Faced with reports of verbal dissent emanating from all points of the nation, revolutionary authorities responded by specifying the circumstances under which counterrevolutionary talk could be prosecuted in the courts. Initially, and long before the fall of the monarchy, legislators simply substituted the concept of nation for that of king in the crime of lèse-majesté, creating a supreme court, the Haute Cour nationale, to deal with a form of treason now referred to as lèse-nation. The concept was in fact not new: a form of lèse-majesté against the public good had been described in earlier centuries, but the Haute Cour was not designed to deal with the volume and variety of dissent that would emerge in the months and years that followed.