Counter-revolutionary Movement Research Articles

Some Things That Have Happened toThe Sun After September 1965: Politics and the Interpretation of an Indonesian Painting

As most tell the story, the mysterious and fearful twilight of Sukarno's Indonesia began in Jakarta sometime after sundown on the last day of September 1965. That night and in the early hours of October 1, a group led by leftist, middle-ranking military officers calling themselves the September Thirtieth Movement kidnapped and killed six generals in an attempted putsch. In its radio broadcasts the following morning, the movement announced its loyalty to President Sukarno and claimed that it had acted in order to thwart a coup planned by a ‘Council of Generals.’ In the year leading up to the putsch, the president's hold on power had been strained by the increasing polarization between the army and disaffected Muslims on the one hand, and Sukarno and the PKI—the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Kommunis Indonesia)— on the other. Sukarno's ill health, factionalism within military ranks, and the shadow of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) only added to the anxiety and uncertainty. It is unclear whether this Council of Generals had anything more than a phantom existence. What is clear is that the head of the strategic reserve command in Jakarta, Major General Soeharto, was quick to manipulate the situation and bring the movement to a halt within hours. In an evening radio broadcast on October 1, Soeharto described the putsch as a counter-revolutionary movement and told listeners that the army and police under his leadership had regained control.

Against Rousseau: "On the state of nature" and "On the sovereignty of the people"

On the State of Nature and On the Sovereignty of the People are Maistre's most comprehensive treatment of Rousseau's ideas and his most sustained critique of the ideological foundations of the revolution. On the State of Nature, a detailed critique of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, focuses on Rousseau's belief in the natural goodness of man; On the Sovereignty of the People, a critique of Social Contract, explores Rousseau's theory of popular sovereignty. In Maistre's eyes Rousseau encouraged the socially destructive individualism that lay at the heart of the French Revolution. However, the essays reveal some surprising ambiguities in the relationship between two seminal thinkers who are usually thought of as polar opposites, suggesting that Maistre's vision was more akin to Rousseau's than he would have admitted. Against Rousseau offers valuable insights into the evolution of Maistre's counter-revolutionary ideas during the crucial years of 1792-97 and illustrates his remarkable insights into society and politics. It is vital to any consideration of his thought or the counter-revolutionary movement in eighteenth-century France.

The Failure of Popular Counter-Revolution in Risorgimento Italy: the Case of the Centurions, 1831–1847

In contrast to the innumerable studies of the revolutionary movement in risorgimento Italy, the popular counter-revolutionary movement has received scant attention from historians. Reasons for this neglect are not hard to find: distaste for what is perceived as a retrograde movement on behalf of a deservedly lost cause reinforces the normal tendency of historians to concentrate on the ‘winners’ rather than the ‘losers’ who by their very nature seem of less significance. That the Italian popular counter-revolution, was among the losers of history is undeniable: it did not succeed in its own time, nor did it contribute to any of the great progressive movements that transformed European society over the next century. Nonetheless, this neglect seems unjustified. To ignore a movement that had the support of a sizeable part of the Italian people – indeed, greater support at times than the risorgimento itself, which few historians would deny was the work of a small elite – can only result in a very distorted picture of nineteenth-century Italy. Moreover, to understand the development of a complex historical event such as the risorgimento, it is not sufficient to study only the winners, for the nature and weaknesses of the losers may also have played a major role in determining the outcome. This raises a fundamental question concerning the Italian counter-revolution: enjoying as it did wide popular support, why did it accomplish so little? It had its moments of triumph, but in general its record was unimpressive. Why did not this reservoir of popular support give conservatives the upper hand and abort the risorgimento? Why, in particular, did conservative governments make so little use of this apparently potent ally?

Women's Memory, Women's History, Women's Political Action: The French Revolution in Retrospect, 1789-1889-1989

Women's Memory, Women's History, Women's Political Action: The French Revolution in Retrospect, Ί789-Ί889-Ί989* Karen Offen In April 1989, over five hundred scholars and women's movement activists gathered in France, at the Le Mirail campus of the University of Toulouse, to commemorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution by insisting on the historical role of women, the issue of their rights, and the importance of gender in the politics of the revolutionary era. Nearly two hundred papers were presented. Most—though by no means all—of them were the work of women scholars with graduate degrees in history, law, literature, political science, and art history. These scholars came not only from France, both Germanies, neighboring Belgium and Switzerland, and the Netherlands, but also from Tunisia, Canada, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan. The Toulouse congress had several official and several unofficial justifications . The organizers' stated objectives included highlighting the participation of women as active subjects in the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, thereby encouraging critical reflection on the issues of equality, citizenship, natural law, and universalism. Other objectives were to arrive at a deeper understanding of the social construction of the sexes, and its historical operations during the revolutionary period, and to encourage an interdisciplinary enrichment of methods of historical research.1 Participants shared what they had learned from exhuming and reexamining the historical memory of French women's participation in the revolution. They reevaluated its varied aspects in accordance with the rigorous evidential standards of contemporary historical analysis, and often in the light of theoretical concerns generated by contemporary feminism. Some of those present also deemed it important to remind present-day women's movement activists and the world at large of the important tradition of French women's political activism, the difficulties of their struggle, and the obstacles they faced, and to celebrate the vital legacy of French revolutionary principles for contemporary women—and men.2 Activists ©1990 Journal of Women's History. Vol. ι No. 3 (Winter)_________________ *This is an expanded version of a paper presented at the International Colloquium "Les Femmes et Ia Révolution Française," April 12-13,1989, in Toulouse, France, and at the May 1989 International Congress on the History of the French Revolution in Washington, D.C. I am particularly indebted to the provocative reflections on memory and feminist history by Laurence Klejman & Florence Rochefort, "Féminisme -Histoire-Mémoire," Penelope no. 12 (Spring 1985): 129-38, and Michèle RiotSarcey , "Mémoire et oubli," ibid. : 139-48.1 would also like to thank Patrick Hutton and Bonnie Smith for their counsel. 212 Journal of Women's History Winter used the Toulouse conference as an occasion to found a national French feminist studies organization, within the framework of a pan-European Community women's studies initiative.3 The Toulouse Congress and the French Revolutionary Bicentennial raise important questions about the intertwined relationship between memory, history, and political action, and the role that gender may play in this relationship. In this article, I will address three questions concerning this relationship that refer particularly to women's history in the revolutionary period: first, what have women (especially those who are politically active) known about this history; second, from what sources do they know it (that is, how have they found out); and, third, what relationship can be said to exist between such historical knowledge and women's subsequent political action, and how should we understand it? It is paradoxical, for example, that although many women and men are intrinsically interested in women's history, and that there is clearly an audience for the plethora of scholarly and popular works now being published, a significant number of activists in the contemporary women's movement have only a cursory or highly selective historical memory. Some, including a surprising number of highly educated women and men, are skeptical about the utility of historical knowledge except as a form of entertainment. How, then, are we to understand the historical legacy of the French Revolution as it concerns women? Of what use is this particular "historical memory," so much discussed at Toulouse, for contemporary women?4 The legacy itself has three staple...

Restoration and Repression: The Language Projects of the Royal Society

Restoration and Repression: The Language Projects of the Royal Society JOEL REED Historians studying the eighteenth century need not look to V. N. Voloshinov to realize that “the word is the most sensitive index of social changes”; writings of the early 1700s show an awareness of language’s social context two hundred years before Voloshinov made his observa­ tion, even if those doing the work would find themselves opposed to Voloshinov’s motivations.1 At the close of the seventeenth century mem­ bers of the Royal Society were doing the most important work on the English language, Thomas Sprat and Bishop John Wilkins in particular. We might in retrospect call their work socio-linguistics and, in Sprat’s case, a kind of discourse analysis, for they were especially concerned with the social context of language usage, with the two-way relationship between language and the society which speaks it. Of course, an impor­ tant distinction between Voloshinov and his predecessors in socio­ linguistics is that while Voloshinov’s project was linked with one of the most important revolutions of our century, we can link the Royal Socie­ ty’s linguistics to the most significant counter-revolutionary movement of theirs: the Restoration.2 Paralleling the restoration of the monarchy were Sprat and Wilkins’s efforts to restore language to an earlier, mythic purity, a double return of the repressed that is by no means coincidental. The politics of Royal Society linguistics is at least as significant as the Society’s scientific con­ 399 400 / REED tributions to the study of language for what it reveals about the political and ideological shifts at the turn of the century. In their work we see an important conjunction of the beginnings of scientific discourse, the epi­ steme of rational experimentalism that Timothy Reiss investigates, and a much older theological discourse which in the context of the Restoration could only be called a politico-theology.3 Royal Society discourse analy­ sis was particularly concerned with the relation between a fallen language and a fallen state, and with the proposition that a language saved from the fall, a language redeemed, could play a part in saving from corrup­ tion the state which speaks that language. This linguistic politico-theology was developed in two closely linked texts. Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) and Wilkins’s Essay Towards A Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) were printed for the Royal Society only a year apart, though the chronology of the texts must be complicated by the fact that Wilkins had completed his Essay in 1665, and it was nearly completely in print in 1666 when it was destroyed by the London fire.4 Thus, deciding which came first, Sprat or Wilkins, and which text is the primary or original one in the politicotheological linguistics, is more complex than it might seem from publica­ tion dates; the matter is complicated still further when we realize that Wilkins acted as a supervisor and ghost writer of Sprat’s History.5 Of course, this conjunction does not suggest that we regard these texts as identical; Wilkins’s invention of a universal language is precisely an example of the kind of research that Sprat refers to as the Royal Society’s principal work, while Sprat’s text, rather than being a particular scien­ tific study, has other functions. His history was written only five years after the Society received its charter from Charles II, but Sprat takes advantage of his project to work in a statement of intentions —a mani­ festo of sorts —as well as a “Defence and Recommendation of Experi­ mental Knowledge.”6 But an investigation of the development of a new discourse that relies heavily on the older theological forms allows us to see their work, at least on language and language history, in a close and even complementary relation. The Restoration plays an important role in their linguistic projects, both as a political and ideological ground, for what motivates Royal Society linguistics is precisely the restoration of an Adamic language and a return to an earlier time and social order that can be used to push forward new national projects. In a passage often...

Charles-Francois Dumouriez and the Revolutionizing of French Foreign Affairs in 1792

Although the National Constituent Assembly, during 1789-91, subjected French internal institutions to a thorough revolutionary reorganization, it intended to leave the formulation and administration of foreign policy to the king. Nevertheless, external events obliged that Assembly to take cognizance of international relations and foreign policy. By May 1790 the Nootka Sound controversy raised the question of whether the family compact with Spain, which reflected the interests and goals of the Bourbon dynasty, was consistent with the interests and goals of the sovereign people of France. In August 1791 the petitions of the people of Avignon and the Comtat-Venaissin for annexation to France led the Assembly to decide that the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people required that these territories be annexed to France, even though under the international law of the Old Regime they belonged to the pope. Finally, the suspected collusion between Louis XVI and a European counterrevolutionary movement provoked a growing conviction among the deputies of the Left that the foreign policy of the French crown and the aims of the representative assembly of the French people were in direct conflict. Thus, the idea that the formulation and conduct of foreign policy could remain in the hands of the king alone became increasingly incompatible with the revolutionary idea that the interests and will of the people, or the nation, were primary.

Controlled Repression in Salazar's Portugal

The first of Portugal's two experiments with liberal democratic forms ended in 1926 when the civilian right, the landed oligarchy, and the military joined forces in a counter-revolutionary movement that seized power and laid the ground for Europe's lengthiest dictatorship of the right. For the next forty-eight years, organized opposition to Portuguese authoritarianism was miniscule and ultimately it was contradictions within the apparatus of state that caused the regime to topple in 1974. This was a sudden demise, but over the long term, the regime's dependence on the capability of a single individual Professor Ant6nio d'Oliveira Salazar had been a fatal weakness. At no time did the dictator virtually a reclusive personality encourage internal debate or establish mechanisms for choosing a successor. His was an informal personalist regime that might have come under sustained challenge sooner but for a key mitigating circumstance. Portuguese authoritarianism consistently displayed a high degree of rationality in the area of internal security. For many years, an extremely efficient undercover police apparatus kept down opposition without resorting to total repression: over four decades, political murders committed in metropolitan Portugal amounted to less than 500. However, opposition forces remained continually diffuse and inactive in a country where, after the first few years, the governing elite was not popular, to say the least.

Trotsky's Autobiography

Leon Trotsky's My Life, An Attempt at an Autobiography (Moia zhizn'. Opyt avtobiografii, 1929) was written in the classical autobiographical situation: a man at one point in time looks back over the whole of his life and tries to derive a significance from it. The historical occasion is momentous. Trotsky has been declared an enemy of the Soviet Union, the ringleader of a counter-revolutionary movement, and has been exiled to Constantinople. He considers the charge criminal and submits to the exile only by force. Now, on the island of Prinkipo, he needs to interpret this event, to understand how the course of his life, once brimming with personal power, has come to such a personal defeat. His solution is to minimize the personal. He writes in the Foreword:

The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution

On February 19, 1934, Chiang Kai-shek inaugurated the New Life Movement in Nanchang, Kiangsi, with the express goal of “revolutionizing” Chinese life. The Kuomintang leadership, holding the material and spiritual “degeneration” of the people responsible for China's continued crisis, decided at this time to launch a movement for hygienic and behavioral reform to revitalize the country. The movement was to signal the start of a new phase of Chinese history, one that was to be both conserving and revolutionary in spirit. It would achieve the most fundamental goals of the Chinese revolution without sacrificing native traditions. Nevertheless, the stress on the revival of native morality was the most striking aspect of the movement with its historical context, and endowed it with an aura of conservatism that overshadowed its revolutionary claims and has dominated its image since then. This image is somewhat misleading in its implication that the New Life Movement was the expression of a traditionalist upsurge in the Kuomintang during the Nanking Decade (1928–1937). The present study attempts a close analysis of New Life ideology—used here in the sense of a world view that underlay conceptions of politics and society—to demonstrate that the conservatism and the revolutionary claims of the New Life Movement must be taken equally seriously. The movement was conservative, but conservative in a very specific sense: far from being a reaffirmation of traditional Chinese political conceptions, it was fashioned by and in response to the twentieth-century Chinese revolution. Its underlying spirit had greater affinity with modern counterrevolutionary movements than with political attitudes inherited from China's past. It was, in short, not a traditional but a modern response to a modern problem.

The Revolutionary Situation in Thailand

The present paper is concerned with: (1) providing an account of the overthrow of the military government in Thailand in October 1973 by the massive force of students and other people; (2) investigating the historical background and effects of that bloody October; (3) analysing the process of political control and student activism before and after October 1973; and (4) interpreting the orientations and directions in which different activist or political groups escalate, or are likely to escalate, into revolutionary or counter-revolutionary movements.

The origins of the Orange Order and the United Irishmen

The paper analyses the social-structural conditions of existence and the consequent political features of two eighteenth-century social movements, the United Irishmen and the Orange Order. Many subsequent historians have identified the United Irishmen as a purely revolutionary movement and the Orange Order as a purely counter-revolutionary movement in the service of the established order. Historical evidence concerning the social, economic and political situation in Ireland at this time is employed to demonstrate that this antithesis is untenable and that the political character of these movements is far more complex.

Protestant-Catholic Relations and the Roots of the First Popular Counterrevolutionary Movement in France

Previous articleNext article No AccessErratumProtestant-Catholic Relations and the Roots of the First Popular Counterrevolutionary Movement in FranceJames N. HoodJames N. Hood Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 43, Number 4Dec., 1971 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/240702 Copyright 1971 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Protestant-Catholic Relations and the Roots of the First Popular Counterrevolutionary Movement in France

Founded by Phoenicians, according to the Encvclope'die, and greatly expanded as the Roman colony Nemausus, Nimes later shrank until most of the population lived within the walls of the Arena. It grew slowly from a medieval center of local commerce until rapid industrial concentration late in the eighteenth century transformed it into the eighth largest city in France and the greatest industrial center south of Lyon.' As in many cities which experienced less spectacular commercial expansion, society in Nimes disintegrated briefly into anarchy during the Revolution. There, however, reactionaries organized popular support by the end of 1789, while elsewhere opposition to the Revolution was almost exclusively limited to noble and clerical circles for two more years. Both the emergence of this first popular counterrevolutionary movement and its repression expressed a political intolerance, common later in the Revolution, which culminated in Nimes in May and June of 1790-a year of social calm in most of France. On May Day patriots reported that members of counterrevolutionary companies of the citizen militia had planted a maypole before the mayor's house, dancing, singing, and crying, live the King! Long live the Cross! Down with the Nation! The next day royal soldiers, accompanied by militiamen wearing the new national tricolor, were stoned by other militiamen wearing the royal white cockade. ILater, crowds of poor, antipatriot peasants reportedly expressed their bitter hatred for Prot-