Illyrian Provinces from a Slovene Perspective: Myth and Reality

Abstract

In 1909, on the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Illyrian Provinces, the French-Illyrian Club was founded in Ljubljana with the aim of encouraging interest in French culture and language. Slovene newspapers looked back to the Illyrian Provinces with recognition and gratitude, since the French — so they claimed — had done more for the Slovenes in the barely four years during which ‘the Slovene regions were part of the French Empire,’ with measures to improve education, administration and the condition of the peasantry, than Austria had in centuries.1 The legend about Napoleon’s Slavic sympathies and the pro-Slovene attitude of the French government during the period of the Illyrian Provinces was widely embraced, especially by liberal intellectuals, who were influential in introducing it into school textbooks between the First and Second World Wars, where it remains to this day.