tocsin

plural tocsins

1. An alarm or other signal sounded by a bell or bells, originally especially with reference to France.

   I'll ring the tocsin, I'll have Saint-Antoine out. I can put twenty thousand armed men on the streets, just like that.

   1992, Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety, Harper Perennial, published 2007, page 281

   4 more examples

   At half-past one, on the sounding of the tocsin (or bell of the public-house) about fifteen persons were collected, when the Rev. J. Bromley was called to the chair.

   1804 August 23, The Times, p.3 col. C

   The noise of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany Street Barracks, and every church within earshot was hard at work killing sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin.

   1895–1897, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “In London”, in The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, published 1898, →OCLC, book I (The Coming of the Martians), page 131

   As she entered the projection theatre the soundtrack reverberated across the sculpture garden, a melancholy tocsin modulated by Talbert’s less and less coherent commentary.

   1970, JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition

   Allen Ginsberg had sounded the tocsin for rescuing humanity from the deadening hand of modernity, which he saw in terms of capitalism, materialism, and monotony, each contributing to the crushing of the human spirit.

   2022, Gary Gerstle, chapter 3, in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order […] , New York: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, Part II. The Neoliberal Order, 1970–2020

2. A bell used to sound an alarm.