Moravia; Countryside; Rural Population; Modernization; Politicization; Education; Civic Activism

This paper deals with the period at the turn of the 20th century when the wave of social and economic changes came even to the poor and peripheral regions such as Wallachia in the eastern part of Moravia as a follow-up to the abolishment of servitude, to the industrial, transport and agricultural revolution, the ascension of the civil society and the development of the education system. This paper follows the modernisation effort of the state, manifested mainly in the education system which had experienced a fundamental change, and also the initiative of the civil society. The national ideology and civic activism were implemented into the rural milieu from the urban milieu, mainly because of the activities of the members of the social group of the intelligentsia who had migrated there, subsequently becoming deeply rooted and partially based on the local initiatives. The cooperative system and association were a distinctive feature of the social modernisation and political mobilisation of the rural milieu. Politisation had set in at the end of the 19th century in connection with the spreading of the right to vote and, in the ethnically homogeneous Czech language milieu, it had mainly the character of competition between the clerical and progressive (anti-clerical) camp.