Czechoslovak National Council

Czechoslovak National Council (or Czecho-Slovak National Council) was an organization founded by Czech and Slovak émigrés during World War I to liberate their homeland from Austria-Hungary. During the closing weeks of the war, the Czechoslovak National Council was formally upgraded to a provisional government and its members were designated to hold top offices in the First Czechoslovak Republic.

The homelands of the Czechs and Slovaks entered the Habsburg domains in 1526. The notion of union between Czechs in Austria and Slovaks in Hungary took root among some Czech leaders around the turn of the twentieth-century. However, the proposal did not gain widespread appeal among the two peoples until well into the First World War.

When World War I broke out in August 1914, Czech and Slovak émigrés residing in many Allied and neutral countries formed organizations to express their loyalty to the Allied cause and to spare their members internment. In early 1915 a Czech living in Russia, Svatopluk Koníček, made the first attempt to bring these various groups together under a single umbrella organization. His project, however, failed to bridge the differences between liberal, democratic Czech and Slovak groups and those with a more conservative, Pan-Slav outlook.

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, a Slovak professor and politician who went into exile in Switzerland in December 1914, gradually secured the support of the Czech and Slovak groups in Western Europe during the following months. On 14 November 1915 his organization, calling itself the Czech Committee Abroad, published a manifesto declaring war on Austria-Hungary. Shortly afterwards, the Czech Committee Abroad was reconstituted as the Czecho-Slovak National Council.

The Czechoslovak National Council originally consisted of Masaryk and another Czech political exile, Josef Dürich, as co-chairmen. Edvard Beneš, who joined Masaryk in exile in September 1915, was named the organization’s general secretary. Milan Štefánik, a Slovak who was an aviator in the French Army, was designated to represent Slovak interests in the national council. The headquarters of the Czechoslovak National Council was in Paris, France, while branch offices were eventually opened up in other Allied countries.

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