Resumen de From the revolutionary assembly to the House of Lords: František Ladislav Rieger and the difficult birth of modernparliamentarism in the Habsburg monarchy

Pavel Máša

• Czech politician František Ladislav Rieger served as a deputy invarious legislative bodies in Bohemia and the Habsburgmonarchy from the revolutionary year of 1848 until his death in1903. At the beginning of his public activity, he had alreadyearned a European reputation when he defended the principlethat ‘all power comes from the people’ at the Austrian Reichstag.But in the end he died as an emperor-appointed member of theHouse of Lords and had to face the reproach that during hislifetime he had betrayed the liberal ideals of his youth. Rieger’spolitical career was really complicated and greatly influenced bythe upheavals of the time and the same can be said of his viewson the nature of parliamentarism. Thanks to this, we can useRieger’s case to demonstrate some of the difficulties that modernparliamentarism in the Central Europe had to face at its birth.