During the most rapid period of French colonial expansion (roughly 1880–1914) the French faced regular, often violent, resistance to the expansion of their imperial dominion over people in Africa and Southeast Asia. This article examines the changing terminology that French soldiers, officers and administrators used to describe the anticolonial movements they were called upon to suppress during the course of French conquest and ‘pacification’ operations. This terminology is gleaned both from archival sources, as well as from the so-called ‘grey literature’ of books, letters and pamphlets published by members of the French military, which do not exist in traditional libraries and holdings like the Bibliothèque Nationale. Taken as a whole this analysis grants us insight into how the French thought about themselves, their anticolonial opponents, how these conceptions changed over time, and how these conceptions translated into action and methodology.