1790-1815 1918-1941






Slovenia 1815-1918



In 1813 the "Illyrian Provinces" were again placed under Austrian rule; the historical territories that made up Slovenia - Carinthia, Carniola, Styria and Gorizia - were reestablished.
While the Ancien was reestablished by the Austrian administration, lead by chancellor CLEMENS VON METTERNICH, the events of the preceding decades had laid the seeds for a Slovenian national movement, which began as a cultural movement, later to become more and more political. An 1816 poem mentioned the name SLOVENIA for the first time.
In 1848, poet FRANCE PRESEREN demanded the various Slovenian territories to be merged to form a UNIFIED SLOVENIA, in which Slovenian should be the official language. The country was to have its own diet, enjoy political autonomy within the Habsburg Monarchy. As the various revolutions of 1848/49 were suppressed by force, the plans were not executed.
The 19th century brought numerous economic changes. The railway connecting Trieste and Vienna crossed the country, a modern industry emerged, urbanization set in.
In the second half of the century, within the Austrian dominions the German and Slavic population elements found each other separated by a widening gap; while a widespread attitude among the Germans assumed German to be a superior language/civilization and therefore should remain the language of administration, jurisdiction and education, the Slavic ethnicities demanded the respective Slavic language, thus Slovenian in the Slovenian territories, to be introduced as the (exclusive) language of administration, jurisdiction and education - and expecting the German minority living in their area to assimilate. In 1893 the debate over the language of instruction at the grammar school in Celje, southern Styria (present Slovenia) became an Austria-wide affair.
After 1848, Slovenian cultural and political organizations were founded; a political press emerged. The cession of VENETIA (to Italy, in 1866) and the AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN AUSGLEICH of 1867 were regarded as steps reducing the cultural entity of Slovenia, as groups of ethnic Slovenians living in Venetia resp. across the Mur River in Hungary were thus separated from the core group in Carniola, Carinthia, Gorizia, Trieste/Istria and Styria.





EXTERNAL
LINKS 		A Brief History of Slovenia, by Stane Granda
A Brief History of the Slovene Nation, from Catholic Church of Slovenia
Geschichte Sloweniens, from Europa wird bunter
History of Ljubljana, from Ljubljana
France Preseren Website; another biography from Slovenija
DOCUMENTS Article Slowenen (Slovenians), from Meyers Konversationslexikon, 1888-1890 edition, in German
REFERENCE


This page is part of World History at KMLA
First posted on August 18th 2002, last revised on January 11th 2005

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