The concept of revolution is based on specific historical situations. It is a concept that enables us to think of a general phenomenon of discontinuity in history, which in turn encompasses several concrete situations. Political revolutions have a single common denominator: a break in the way societies are governed. Beyond that, an incalculable diversity of species.
As a historical concept, revolution is itself a product of history. It evolves as history is enriched by new experiences comparable to those that gave rise to the first births and uses of the concept. Each new experience, related to the older ones by virtue of its similarity, brings its own particular experiences with its own language, but seeks, for a variety of reasons, including valorization and prestige, to become part of the historical cycle of modern democratic revolutions, almost invariably seen as signs of progress.
The concept is constructed in French between 1789 and the Paris Commune, in English between events in England in the 17thcentury and those in the United States at the end of the 18th century, in Russian between 1905 and 1917, in Chinese between the era of Sun Yat-sen and that of Mao Tse-Tung, in Spanish from the revolutions of Latin America, over which the Bolivarian revolutionary ritual hovers[1], in Arabic, from reformism and the discovery of the French Revolution that stunned the Arab world. In all these cases, we are moving from the situation to the concept.