How the Young Turks Came to Power

By the 1890s it was not just minorities within the Ottoman Empire who were calling for change and in some cases revolution. Christians, Muslims, and Jews were now joined by Turks and even members of the nobility—including the sultan's nephew, Prince Sabahaddin. At his home in Paris, the prince hosted a wide range of Ottoman dissidents in February of 1902 as the Congress of Ottoman Opposition. At the conference, 47 delegates, representing Turkish, Arab, Greek, Kurdish, Armenian, and Jewish groups, formed an alliance against the sultan. Together the groups called for equal rights for all Ottoman citizens, self-administration for minorities, and restoration of the Ottoman constitution the sultan had suspended in 1878. In 1907, the prince, with the support of the Armenian Dashnak Party, organized the second Congress of Ottoman Liberals. At the meeting representatives called for immediate overthrow of the sultan.

One of the groups calling for change was the Young Turks—a coalition of Turkish groups that proposed transforming the empire into a representative constitutional government. In 1908, while the prince was organizing opposition groups in exile, military forces representing the Committee of Union and Progress (a branch of the Young Turk movement) found themselves on the brink of being exposed by the sultan's forces. Not knowing what else to do, they went public. The committee representatives demanded restoration of the Ottoman constitution and marched toward the capital. As they traveled from town to town, the mutiny picked up public support. Without sufficient troops to put down the uprising, the sultan gave in to the demands of the Committee of Union and Progress on July 24, 1908. The Young Turk revolution was greeted with broad support. Newspapers reported scenes of Christians, Jews, and Muslims embracing in the streets.