During the French Revolutionary Wars in 1794, French soldiers near Lalain, close to Lille, witnessed a heavy rain that brought with it a deluge of toads falling from the sky. This remarkable animal rain event was recorded in contemporary accounts and became one of the most cited examples of the phenomenon. The soldiers, already in a state of wartime tension, were astonished by this bizarre meteorological occurrence.

The Lalain toad rain captured the Romantic imagination as an example of nature's wild caprice during an era of political upheaval. Poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who were interested in the sublime and the strange, may have drawn on such accounts in their explorations of nature's unpredictable power. The event also appears in later compilations of natural wonders.