The article discusses the attitude of the Hotel Lambert political group towards Josip Jelacic who, as the author indicates, already in 1844 was perceived as the most outstanding Croatian officer. After the outbreak of the Spring of Nations in the Habsburg monarchy (1848), efforts of the Hotel Lambert emissaries were concentrated on persuading the ban of Croatia to withdraw his troops from Lombardy, at the time involved in a campaign against Austria, and to join the anti-Habsburg uprising in Hungary. The failure of those attempts, which engaged even French and Sardinian diplomats, meant that from the beginning of 1849 the predominant conception consisted of depriving Jelacic of power by supporting the local Croatian opposition headed by Ljudevit Gaj. The repressions deployed by Jelacic towards the opposition press and the Hotel Lambert envoys as well as the stifling of the insurrection in Hungary by the Russian army, led to the ultimate fall of the plan. The author accentuates that the basic reason for the failure of the projects conceived by Hotel Lambert was the conflict between Croatian political elites aspiring to the greatest possible independence of the country, and the majority of Hungarian society, which envisaged Croatia as one of the provinces of Hungary.
