„Discarded Constitutions“ and Their Unknown Authors

As a starting point, the article provides summary of existing information about the draft constitutions or, more precisely, about the concepts of future constitution of the Czech countries and Slovakia which occured in 1917. These drafts were prepared in the Czech surroundings and they further developed the principles of the constitutional declaration of the 30th of May 1917. Therefore, they presumed that the Habsburg monarchy would be preserved in a reorganised form and there would be an area consisting of the Czech countries and Slovakia which would exist within the monarchy. The individual concepts were anonymously written by the members of a group of experts, evidently formed on the initiative of Antonín Švehla. They were all published after the establishment of the Czechoslovak republic, yet their authors (except František Weyr) remained unknown. With the help of archive materials, the author presents some new findings regarding the mystery about the authorship of these documents. These findings complement, confirm, but also conflict with some partial conclusions made by Martin Kučera, who recently dealt with these drafts thoroughly.