‘Rebellion’ in eighteenth-century France was much less serious than ‘riot’, as it involved physical resistance to the authorities by only a handful of people or even a single individual. ‘Rebellion’ in fact was as devalued a term as assassinat, and was always supplemented in police reports and judicial charges with references to aggravated circumstances: ‘rebellion with insults and threats’; ‘rebellion with violence and assault’; ‘armed rebellion’ even if the accused had only carried a pistol or shotgun. If at least four people had been involved in the resistance, it became ‘rebellion with attroupement’. If so many had taken part that the authorities had seriously taken fright, it became a ‘sedition’. A full-scale riot was usually described as a ‘popular emotion’. For greatest effect, these various charges would be compounded, so that a grain riot became an ‘attroupement and popular emotion with insults, threats and violence likely to prevent the grain trade’.

Despite the apparent gravity of these charges, it is clear from the lenient, even trivial, sentences imposed by the magistrates that the eighteenth-century authorities were not so alarmed for the safety of the political and social fabric as their vocabulary suggested. Throughout the century in fact, the authorities displayed the complacency and over-confidence which led to disaster in 1788/9. Since small and scattered brigades, a make-believe police force, had sufficed for so long to control make-believe rebellions and seditions, the government found at the outbreak of the Revolution that it did not have the means to control a real rebellion.