[2] During the decades that followed, Poles largely forsook the goal of immediate independence and turned instead to fortifying the nation through the subtler means of education, economic development and modernization.
For some, the adoption of organic work meant permanent resignation to foreign rule, but many advocates recommended it as a strategy to combat repression and to await an eventual opportunity for the achievement of self-government.
Neither as colourful as the Polish rebellions nor as loftily enshrined in national memory, the quotidian methods of organic work proved well suited to the political conditions of the late 19th century.
Poles under Russian and German rule also endured official campaigns against the Roman Catholic Church: the cultural struggle (Kulturkampf) of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to bring the Roman Catholic Church under state control and the Russian campaign to replace Catholicism by extending Orthodoxy throughout the empire.
Poles suffered no religious persecution in predominantly-Catholic Austria, and Vienna counted on the Polish nobility as allies in the complex political calculus of its multinational realm.