The Renaixença ("rebirth" or "renaissance") was a cultural, historical and literary movement that pursued, in the wake of European Romanticism, the recovery of the Catalans' own language and literature after a century of repression and radical political and economical changes. As time went by, and particularly immediately after the fiasco of the Revolution of 1868 (led by the Catalan general Juan Prim) and the subsequent fail of the First Spanish Republic (1873–1874), which many Catalans expected an instauration of a federal republic, the movement acquired a clear political character, directed to the attainment of self-government for Catalonia within the framework of the Spanish liberal state.