„Národ nezná odpuštění“: Expatriace Karla Sabiny v srpnu 1872
: “The nation knows no forgiveness”: The expatriation of Karel Sabina in August 1872

Summary/Abstract: This study follows in detail the circumstances surrounding the “national judgement” of Karel Sabina, who was revealed in 1872 to be a Prague police informer and thus compelled by Czech patriotic and political circles to emigrate from Bohemia and to halt his official activities as a writer. This is partly based on the publication of police and court documents acquired by Petr Kovařík (2010), which provide evidence of the circumstances behind the investigation of Sabina's case and his unsuccessful defence before a court, which never sat for a main hearing. However, the study's main subject of interest is the numerous articles in Czech and Austrian (particularly Prague and Viennese) newspapers, which turned the Sabina affair into a political scandal, unleashing a massive campaign primarily targeting the Czech anti-imperial opposition, represented in particular by Julius Grégr and Jan Stanislav Skrejšovský. The study compares the official level of Sabina's case with the public level, commenting on the numerous statements in the newspapers on the case and adding previous knowledge on many new details, such as Sabina's loss of employment as the editor in charge of the Slovan journal just a day after the “national judgement', his month-long stay in prison in 1873 for a press misdemeanour by Slovan when Sabina was editor and so forth. It also offers several possible interpretations of the entire case, which can be viewed at the legal, moral, political, cultural and private levels, or can also be seen as an unfortunate coincidence.

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