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:
“Bias, point of view, fury—are they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)