coup de force

Borrowed from French coup de force.

coup de force (plural coups de force)

1. A sudden, violent act.

   Coordinate term: coup de main

   • 2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 46:

     On 26 August 1718, in a remarkable coup de force, Orléans crushed the political audacity and embryonic constitutional pretensions of the Parlement.

   • 2004, Charles Taylor, “The Sovereign People”, in Modern Social Imaginaries (Public Planet Books), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, →ISBN, page 139:

     The undecidable issue between these different institutions and procedures had in the end to be determined at the boundary of all of them, through coups de force.

   • 2007, Olivier Roy, “De Facto Secularization”, in George Holoch, transl., Secularism Confronts Islam, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 93:

     It can, of course, always be argued that the acceptance of democracy by the Communists and by the Catholic Church was a matter of power relations: the church had everything to lose from a struggle for power, and the strategic balance between the Soviet Union and NATO barred the French and Italian Communist Parties from any possibility of a coup de force.

   • 2012, Richard Martin, “The Birth of Nuclear Power”, in SuperFuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source for the Future, New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, →ISBN, page 103:

     Then, in a remarkable coup de force, he convinced Lilienthal to set up a naval reactors branch at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)—and had himself appointed its head.

   • 2016, Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam, Penguin, published 2017, page 203:

     On 9 March 1945, […] the Japanese launched a coup de force, overthrowing eighty years of French rule in a matter of days.

• IPA^(key): /ku d(ə) fɔʁs/

coup de force m (plural coups de force)

1. power move, power play, show of force, coup de force

• passer en force