Historica Olomucensia

Nobility in Modern Czech Society

Since the Middle Ages, nobility constituted a privileged social elite. Its social standing was codified through many legal documents. These documents reflected specific developments of many European countries and therefore it is not very surprising that they were rather different from one another. Thanks to this, there were countries with numerous noble class (Hungary or Poland, for example), and, on the other hand, countries where noblemen were rather scarce, as is the case of the Czech Lands - here the rate of noblemen to commoners was 828:1 (about 1850). The main reason is that since the Middle Ages, numbers especially of lower nobility were in steady decline. Implications for the future of local society were interesting - the rich, but numerically underrepresented nobility constituted only a fragment of society, although with enormous possessions. There was no lower nobility to form a social bridge towards the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, ethnically Czech elites among commoners lacked any rich city-dwelling elites, which could overthrow old social systems from the other side. Result was that modern Czech society was made of two deeply divided extremes, as could be seen in the second half of the 19th century, when the respective paths of noble and bourgeois elites ran in their respective, and rather opposite, directions, and verbal resistance against the nobility has become one of the most important signs of "progressive" national politicians.