François Georgeon, Un printemps Ottoman: La révolution jeune-turque de 1908 [An Ottoman Spring: The Young Turk Revolution of 1908]. Les Belles Lettres, €26,90.

‘In the Orient, the exotic taste for freedom is transient.’ So read the headline of the review in the French daily Le Figaro of the newly published Un printemps Ottoman: La révolution jeune-turque de 1908, an historical account by the French scholar François Georgeon that holds contemporary relevance. A renowned specialist on late-Ottoman history, Georgeon is the author of an excellent biography of Abdülhamid II, the last Ottoman sultan who wielded real power. Abdülhamid believed that authoritarian rule and an emphasis on Islam as a binding force would save the Empire. The Young Turks – military officers, civil servants and intellectuals – wagered that freedom would. The Young Turks’ revolution held out an ultimately unfulfilled promise of a multiethnic and multi-confessional, liberal and democratic Ottoman polity. Does its failure provide yet another argument for the supposition that the Middle East is intrinsically alien to freedom and democracy?

In 1908, Young Turk revolutionaries forced Abdülhamid to reinstate the Ottoman constitution of 1876 – the Empire’s first – that he had suspended in 1878 when he dissolved the then newly elected parliament. The revolution was not an isolated occurrence: Georgeon brings attention to the fact that the revolutionaries were inspired by the preceding revolutions in Russia and Persia in 1905 and 1906 that had ushered in constitutional rule, and by the stunning victory in 1905 of Japan, a constitutional monarchy, over absolutist Russia. That victory reinforced the Young Turks’ conviction that constitutional rule was a source of state strength.

The reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution was greeted with an outpouring of joy and euphoria unprecedented in Ottoman history. Turks, Armenians, Greeks and others joined together in celebration as they had never done before, rallying around banners that proclaimed ‘Freedom, Equality and Justice’. The revolution decreed the equality of the Muslim, Christian and Jewish subjects of the Empire and turned it into a constitutional monarchy. ‘If an historian were someday to write a history of joy, he should devote a chapter to this moment of euphoria and collective jubilation in the Empire’, Georgeon proposes.

The Young Turks were indeed relatively young and, as it were to prove, fatefully inexperienced and unprepared for running an Empire. However, not all of them were Turks. Of the five students at the Medical Military Academy in Istanbul that founded the first Young Turk cell in 1889 one was Albanian, one Circassian, two Kurds and only one Turkish. The next step on the path to the revolution was taken with the founding in 1895 of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) by Ottoman exiles in Paris. The massacres of Armenians the same year in Anatolia shocked the Young Turks into action, but the dissidents were also encouraged by the Armenian resistance to Abdülhamid’s despotic rule. The Committee and Armenian socialist revolutionaries joined forces in the fight against autocracy. Ahmed Riza, the leader of the CUP, was greeted by Armenian students upon his return from exile.

In November 1908, less than four months after the revolution, elections were held. The biggest challenge for the Committee was to mobilise a largely analphabetic, unmotivated and suspicious Muslim electorate. ‘Elections are good for Christians, but not for us’, Muslims in the Aegean city Pergamon told an American observer. Yet the introduction of parliamentarianism had the paradoxical effect of underscoring the numerical disadvantage of non-Muslims, Greeks, Armenians and Jews, who were socially and economically the most dynamic communities of the Empire. The Greeks in particular had nourished hopes that liberal democracy was going to bestow them with a political clout commensurate with their economic, social and cultural preeminence. However, the implacable reality of numbers deprived Christians and Jews of corresponding political preeminence.

Nonetheless, it was no small feat that parliamentary rule was enshrined. Yet disasters followed in short order. The Balkan War of 1912 amputated the Empire’s European possessions and precipitated a first wave of ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Greeks, which was subsequently completed with the population exchange between Greece and the new Turkish Republic after 1923. By 1913, the former liberators had established authoritarian one-party rule. The Committee of Union and Progress then fatefully led the Empire into the First World War and perpetrated the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. By 1918, a decade after they launched a revolution to save the Empire, the Young Turks had ended up precipitating its fall. Freedom, it turned out, proved transient in the face of the surge of nationalisms and geopolitical rivalries.

Had it all been a dream, Georgeon asks. Was there ever a chance that the promises of the revolution could have been realised, if only geopolitical circumstances had been more favourable? Georgeon’s account suggests that the outcome was preordained. That may be so, but did the revolution fail because the Young Turks were ‘oriental’, as the Le Figaro review suggests?

The aftermath of the revolution revealed that there was a fundamental misunderstanding between the Young Turks and the empire’s Christian communities: while the latter saw their future in an Empire that respected their cultural and religious autonomy, the former argued for an Ottoman political community in which the religious beliefs or ethnicity of the citizens would have no bearing on their rights. The Young Turks’ notion of the social contract was anything but Middle Eastern. It aligned with post-Enlightenment European thinking; strongly influenced by French Jacobin ideals of a centralised, egalitarian state, they were excessively European rather than exponents of ‘oriental despotism’.

The fact that the modernist Young Turks were also at odds with the cultural and religious sensibilities of the conservative Muslim majority has often been noted. However, Georgeon emphasises the overlooked class aspect of the authoritarian drift of the revolutionaries: the middle-class Young Turks were partisans of free market liberalism and clamped down on workers who took advantage of the freedom that the revolution had proclaimed to stage an unprecedented wave of strikes. Georgeon points out that the Young Turks were inheritors of the deeply anchored tradition in Ottoman history that distinguished between the elite and the people. However, the primordial, entrenched fear of the people was compounded by the emerging, modern-era conflict between labour and capital. In that respect, the Young Turk revolution shared an affiliation with the bourgeois revolutions of Europe.

Ultimately, the bourgeois revolutionaries of the Ottoman Empire came to view democratic participation as a gateway to disorder. François Georgeon quotes Hüseyin Cahid, the influential editor of the leading Young Turk daily Tanin, who during the elated days of the revolution warned that ‘freedom is a dangerous thing’. Turkey’s rulers for the last century have never forgotten that warning.