Formed by disaffected Liberals, this describes itself as "autonomist"—a constitutional half-way house that suits Quebec's newly pragmatic nationalism.
A leader of the National Democratic Party from its foundation (1897), he opposed revolutionary methods of establishing an independent Poland and favoured an autonomist solution to national aspirations within the Russian Empire.
Also, a dispute with Brazil known as the Acre problem was resolved: this had involved an unsuccessful attempt by the central government to crush an autonomist rebellion (1889 1903) in the rubber-boom territory of Acre on the Brazilian border.
He became a leader of the autonomist parties, and in 1897 he was instrumental in obtaining Puerto Rico's charter of home rule from Spain.
Since then many of the French prewar governmental policies that had clashed with the region's particularism have been modified, and the autonomist movement has largely disappeared.
From the summer of 1915, however, he looked solely to the Western powers for deliverance and discarded his autonomist program for one demanding full national sovereignty for Poland.
Sicily, where autonomist opposition to the Bourbon government was endemic and extreme, was the most obvious place for a democratic revival.
He soon became secretary of state and later president of the first autonomist cabinet.
Many young people were attracted by the violent rhetoric of the ultraleftist "autonomist" groups or by the neofascist movement, which had long had a following in the capital.
In Italy, autonomist meant acting on one's own, but the movement known as Autonomia was people acting independently but also in concert, coöperating not because they were being ordered to by a charismatic leader but because they were suddenly guided by basic personal ideas and drives.
The process reads as trancelike and autonomist; the effect is delicately hallucinatory, like a mirage seen through clouds or smoke, as well as an unusually simple joining of geometry and gesture.
