bouleversement

plural bouleversements

1. Complete overthrow; reversal; turmoil

   This is a bouleversement of Plato.

   2002, Paolo Soleri, What if?: collected writings 1986-2000, page 18

   2 more examples

   It reflects the feverish hopes, the quick successes, the amazing social bouleversements only possible when all the old elements of society have been poured together and shaken up pellmell.

   1916, The Publishers Weekly - Volume 89, page 596

   Among these the nautilus pompilius, or pearly nautilus, affords a truly admirable study, since it actually exists in the present, and is also found in the recent, and the ante-diluvian state,—being the only creature known to have maintained its station through the many supposed bouleversements and cataclysms which the globe has undergone: in more exact words—from still existing, it affords a valuable aid towards revealing the inhabitant of the allied fossil forms, which endured from the Devonian period through the carboniferous group, the liassic formation, the oolites, and the green sands, up to the London clay.

   2014, William Henry Smyth, Aedes Hartwellianae - Volume 1, page 25