Enlightenment and Nation-Defence Profile of Ján Čaplovič

Abstract

Ján Čaplovič (1780 - 1847) was one of the major figures of the Slovak national-revivalist generation, in large part due to the role he played in bridging the professional and language gaps during the reform course of the rulers of the Austrian monarchy, and the struggle of the Hungarian nobility for Hungarian independence in the late 18th and early 19th centuries due to the search for soft but effective forms of nation-defence activities. This study presents the enlightenment and nation-defence profile of the Slovak patriot Ján Čaplovič who has received minimal attention from the Slovak academic community after 1990s. Although he is not considered a prominent national revivalist, his publishing devoted to ethnographic and national defence issues significantly contributed to Slovaks taking their stance in the multinational Austrian monarchy, in strengthening their ethnic identity, and in fostering the process of codification of their literary language as the most important national identification sign in 1843. The study is divided into three relatively separate but interrelated sections. The first part outlines his enlightenment profile, with special attention paid to its most important component, which was used in his ethnographic and patriotic works. The second part profiles the Slovak national defences of the first four decades of the 19th century of authors such as Pavol Senický, Juraj Rohonyi, Samuel Hoič, Matej Šuhajda, Ján Chalupka, Jozef Meltzer, Ondrej Soltys, Ľudovít Štúr, Ján Francisci, and Michal Miloslav Hodža. Their defences played an important role in supporting active political forms of enforcing the ethnic-emancipatory demands of the representatives of the Slovak nation-forming elite for a more democratic settlement of the contemporaneous conditions in the monarchy, especially in historic Hungary. The last part analyses in detail the national defences of Ján Čaplovič and evaluates their expressive value.