During the period of Austro-Hungarian rule in Transylvania and Ottoman suzerainty over Wallachia and Moldavia, most Romanians were in the situation of being second-class citizens (or even non-citizens) in their own country. In some Transylvanian cities, such as Braşov (at that time the Saxon citadel of Kronstadt), Romanians were not allowed to even to reside within the city walls.

Increasingly, in the Romantic era, the concept of a national state emerged among the Romanians, as among many other peoples of Europe. Defining themselves against the nearby Slavs, Germans, and Hungarians, the nationalist Romanians looked for models of nationality in the other "Latin" countries, notably France.

As in most European countries, 1848 brought revolution to Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania, announced by the Tudor Vladimirescu's rebellion in 1821. Its goals - complete independence for the first two and national emancipation in the third - remained unfulfilled, but were the basis of the subsequent evolutions.

The Romanians' expressed desire to officially unite in a single state being unsupported by the Great Powers, the electors in both Moldavia and Wallachia chose the same person – Alexandru Ioan Cuza – as prince (Domnitor in Romanian). Thus, Romania was created as a personal union, albeit a Romania that didn't include Transylvania, where Romanian nationalism inevitably ran up against Hungarian nationalism. For some time yet, the Austria-Hungary, especially under the Dual Monarchy of 1867, would keep the Hungarians firmly in control, even in parts of Transylvania where Romanians constituted a local majority.

In 1861 the Transylvanian Association for the Literature and Culture of the Romanians (ASTRA ) was founded in Sibiu (then Hermannstadt), protected by an uncommonly enlightened local government composed largely of Germans.

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