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 Moravian professor (on Charles University in Prague, from 1882) 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. In 1916, Dürich journeyed to Russia with the purpose of establishing the Czechoslovak National Council’s authority over the Czech and Slovak groups there. Shortly after his arrival in that country, however, he began to support the tsarist government’s plans for a new émigré organization with the goal of rendering the Czech and Slovak homelands dependent or closely aligned with the Russian Empire after the war. Eventually, Dürich was expelled from the Paris-based Czechoslovak National Council and formed his own national council in Russia which was directly funded by the tsarist government. In the meantime, the Czech and Slovak groups in Russia were divided between pro-Dürich and pro-Masaryk camps. Masaryk emerged as the victor from this rivalry after the outbreak of the
Russian Revolution in March 1917 deprived Dürich and his group of the tsarist government’s support. Masaryk traveled to Russia later that year and established a Russian branch of the Czechoslovak National Council, which was crucial in organizing the
Czechoslovak Legion in Russia. Elsewhere, the Czechoslovak National Council continued to generate anti-Habsburg propaganda in Allied countries, organized Czechoslovak legions in France and Italy, and guided revolutionary activity in Bohemia through secret messages to
Maffia, an underground organization formed in
Prague during the war. == Upgrade to Provisional Government ==