Revolutionaries in prison

The creation of this book is due to the discovery of a previously completely unknown and unexplored set of archival materials from the Special Military Investigation Commissions from the former fortresses of Josefov and Hradec Králové. These commissions in the years 1855–1857 addressed problems associated with the imprisonment of revolutionaries, especially their attempts to escape, successful escapes, writing texts, especially letters, and live collaboration with supervising staff.

The main characters of the book are two Hungarian and two Polish revolutionaries, traitors who involuntarily ended up in fortresses in eastern Bohemia. The reconstruction of the fates and confiscated texts of these political prisoners is followed by an analysis of their small prison community in Josefov. The next part of the publication is a comparison of well-known literary works from the prison environment of the time by the Italian Carbonari Silvio Pellico and the Czech writer and radical democrat Karel Sabina.

Materials related to the investigative commissions, the stories and the community of prisoners are part of an even broader interpretation of the period atmosphere of the 1840s to 1860s in the Habsburg Empire. It is also related to the overall transformation of the old world into the new one as part of the modernization process. Throughout the individual chapters, one can observe how things " worked" in fortress prisons, and especially in the microworld of Josefov in the 1850s, and what limits and loopholes the imprisonment of revolutionaries had at that time. Specific figures and very specific problems in Josefov and Hradec Králové can thus well reflect the atmosphere in society at the time and its overall fundamental political transformation.