Incertitude du temps révolutionnaire

• Main Author: Sophie Wahnich
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Les Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme 2013-12-01
• Series: Socio
• Subjects: french revolution; arab spring; temporality; precipitate; utopia
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/socio/422
• ISSN: 2266-3134; 2425-2158

The uncertainty in revolutionary time which we analyze here concerns not only the historians or social science specialists who observe past and present events but also the experience of the actors. These two dimensions of time, time observed and recorded and time experienced are addressed in an approach which compares our present day ‘revolutions, challenges and ‘indignados’ with the period of the French revolution. The aim is to understand what is in fact being objected to today when the term ‘revolution’ is declared inadequate for an understanding of our present. By going back to the time of the French Revolution, the article demonstrates that it is often our lack of understanding of this event which is the origin of our reserve concerning the concept of revolution in the modern era. It is therefore a question of showing the analogies between various revolutionary periods, or referred to as such by the actors, in an effort to grasp how this concept of revolution in modern times remains relevant to the analysis of our own times. We also wish to show its limits and the need to take another look at the history of the semantic of the word ‘revolution’. Hence, as a historian of this semantics, it seems to us of little interest to refute the words of the actors, even if our representations of the revolution are sometimes remote from what we see. However, while we must assess the new and the unusual, it seems to us to be equally important to endeavor to update a nomos of revolutionary time. This is not to assert that any revolution is the coming of a glorious time recognizable under this title, but to show that the beginning of revolutionary time takes place in two phases. The phase which could be called the gift of the revolution, a precipitate in which time is condensed and races out of control in times of crises which erase sectorial barriers of class, age and gender but above all, give the impression of exceeding in an unprecedented manner both the field of experience and the horizon of expectations. This is the utopia of blurred lines where time becomes more chaotic and where conflictuality reigns supreme. The point at which the revolution precipitates is then both what happens, as well as what happens through the actors but unknown to them. This moment of the precipitate is irreversible – not in its empirical and social effects but in its subjective effects. Events of this type are watersheds; they mark a before and after and the desire shared by the parties involved in the revolutionary event to advance the project thus launched to ensure that the opportunity not be lost. The fear of reversibility and the desire for victory are then the subjective, emotive modes which accompany this phase. Thus the revolutionary moment calls for courage. This courage must be deployed in a more lucid manner in the phase of the utopia of blurred lines for, while the moment of grace is experienced as synchronous, there is now a feeling of chaos associated with the massive social de-synchronization. The two-fold risk with revolutions is then discouragement linked with disappointment, but also civil war associated with this desynchronized conflictuality. The question of what happens in the wake of revolutions raises the important question of a possibility of harmony between societies which do not have the same history, those in the North are confronted with those of the Arab Spring. We intend here to assess this distance, but also what is shared: a demand for dignity, rediscovery of humanity, a recovery of democracy. In this respect it is a question of restoring the possibility of thinking not only ‘globally’, since today dehumanization may appear to be global to many actors, but also undoubtedly ‘universally’. While the locations of revolution and indignation may not be synchronous, each individual place does seem to harbor a demand for re-humanization which, while nothing is less certain, could well be revolutionary.