pre-revolutionaryadj.n.

1839 Southern Literary Messenger 5 796/1 How many tales she had to tell of pre-revolutionary festivities—of the old aristocratic families, too many of which are now extinct, or scattered.

1861 H. S. Maine Anc. Law iv. 85 The præ-revolutionary jurists.

1874 T. B. Aldrich Prudence Palfrey x. 166 Since the hanging of a witch or two in pre-revolutionary days, the office of sheriff there has been virtually a sinecure.

1920 E. Wharton Age of Innocence ii. 10 But the cream-coloured house..was there as a visible proof of her moral courage; and she throned in it, among pre-Revolutionary furniture and souvenirs of the Tuileries of Louis Napoleon.

1933 Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald 24 Nov. 21/8 A great deal of pre-revolutionary unrest was due to a futile attempt of the Czarist Government to enforce this law.

1961 Times 29 Dec. 11/1 Pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg.

1976 New Yorker 15 Nov. 213/1 Some extraordinarily rich evocations of pre-revolutionary village life in China.

2005 Ottawa Citizen (Nexis) 17 Oct. a3 In 2004, the Russian capital hosted the President's Cup horse race, reviving a pre-revolutionary tradition in which the winning horse was awarded a prize by the czar himself.

1964 R. D. Hopper in I. L. Horowitz New Sociol. xix. 313 In pre-revolutionary societies, there is formed a group that is marginal to the structure of political power and social prestige.

1968 Daily Courier (Connellsville, Pa.) 7 June 14/5 Marcuse sits around waiting for a ‘prerevolutionary’ situation to develop, cursing its slowness in coming in language not often heard on educational TV.

1972 ‘H. Buckmaster’ Walking Trip 85 It is a prerevolutionary situation I'm told by a white politician in Salisbury, and he thinks the next step is violence.

1975 A. Beevor Violent Brink vii. 165 England, the despair of Marx, seemed at last about to move into a pre-revolutionary situation.

1985 Washington Post (Nexis) 23 July a14 A profound, almost prerevolutionary discontent is everywhere apparent; stirred by the familiar injustices of apartheid.

1996 R. Kiely Politics of Labour & Developm. in Trinidad iv. 125 The movement was..likely to fail ‘as long as the trade union movement..remained bitterly divided.’ This is the second reason why the events of 1970 did not constitute a revolutionary or prerevolutionary situation.

1937 Times Lit. Suppl. 1 May 323/2 Mr. Stephen Spender's ‘The Destructive Element’, with its presentation of Henry James as a master pre-revolutionary.

1955 William & Mary Q. 12 463 The pre-revolutionaries and revolutionaries who made the ‘spirit of 1789’ developed an anti-historical, rationalistic, dogmatic rights-of-man type of philosophy.

1969 Ann. Amer. Acad. Polit. & Social Sci. 386 190 He firmly documents the mesmerist preoccupations of these prerevolutionaries.

1991 Slavic Rev. 50 302 Until 1929 the state even tolerated the Society for Russian History and Antiquity, which Lenin considered a center for prerevolutionaries.

1998 L. Sklair Sociol. Progress ii. 25 The pre-revolutionaries were unable to take the large step back which would have enabled them to cast a long cool look on science as their nineteenth-century counterparts, the Positivists, were able to do.