzi dvoma vojnami’, p. 154; For a detailed account of these demonstrations see Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 135–7. 79 See Sokolovič, Hlinkova Garda, pp. 35–47; Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months’, pp. 82–3; Felak, At the Price of the Republic, pp. 193–4; Letz, Andrej Hlinka vo svetle dokumentov, p. 321; Delfiner, Vienna Broadcasts to Slovakia, p. 123; Witt, Nationalistiche Intellektuelle in der Slowakei, pp. 131 and 273 and NA, FO, 371, 22896, 99. 80 Sokolovič, Hlinkova Garda, pp. 80–7 and 376–84; See also Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939, pp. 73–5 and Eduard Nižnanský, Nacizmus, holokaust, slovenský štát, Bratislava, 2010, pp. 22–34. 81 Quoted in Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 190. 82 See, for example, Rory Yeoman’s account of the Ustašha, Visions of Annihilation: The Ustasha Regime and the Cultural Politics of Fascism, 1941–1945, Pittsburgh, 2013. 83 Kennan, From Prague After Munich, p. 16. 84 František Vnuk, ‘Ľudova strana v slovenskej politike’, in Literarny Almanach, Slovaka v Amerike, 1968, Pittsburg, pp. 22–6. 85 SNA, OFVŠ, 10, 613: See also Michal Marťák and Lukáš Marťák, ‘Katolícke noviny 1919–1920 – Tláčovej organ agrárnéj strany’, pp. 46–50. 86 Kramer, Slovenské autonomistické hnutie, pp. 273–306; See also Letz, ‘Príloha’, in Slovenská ľudová strana v dejinách, pp. 362–72; Lipták, Politické strany na Slovensku, p. 115; Hertel, ‘Rozpory v HSĽS v 20. Rokoch 20. Storočia’, pp. 181–95. 87 Slovensko v Československu, p. 565; See also El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939, p. 100. 88 See Felak, At the Price of the Republic, p. 137. 89 Bystrický, ‘Andrej Hlinka a HSĽS v druhej polovici 30. rokov’, in Pekník et al. (eds), Ferdinand Juriga ľudový smer slovenskej politiky, pp. 363–5; See also Hoensch, Dokumente zur Autonmiepolitik der Slowakischen Volkspartei Hlinkas, pp. 234–5. 90 Quoted in Hlôška, Kam viedla Slovensko politika slovenského štátu, p. 11.

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91 See, for example, Franz Jehlička, Moskaus Hand in Mitteleuropa, Berlin, 1937, pp. 9–15. 92 Hertel, ‘Rozpory v HSĽS v 20. Rokoch 20. Storočia’, p. 182. 93 Balázs Ablonczy, Nyombiztosítás. Letűnt magyarok: Kisebbség és müvelődéstörténeti tanulmányok, Bratislava, 2011, pp. 76–7. 94 See, for example, Kamenec, Tragédia politika, kňaza a človeka, p. 45. 95 See Miroslav Michela, ‘Občianska vojna v Španielsku v politike HSĽS v rokoch 1936–1939’, in Peter Száraz (ed.), Španielsko a stredná európa. Minulosť a prítomnosť vzájomných vzťahov, Bratislava, 2004, pp. 75–6. 96 Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, pp. 142–4; An admiration for the antirepublican forces was particularly evident on the right-radical wing of the SĽS. One of the leading figures in the Hlinka Guard, Karol Murgaš even wrote a novel idealizing Franco’s troops entitled ‘The Heroes of the Alcazar’. See Bystrický, Letz and Podolec, Vznik Slovenského štátu, p. 298. 97 Quoted in Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 190. See also Thomas Lorman, ‘The Chsitian Social roots of Jozef Tiso’s Radicalism, 1887–1939’, in In the Shadow of Hitler, p. 251. 98 Quoted in Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months’, p. 80; See also Hertel, ‘Rozpory’, pp. 192–3 and Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, pp. 141–2. 99 See, in this regard, the comments by Mach in Alexander Mach. Z ďalekých ciest, p. 99. 100 Letz, Slovenské dejiny, p. 187. 101 Slovensko v Československu, pp. 494–528 and 559–69; Letz, Slovenské dejiny, pp. 277–8. 102 Slovensko v Československu, pp. 553–69; Felak, At the Price of the Republic, pp. 146–8. 103 Quoted in Mikus, Slovakia, p. 16. 104 Slovensko v Československu, pp. 554–70. 105 Ibid., p. 602. 106 Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 285. 107 Quoted in Kamenec, ‘The Slovak State, 1939–1945’, p. 183. 108 Maxwell, Choosing Slovakia, pp. 176–7; See also Rychlík, R.W. Seton-Watson and His Relations with the Czechs and Slovaks, p. 348. 109 Quoted in El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939, p. 126; See also Slovák tyždennik, 19 March 1939. 110 Quoted in Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 151; See also Jelinek, The Parish Republic, pp. 10–15 and Felak, At the Price of the Republic, pp. 173–83. 111 Quoted in El Mallakh, The Slovak Autonomy Movement 1935–1939, p. 98; See also Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 155.

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112 See, for example, Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia. The State that Failed, New Haven and London, 2009 (hereafter Heimann, Czechoslovakia. The State that Failed), p. 87. 113 For a clear account of the SĽS’s seizure of power, see James Mace Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator. Jozef Tiso and the making of fascist Slovakia, New York, 2013 (hereafter Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator), pp. 156–8. 114 NA, FO, 470, 13. Czechoslovakia. Annual report, 1938, p. 51; See also the similar assessment in Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, pp. 161–2. 115 Magyar Távirati Iroda, Rádiófigyelő, 6 October 1938. 116 Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 157. 117 E. Woodward, Rohan Butler and Margaret Lambert (eds), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, Third Series, London, 1950 (hereafter Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, Third Series), Vol. III, p. 217 and Vol. IV, pp. 96 and 238; See also Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months’, pp. 82–3. 118 Bystrický, ‘The Munich Conference to the declaration of independence’, pp. 159–60. 119 Josette Baer, Seven Slovak Women: Portraits of Courage, Humanism and Enlightenment, 2014, pp. 78–9; See also NA, FO, 371, 22896, 31. 120 Letz, ‘Príloha’, p. 374; Ward, Priest, Politician, Collaborator, p. 171. 121 Jozef Hlinka, ‘Slovenské medailérske a platobné pamiatky na Andreja Hlinku’, in Bielek and Borovský (eds), Andrej Hlinka a jeho miesto v slovenských dejinách, pp. 134–44; Čaplovič, Branné organizácie v Československu 1918–1939, p. 75. 122 Vnuk, ‘Slovakia’s Six Eventful Months’, pp. 119–20.

Conclusion 1 Nemes, ‘The Uncivil Origins of Civil Marriage: Hungary’, pp. 332–4. 2 See Philip Howe, Thomas Lorman and Daniel Miller, ‘The Creation of the Conditions for Consociational Democracy and its Development in Interwar Czechoslovakia’, Bohemia. Zeitschrift für Geschicte und Kultur der bömischen Länder/A Journal of the History of east central Europe, 56/2, 2016, pp. 362–80. 3 Evans, ‘Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks’, p. 114. 4 Heimann, Czechoslovakia. The State that Failed, p. 90.

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Index Abaúj County  78, 84 abortion  161, 164, 178 Adriányi, Gabriel  9, 33 agnosticism  56 agriculture  35–7, 65, 68, 86, 88, 91, 100, 107, 125, 152, 161, 167, 168, 171, 202 alcoholism  41–3, 58, 73, 77, 170, 194 alispáns  23, 97, 100, 108 Alkotmány  60, 120 almanacs  72, 74, 109 America  34, 36–9, 42, 64, 69, 74, 87, 92, 93, 100, 108–10, 113, 115, 127, 143, 154, 168, 173, 182, 190, 208 Andrássy, Gyula ‘the younger’  27, 28, 53, 54, 92, 125 antisemitism  2, 43, 47, 48, 58–60, 70, 87, 102, 106, 133, 146, 158, 168, 172, 173, 183, 184, 187, 189–91, 193, 194, 205, 206, 209, 215, 226 Apponyi, Albert  24, 53, 54, 125, 134, 135, 137, 142, 151, 152 Aquinas, Thomas  67 Arany, János  40 Árva County  73, 83, 84, 86, 92, 93, 100, 106–8, 122, 140, 150 associations  5, 7, 9, 27, 43, 50, 51, 54–7, 60, 62, 64–71, 74–7, 79, 81, 82, 85, 86, 88, 89, 91–3, 95–103, 106, 109–11, 113, 121, 124, 128, 137, 138, 141, 142, 165, 170, 179, 189, 196, 197, 216, 220, 222, 224, 228 atheism  12, 33, 71, 142, 144, 145, 165, 206 Ausgleich (1867 settlement)  20, 21, 25, 32, 37, 38, 53, 96 Austria  20, 35, 67, 137, 161, 163, 203 Baer, Josette  216 Bajor, Michal  148 Bánffy, Dezső  105 banks  36, 42, 48, 66, 67, 73, 75, 81–7, 89, 91, 93, 94, 97, 98–103, 106–8, 118, 119, 124, 161, 167, 170, 179, 221, 222

Bars County  78, 84 Bartlová, Alena  159 Batthyány, Vilmos  144 Battle of Mohács  19 Bavaria  39 Bazovský, Ľudovít  85, 210 Belanský, Karol  200 Belgium  67 Bella, Metod  120, 129, 140 Beneš, Eduard  159, 214 Berglund, Bruce  163, 164 Berlin  189, 217 Bielek, Anton  31, 44, 49, 55, 73, 74, 106, 110, 112, 113, 118, 126, 127, 228 Bielek, Katuš  45, 76 bishops  9, 26, 27, 33, 44, 67, 68, 94, 96, 113, 124, 127, 128, 142, 144, 164, 175. See also Catholic hierarchy Bismarck, Otto von  9 Blaho, Dr. Pavol  38, 86, 93, 110–12, 118–20, 122, 123, 127, 129–32, 140, 142, 146, 150, 158, 208, 223, 228 Bobok, Arnold  174 Bohemia  155, 159 Bolshevism  141, 153, 154, 157, 158, 171–3, 190, 194, 195, 199, 205, 226. See also Communism brandy  42, 43, 70, 91, 107, 194 Bratislava  55, 69, 80, 94, 96, 112, 115, 124, 133, 142, 151, 152, 158, 170, 178, 189, 195, 204, 206, 209 Bresztyansky, Kálmán  124 Bretons  28 Britain  111, 150, 154, 157, 187, 193, 194, 215 Brock, Peter  16 Budapest  17, 20–3, 25, 26, 29, 31, 34, 38, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48, 55, 57, 63, 69, 71, 77, 80, 93, 98, 99, 109, 115, 116, 118, 129, 144, 149, 156, 158, 169, 170, 173, 189, 209, 210, 220, 223, 225–7 Budapesti Hirlap  100

300

Index

Buday, Jozef  133, 144 , 146, 160, 176 bureaucracy  42, 46, 108, 157, 162, 167, 221 burghers  20, 96 businessmen  48–50, 77, 107, 112, 123, 132, 222 Calvinism  46, 156 capitalism  40, 42, 57, 62, 65, 74, 87, 204, 205, 221 Carpathian mountains  14, 31 Cartledge, Bryan  28 Catholic hierarchy  11, 27, 28, 32–4, 43, 56, 65, 74, 87, 90, 96, 123, 127–30, 132, 135, 138, 143, 144, 158, 173, 174, 179, 209. See also bishops Catholicism  3, 5–7, 9–16, 18, 20, 21, 26–8, 30, 32–5, 39–41, 43–6, 48–52, 54–6, 58–60, 62, 63, 65–82, 85–103, 105–30, 132–5, 137–9, 141–6, 149, 150, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 161–5, 168–80, 182, 184, 188–91, 194, 196–202, 204, 206–12, 215, 216, 219–29 Catholic People’s Party (KNP)  12, 13, 58–64, 69, 70, 72, 77–8, 81, 85, 93, 103–9, 113–20, 122–6, 132, 134–40, 142, 149, 176, 222, 264 celibacy  174 censorship  13, 92, 155, 212 Central Europe  3–4, 6, 7, 9, 13, 16, 22, 35, 42–3, 62, 64, 66, 85, 90, 149, 162, 166, 169, 171, 172, 183, 190, 193, 202, 203, 209, 223, 228, 229 centralization  19, 22, 23, 26, 38, 49, 54, 162, 226 Černokňažník  129 Černová  34, 128, 132, 137, 144, 179, 180 Charles I/IV (Emperor)  152, 156 chauvinism  13, 29, 30, 32, 33, 52, 59, 104, 105, 115, 116, 122, 125, 130, 136, 138, 146, 151, 156, 181 children  10, 12, 27, 31, 35, 46, 63, 67, 70, 74, 95, 119, 121, 143, 144, 151, 171, 193, 196, 216. See also youth choirs  65, 80, 81 Christian Social Party (of Austria)  67 clergy  5, 9–12, 15, 16, 27, 32–4, 39, 40, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63, 66–70, 72, 74–6, 82, 87, 89, 90, 94, 96–8, 100, 110–13, 120, 122–4,

127, 129, 138, 150, 153, 158, 164, 172, 174–6, 180, 201, 208, 219, 220, 222 Cleveland  154, 184 clubs  25, 34, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 75–81, 85–8, 91, 93, 94, 96–101, 103, 107, 109, 110, 112, 115, 121, 122, 127, 134–6, 179, 196, 197, 222 Communism (Marxism)  11, 74, 156, 171, 187, 199, 204, 210, 226, 229 consociationalism  225 cooperatives  63, 65, 66, 68, 71, 85–9, 91, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100–1, 106, 108, 122, 127, 137, 222 Cornwall, Mark  200 courts  29–31, 45, 61, 128, 141, 172 cremations  164 criminality  44, 45, 226 Croats  22, 29, 139, 208 Crowhurst, Patrick  162 Csernoch, János  34, 124 Csippék, Ferencz  68 Csizmadia, Ferenc  124 culture war  6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 27, 33, 49, 51, 62, 164, 165, 189, 217, 219, 220, 223, 228, 229 Čuřík, Antonín  211 Czambel, Samuel  92 Czar  54, 55, 130 czechification  130, 165–7, 203, 225 Czech nationalism  81, 163 Czechoslovak Communist Party  171, 199, 226 Czechoslovak elections  4, 5, 171, 174, 178, 179, 182, 191, 205, 206, 212, 213 Czechoslovak government  2, 4, 6, 13, 130, 157–61, 163–70, 172, 173, 175, 177, 181, 182, 184, 185, 191–3, 197, 199, 203–6, 210, 211, 214, 215, 217, 219, 224–7 Czechoslovakia  1–4, 6, 7, 13, 16–18, 38, 56, 111, 130, 139, 147, 149, 153–79, 181–5, 187–93, 195–7, 199, 200, 202–5, 209–15, 217, 219, 220, 223–9 Czechoslovak nationalism  81, 163 Czechoslovak parliament  159, 160, 177, 182, 184, 188, 192, 212, 214 Czechoslovak People’s Party  212 Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers Party (ČSSR)  162, 172

Index Czechs  2, 3, 16–18, 33, 56, 79, 81, 82, 90, 98, 107, 122, 130, 136, 142–4, 151, 154–61, 163–70, 173, 181–4, 193, 195, 197, 199–201, 203–6, 209–13, 215, 225 Darwin, Charles  10 Daxner, Samuel  129 Deák, Ferenc  29, 30, 115 Dembovský, Karol  171 Derer, Ivan  119 divorce  10, 27, 45, 164, 178 doctors  87, 97, 100, 172 Donoval, Ján  208 drunkenness  12, 16, 32, 42–4, 76, 91, 170, 221, 226. See also alcoholism Duchovný pastier  150 Dugovich, Titusz  87 Ďurčanský, Ferdinand  193, 195, 196, 204, 207, 228 Durčansky, Ján  193, 204, 207, 228 education  27, 31, 34, 48, 53, 67, 74, 88, 98, 107, 134, 152, 164, 171, 189, 204, 220, 224, 225. See also schools election boycott  54, 56, 106, 159, 222 electoral reform  4, 51, 57, 74, 101, 104, 106, 114–18, 129, 131–3, 138, 139, 141, 146, 152, 153, 158, 159, 175 electoral system  1, 4, 5, 23–6, 44, 58, 114, 120, 136, 182, 213, 222, 224 electrification  161, 167, 203 espionage  188, 189, 192, 199, 202 Esztergom (newspaper)  43, 88, 116 Esztergom (town)  194 Europe  1, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 23, 27, 34, 36, 38, 39, 41–2, 51, 64–6, 71, 130, 152, 155, 165, 168, 171, 183, 184, 187, 188, 190, 193, 195, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205–7, 210, 221, 228, 229. See also Central Europe European Union  229 Evans, Robert  162, 225 farmers  36, 38, 57, 63, 66, 67, 77, 85, 86, 89, 91, 101, 123, 129, 199. See also peasantry farming  36, 37, 42, 85, 111, 140, 161 fascism  7, 171, 181, 187, 188, 190–3, 195, 198–211, 214–17, 227, 228 Feinberg, Melissa  164

301

Fejérváry, Géza  114 Ferdinand, Franz  135, 149 feudalism  13, 51 Fischer-Colbrie, Ágoston (Augustin)  44, 68, 69, 144 főispáns  23, 25, 92–5, 100, 109, 116, 140, 155, 163 France  9, 23, 27, 67, 150, 154, 157, 189, 190, 206 freemasonry  12, 63, 205, 216 Gašpar, Tido  209 Gažík, Marko  208 gendarmerie  34, 44, 94, 123, 128, 137 German language  19, 189 Germans  3, 14, 20, 39, 89, 151, 157, 170, 174, 211, 214 Germany (before 1933)  9, 27, 39, 66, 89, 90, 190 Germany (after 1933)  2, 7, 187, 188, 193, 195, 196, 203–6, 208–10, 214, 217, 228, 229 German army (Wehrmacht)  1, 3, 155, 187 Giesswein, Sándor  117, 174 Gogolák, Juraj  12–15 Gömör and Kishont County  78, 83 Great Moravian Empire  16, 88, 130 Grebáč-Orlov, Ignác  145, 209 Grünwald, Béla  14, 97, 99 Gyürky, Ödön  69 Habsburg dynasty  16, 19–22, 29, 52, 59, 64, 96, 105, 135, 149, 150, 152, 153, 173, 225 Habsburg Empire  13, 16, 17, 20, 22, 26, 46, 55, 67, 88, 92, 93, 116, 130, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152–4, 156–8, 162, 183, 200, 223 Hácha, Emil  214, 217 Hamaj, Jozef  176 Hanebrink, Paul  27, 28 Haynes, Rebecca  171, 183 Heimann, Mary  214, 227 Henlein, Konrad  205 Henschel, Frank  33 Hitler, Adolf  2, 3, 7, 190, 193, 195, 199, 203, 205, 207, 210, 214, 217, 228 Hlas  42, 49, 56, 58, 106, 112, 119, 127, 129, 130 Hlas ľudu  105

302

Index

Hlinka, Andrej  5, 31, 34, 46, 50, 60, 71, 73, 74, 84, 86, 88, 93, 95, 99, 101, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112, 116, 118, 121, 122, 126–8, 130–2, 137, 140–7, 149, 150, 154–6, 158, 160, 161, 164–6, 170, 172–84, 191–3, 195, 197–9, 205–10, 213–17, 223, 226–8 Hlinka Guard  206–8, 210, 215–17, 280 Hodža, Milan  57, 58, 86, 105, 109, 113–16, 118–20, 124, 126, 129, 131, 134, 135, 140–2, 144, 146, 147, 208, 209, 214, 228 Hoensch, Jörg  52, 181 Holček, Juraj  69 Holec, Roman  81, 123, 164 Hont County  78, 83–5 Hötzendorf, Franz Conrad von  153 Houdek, Fedor  49 Hromada, Anton  97 Hudec, Vojtech  200 Hungarian elections  4, 10, 17, 21, 24–6, 32, 45, 52–4, 58, 59, 61, 70–2, 81, 93, 96, 97, 103, 105–7, 109, 110, 114, 115, 118–29, 133–40, 142, 151, 152, 182, 196, 219, 223, 224 Hungarian government  3, 4, 6, 7, 10–13, 15–31, 33, 36–8, 41, 44–9, 61, 62, 64, 88, 92, 95, 96, 101, 102, 104, 105, 108, 113–15, 119, 121, 125, 127, 128, 132, 134, 135, 137, 139–44, 150–2, 155–7, 169, 170, 173, 181, 189, 205, 210, 219, 220, 223, 225–7, 229 Hungarian (civic) nationalism  15, 96, 223 Hungarian parliament  4, 11, 14, 19–23, 25–7, 30, 31, 45, 46, 48, 51, 53, 58–61, 86, 96, 103–5, 107–10, 114, 115, 117–20, 122, 123, 125, 127, 129, 133–7, 140, 142, 149–53, 155, 162, 171, 196, 223, 229 Hungarian Social Democratic Party (MSZDP)  25, 132, 133, 161 Hungarus idea  15–18, 96, 108, 111, 136, 151, 153, 185, 188–90, 192, 223 Hunyady, László  124 Hurban-Vajanský, Svetozár  55, 57, 130 Hvodzík, Ján  208 imprisonment  9, 13, 92, 126–8, 139, 141, 180, 188, 192, 195, 202, 212, 223, 229 Independence and Forty-Eighter Party  21, 25, 51–4, 104, 105, 114, 119, 120, 125, 139, 140, 151, 221, 243

industry  35, 36, 39, 41, 42, 45–7, 49, 54, 63, 64, 67, 107, 111, 167, 179, 202 Ireland  37, 169 Italy  9, 32, 66, 154, 157, 188, 190, 191, 199–204, 207, 209, 210, 217, 228 Ivanka, Milan  146 Izak, Gustav  70 Janček, Ondrej  144 Janda, Jozef  63 Janos, Andrew  21, 125 Jászi, Oszkár  13, 156 Jednota katolíckeho ľudu  138 Jehlička, František  41, 46, 96, 111, 112, 118, 120, 127, 128, 135, 136, 140, 146, 158, 160, 166, 174, 176, 182, 183, 191, 196, 209, 226, 228 Jelinek, Yeshayahu  214 Jesuits  89, 90, 189 Jews  3, 4, 13, 14, 17, 38, 40, 41, 43–9, 52, 54, 58–63, 70, 73, 74, 76, 80, 81, 83, 87–9, 95, 101, 102, 108, 125, 129, 132, 133, 137, 142, 143, 145, 146, 156–8, 167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 183, 187, 189–91, 193, 194, 199, 201, 203–6, 208, 210, 211, 215, 221, 226 Jones, Gwen  40, 41 Joseph, Franz (Emperor)  10, 18, 19, 112, 114 journalists  39, 41, 45, 50, 55, 57, 60, 92, 105, 144, 200 Judson, Pietor  99 Juriga, Ferdinand (Ferdiš)  31, 46, 71, 86, 111, 112, 115, 116, 120, 121, 123, 126–8, 131, 135–7, 140–2, 145–7, 149–56, 158, 169, 174, 175, 180, 184, 196, 199, 208, 212, 223, 226, 228 Jurkovič, Dušan  44 Kabina, František  105 Kačka, Jozef  153, 176 Kaiser, Wolfram  9 Kálal, Karol  142 Károlyi, Mihály  139, 156, 157 Katolícke noviny  12, 13, 33, 44, 72, 76, 78, 80, 98, 101, 103, 110, 112–21, 123, 127–9, 136, 142, 222 Katolické noviny pre obecný ľud  71 Katus, László  13

Index Kazateľňa  72 Kempný, Ján  43 Kennan, George  173, 208 Khuen-Héderváry, Károly  139 Kirschbaum, Jozef  195, 196, 207, 213 Klein-Pejšova, Rebekah  48 Klempa, Simon  75 Kocourek, Katya  49, 56, 127, 185 Kokovay, János  87 Kolísek, Alojz  33 Kollár, Martin  16, 72, 75, 90, 103, 104, 110, 120, 136, 140, 146 Komárom  78, 219 Kontler, László  21 Körper, F.  201 Košice  40, 44, 76, 124, 133, 144, 172, 207, 208 Kossuth, Ferenc  52, 105 Kossuth, Lajos  51–3 Krajan  64 Kráľovná sv. ruženca  72, 108 Kresťan  63, 64, 72, 73, 109, 115, 117, 118, 136, 137 Kubica, Vlado  145 Kubina, Ján  118 kulturkampf  9, 27 Kun, Béla  158, 171, 190 Lajos II, King of Hungary  19 landowners  29, 36, 42, 89, 93, 123, 156 Latin language  16 lawyers  79, 94, 97, 100, 214 Leff-Skalnik, Carol  182 Lenin, Vladimir  154 liberalism  5, 7, 9, 11–15, 22, 28, 33, 35, 38, 41, 44–7, 49–53, 60, 61, 63, 66, 72, 73, 75, 86, 89, 99, 103, 104, 113, 117, 119, 125, 126, 132, 137, 140, 142, 149, 157, 161, 162, 171–3, 175, 185, 189, 193, 203, 205, 209, 217, 219, 221, 222, 224–9 Liberal Party  13, 21–9, 34–6, 38, 44, 46–9, 51–5, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 77, 85, 89, 97, 103–8, 113–15, 117, 119, 120, 122, 125, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 165, 219, 221, 222, 224 libraries  32, 55, 66, 68, 70, 75, 80, 95, 109 Liptó County  34, 60, 71, 73, 78, 83–6, 95, 99, 100, 106, 120, 122, 144 Litarné listy  112, 129

303

London  223 Ľudové noviny  41, 129–33, 137, 138, 141, 142, 196 Ľudové noviny pre kresťanský slovenský ľud  71, 73, 74, 82, 94, 97, 101, 106, 110, 112, 113, 136 Lutheranism  18, 54, 124, 129, 137, 145, 146 Macartney, C. A.  36, 166 Mach, Alexander  1–4, 111, 177, 181, 191–6, 198, 200–2, 204, 206, 207, 209, 214, 215, 228 Macháček, Pavel  176, 208 Machar, Josef  142 magyarization  18, 28–35, 38, 40, 41, 48, 49, 52–5, 57, 74, 106, 108, 115, 117, 125, 127, 129–32, 134–7, 165, 166, 204, 220–2, 225 Magyar language  7, 12, 16, 28–33, 40, 48, 53, 59, 60, 62, 66, 76, 93–5, 116, 134, 135, 188, 221 Magyar national council  156 Magyar nationalism  13, 15, 18, 19, 21, 23, 30, 59, 93, 103, 105, 115, 132, 156, 189, 220, 223 magyarones  18, 34, 107, 175–7, 182, 184, 189, 191, 192 Majlath, József  85 El Mallakh, Dorothy  164 Mannová, Elena  65, 165 Markovič, Ivan  122, 126 Markovič, Julius  81, 88, 94, 105, 118, 119, 121, 126, 146, 208 Markovič, Rudolf  94 marriage reform  9, 10, 12, 16, 20, 27, 33, 42, 49, 58, 77, 125, 149, 155, 164, 171, 219, 225 Marx, Karl  153 Masaryk, T. G.  56, 142, 143, 145, 154, 159, 163, 172, 183, 184 Matica Slovenska  54, 91, 95, 165 Maxwell, Alexander  15 mayors  10, 23, 112, 129 Medvecký, Karol  48, 49, 146, 208 Mezöfi, Vilmos  45 Mičura, Martin  177, 208 migration  14, 37–42, 44, 46, 47, 49, 67, 73, 85, 125, 161, 166, 168–70, 200, 201, 204, 215, 221, 226

304 Miklós, Péter  100 missions  89–91 Mlynárik, Ján  160 Mnohel, Štefan  175, 177, 178, 210 Moldavia  136 monasteries  146, 201 Moravia  155, 159, 197 Moyš, Ladislav  141, 208 Murgaš, Karol  207, 280 music  1, 62, 79, 80 Mussolini, Benito  190, 198, 199, 201, 207, 216, 228 Nagodba  22 Nagy, Zsolt  155 Námestovo  84, 94, 108, 109, 150 Národnie noviny  54, 61, 73, 112, 130, 149 Naše noviny  133 Nástup  196, 198, 202, 204–7, 209, 210 nationalism  2–6, 13–15, 17–19, 21, 23, 29, 32, 35, 47, 48, 52, 53, 55–60, 69, 70, 73, 74, 80–3, 85, 87–9, 92–7, 98, 99, 100, 103–7, 109–17, 119–22, 126–8, 130, 136, 139–41, 143, 147, 149–51, 153, 155–8, 160, 162, 170, 173, 174, 180, 184, 185, 188, 189, 193, 197, 198, 211, 212, 217, 220–4, 226, 228 National Party  21, 53 National Party of Work  139–41, 219 Nebuchadnezzar  34 Nemes, Robert  11, 62, 63, 219 neo-scholasticism  67 newspapers  12, 25, 54, 57, 58, 62, 63, 66, 67, 70–3, 75, 78–80, 82, 88, 91–3, 96, 97, 101, 102, 106, 109–11, 113, 115–16, 118, 120, 127, 131, 137, 140, 142–3, 145, 175, 177, 179, 183, 184, 205, 206, 212, 216, 222 Nitra  144, 160, 176, 183, 195, 200, 206, 210 nobility  13, 15, 19, 20, 23, 33, 37, 38, 47, 55, 57, 59, 63, 70, 81, 104, 108, 127, 132, 157, 198 Nográd County  84 Norwegians  37 Nové Mesto nad Váhom  81, 94 Nyitra County  43, 62, 78, 83, 86, 87, 91, 100, 106, 110, 122, 124, 144, 193

Index officials  10–12, 23–6, 29, 30, 35, 37, 38, 40, 69, 73, 92–4, 96, 97, 104, 113, 116, 118, 121–3, 133, 150, 155, 166, 171, 182, 204, 210, 212, 220, 221, 225 Okánik, Ľudevít  86, 87, 208 Onderčo, Štefan  199, 209 orchestras  65, 165, 170 Osvald, Richard  112, 208 Ottoman Empire  19, 22, 29 Paces, Cynthia  163 panslavism  16, 18, 29, 55, 60, 91–5, 99, 104, 116, 123, 136, 149 Papacy  5, 9, 32, 67, 68, 113, 133, 165, 171. See also Vatican papal encyclicals  5, 65–8, 75, 113, 127, 133, 171 Paris  39, 160, 180, 189, 195, 197, 223 Párvy, Sándor  68, 128, 129, 142, 144 Pastor, Peter  152 patronage  97, 195, 196 Pazmaneum  34, 111, 112 Pazurik, Martin  128 peasantry  29, 31, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42, 49, 57, 58, 62, 68, 73, 74, 81, 85, 88, 97, 107, 115, 123, 129, 180. See also farmers Pech, Stanley  55 Pechány, Adolf  83, 92 Pécs  189 philosemitism  44, 46, 47, 49, 59, 172, 189, 205, 206, 221, 226 pilgrimage  76, 79, 142, 201 Pilsudski, Jozef  193 Pittsburgh  184 Podolák, Ján  39 Poland (Poles)  55, 109, 151, 171, 175, 187, 193, 203, 208, 212 Pollard, John  171, 190 Polyák, Štefan  209 Popély, Julius (Gyula)  62, 63 Posol b. srdca Ježišového  72 Potemra, Michal  65 Prague  2, 55, 56, 107, 109, 130, 156–8, 161, 163–5, 169, 170, 173, 177, 181, 184, 189, 191, 193, 203, 215, 217, 226, 227 Prešov  94 priests  1, 2, 5, 11, 12, 27, 33, 34, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 55, 56, 60–3, 65, 67–76, 79, 80, 82, 85, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96,

Index 97, 100, 101, 106, 107, 110–13, 115, 116, 118, 120, 123, 124, 127–9, 133, 137, 138, 141, 142, 144–6, 150, 161, 173, 174, 176, 180, 193, 199, 200, 210, 216, 221 Prince Primate  26, 96, 116, 124, 127, 128, 135, 144 processions  61, 79, 90, 120 Protestants  6, 11, 27, 46, 52, 55, 58, 65, 96, 97, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 114, 119, 124, 129, 130, 143, 150, 209, 212, 223 Prussia  9 publicists  11, 55, 60, 70, 76, 85 Putnik svätovojtesky  72 radicalization  1, 4, 5, 35, 187, 188, 196, 203, 209–11, 215, 217, 223, 227 radio  1, 2, 165, 169, 170, 214, 215, 226 Rady, Martyn  17 railways  35, 38, 42, 161, 166–8 Rakovszky, István  93, 104, 115, 124 Rath, Augustin  118 Ravasz, Viktor  208 Razus, Martin  209 Republican Party of Agrarians and Small Farmers  199 revolutions of 1848  17, 19, 21, 29, 51, 52, 57 Roberts, James  42, 64 Rodobrana  195, 198–202, 204, 207, 210 Rojka, Andrej  70 Roma (Gypsies)  3, 187 Romania  22, 29, 57, 118, 133–5, 152, 154, 157, 208 Rosary devotion  72, 75, 76, 79, 108 Rozvoj  182, 197 Russia  18, 19, 29, 36, 46, 54, 55, 64, 130, 149, 150, 153–5, 171 Rusyns (Ruthenians)  3, 157, 211, 212, 215 Ružiak, Ján  105, 109 Ružomberok  60, 71–3, 78, 80, 84, 93, 97, 101, 106, 108, 109, 112, 116, 121–3, 128, 140, 142, 144–6, 150, 161, 170, 175, 184, 192, 197 Šándorfi, Eduard  45, 48, 63, 80, 87, 91, 98, 115, 118 Saros County  44, 78, 84, 99 Sasinek, František  70

305

schools  9, 27–34, 36, 39, 44, 53, 55, 56, 66–70, 73–5, 87, 91, 96, 100, 107, 111, 112, 117, 121, 123, 124, 134, 137, 146, 151, 152, 164, 165, 171, 174, 175, 192, 194, 196, 197, 204, 220, 226. See also education Schorske, Carl  5, 62 secularization  164, 171, 226 sectarianism  102, 105, 126, 127, 141, 142, 144, 146, 150, 197, 212, 223, 227 seminaries  32, 55, 111, 123 Serbia  22, 29, 57, 109, 118, 133–5, 149, 150, 157 Seton-Watson, R. W.  28, 32, 81, 160 Sidor, Karol  177, 192, 193, 196–8, 204, 207, 217, 228 Silesia  155 Šimko, Ľudovít  118, 119 Skalica  77, 79, 86, 87, 91, 98, 110–13, 121, 123, 127, 131, 142 Škultéty, Jozef  69, 70 Skyčák, František  31, 50, 81, 84, 99, 101, 107–10, 112, 114–20, 122, 126, 127, 129, 132, 134, 136, 140, 141, 143, 145, 150, 151, 198, 208, 222, 223, 228 Slovák  169, 176–8, 180, 188, 192, 197, 200, 201 Slovak national council  154, 156, 157, 163, 174, 177, 184 Slovak nationalism  1–4, 6, 14, 15, 17, 18, 29, 32, 35, 40, 47, 48, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 65, 69, 70, 73, 74, 80–3, 85, 87, 88, 89, 92–7, 98, 99, 100, 103–5, 107, 109–12, 115–17, 119–22, 126–8, 130–2, 136, 138, 140, 141, 143, 147, 149–51, 153–8, 160, 165, 166, 170, 174, 180, 184, 185, 188, 189, 193, 197, 198, 203, 212, 217, 220–6, 228 Slovak National Party (SNS)  54–8, 61, 83, 95, 103, 105–7, 109, 112, 114, 118–20, 122, 124, 126, 127, 129–31, 137, 139–41, 145, 146, 149, 153–6, 212, 221, 222 Slovak Social Democratic Party of Hungary  41, 131, 133, 143, 154, 155, 156 Slovák týždenník  169 Slovenské listy  57 Slovenské ľudové noviny  142–6, 149, 158, 180 Slovenské noviny  64

306 Slovenský denník  174 Slovenský týždenník  57, 113–18, 140, 143, 144, 169 Snaczký, Anton  192, 200, 202, 207 socialism  6, 45, 50, 74, 80, 132, 133, 143, 155 Society of Saint Adalbert  72, 74, 90, 98, 103, 110, 141 sodalities  5, 75–9, 85, 87, 89, 91, 101, 102, 106, 108, 179, 189, 201, 222 Sokol, Martin  214, 217 Soviet Union  171, 187, 210, 226, 229 Spain  66, 210 Šrobár, Vavro  38, 56, 58, 98, 107, 119, 121, 123, 126, 141–4, 146, 147, 154, 163, 164, 174, 175, 181, 208, 210, 228 Štefánek, Anton  127, 129–32, 142 Straka, Vojtech  197 strikes  132, 167, 197, 223 Strisko, Igor  200 Sv. Adalbert  72 Sväta rodina  72 Szabó, Daniel  22, 86, 100 Szabó, Miloslav  60 Szarka, László  28, 93, 97 Szeged  141 Szentimrey, M.  67 Szepes County  68, 76, 78, 79, 84, 98, 128, 142, 145 Tajták, Ladislav  39 tariffs  17, 23, 35, 36, 161, 167, 202 taverns  12, 31, 42–4, 48, 70, 71, 73, 80, 81, 87, 95, 100, 118, 173, 178, 194, 221 taxation  20, 23, 24, 35, 114, 136 teachers  44, 69, 73, 77, 96, 97, 100, 107, 109, 113, 118, 123, 135, 166, 189, 204, 220, 221 theatre  70, 94, 132, 165, 170 theology  11, 34, 56, 67, 80, 107, 111–13, 175 Tiso, Jozef  2–5, 43, 88, 101, 111, 150, 173, 176, 183, 185, 187, 188, 197, 198, 207, 210, 211, 213–17, 226, 228 Tisza, István  30, 114, 151, 152, 155 Tisza, Kálmán  21, 30

Index Tolstoy, Leo  56 Tománek, Florián  142, 145, 208 Tomášek, Jozef  90 Tönsmeyer, Tatjana  187 Transylvania  22, 152, 157 Trencsén County  34, 70, 78, 81, 83, 87, 93, 95, 99, 105, 106, 122 Trevor-Roper, Hugh  13 Trianon, treaty of  157 Trnava  81, 103, 124 Tuka, Vojtech  176, 177, 181, 188–96, 199–203, 207, 208, 210, 226, 228 Turócz County  17, 78, 83, 84, 106, 140, 155 Ukraine  171 unemployment  36, 204, 226 Unger, František  176, 210 Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church  18, 124 universities  9, 22, 46, 55, 56, 69, 107, 112, 151, 152, 158, 170, 188–90, 195, 197, 204, 209 Urban, Milo  177, 197 urbanization  12, 38–41, 45, 49, 54, 60, 64, 169, 221 usury  32, 42, 43, 81, 88, 221 Valášek, Ján  109 vampires  41 Vásárhelyi, Zoltán  104 Vaszary, Kolos  127, 128 Vatican  9, 11, 27, 32, 65, 66, 68, 187, 222. See also Papacy Vatra  197 Veselovský, František  70, 109 Világos, battle of  19 Vnuk, František  185 Vojtaššák, Ján  150, 155, 209 Volkische Beobachter  206 Volksverein  88 Vrabec, Jozef  208 Ward, James  44, 183, 211, 213 Washington  223 Wilson, Woodrow  154, 190 Wingfield, Nancy  163 Witt, Sabine  182, 198, 205 women  1, 24, 41, 42, 54, 70, 79, 98, 153, 177, 178, 187, 216, 222, 225

Index workers (labourers)  36, 63, 67, 68, 77, 80, 91, 98, 99, 104, 111, 112, 118, 123, 132, 157, 166, 169, 171 writers  15, 16, 39–43, 55, 56, 61, 67, 68, 76, 88, 122, 130, 142, 164, 169, 180, 197, 205, 222 youth  41, 66, 71, 75, 77, 79, 80, 95, 99, 187, 196, 198 Zakopane  109 Zangerl, Carl  39, 66

Zaymus, Romuald  93 Zelenyák, János  61 Zemplén County  78, 84, 97, 100, 106 Zichy, Aladár  104, 117 Zichy, Ferdinand  59 Zichy, János  104 Žilina  60, 78, 93, 118, 119, 146, 169, 170, 175, 177, 215 Zionism  172 Zmeskál, Zoltán  108, 109 Zólyom County  78, 83, 84, 188

307

308