coup de force

plural coups de force

1. A sudden, violent act.

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

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

   4 more examples

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

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

   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.

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

   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.

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

   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.

   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