Page - 38 - in Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 - A Social History of a Multilingual Space

38 ♦  Universities in Imperial Austria, 1848–1918 variations reflecting the cultural particularities of the empire. Universities began to teach humanist subjects at the academic level, in accordance with liberal and nationalist demands, but with the same aim as in the Vormärz, that is, promoting a loyalist narrative, a plan that ultimately backfired. Second, the revolution spawned various regional demands: Bohemia sought a reas- sessment of the boundaries of the German Confederation, the Hungarians wanted changes in the structure of political relations, and the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia demanded federalization and secession. All this illus- trates the instability of the imperial space and political structures, across the empire as well as within the provinces themselves, requiring new modes of spatial governance. Third, the constitutional reforms, as well as the liberal- ization of cultural life, although brief and followed by a neoabsolutist regime, reconfigured the political structure of the monarchy as well as the discourse of loyalty and culture’s place in it. The Frankfurt Parliament, the Krems Parliament, the Prague Slavic Congress, the April Laws in Hungary, the Petition of Liptovský Mikuláš (Liptau-Sankt-Nikolaus, Liptószentmiklós), and other events did not result in changes to the laws, but they publicly pre- sented the points of agreement among the different parties. This, along with the abolition of censorship, enabled the creation of an active public sphere and an open discussion of how the monarchy should be structured. For uni- versities, and scholarship in general, changes in the political sphere did not mean a complete revolution but rather a set of gradual transformations fa- cilitated by the atmosphere of 1848, including the free flow of literature, the accentuation and acceptance of cultural diversity, and a relaxation of border policing, which elevated the importance of cultural-cum-linguistic spaces while lessening the influence of state borders. As the wave of revolutionary movements and outbreaks in 1848 shook the Habsburg monarchy, students were among the first on the barricades in Cracow, Prague, and Vienna (see figure 1).83 Their teachers often joined in or even led the political reaction against absolutism, proving that political supervision during the Vormärz was either unsuccessful or not as grim as often claimed. This was, of course, not the first openly political movement against the government in which scholars participated. In Cracow, for ex- ample, scholarly political activism had a long-standing tradition. During the uprising in the Free City of Cracow in 1846, the professors of the med- ical faculty had cared for the wounded insurgents on the battlefield. The professor of Polish language and literature Michał Wiszniewski was even, for a day, the self-proclaimed leader of the rebellion in Cracow, although