ABSTRACT
A major shot in the arm to the fledgling Slovene national movement came from Napoleon Bonaparte, whose French administration in the short-lived Illyrian Provinces put forward ambitious plans for Slovene educational and administrative reform, even though little was actually done. Yet this seeming historic insignificance was however a blessing in disguise, as the Habsburg authorities remained tolerant, or benignly neglectful of the Slovene cultural renaissance in the first half of the nineteenth century. The revolutions of 1848 injected the destabilizing contribution of Slovene political activism. Lacking any historic dynastic rights to the existing Habsburg crownlands, such as the Czechs had to Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia, Slovene national demands, as voiced in their April 1848 petition to the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I, had to rely on an ethnic principle. In the 1850s, it was impossible as Slovene lands and the rest of the crownlands fell under the neo-absolutist regime of the Austrian Interior Minister Baron Alexander von Bach.
