At the end of the 18th century, there was growing resentment in Czechoslovakia towards the Bohemian nobles with their inherited privileges. There was growing concern that a Czechoslovakia national identity did not exist and this concern eventually led to the formation of a group of Czech intellectual determined to create a Czech national identity. They went about this by publishing dictionaries and grammars, newspapers and periodicals, and by writing many works of scholarship and belles lettres. This established a Czech character for previously established Bohemian institutions. During this period, there were also attempts to federalize the Habsburg Monarchy into ethnic units that would be politically and culturally equal but these attempts remained suppressed and the revival period was more cultural than political. The changing role of the Habsburg monarch in Czechoslovakia was threatening the Bohemian German minority and the tension between this minority and the rest of the Czech population was a factor that led to the racism that eventually led to the Nazi period.

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