History
After the Crimean War, Fennomans founded the Finnish Party and intensified the language strife, yearning to raise the Finnish language and Finnic culture from peasant status to the position of a national language and a national culture. The opposition, the Svecomans, tried to defend the status of Swedish and the ties to the Germanic world.
Although the notion of Fennomans was not as common after Paasikivi's (born 1870) generation, their ideas have dominated the Finns' understanding of their nation.
Many of the first generation of Fennomans were originally Swedish-speaking as their mother tongue. Some of the originally Swedish-speaking Fennomans learned Finnish, and made a point of using it inside and outside the home.
Several Fennomans were from Finnish or bilingual homes. Some originally had Swedish surnames, common in Finland at that time.
Most of the Fennomans also Finnicized their family names, particularly from the end of the 19th century.
In the last years of the 19th century, and in the first years of the 20th, the Fennoman movement split into two political parties: the Old Finnish Party and the Young Finnish Party.
Read more about this topic: Fennoman Movement
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)