And many others were absorbed.
True(I live in a country where a language was obliterated by industrialisation rather than revived), but it was hardly a lottery. There were factors. The Czechs have a lot of factors in their favour, such as a historical tradition and a clearly-defined kingdom.
And typically provide a very strong push for cultural unification.
But, specifically, in Czechia, it did the reverse. There are other exceptions.
Then the industrializing Empire shall simply set up a decent system of public schools and the Slav children shall be assimilated within a couple generations.
People have a remarkable tendency to not do this. The Greek clergy in the pre-revolt days talked confidently about Bulgarians and Serbs being gone soon. And the ever-resilient Slovaks were latterly under a pretty serious Magyarisation program. The fact is, moher tongue is called mother tongue and not teacher tongue for a reason. Our first language and the one we identify with is the one we learn from our families, which gives people a remarkable continuity.
And why the Bohemian intellectual elites of an Empire that has been united for a half millennium under Germanic-Italian cultural hegemony shall develop an irresistible nationalistic fascination for quaint peasant dialects ?
That's not how it works. An industrial revolution
creates a new intellectual elite from the people who have bettered their social status and are able to send their children to a proper education, and this new elite can actively promote their language. A classis example is the Ukrainians, who gained awareness of themselves as distinct within (not from: this is a bit of apet issue with me) Russia at pretty much exactly the time a univesity was founded in Kiev with th explicit purpose of introducing an intellectual elite to Ukraine that wasn't Polish.
Also, "quaint peasant dialects"? Given this, your glee at "annoying Slavophiles", and the conspicuous absense of Russia from your list of prominent European nations rather leads me to feel that whatever nationalist agendas you may or may not have, you have some sort of problem with Slavs.
Just like Old Egyptian and Aramaic. Got any luck finding people speaking it nowadays ?
On the other side of the coin, Slovak (seriously, though, Slovak!), a language
without deep and strong roots of tradition, weathered the centuries.
If it may give you a different perspective on my PoV, I find deeply unsightly that the Romans didn't conquer Germania and kept their Empire together, so bringing Latinization and enduring political-cultural unity to all of Europe west of the steppes. That said, the less languages are around to create rallying points for nationalist Balkanization misery in Europe and the world, the better, regardless of whether the political and cultural unification is accomplished by the Romans, the Franks, the French, the Germans, the Spanish, or whomever.
I should probably have guessed from the name.
I think the hopeless romantic who is a -phile for everybody and the calculating nations-suck bloke who is a -phile for the top-dog are just going to hvae to disagree. I like languages, cultures, and traditions purely on their own merits, you don't.
Liking the people is way different from rooting for Balkanization. Personally I rather prefer the way that Cantonese and Pekingese, or Texans and Californians, can, or the Romans could, express meaningful cultural differences while being able to share the same greater cultural and political unity, and root for TLs where that kind of difference in unity is far more widespread throughout the world, espeically in my preferred continent.
That doesn't mean who you have to go around referring to Czech as a "quaint peasent dialect". In you're determination to Destroy the Slavs, you're not really talking about Texans and Californians so much as modern Americans everywhere and the native peoples everywhere.
