The reformist and nationalist opposition that tried to save the late Ottoman Empire by remaking it. Its leading body, the Committee of Union and Progress, forced the restoration of the constitution in the 1908 revolution and seized full power in a 1913 coup. Beginning in a hopeful equality of all Ottoman subjects, the movement turned toward Turkish nationalism, governed under a wartime triumvirate, organized the genocide of the empire's Armenians, and brought the empire into the First World War, where it fell apart.
In the summer of 1908, crowds in the streets of Salonica and Istanbul embraced strangers and wept for joy. Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Jews, and Bulgarians celebrated together as a new word passed from mouth to mouth: liberty. Army officers had forced the sultan to bring back a constitution he had shelved for thirty years. For a few weeks it looked as if a dying empire might be reborn as a brotherhood of free and equal citizens. Within a decade, men from the party that grew out of that revolution would preside over a wartime catastrophe and the destruction of a people.