of the Constitutional

If the movement failed to bring about a coup d&s;etat, it succeeded in becoming an intellectual crusade against the Pad~ah and his government by Young Ottomans who had fled to Europe and assembled in Paris and London. The man who set off the first verbal blast and financed the organization was Mustafa Fazll P~a, a grandson of Mehmet Ali of Egypt and a one-time Minister of Finance in Turkey. It seems that the Young Ottomans took their signal from a lengthy letter of 1867. written, or underwritten, by Mustafa FazJl and addressed to the ruler, Abdm-Aziz. We learn from this letter that FazJl had already established in Paris a group of Young Ottomans calling themselves Jeunes Turcs; according to Engelhardt, the constitution of this society was published on April 30, 1867.