by BENOIT VITKINE
Jean Tulard is a historian, specializing in the French Revolution and revolutions in general. According to Tulard, the future of the Tunisian uprising will depend on the role played by the army.
In a month of uprising, the Tunisian people has successfully toppled the Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali regime. Is it a revolution?
Right now we are in the pivotal phase of the Tunisian uprising. From a simple revolt, this movement is on the way to becoming a revolution.
A revolt is a spontaneous act, born of anger, discontent, desperation. It is generally anarchic, without a leader, without a watchword, and geographically limited. That is a perfect description of the Tunisian case, at least of its early stages.
A revolution promotes radical transformation of people, of institutions, of the way of thinking. To take the example of the French Revolution, the insurrection was foreseeable and its objectives well known: equality, through the abolition of privileges, the suppression of feudal rights that oppressed peasants, the end of absolute monarchy. The Tunisian model doesn’t correspond to this schema, for it began and has continued without leadership or ideology.
However, it is following a trajectory parallel to that of the French Revolution, which makes the two events comparable enough. The French Revolution, too, went through a phase of riots before it gripped the hearts and minds of a critical mass of the population as on 14 July 1789 or 10 August 1792. It started with riots due to hunger and unemployment, as in Tunisia.
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