The following decades saw the rise of the political Catalanism still prevalent today: the first formulations of the modern Catalan national identity can be seen in Valentí Almirall, a relevant federalist republican. Almirall, despite being a left-wing republican, tried to unite the Catalan left and right, but he did not succeed because there were too many divergences between the two currents. He promoted the First Catalanist Congress, held in 1880, in which the different Catalanist groups were united: federal republicanism and the apolitical current, the literary one, from "La Renaixença" magazine, but the leftist tendencies of Almirall caused that the group of the Renaixença left the Congress and broke the agreement. However, the Congress took three fundamental agreements: creating an entity that brings together Catalanism (the Centre Català, "Catalan Center"), the beginning of efforts to establish the Academy of the Catalan Language, and the drafting of a document on defense of Catalan as official language. The crisis of the Centre Català was shown due the differences around the position about the 1888 Barcelona Universal Exposition. The opposite positions led to the dissolution of the group, and the left-wing Catalan nationalism was seriously weakened for decades.