"Maurras's nostalgia for his native province had inspired him to learn the Provençal language and eventually to join the Félibres, a tiny group of southern émigrés in Paris who sought to promote the Provençal renaissance inaugurated by the poet Frédéric Mistral. From this provincial, back-to-the-soil milieu emerged the guiding principles of Maurras's peculiar brand of royalism: political decentralization, restoration of the pre-revolutionary provincial boundaries, opposition to statism, official recognition of Provençal. Such doctrines hardly appealed to the cosmopolitan young Parisian who had recently observed the failure of Bavarian separatism and the enviable vitality of the unitary German Empire. In a subsequent letter Bainville declared himself in favor of centralization and accused Maurras of exaggerating the intelligence of France's rural population."