Illyrian Movement - 19th Century

19th Century

The Illyrian name was revived officially during the Napoleonic Wars, when the French gave the name Illyrian Provinces to the Adriatic possessions acquired from the Austrian Empire in 1809. After 1813, when the territories were again included into the Austrian Empire, the Austrians kept the denomination and formed the Kingdom of Illyria, which comprised mostly the Slovene Lands.

In 19th century Europe, liberalism and nationalism were ideologies which came to the forefront of political culture. In Central Europe, where the Habsburg Empire had long asserted control over a variety of ethnic and cultural groups, nationalism appeared in a standard format. The beginning of the 19th century "was the period when the smaller, mostly Slavic nationalities of the empire - Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Ukrainians - remembered their historical traditions, revived their native languages as literary languages, reappropriated their traditions and folklore, in short reasserted their existence as nations." This revival of national heritage encompasses the Illyrian Movement in Croatia.

In 1813, the bishop of Zagreb Maksimilijan Vrhovac issued a plea for the collection of "national treasures" (Poziv na sve duhovne pastire svoje biskupije), thereby heralding the national revival movement.

Just as Croatia felt nationalistic stirrings at this time, so did its larger neighbors, Hungary and Austria. Croats were uneasy with rising Hungarian nationalism, which pursued reduction of the Croatian autonomy and increased Magyarization. In order to preserve their autonomy, Croats pursued a deepening of their culture and a revival of their heritage.

In the beginning of the 1830s, a group of young Croatian writers gathered in Zagreb and established a movement for national renewal and unity of all South Slavs within the Habsburg Monarchy. The city of Zagreb had become an important center of political, economic, and cultural activity, so it was the center of the movement. Count Janko Drašković published his Dissertation in 1832, a pamphlet that later came to be considered the political, economic, social and cultural program of the movement, as it promoted the native language as official, more autonomy from central government, and better education and enlightenment for the common people.

The most important focus of the new Illyrians was the establishment of a standard language as a counter-weight to Hungarian, and the promotion of Croatian written literature and official culture. Ljudevit Gaj was instrumental in providing the foundation for the flourishing of the Croatian literature. Gaj was in fact the leader of the movement as a whole in the beginning for eight or nine years, at which point the leadership changed hands. Gaj was largely responsible for writing the Croatian orthography and grammar (Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja – Brief basics of the Croatian-Slavonic orthography), which was necessary before a literary movement would be successful.