Hodža’s Slovak National Council

On 22 November 1939, in Paris, the former Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia Milan Hodža founded the Slovak National Council (Slovenská národná rada), which proclaimed itself the supreme body of the Slovaks fighting for their cause in exile. Hodža became its chairman and the journalist Peter Prídavok its secretary. The Council stood for the restoration of a common state of Czechs and Slovaks, but on new principles: with autonomy for Slovakia and without a return to the order that had existed before Munich, the order personified by Edvard Beneš. It was thus a challenge to the Czechoslovak National Committee, which Beneš had set up in Paris in October and which had just won its first recognition from France, limited though it was. Throughout the winter of 1939–1940 the dispute between the two centres weakened the Czechoslovak exiles in the eyes of the Allies.

French recognition of the Committee

It is often stated that on 17 November 1939 the French government recognised the Czechoslovak National Committee, but only as the “representation of the Czechoslovaks abroad”. This is correct in substance but not in its date. Czech studies and historians of the Czechoslovak exile point to a French note of 13 November 1939. The date of 17 November appears in some chronicles; the Committee, proclaimed on 17 October, informed the French in November that it was taking over the obligations arising from the military agreement signed on 2 October by the minister in Paris, Štefan Osuský, and Prime Minister Édouard Daladier. Osuský had signed that agreement on behalf of a “provisional Czechoslovak government” that did not in fact exist.

The French note recognised the Committee as a body entitled to represent the Czechoslovak nation, which in practice meant the Czechs and Slovaks in exile, and to direct the rebuilding of the Czechoslovak army in France. It gave it the right to conclude agreements, but not in the name of the Czechoslovak Republic. The Committee was not a government, and in Paris’s eyes Beneš was not president. The French treated him as a politician with whom they had to work, because only he could provide the army with soldiers, but not necessarily as the voice of the whole emigration. Neville Chamberlain’s government recognised the Committee to a similar extent only on 20 December 1939.

This caution had several sources. Paris and London did not want to prejudge the post-war frontiers of Central Europe or to repudiate the Munich Agreement, which they had themselves signed. Some French politicians saw Beneš as the symbol of the defeat of 1938. Finally, a Slovak State already existed, with Jozef Tiso as its president from 26 October, and its troops had taken part in the attack on Poland. It was not clear whether Beneš, an advocate of the idea of a single Czechoslovak nation, spoke for the Slovaks. Hodža decided to exploit this doubt.

Hodža and Osuský

Milan Hodža, born in 1878 in Sučany, was one of the most experienced Slovak politicians. Before 1914 he had sat in the Hungarian parliament and belonged to the circle of advisers of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; in 1918 he signed the Martin Declaration, which joined the Slovaks to Czechoslovakia; and between the wars he was one of the leaders of the Agrarian Party, a minister many times over and, from November 1935 to 22 September 1938, the republic’s first Slovak prime minister. His government led the country through the Sudeten crisis and resigned at its height. Beneš’s circle later accused him of having himself prompted the French, during the night of 20–21 September 1938, to deliver the ultimatum that was to make it easier for the government to accept the plan to cede the Sudetenland. Hodža denied this.

After Munich he went to Switzerland and then to France. He had good contacts in Paris and a reputation as a moderate politician who understood Slovak aspirations. In October 1939 he co-authored a memorandum on the position of Slovakia, in which he demanded that in the restored state the Slovaks should decide their own affairs. Only foreign policy, the army, finance, trade and communications were to remain common. It was a programme close to the Pittsburgh Agreement of 1918, in which Tomáš Masaryk had promised the American Slovaks an autonomy that was never realised in the First Republic.

The second pillar of the Slovak opposition to Beneš was Štefan Osuský, minister in Paris since 1921, who after March 1939 refused to hand the legation over to the Germans and was the first to start organising a Czechoslovak resistance movement in France. He joined Beneš’s Committee, but Slovak studies also name him among the co-founders of Hodža’s Council. Both men considered themselves the true representatives of the Slovaks in exile, and both knew that the British and French reproached Beneš for his weak support among the Slovaks.

The Council and its secretary

The Slovak National Council was founded on 22 November 1939 as the representation of the Slovak nation abroad. Its name drew on tradition: the Slovak National Council of 1848, and that of 1918, which at Martin adopted the declaration on a common state, were symbols of Slovak nationhood. The Council’s programme envisaged the restoration of a Czechoslovakia based on equal rights for Czechs and Slovaks, and therefore a state different from the centralised republic of 1918–1938. Hodža rejected Slovak independence under Hitler’s patronage, but he also rejected Beneš’s thesis of a single Czechoslovak nation.

The Council’s secretary, Peter Prídavok, born in 1902 in Stankovany, was a telling figure. He came from the autonomist camp: in 1926–1929 he published and edited the weekly Rodobrana, named after the paramilitary wing of the autonomist Slovak People’s Party, and in 1938–1939 he headed the press department of the autonomous Slovak government and the Slovak Press Agency in Bratislava. In April 1939 he emigrated to Paris. His presence showed that the Council wanted to attract those Slovaks who did not accept Tiso’s regime but had no intention of returning to a state ruled from Prague.

Rivalry with Beneš

Beneš regarded the Council as an attack on the unity of the emigration and opposed it from the outset. At the beginning of 1940 Hodža, to rebut the charge of Slovak separatism, transformed it into the Czech-Slovak National Council, which Czech opponents of Beneš also joined. Slovak studies state that the new council was founded in Paris on 28 January 1940. Hodža was again chairman and Prídavok secretary. On 6 February 1940 Hodža officially notified Beneš of its creation and demanded negotiations on a joint leadership of the resistance movement. Beneš refused.

The matter was decided by an advantage the Council could not offset: Beneš’s Committee had the recognition of France and Britain, money, an administrative apparatus and, above all, an army – the 1st Czechoslovak Infantry Division being formed at Agde. Hodža had a name, contacts and a programme, but no soldiers. French diplomacy listened readily to his arguments and throughout the winter avoided committing itself to Beneš’s plans, but it had no intention of building up a second centre. For the Allies, who in the same weeks were receiving the Polish government in France, what counted was who would supply troops, not the dispute over the shape of the post-war state.

Its place in the war

The fall of France in June 1940 put an end to the Paris quarrels. The Czech-Slovak National Council ceased to function, and in London Beneš transformed the Committee into a government-in-exile, recognised by Britain in July 1940. Hodža gave way: in November 1940 he accepted the post of vice-chairman of the State Council, the exiles’ substitute for a parliament, but in 1941 he left for the United States. There he developed a plan for a post-war Central European federation, set out in his book Federation in Central Europe (1942), which attracted the attention of American intellectuals and the State Department but had no influence on the post-war order. He died on 27 June 1944 in Clearwater, Florida. His remains were brought back in 2002 to the National Cemetery in Martin.

Osuský, at ever sharper odds with Beneš, joined the government-in-exile in 1940, but in March 1942 was stripped of all his posts. Prídavok went in the opposite direction from Hodža: from June 1940 he was active in London, and on 31 December 1943 he founded a new Slovak National Council there, which leaned rather towards a separate Slovak state within a federated Europe. After the war he belonged to the émigré Slovak National Council Abroad, and from 1952 until his death in 1966 he worked in the Slovak section of the BBC.

Hodža’s Council proved an episode, but the dispute it exposed outlasted the war. Beneš returned home in 1945 as a president recognised by all the Allies and built the renewed Czechoslovakia on the idea of unity, although under pressure from the Slovak participants in the National Uprising of 1944 he had to acknowledge the separate identity of the Slovak nation. The question that Hodža had posed in Paris in the autumn of 1939 – on what terms Czechs and Slovaks should live together – returned in 1968 with the creation of the federation and finally in 1992, when the common state broke up.