Young Slovenes

In 1876, they forged a fragile tactical alliance against Austrian centralism and German nationalism, and united in support of the coalition government of Eduard Taaffe.

As a response to what they considered inefficient "cabinet politics", the Young Slovenes organized mass popular rallies in support of the United Slovenia program, modelled after of Daniel O'Connell's monster meetings.

Although they supported a laicist and secularist view, they tried to avoid direct confrontation with Roman Catholisim; several liberal Catholic priests, such as the poet Simon Gregorčič, were also sympathetic to the Young Slovene movement.

The Young Slovenes issued the newspaper Slovenski narod, founded in Maribor in 1868, and controlled the editorial policy of the cultural magazine Ljubljanski zvon.

The strife between the two faction reached its height between 1886 and 1887, when the Young Slovene newspaper Slovenski narod, controlled by the radicals, started publishing a series of articles with a pronounced Pan-Slavic and Anti-Catholic content, written by the controversial pro-Russian nationalist publicist Davorin Hostnik.

The radical turn in the editorial policies of the liberal press provoked a fierce reaction in some Catholic circles, and was one of the elements that contributed to the rise of the Kulturkampf in the Slovene Lands in the mid-1880s.

In the mid-1880s, several influential Roman Catholic groups, rallied around the Bishop of Ljubljana Jakob Missia (later Archbishop of Gorizia) and the theologian Anton Mahnič, launched an attack on modernism in the Slovene Lands.