On 24 July 1908, a wave of celebrations swept across the Ottoman Empire. In town squares and city streets from the Balkans to Anatolia and the Levant, vast crowds gathered, while sprawling red and white banners heralded the beginning of a new era of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Justice’. For a moment, it seemed that the empire’s kaleidoscope of ethnicities and faiths had come together: Turks and Arabs embraced Kurds and Armenians, and, amid the euphoria, Ottoman Christians, Muslims and Jews rejoiced as one. There was a ‘belief’ in the air, as one eyewitness put it, ‘that there were no longer Arabs or Turks or Armenians or Kurds in the state, but that everyone had become an Ottoman with equal rights and responsibilities’.

This tide of optimism and euphoria was unleashed after the ageing and autocratic Sultan Abdülhamid II announced his decision to restore the long-suspended Ottoman constitution. Proclaimed to much fanfare in 1876, amid an acute crisis for the empire, which was then close to war with Russia, this constitution was suspended less than two years later once the crisis had receded.

Decades later, amid a mounting military uprising in the Balkans, the Sultan concluded that only restoring the constitution could douse the flame of revolt and save his throne. A revolution was underway that promised to transform the empire’s political order.

The revolutionaries responsible for this dramatic coup d’état belonged to a late-Ottoman political movement called the Young Turks. The movement had emerged as a small, clandestine group of students at Istanbul’s Royal Medical Academy in 1889, but rapidly spread to the other Ottoman civil and military colleges. Before long, a whole generation of young civil servants and officers had been captured by the Young Turks’ ideals.

What were their ideals? These are not always easy to define. The Young Turk banner provided a rallying point for diverse political and ideological tendencies, ranging from expressions of Ottoman liberalism to Turkist proto-nationalism. And despite their name, they were not all ethnic Turks: the movement’s founders were two Kurds, an Albanian and a Circassian. Nonetheless, the Turkist character of the movement was strong, and grew more dominant over time.

What really bound the Young Turks together was their common hatred for the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid, with its fawning courtiers, cliquey patronage networks, and repressive secret police. Educated in the meritocratic hothouses of the Ottoman Tanzimat – the name given to a sweeping series of 19th-century modernising reforms – the Young Turks’ whole formation had been shaped by a westward-looking devotion to scientific rationalism and legalistic order, combined with a strong dose of Ottoman patriotism. They saw the Sultan’s crony court and pan-Islamic ideology as the antithesis of their core convictions. They decried a regime that, in their eyes, bred sycophantic loyalty to a corrupt despot rather than a selfless devotion to the state (devlet) or fatherland (vatan).

The Young Turks were in many ways typical late-19th century liberal nationalists, but with an Ottoman twist. They believed that it would be necessary to reform, rationalise and westernise the Ottoman state in order to save it. They saw the dormant 1876 constitution as the battering ram with which to smash Abdülhamid’s reactionary regime.

The Sultan had tried to clamp down on the Young Turks and neuter their political challenge to his rule, but to no avail. Waves of repression failed to crush them; bribes and inducements were unable to kill them with kindness.

Instead, the Young Turks fled into exile, organised themselves into a Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) based in Paris, founded political journals, and circulated stinging critiques of the Sultan’s rule through clandestine networks within the Ottoman domains.

The founding regulations of the CUP – set up in 1895 – railed against ‘the existing Ottoman government, which… stops all Ottomans from progress and precipitated the fall of the fatherland into the hands of foreign molestation and coercion’. The first edition of the CUP’s house journal – Meşveret – stated that the group’s task was to ‘salvage the state and the caliphate’.

Preparing for a revolution, the CUP’s exiled leaders built up their connections with the officer corps of the empire’s Balkan provinces, bided their time, and then struck. When Young Turk officers launched an uprising in Macedonia on 3 July 1908, the forces sent by Sultan Abdülhamid to restore order quickly crumbled. The insurgency, led by two officers in the Ottoman Third Army – Ahmed Niyazi and Ismail Enver – gained momentum, and became irresistible. Within weeks, it was clear that Abdülhamid had no other option but to concede to the Young Turks’ central demand – to restore the Ottoman constitution.

Evoking the slogans of the French Revolution, the Young Turks swept into Istanbul with the rallying cry of ‘Liberty’ (Hürriyet), and their revolution was greeted with jubilation across the empire. However, they soon discovered that it was easier to overturn a political order than to create a new one. And the task of governing, let alone saving, the Ottoman state would prove to be far harder than they had imagined.

The CUP’s political party won a landslide in elections held in late 1908. But the Young Turks’ leaders, many of whom were military men and politically inexperienced, at first preferred to leave day-to-day government to civilian politicians.

Then, in April 1909, they were rocked by a counter-revolution that temporarily succeeded in ousting the CUP-backed government from power in Istanbul. Although the counter-revolution was quickly defeated, the episode proved to be a watershed, spelling the end of Sultanic power. In late April 1909, the defiant and troublesome Abdülhamid – a constant thorn in the Young Turks’ side – was deposed in favour of the compliant Mehmed V, a puppet with a precarious peacock throne.

More important still, in the aftermath of the counter-revolution, the Young Turks turned to increasingly tyrannical methods of rule to restore their power over the state. The liberal principles they had previously espoused were swiftly jettisoned. The Ottoman constitution, which many of them had not even read, had served its purpose in dislodging the Sultan’s supremacy. Any promise of genuine constitutional government could now be safely sacrificed on the altar of saving the empire.

Step by step, the Young Turks came to resemble the regime that they had replaced. Their capture of the state continued steadily until January 1913, when the CUP finally seized direct control of the government. From this point on, the empire’s political life would be run by a triumvirate of Young Turk diehards – Ismail Enver became minister of war, Ahmed Djemal minister of the navy, and Mehmed Talaat grand vizier, or prime minister. Now firmly in command of the reins of power, these three pashas launched a campaign of repression against dissidents, tightened their grip on the Ottoman parliament, silenced the press, and purged the armed forces. Their control of the state would remain unchallenged until the end of the First World War.

Yet for all their consolidation of power, they were unable to arrest the Ottoman empire’s precipitous decline. In 1911, Libya’s main cities were lost to an Italian invasion. In 1912-13, the Ottomans’ former subjects – Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Serbia – inflicted humiliating defeats in the Balkan Wars, reducing the empire’s once-vast European territories to a rump around Edirne. Having failed to strike an alliance with their favoured great powers, Britain and France, the Ottomans hurriedly threw in their lot with Germany and Austria-Hungary in August 1914 as Europe’s July Crisis escalated into the Great War.

All the while, the dream of a multi-national empire was also unravelling. The three pashas’ Turkification drives, imposing Ottoman Turkish as the language of education, the courts and administration throughout the empire, created powerful ethnic resentments. In time, these oppressive measures would encourage many Arab-Ottoman officers to join the Arab Revolt against the empire in 1916.

The very same Turkist chauvinism, combined with a state of war, also paved the way for the Young Turks’ most chilling, and tragic, legacy – the Armenian Genocide. For this latter crime, two of the three pashas – Talaat and Djemal – would later be assassinated by Armenian revolutionaries.

The Young Turk revolution is important because it set the pattern for 20th-century Turkish politics. It established the notion that powerful military figures should act as guardians over the state, and issue constitutions whose principles could be enforced and dispensed with at the convenience of the army. The founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was profoundly shaped by the same Young Turk worldview, with its militaristic ethos and nationalist ideals, that had driven the three pashas. His state-building vision was born out of the same political ferment that arose from the collapse of the Ottoman empire.

The dramatic rise and fall of the Young Turks also warn us that liberators can easily turn into tyrants, and that new political dawns can be deceptive. Their fate provides a cautionary tale for a recently liberated Syria, where the militant Islamist group, HTS, has ousted a despotic regime, promising a new Syria for all Syrians. Like its Young Turk predecessors, the new government in Damascus is struggling to build a better order amid sectarian tensions and external threats. The tide of jubilation that swept across Syria in December 2024, resembling the celebrations that broke out across Ottoman lands in July 1908, was only the opening chapter of a young revolution yet to run its course.