In 1871 Europe was shook by the Paris Commune. A decade later Egypt was to witness the ‘Urabi revolt/rebellion/sedition, or, as the Legitimists’ mouthpiece the Gazette de France proclaimed, the “Commune au Caire.” The same discursive tools that were used against the Commune would be dug up and used against ‘Urabi: the Urabists are crazy incendiaries (just like the Petreoleuses of the Commune, the racialization of the ‘Urabists replacing the gendering of the Petroleuses), and ‘Urabi “has only learnt from history its darkest lessons, and thus went on imitating the rebels of Paris” (according to one Egyptian newspaper) and he even “sullied his ranks with the socialists who burnt the city of Paris” (according to the famous pan-Ottoman al-Jawa’ib). Still a decade later LeBon, haunted by both the memory of the Paris Commune and the threat of the colonies, would publish The Crowd, in which he proclaims the crowds to be like women and primitives. Its racial bias notwithstanding, The Crowd would later become part of the cannon of an emerging nationalist but highly colonized Egyptian intelligentsia. A back-and-forth dynamic between the colony and the metropole can therefore be observed: the threat of the colony is projected on the European revolutionary crowd (thus, for example, various orientalist and civilizationalist tropes were used to depict the Commune), and the threat of the European revolutionary crowd is projected onto the crowd in the colony (hence the “Commune au Caire.”) Through a close reading of diverse sources (including Arabic newspaper reports on the Paris Commune, French and English newspaper reports on the ‘Urabi revolt, and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, emblematic of the mid-19th century discourse on the crowd, haunted by the Indian rebellion, and later an important part of the Egyptian cannon and school system) this paper aims to study the mapping of the (revolutionary) crowd and the (savage) population of the colony onto one another, while paying a close attention to the interconnectedness of the racialization and gendering dynamics of this mapping. Through these mappings the crowd, and especially the revolutionary crowd, becomes a licentious space that produces bad subjects and threatens the dissolution of good subjectivity, even individuality. This inquiry is part of a larger project that aims to understand the history and rationale behind the contemporary counterrevolutionary discourse, unleashed post-2011, that understands revolution (or political activism) as a licentious space and depicts political activists as licentious subjects.