1916 E. Beneš: Détruisez l'Autriche-Hongrie!

BENES, Edvard. Détruisez l’Autriche-Hongrie ! Le martyre des Tchéco-Slovaques à travers l’histoire. Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1916. 12mo (18.5 × 12 cm). 71, [1] pp. Original printed wrappers with vignette to front and publisher’s device repeated on title-page. First edition of this scarce and fragile wartime pamphlet by Edvard Beneš (1884–1948), later the second President of Czechoslovakia. Written during his exile in Paris, Beneš—then Privatdozent of sociology at the Czech University of Prague and Secretary-General of the Czechoslovak National Council—sets out the historic grievances of the Czechs and Slovaks under Habsburg rule and calls explicitly for the destruction of Austria-Hungary. Published in 1916, two years before the Empire’s collapse, the tract functioned both as a piece of propaganda and as a manifesto for the future independence of Czechoslovakia. It is one of Beneš’s earliest published appeals in French to the Allied world and remains a key document of Central European nationalist agitation during the First World War. Of note, contemporary censorship affected certain passages: some copies carry the publisher’s notice that pages 66–67 were suppressed. Very good condition, light soiling and wear to edges, light foxing to some pages. Inv G4