Protest, as one of the most fundamental forms of social action, bears a close relationship to the dominant conception of the political human, the structure of power, and the status of law. In Iranian history, protest has not merely been a reactive behavior; rather, it serves as an indicator for understanding conceptual transformations in the relationship between state and society. Adopting a phenomenological approach and drawing upon the foundations of public law, this article examines the transformation of the meaning of protest within the historical transition from subjecthood to citizenship, from the pre‑constitutional period to the Constitutional Revolution. The central question of this study is how protest gradually evolved from a moral and religious act, largely situated outside the legal order, into a phenomenon intelligible within the horizon of law and public rights. The article advances the hypothesis that protest functions as a mirror through which the transformation of the political human in Iran can be understood. In pre‑constitutional society, the political human was defined as a subject (ra‘iyat), and therefore the possibility of protest in its juridical sense did not exist. Responses to power typically appeared in forms such as supplication, patience, or individual petitions for redress. With the intensification of social and economic crises in the nineteenth century, a form of pre‑political collective consciousness emerged that created the conditions for the rise of social protest. Within this context, the Tobacco Protest constitutes a historical turning point, marking the first widespread and relatively organized experience of protest and challenging the prevailing perception of society’s incapacity vis‑à‑vis political power. The article demonstrates that although such protests possessed social legitimacy, they lacked a juridical articulation prior to the Constitutional Revolution. The Constitutional Movement represented an attempt to transform the social experience of protest into a legal understanding grounded in the recognition of the citizen, the limitation of power, and the rule of law. Ultimately, the article argues that the right to protest is the historical product of this transformative trajectory, and that without acknowledging this development, the analysis of public law in Iran remains incomplete.