In the mid-1780s, as the foundations of France's old regime were crumbling, a series of scandal trials began to appear in Paris. In one of the most notorious, the Cléraux affair, a servant who had resisted the advances of her master was accused of robbing him and was hauled into court. Not only was the case decided in her favor (pace Dickens), but a wave of popular outrage against the courts and the lewd master surged across Paris. In a routine that had become familiar by the late eighteenth century, the master's house was sacked, his goods thrown into the street, and he himself barely saved from the fury of the crowd. A contemporary observer described the émotion in this way:

The affair contributed to the atmosphere of corruption surrounding the Old Regime, but its forms and its rhetoric were familiar from the European past.

Sixty years later, in February 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville left his house for parliament amid the tumult of Paris in revolution. Along his route, as citizens quietly watched, men were systematically putting up barricades. “These barricades,” he observed,