The considerations that drove the French and Dutch states to tighten their communal centralism, and that drove Germans and Italians to seek unification in a common, culturally defined state, also drove cultural minorities away from the capitals from where they were governed. We may roughly distinguish two sub-types of this trend: those autonomist movements which harked back to ancient and still-remembered feudal independence (e.g. in Catalonia, Scotland, Hungary and Poland), and those which emerged with the discovery of a separate culture and identity among a local rustic populace (e.g. in Finland and the Baltic, or Bulgaria). The distinction between those two sub-types is gradual and tenuous: even the most illiterate and pre-modern peasantries were taught their national culture and ‘roots’ by intellectuals and activists from the gentry, or the professional and middle class, and even the most feudally inspired Romantic nationalists drew on the local colour of the native peasantry to underline the ancient realm's claim to continued separateness.

In itself there was nothing new in the fact that the imperial capitals of Europe had to cope with disaffected populations on their peripheries. The ‘Congress’ system that Metternich imposed after 1815 intended to subdue those restive provincials in the same gesture that should stifle all populist unrest: restoration of the monarch's central power also meant the imposition of obedience, not only of the rabble in the great metropolitan centres of Europe, but also in the provinces and margins. Whatever sedition or disaffection was going on in the outlying provinces had for centuries been a fact of life, part of the ongoing political push-and-pull of centrifugal resistance against central authority.

In the century following 1815, however, the rustic peasantry in the outlying provinces experienced a transformation: in many cases, its cultural, and specifically linguistic particularity gained for it a symbolic status which had been held in relatively low esteem before, but which now became nothing less than a badge of national identity. Peasant unrest, usually driven by oppression, exploitation, poverty and lack of legal status, was thereby transmuted into a national emancipation movement. Nationalism and the pursuit of national independence did not, of course, replace the old grievances of poverty and oppression; but it provided an indispensable focus for largescale self-identification and for a sense of solidarity between peasantry and an emerging professional class or bourgeoisie.