Counterrevolutionary
A
counterrevolutionary is anyone who opposes a
revolution, particularly those who act after a revolution to try to overturn or reverse it, in full or in part.
The word "counterrevolutionary" originally refers to thinkers who opposed themselves to the 1789
French Revolution, such as
Joseph de Maistre or
Louis de Bonald. Henceforth, it is used in France to qualify political movements that refuse the legacy of the 1789 Revolution, which historian
René Rémond has referred to as
légitimistes. Thus,
monarchists supporters of the
Ancien Régime following the
French Revolution were counterrevolutionaries, and so were the monarchies that put down the various
Revolutions of 1848. The royalist
legitimist counterrevolutionary French movement survives to this day, albeit marginally. It was active during
Vichy France, though, which has been considered by René Rémond not as a
fascist regime but as a counterrevolutionary regime, whose motto was
Travail, Famille, Patrie ("Work, Family, Fatherland"), which replaced the
Republican motto
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
In
France before
World War I, people who "opposed democratic ideas, parliamentary government, trade-unions, or socialism" were often considered counterrevolutionary by their opponents. The
White Army and its supporters who tried to defeat the
Bolsheviks after the
October Revolution, as well as the German
Freikorps who crushed the
German revolution of
1919, were also counterrevolutionaries.
More recently, the
1961 Bay of Pigs invasion into
Cuba was conducted by counterrevolutionaries who hoped to overthrow the revolutionary government of
Fidel Castro. In the
1980s, the
United States sponsored
Contra-Revolución rebels fighting to overthrow the revolutionary
Sandinista government in
Nicaragua. In fact, the Contras received their name precisely because they were counterrevolutionaries.
Some counterrevolutionaries are former
revolutionaries who supported the initial overthrow of the previous regime, but came to differ with those who ultimately came to power after the revolution. For example, some of the Contras originally fought with the Sandinistas to overthrow
Anastasio Somoza, and some of those who oppose Castro also opposed
Batista.
The word is often used interchangeably with
reactionary; however, some people considered reactionaries by Marxists (like the
Nazis and
Italian fascists) used the term
counterrevolutionary to describe their opponents - even if those opponents were advocates of a Marxist revolution (Nazis and fascists also claimed to be revolutionary rather than reactionary). Similarly, the clerics who took power following the
Iranian Revolution would describe all those who opposed them as
counterrevolutionary, even though some were
Communists. The term, therefore, should be understood in a relative sense politically, rather than as an absolute concept.
*
Anti-Soviet agitation and
Article 58 (RSFSR Penal Code)*
Recontra, the Contras who did not accept the new government after the ejection of revolutionary Sandinists.
*
Liberalism and the Challenge of Fascism, Social Forces in England and France (1815-1870), Prof. J. Salwyn Schapiro, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., NY, l949. pg 364.
