Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
Czech professor turned statesman, considered to be one of the fathers of
Czechoslovakia and a national hero in today's
Czech Republic. Born Tomáš Masaryk, he added the middle name Garrigue after marrying
Charlotte Garrigue, a
Brooklyn woman of French
Huguenot extraction.
From humble origins in southern
Moravia, where he was born the son of a peasant in
1850 and apprenticed to be a
blacksmith, Masaryk became an eminent historian in
Prague before the
First World War, when the Czech lands and
Slovakia belonged to
Austria-Hungary. Economically the best developed of the
Dual Monarchy's Slavic nationalities, the Czechs had the longest-established nationalist programme, although very few demanded more than the same autonomy accorded to the
Magyars.
Several future nationalist leaders went to study under Masaryk, and he had already aided the
Yugoslav cause in
1909 and
1910: he defended a number of
Croat leaders against allegations of conspiring with
Serbia against the Habsburgs, an incident known, predictably, as the
Zagreb Treason Trial. He subsequently testified against the Viennese historian
Heinrich Friedjung, who had (perhaps unknowingly) supplied the false allegations, in the trial for forgery which arose out of the collapsed Zagreb case.
Not long after war had broken out in August
1914, Masaryk went into exile and led a four-year campaign for Czechoslovak independence which would have exhausted many of his students, let alone a man of 64. Unlike many Czech nationalists who looked to
Russia as their brothers in Slavdom, Masaryk was strongly oriented towards the West, even when it came to marriage. With the aid of fellow émigrés
Eduard Beneš and
Milan Štefánik, with whom he formed the
Czech National Council in
Paris, he was mostly involved in lobbying Britain and France to support the Czechoslovak cause.
He quickly made contact with British experts on Austria-Hungary.
R. W. Seton-Watson obtained him a lectureship at
King's College in London, and
Henry Wickham Steed found him a solution to the dilemma that Russian soldiers were firing on Czech soldiers trying to desert. Steed, the foreign editor of
The Times, suggested they sing a Czech national song,
Hej, Sloveni, to identify themselves.
The song was also taken up by Polish troops in the Austrian army for the same purposes. After the war, Steed was amused - or so his memoirs relate - to hear the scholar
Bernard Pares remember that, on a visit to the Russian lines, he had overheard what he took to be Russian soldiers singing the anthem of their Polish neighbours with whom they traditionally had
less than cordial relations.
By
1918, the Allies had accepted, with a little prodding from
Woodrow Wilson and various propagandists, that Austria-Hungary's days were numbered and that Czechoslovakia would be formed largely along the lines that Masaryk had suggested to the British three years before.
A victorious Masaryk, then in America, returned to Prague via London where a parade from
Euston station was organised in his honour. The
military band hadn't had quite enough practice at
Hej, Sloveni, and improvised with a quick blast of
See, the Conquering Hero Comes.
Masaryk was elected the first president of Czechoslovakia as soon as he came home, and was re-elected in
1920,
1927 and
1934. Under his presidency, Czechoslovakia bucked the authoritarian trend common to the other
successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy, although Slovak dissatisfaction that they had not been given more autonomy proved to be a source of instability, as did the
German minority which fell under
Nazi influence.
For health reasons, the 85-year-old Masaryk handed over the presidency in
1935 to his foreign minister Beneš, and died in
1937, the year before the Western democracies
acquiesced in Hitler's annexation of the
Sudetenland. His son,
Jan Masaryk, was a politician in his own right and was found dead in
mysterious circumstances under his bathroom window two weeks after the Communist takeover of
February 25, 1948.
Masaryk University in
Brno, the capital of his native Moravia, is named in his memory today, as is the main hall of the library at Seton-Watson's
School of Slavonic and East European Studies.