It’s well-known that Gavrilo Princip’s murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo 110 years ago started a chain of events that led to World War I. Less known is the revolutionary ideology of social justice that drove Princip and his Young Bosnia group to violence, writes historian Milos Vojinovic.
Two bullets fired from Gavrilo Princip’s Browning pistol shortly before 11 o’clock on June 28, 1914, in front of Schiller’s convenience store in Sarajevo, set in motion a chain of events with global consequences. Exactly one month later, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Other declarations of war followed. Within a week, the world was at war.
Who was the man who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand? What did his group of comrades, known as Young Bosnia, stand for? During the research for my book Political Ideas of Young Bosnia, I came to realise that attempts to portray Princip simply as a hero or a villain were insufficient.
By the time the war started, the general public in Austria-Hungary hadn’t even been allowed to see the police’s photographs of Princip, let alone learn about his principles. The first opportunity for him to explain himself in public came in October 1914, during the trial.
When the prosecutor asked Princip why he shot the archduke, he replied: “People suffer because they are so poor and because they are treated as animals. I am the son of a peasant; I know how people live in the villages, and that is why I wanted revenge”.
The pre-war Belle Epoque, as this period which saw a flourishing of arts and ideas in Europe is called, was not belle for everyone.
How did people really live in the villages of Bosnia and Herzegovina? In Vienna at this time, Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, and Erwin Schrödinger were setting some of the key trajectories of arts and sciences for the decades to come. Bosnia was part of the same state. However, it was separated from Vienna not only by a couple of hundred kilometres, but also by centuries.
The Habsburg Empire occupied previously Ottoman Bosnia in 1878, where medieval feudal laws were in power. In 1914, they were still in power. This meant that a huge number of families, predominantly Orthodox Christian ones, were so-called “serf” families. According to the 1910 census, Orthodox Christians, then 43.5 per cent of the population, controlled only six per cent of the land, while the Muslims, 32 per cent of the population, controlled 91.1 per cent.
After the war ended and Austria-Hungary collapsed, Austrian politician Joseph Bärnreither wrote: “Evidently, no one has paused to consider the kind of impression this must leave on the consciousness of a population that knows there is no aristocrat across the Drina and Sava rivers who will collect a third of the harvest each year”. Among the serfs was the Princip family.
Feudal system causes fury
Austria-Hungary was not solely to blame for the country’s economic backwardness, but the government intentionally blocked agrarian reform to secure the loyalty of the landowning elite. The feudal system was one of the first things Young Bosnians wanted to destroy.
In a political pamphlet from 1912, they called for the “expropriation of all estates belonging to clergy and aristocracy and for the abolition of social privileges and prerogatives aristocracy has.” It is no wonder that one of the conspirators claimed that the French Revolution was “the most noble and magnificent epoch of world’s history”. However, this kind of social dissatisfaction does not simply create assassins.
Changes occurred in the decade before the assassination. Police archives show that there was a detailed investigation of Bosnian students in 1902 concluded was that there was no youth political organisation. That changed completely within ten years. After Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia in 1908, religious dignitaries in Sarajevo were obliged to pray for the Habsburg family.
When this was done for the first time in the Serb Orthodox cathedral in Sarajevo, the representative of the Vienna government stated: “When Bishop Letica raised his arms and prayed for the emperor, all present Serbs kneeled, except the group of young students, who were lined up according to their years, and they simply remained standing. They were little kids from Sarajevo gymnasium.”
In 1910, 88 per cent of Bosnia’s population was illiterate, with education traditionally reserved for the wealthiest families. However, this was beginning to change as new scholarships were introduced, specifically targeting children from poorer backgrounds.
The deadliest opposition to Austro-Hungary’s monarchy was emerging from the empire’s schools. One of the Young Bosnia group, himself a serf-child, noted: “When our peasants come home [after graduation], they are different: they criticise, they are much less obedient.” The first generation of educated peasant sons produce the assassins.
The Habsburg state prosecutor claimed during the trial in September 1914 that Princip’s soul was corrupted with bad literature. Acts of individuals are often conditioned by their own role models; however, in this case, these literature-based paragons had unusually high importance due to several factors. Firstly, Princip and his fellow conspirators did not only hate the Habsburgs but also the generation of their parents, who they considered weak and spineless. Even energetic and dedicated political activists, such as Petar Kocic, who, because of his journalism, spent almost a year in solitary confinement, were deemed as not radical enough.
There was no local tradition of political engagement that they found worthy. Princip was proud because his friends called him Gavroche, after a boy character from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables who dies on the barricades in Paris. Psychiatrist Martin Papennheim interviewed Princip in Theresienstadt prison in 1916, where Princip served his prison sentence.
“Our older generations are mostly conservative, but there is a strong will for national liberation among younger people. Older generations did not agree with younger ones… they were talking about freedom that we should win legally from Austria. We did not believe in that kind of freedom,” Princip told Papennheim.
The important question is why these students did not try to improve the situation in Bosnia legally. An aspiring 16-year-old journalist named Gavrilo Princip made one depiction of the local election. On the day before the election, individuals who were vocal in their opposition to the government were arrested. On the day of the election, according to Princip: “Around eight police officers came to the polling station. Apart from their main role to watch these local ‘savages’, they had another one, to threaten and force people to vote for the governmental candidate.”
In the Young Bosnia statute from 1912, it was written: “We consider any kind of parliamentary struggle, in a country without real parliamentarism, to be futile”. They noticed that Bosnia was not unique in its situation.
They saw similarities between the actions of Japan in Korea, the US in Cuba and the Philippines, Russia in Central Asia and, of course, with the politics of Britain in India: “Austria-Hungary had to use imperialism in order to keep herself among sisters, other Great Powers. But Austria-Hungary does not have her own Morocco, nor Persia or India, where she could create colonies, so she had turned to the Balkans, where she colonise and exploit South Slavs.”
Crackdowns on civil disobedience
Individual acts of violence were still not a preferred method of political struggle. Young Bosnians, especially during 1912, organised gatherings around Bosnia. They hoped to mobilise the general population for a wider political movement. They failed. Their peasant audiences did not react to the abstract-sounding students and their revolutionary phrases.
In February 1912, a large protest in Sarajevo was dispersed by mounted police. Princip ended up in bruises. Even small acts of civil disobedience were punished severely. Princip left Bosnia for Serbia because he feared arrest.
In 1912, the magazines and journals they edited started to change their content. Young Bosnians hoped to achieve what Germans and Italians did – national unification of all their South Slav compatriots – but anarchism offered the methods that became increasingly recognised as suitable.
Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? was one of the most popular books among Young Bosnians. Chernyshevsky’s key character, Rahmetov, was considered the ideal revolutionary; he did not drink and did not need any rest; characters like Rahmetov helped them build their own system of values: devotion, action, and sacrifice.
Young Bosnia incarnated fictional and non-fictional models discovered in literature, into their own reality. In the words of one of the conspirators: “We were reading works of Russian authors that were filled with revolutionary characters. That motivated us to read about Russian terrorism, assassinations, and revolutionary struggle. Nothing sounded as magical to us as the words revolution, assassination, and strike.”
It is important to point out that Archduke Franz Ferdinand did not become a target because of his character or politics. In the transcript of the trial, we read that, as Princip said, Ferdinand became a target because he was the incarnation of power.
During the trial, the prosecutor learned about the beliefs of Nedeljko Cabrinovic, who threw a bomb at Franz Ferdinand roughly half an hour before Princip’s shots: “We were told that Christ said that if someone throws a brick on you should throw bread at him. We have suffered so much, and now we say, if someone throws a brick at you, you should throw two bricks at him.”
Cabrinovic was clearly describing his convictions: “I am a supporter of radical anarchist ideas; I want to destroy the present system with terror and to introduce the different, more liberal system; I hate our representatives of this fake constitutional government.”
Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, was driven by deep-rooted socio-political discontent and revolutionary ideals. Princip and his fellow Young Bosnians sought to end the oppressive feudal system and foreign domination in Bosnia, influenced by radical literature and inspired by anti-imperialist and national movements.
Despite efforts to mobilise the population through peaceful means, their frustrations with the lack of meaningful evolution led them to resort to violence as a catalyst for change – and what a change it was.
