INSURGENCE: "Every act of disobedience against power, the established order." The 20th century dared to overturn all kinds of things, in all fields: in art, in life, in society, in political organization. The entire history of the 20th century confirms the diversity of uprisings and the subsequent upheavals: violent and peaceful, individual and collective, humanistic or nihilistic.

The Century of Upheaval, as a necessary aid in understanding our times, illuminates the events, currents, and movements, the personalities and places that forged it. This dictionary, in the form of a chronologically displaced account of the 20th century, is not only a rediscovery of our era.

It is a collective and synthetic work, as it has been written by historians, philosophers, novelists, and essayists with sometimes radically different sensitivities and draws its richness from their diverse biased judgments. The material covers a wide range of topics, from Picasso to the Beatles and from Greenpeace to May '68.

Approximately 500 entries, written by over 150 authors, are categorized according to their content into five sections: - topics - movements - biographies - titles of works - locations and objects. The whole is structured around the relationships of the conceptual entries (which form the skeleton of the book) with their "satellites," the biographies, the movements, the titles, the locations, and the objects.

Additionally, next to some entries, there are certain pages dedicated to topics that complement the entries. From the time of the historical "avant-gardes" to the present day, from the pioneers of the early century to Nelson Mandela, we find that to "do something" also means wanting to "expand the boundaries of the possible."