Not long after the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and signing of the Treaty of Versailles, a failed coup d'état known as the Kapp Putsch was instigated by various elements opposed to the Weimar Republic. After the 1867– 71 creation of a new German realm by Prussia, chancellor Otto von Bismarck used policies favored by Socialists (such as state-sponsored healthcare) to undercut the opponents of the monarchy and protect it against revolution.
The German Empire, and its predecessors the Holy Roman Empire and German Confederation, operated under counterrevolutionary principles, with these monarchical federations crushing attempted uprisings in, for example, 1848. The Vendeans also rose up against Napoleon's attempt to conscript them in 1815. Monarchists and Catholics took up arms against the revolutionaries' French Republic in 1793 after the government asked that 300,000 men be conscripted into the Republican military in what was called the levée en masse. This counter-revolution produced what is debated to be the first modern genocide. It was active during the purported " Révolution nationale" enacted by Vichy France, though, which has been considered by René Rémond not as a fascist regime but as a counter-revolutionary regime, whose motto was Travail, Famille, Patrie ("Work, Family, Fatherland"), which replaced the Republican motto Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.Īfter the French Revolution, anti-clerical policies and the execution of King Louis XVI led to the Revolt in the Vendee. The royalist legitimist counter-revolutionary French movement survives to this day, albeit marginally. Thus, monarchist supporters of the Ancien Régime following the French Revolution were counter-revolutionaries, as were supporters of the Revolt in the Vendée and of the monarchies that put down the various Revolutions of 1848. More recently, it has been used in France to describe political movements that reject the legacy of the 1789 Revolution, which historian René Rémond has referred to as légitimistes. The word "counter-revolutionary" originally referred to thinkers who opposed themselves to the 1789 French Revolution, such as Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald or, later, Charles Maurras, the founder of the Action française monarchist movement.