Journal article

Publication year: 2018

Pages: 187-206

Journal: Austrian History Yearbook

Volume number: 49

ISSN: 0067-2378

eISSN: 1558-5255

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0067237818000152

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Abstract: 
It is fitting that a story about charitable donations and their provenance should begin with a gesture of gift giving. In 1849 a group of Habsburg subjects came together with the intention of raising money to purchase a gift for Josip Jelai, general of the Habsburg army and Ban (Governor) of Civil Croatia. Jelai was identified as one of the notional saviors of the Habsburg Empire, whose actions in the field had helped quell the revolutionary and military perils of the previous months. The proposed gift was a suitable symbol of imperial honor and military prowess: a ceremonial sabre designed especially for the Ban. Jelai was apparently moved by the gesture but had a more practical idea: better to use the money raised for his gift to help those less fortunate (and less celebrated) than himself, it should be put toward a fund to support soldiers who had served in his units and militias and who had been injured in fightingand also to the families of those that had been killed. To this end, a committee was already operating, based in Vienna, but collecting funds through the Ban's Council (Bansko Vijee) in Zagreb. This would become a mobilization of Habsburg society whose impetus rested on precisely the same values of dynastic loyalty and respect for the Habsburg military as the ceremonial sabre, except that many more people would have a chance to show their devotion and support to the heroes of 1848-49.

Harvard Citation style: Haslinger, P. (2018) Dilemmas of Security: The State, Local Agency, and the Czechoslovak-Hungarian Boundary Commission, 1921-25, Austrian History Yearbook, 49, pp. 187-206. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0067237818000152

APA Citation style: Haslinger, P. (2018). Dilemmas of Security: The State, Local Agency, and the Czechoslovak-Hungarian Boundary Commission, 1921-25. Austrian History Yearbook. 49, 187-206. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0067237818000152