Arrest of General Changarnier during Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851, image of a man in a nightshirt in his bedroom being arrested by soldiers
20 November 2020
A coup d’état is a sudden, illegal or extra-constitutional change in a government. The phrase is often shortened to simply coup. It can be either violent or non-violent, but revolutions and civil wars are not generally considered to be coups d’état. Typically, a coup d’état involves the military seizing the reins of power. The term is, obviously, borrowed from French. A coup is literally a blow or stroke, from from the Latin colaphus, a blow with the fist, and the Greek κόλαϕος (kolaphos), a cuff or buffet. And état means state; both état and state come from the Latin status, meaning position or rank. So, a coup d’état is a stroke or blow of state.
But the term didn’t always carry the above sense. When it first entered into English, it referred to a masterful political stratagem. We see it in English use by 1646 in James Howell’s Lustra Ludovici, in which he used the term to describe Cardinal Richelieu’s strategy to cut off support to the Protestant Huguenots:
With this Match with England, there was an alliance also made about the same time with Holland for a summe of Money. These were the two first Coups d' estat, stroaks of State that he made, and it was done with this forecast, that France might be the better enabled to suppres them of the Religion, which the Cardinal found to be the greatest weaknes of that Kingdom.
And in his 1811 Despotism: or the Fall of the Jesuits, Isaac Disraeli, the father of the British prime minister, described a coup d’état as a stratagem to dispose of a ruler’s enemies, emphasizing how it must be kept secret in order to succeed:
It is evident that, among the Arcana Imperiorum, there are sometimes what the political French term, great Coups d’Etat, to be performed; and these Arcana, to adopt the words of Tacitus, are nothing less than flagitia imperiorum, political crimes, supposed to be necessary to preserve the governing Powers. These can only be confided to a select few, to whom the inmost secrets of the King's heart are exposed; from their nature they cannot be deliberated on in any open Council. Henry III. could not have concented the death of the Guises; Henry IV, that of Biron; nor Elizabeth that of Essex, but in the darkest corners of their Cabinets. The massacre of St. Bartholomew, a great Coup d'Etat, could not admit of an open Council—Stratagems are silent things. We do not take hares by blowing a trumpet, nor catch birds by hanging bells in the nets, observed a shrewd Statesman.
In an event that has echoes in the politics of the United States in 2020, the shift to seizing power happened in 1851, when Louis Bonaparte, nephew of the former emperor, conducted a coup d’état against the government of the Second Republic of France. Louis Napoleon was president of the Republic and had just unsuccessfully tried to amend the constitution to allow himself to remain in power for another term. When he failed to achieve the required votes in the Assembly to do so, he used the military to dissolve the Assembly and the Second Republic, thus establishing the Second Empire with himself as Emperor Napoleon III. His actions were both an elimination of his enemies and an extra-constitutional seizure of power. As reported in the London Morning Post on 3 December 1851, the day after the coup d’état:
Nothing could show more strongly the profound conviction prevalent through France, that the Assembly had forgotten its duties and mistaken its proper course, than the quiet approval with which the middle classes contemplated the impending fate of their representatives, while a coup d’état was merely a thing talked of; and it seems, as we judged would be the case, that nothing could be more complete than the indifference with which the actual cessation of their existence, as a member of the body politic, has been regarded by the citizens of Paris.
[...]
Of himself, he has attempted to establish no sovereignty—he claims no power beyond that which he employs in giving the nation freedom to do its own work, and make its own choice. In order to give that freedom, it was necessary, beyond all doubt, to get rid of the Assembly, which had shown itself so disposed to employ its last days in plotting against the free action of public opinion to which the “coup d’état” refers the whole settlement of future government.
The Morning Post got that last bit wrong, of course.
Sources:
Disraeli, Isaac. Despotism: or the Fall of the Jesuits, vol. 2 of 2. London: John Murray, 1811, 338–39. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Howell, James. Lustra Ludovici, or the Life of the Late Victorious King of France, Louis XIII, and of His Cardinal Richelieu. London: Humphrey Moseley, 1646. 167. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Morning Post (London), 3 December 1851, 4. Gale News Vault.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. coup, n.3, coup, n.1.
Image Credit: Illustrated London News, 13 December 1851, 712. Public domain image.