Tunisie. Lire La Revolution

This study of the Tunisian Revolution asks to what extent would this young and fragile democracy established by the Revolution, despite the headwinds, become a stable and consolidated democracy, especially as the world is witnessing a systematic democratic retreat.

By making the Tunisian Revolution my object of study, I am not only interested in the simple insurrections that destroy an order or overthrow a government or despot, but in democratic revolutions that, beyond their insurrectional character, dismantle an authoritarian regime and construct a lasting democratic order. This means a political system based on popular legitimacy expressed through free and transparent elections that are repeatedly held and respected, in which the state is a secular, sovereign nation-state (or multinational), a guarantor of respect for all civil and political rights and public liberties, and in which the individual is a free being, the author of their own life, detached from subjugation to the patriarchal order.

How can we grasp the meaning of the Revolution? As a fortuitous event or as the culmination of a long endeavor, as Tocqueville suggests when he discusses the Old Regime and the French Revolution?

My thesis is that the democratic revolution is not a random event but the culmination of a long endeavor; it is not merely an event but the result of a lengthy historical process through which, on one hand, the sovereign nation-state emerges and, on the other, the free citizen, within the framework of a successful modernization process. This long endeavor is the process that underpins all of these institutional constructions.

It is from the Tunisian Revolution, analyzed as a universal case in the twentieth first century, yet whose process dates back to 1574, when it became a Regency of the Ottoman Empire, that I aim to contribute to the Panel on Revolutions.