coup d'etat

Coup in French means a blow, a strike, a hit, from Late Latin colpus, from Latin colaphus, from Greek kolaphos (a slap, a blow). Coup d'etat (blow of state, blow against the state) was coined in French in the seventeenth century. Gabriel Naude used the phrase in his Considerations Politiques sur les Coups d'Etat (1639). The term was initially neutral — a decisive action by the existing state, not necessarily against it. Richelieu's arrest of conspirators was a coup d'etat in this older sense.

The meaning shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to mean specifically the unconstitutional seizure of power — a group (usually military) overthrowing the existing government by force. Napoleon Bonaparte's coup of 18 Brumaire (November 9, 1799) became the archetype. Napoleon was a general who used military force to dissolve the Directory and make himself First Consul. The word and the event merged.

The twentieth century was the great era of coups. Between 1950 and 2000, there were over 450 attempted coups worldwide. Many succeeded. Cold War superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union — supported coups in countries where the existing government was ideologically inconvenient. The CIA-backed coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Chile (1973) are among the most studied. The French word for a blow became an instrument of geopolitics.

The word has been shortened in English to just 'coup.' A boardroom coup. A palace coup. A soft coup (seizure of power through manipulation of institutions rather than military force). The word's flexibility reflects the variety of ways power can change hands outside constitutional processes. The blow can be military, institutional, or purely political. The word covers them all.