To point one’s gun towards the skies seems to be a pretty transparent act of subversion, totally lacking in ambiguity, and signifying both insubordination and the refusal to fire. And yet, far from being self-evident, guns pointing skywards, if observed throughout the length of the 19th century, appear to have long been difficult to understand. An unintended detail affixed to insurrectional situations, it emerged during the revolutionary period in very different uses and meanings – as a gesture of appeasement, of brotherliness, of the rendering of weapons or vindication of sovereignty – before fixing itself as a sign of a shameful military punishment, form the Napoleonic wars to the July Revolution in 1830. The gesture then came back during the insurrections of the mid-19th century with a meaning as fraternal as it was hesitant (1834-1851), before becoming the mark of a violent revolutionary rupture in 1871.