Abstract
Joachim Cerruti had already foreseen the fatal advent of the French Revolution in 1785, and in 1788 published his Mémoire pour le peuple français. In it, he warned that "the subject of our hopes has become the subject of our disputes". The hope of justice is the common element in all revolutions around the world. If revolution is a revolt that passes through the law and the Constitution, it is because the law is precisely the field that gathers hopes. Most of the revolutions in the ancient Muslim world were reactions to problems of ethnic inequality, intolerable social discrimination or excessive power. Obviously, in the ancient world, revolutions took on a religious expression. Modern revolutions have neither the same language, nor the same philosophical conceptions, as the experience of the Tunisian revolution of 2010 / 2011 proves. This democratic revolution will be examined in the light of its historical, theological and anthropological past, and then in the contradictions, setbacks and crises that have taken it from hope to uncertainty. The opening lecture will conclude with a general reflection on revolutions in today's Arab world.
