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Understanding “to repress” in its original eighteenth-century sense of “to contain”, this article studies the type of response to protests consisting of attempts at ‘appeasement’ – to use the source word – on the part of the authorities. Essential features of a narrative outline clearly emerge from an analysis of the accounts of appeasing interventions considered as exemplary – in the Treatise on Police by Delamare and in the writings of Maréchal de Boufflers’s actions in Paris in 1709. The outline reveals a model of maintenance of order, valid throughout the eighteenth century, based on the authority and the moral perfection associated with magistrates.