As France's Old Regime was dissolving in the 1780s, a wave of violence spread across the country. Jean-Clément Martin puts this dramatically: from the autumn of 1788 to the spring of 1789, at least 289 émeutes occurred (Martin 2006: 52). He writes,

Was this the onset of a “revolution”? The term originally came from the revolution of the planets and in the eighteenth century came to be used for natural disasters, such as the great earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755. And the forms of contention that Martin describes drew upon a well-known repertoire of collective action forms (Tilly 1986, 1995a, 1995b), including grain seizures, the burning down of houses, attacks on elites, charivaris, and a number of other familiar routines. But once the Old Regime began to dissolve, these multiple, and largely traditional, forms of contention were subsumed under a new and broader language: the language of revolution. Martin describes this crucial point: