Václav Klofáč

Václav Jaroslav Klofáč (21 September 1868 – 10 July 1942) was a Czech politician and one of the founders of the Czech National Social Party. Klofáč became one of the best known radical nationalist Czech politicians in the Habsburg monarchy.

Biography

Václav Klofáč was born in 1868 in

His frustrations with the Young Czechs led Klofáč to become one of the founders of the National Social party (originally the National Workers party) in 1898. He was elected to the Austrian parliament for the first time in 1901 along with his colleagues Václav Choc and Václav Fresl, where he used his seat in the parliament to attack the government for what he believed were its anti-Czech, militarist and Catholic policies. Unlike many nationalists of his day, Klofáč was an ardent supporter of women's right to the vote. The stridency of his anti-Habsburg politics led to his arrest by the Austrian authorities on charges of treason in 1915. Although he was sentenced to death, Klofáč was amnestied in 1917 along with many other prominent Czech politicians. In 1939 Klofáč escaped a second incarceration, when Bohemia was occupied by the Germans, due to his impending death. From January 1919 to May 1920 Klofáč served as Czechoslovakia’s minister of national defense.

An avowed pacifist, Klofáč became the first Minister of Defense of

A strong supporter of the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš Masaryk. From 1918 to 1938, Klofáč was a publicist for public understanding and support of political democracy and Masaryk’s concept of the Czechoslovak state. Klofáč remained politically active until the late 1930s when he withdrew from political life to his country home, where he died in 1942.

Secondary sources

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Václav Jaroslav Klofáč

• Garver, Bruce, “Václav Klofáč and the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party,” in John Morison, ed. The Czech and Slovak Experience (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992): 102-23
• Krečmer, Josef, Václav Klofáč a jeho národní socialismus (Prague: Adonal, 2000)
• Šantruček, Bohuslav, Václav Klofáč (1868–1928), Pohledy do života a díla (Prague: Melantrich, 1928)