The
French Revolution gave the English language three politically descriptive words denoting anti-progressive politics: (i) "reactionary", (ii) "conservative", and (iii) "
right". "Reactionary" derives from the French word (a late 18th-century coinage based on the word , "reaction") and "
conservative" from , identifying monarchist parliamentarians opposed to the revolution. In this French usage, reactionary denotes "a movement towards the reversal of an existing tendency or state" and a "return to a previous condition of affairs". The
Oxford English Dictionary cites the first English language usage in 1799 in a translation of
Lazare Carnot's letter on the
Coup of 18 Fructidor. and early 1849, before reactionary forces regained control and the revolutions collapsed. During the French Revolution, conservative forces (especially within the
Catholic Church) organized opposition to the
progressive sociopolitical and economic changes brought by the Revolution; and so Conservatives fought to restore the temporal authority of the Church and
Crown. In 19th Century European politics, the reactionary class included the Catholic Church's hierarchy and the
aristocracy,
royal families, and
royalists who believed that national government was the sole domain of the Church and the State. In France, supporters of traditional rule by direct heirs of the
House of Bourbon dynasty were labeled the
legitimist reaction. In the
Third Republic, the monarchists were the reactionary faction, later renamed
Conservative.
Thermidorian Reaction The
Thermidorian Reaction was a movement within the French Revolution against the perceived excesses of the
Jacobins.
Maximilien Robespierre's
Reign of Terror ended on 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor year II in the
French Republican Calendar). The overthrow of Robespierre signaled the reassertion of the French
National Convention over the
Committee of Public Safety. The Jacobins were suppressed, the prisons were emptied, and the committee was shorn of its powers. After the execution of some 104 Robespierre supporters, the Thermidorian Reaction stopped using the
guillotine against alleged
counter-revolutionaries, set a middle course between the monarchists and the radicals, and ushered in a time of relative exuberance and its accompanying corruption.
Restoration of the French monarchy preparing for the
French intervention in Spain to help the Spanish Royalists, by
George Cruikshank With the
Congress of Vienna, inspired by Tsar
Alexander I of Russia, the monarchs of
Russia,
Prussia and
Austria formed the
Holy Alliance, a form of collective security against
revolution and
Bonapartism. This instance of reaction was surpassed by a movement that developed in France when, after the second fall of
Napoleon, the
Bourbon Restoration, or reinstatement of the
Bourbon dynasty, ensued. This time it was to be a
constitutional monarchy, with an
elected lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies. The Franchise was restricted to men over the age of forty, which indicated that for the first fifteen years of their lives, they had lived under the
ancien régime. Nevertheless, King
Louis XVIII worried he would still suffer an intractable parliament. He was delighted with the
ultra-royalists, or Ultras, whom the election returned, declaring that he had found a
chambre introuvable, literally, an "unfindable house". It was the
Declaration of Saint-Ouen that prepared the way for the Restoration. Before the French Revolution, which radically and bloodily overthrew most aspects of French society's organization, the only way constitutional change could be instituted was by extracting it from old legal documents that could be interpreted as agreeing with the proposal. Everything new had to be expressed as a righteous revival of something old that had lapsed and had been forgotten. This was also the means used by diminished aristocrats to get themselves a bigger piece of the pie. In the 18th century, those gentry whose fortunes and prestige had diminished to the level of peasants would search diligently for every ancient feudal statute that might give them something. For example, the "ban" meant that all peasants had to grind their grain in their lord's mill. Therefore, these gentry came to the
French States-General of 1789 fully prepared to press for expanding such practices in all provinces to the legal limit. They were horrified when, for example, the French Revolution permitted common citizens to go hunting, one of the few perquisites they had always enjoyed. Thus with the Bourbons Restoration, the
Chambre Introuvable set about reverting every law to return society to conditions prior to the
absolute monarchy of
Louis XIV, when the power of the Second Estate was at its zenith. This clearly distinguishes a "reactionary" from a "conservative". The use of the word "reactionary" in later days as a political slur is thus often rhetorical since there is nothing directly comparable with the
Chambre Introuvable in the history of other countries.
Clerical philosophers In the
French Revolution's aftermath, France was continually wracked by quarrels between right-wing
legitimists and left-wing revolutionaries. Herein arose the clerical philosophers—
Joseph de Maistre,
Louis de Bonald,
François-René de Chateaubriand—whose answer was restoring the
House of Bourbon and reinstalling the Catholic Church as the
established church. Since then, France's political spectrum has featured similar divisions (see ). The teachings of the 19th-century popes buttressed the ideas of the clerical philosophers.
Metternich and containment From 1815 to 1848,
Prince Metternich, the
foreign minister of the
Austrian Empire, stepped in to organize the
containment of revolutionary forces through international
alliances to prevent
revolutionary fervor. At the
Congress of Vienna, he was very influential in establishing the new order, the
Concert of Europe, after the defeat of
Napoleon. After the Congress, Prince Metternich worked hard to bolster and stabilize the conservative regime of the Restoration period. He worked furiously to prevent Russia's Tsar
Alexander I (who aided the
liberal forces in Germany, Italy, and France) from gaining influence in Europe. The Church was his principal ally. He promoted it as a conservative principle of order while opposing
nationalist and liberal tendencies within the Church. His basic philosophy was based on
Edmund Burke, who championed the need for old roots and the orderly development of society. He opposed
democratic and
parliamentary institutions but favored
modernizing existing structures through gradual
reform. Despite Metternich's efforts, a series of
revolutions rocked Europe in 1848.
20th century (PRRRS) against the attempt by the
Laval government to replace the
two-round system, which favored the Radicals, with
plurality ("
The two-round suffrage will overcome the reaction.") In the 20th century, proponents of
socialism and
communism used the term
reactionary polemically to label their enemies, such as the
White Armies, who fought in the
Russian Civil War against the
Bolsheviks after the
October Revolution. In
Marxist terminology,
reactionary is a
pejorative adjective denoting people whose ideas might appear to be socialist but, in their opinion, contain elements of
feudalism,
capitalism,
nationalism,
fascism, or other characteristics of the
ruling class, including usage between conflicting factions of Marxist movements. Non-socialists also used the label
reactionary, with British diplomat
Sir John Jordan nicknaming the Chinese
Royalist Party the "reactionary party" for supporting the
Qing dynasty and opposing
republicanism during the
Xinhai Revolution in 1912. Despite being traditionally related to right-wing governments, elements of reactionary politics were present in left-wing governments as well, such as when
Soviet Union leader
Joseph Stalin implemented conservative social policies, such as the
re-criminalisation of homosexuality, restrictions on abortion and divorce, and abolition of the
Zhenotdel women's department.
Reactionary is also used to denote supporters of
authoritarian anti-communist régimes such as
Vichy France, Spain under
Franco, and Portugal under
Salazar. One example occurred after
Boris Pasternak was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature. On 26 October 1958, the day following the
Nobel Committee's announcement, Moscow's
Literary Gazette ran a polemical article by David Zaslavski entitled,
Reactionary Propaganda Uproar over a Literary Weed. The
Italian Fascists desired a new social order based on the ancient feudal principle of delegation (though without
serfdom) in their enthusiasm for the
corporate state.
Benito Mussolini said that "fascism is reaction" and that "fascism, which did not fear to call itself reactionary... has not today any impediment against declaring itself illiberal and anti-liberal."
Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini also attacked certain reactionary policies, particularly monarchism, and veiled some aspects of Italian conservative
Catholicism. In "
Doctrine of Fascism", an essay written by Giovanni Gentile, but credited to Benito Mussolini, they wrote, "History doesn't travel backwards. The fascist doctrine has not taken
De Maistre as its prophet. Monarchical absolutism is of the past, and so is ecclesiolatry." They further elaborated in their political doctrine that the Fascist state is "unique and original creation", and that it is "not reactionary but revolutionary". Although the German
Nazis did not consider themselves fascists or reactionaries and condemned the traditional German forces of reaction (Prussian
monarchists,
Junker nobility, and
Roman Catholic clergy) as being among their enemies, next to their
Red Front enemies in the Nazi Party march , they virulently opposed revolutionary leftism. The fact that the Nazis called their 1933 rise to power the (national revolution) showed that, like the Italian Fascists, they supported some form of revolution; however, the Germans and Italian fascists both idealized tradition, folklore, and the tenets of classical thought and leadership, as exemplified in Nazi-era Germany by the idolization of
Frederick the Great. They also rejected the
Weimar Republic parliamentary era under the
Weimar Constitution, which had succeeded the monarchy in 1918, despite it also being capitalist and classical. Although claiming to be separate from reactionism, the Nazis' rejection of Weimar was based on ostensibly reactionary principles, as the Nazis claimed that the parliamentary system was simply the first step towards
Bolshevism and instead idealized more reactionary parts of Germany's past. They referred to
Nazi Germany as the
German Realm and informally as the
Drittes Reich (Third Realm), a reference to past reactionary German entities: the
Holy Roman Empire (First Realm) and the
German Empire (Second Realm).
Clericalist movements, sometimes labeled as
clerical fascist by their critics, can be considered reactionaries in terms of the 19th century since they share some elements of fascism while at the same time promoting a return to the pre-revolutionary model of social relations, with a strong role for the Church. Their utmost philosopher was
Nicolás Gómez Dávila.
21st century websites strictly prohibited" - Warning against visiting reactionary websites in a
Vietnamese
internet café, though the word "reactionary" in Vietnam, used by the current Communist
authority, may include non-conservative and non-fascist anti-communists, such as
liberals and
social democrats.
Japan's right-wing
nationalist and
populist movements and related organizations, which emerged rapidly from the late 20th century, are considered "reactionary" because they revised the post-war
peace constitution and have an advocating attitude toward the
Japanese Empire. Israel's
Likud government had been criticized as "reactionary" for attempting to reverse developments from the 1990s as part of a
democratic backsliding process, in order to advance an imbalanced
one-state solution to the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict. "Neo-reactionary" is a term that is sometimes a self-description of an informal group of online political theorists who have been active since the 2000s. The phrase "neo-reactionary" was coined by "Mencius Moldbug" (the pseudonym of
Curtis Yarvin, a computer programmer) in 2008.
Arnold Kling used it in 2010 to describe "Moldbug", and the subculture quickly adopted it. == Notable people ==