ABSTRACT

Revolution is the name people give to a period of rapid upheaval of political and social equilibria and of change to the structures of constituted power. The concept of revolution was the fundamental way in which modern culture read and interpreted political, economic and social conflict by seeing them as forming part of the unilinear and irresistible movement of the universal advance of civilization. There has been at least one revolution in every European nation, and in some non-European ones. Underlying the concept of revolution is the semantic shift undergone by the word, which derived from the language of astronomy where it indicated the complete movement of one heavenly body around another. Before the French Revolution, the term revolution thus indicated a change within a state which was seen as virtually a natural phenomenon within a context of recognizable forms. Especially in considering the French Revolution, recent research has given prominence to the subject of revolutionary subjectivity.