November 3, 2025 • 40 mins
The Great Fear was a panic during the French Revolution that spread through rural areas. It all started with a conspiracy theory.
Research:
- Davies, Alun. “The Origins of the French Peasant Revolution of 1789.” History, 1964, Vol. 49, No. 165 (1964). https://www.jstor.org/stable/24404527
- Elster, Jon. “The Two Great Fears of 1789.” Prepared for the Conference on “Emotions and Civil War”, Collège de France June 10-11 2010. https://www.college-de-france.fr/media/jon-elster/UPL13205_LePillouerThe_two_great_fears_of_1789.pdf
- Hill, Henry Bertram. “An Aftermath of the Great Fear.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec. 1950). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1875896
- Kasal, Krystal. “Mapping out France's 'Great Fear of 1789' shows how misinformation spreads like a virus.” Phys.org. 8/28/2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-france-great-misinformation-virus.html
- Lefebvre, Georges. “The Great Fear of 1789; rural panic in revolutionary France.” Joan White, translator. Pantheon Books. 1973.
- Lenharo, Mariana. “An abiding mystery of the French Revolution is solved — by epidemiology.” Nature. 8/27/2025. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02739-9
- Mark, Harrison W. “Great Fear.” World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Great_Fear/
- Markoff, John. “Contexts and Forms of Rural Revolt: France in 1789.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution , Jun., 1986, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), pp. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/174254
- Pelz, William A. “The Rise of the Third Estate: The French People Revolt.” From A People's History of Modern Europe. Pluto Press. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c2crfj.8
- Tackett, Timothy. “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789-1792.” The American Historical Review , Jun., 2000, Vol. 105, No. 3. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2651806
- Zapperi, Stefano et al. “Epidemiology models explain rumour spreading during France’s Great Fear of 1789.” Nature. 8/27/2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09392-2
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. One of the papers that I
had bookmarked to maybe talk about in our most recent
installment of Unearthed was about the Great Fear of seventeen
eighty nine, which took place over just a few weeks
in the early part of the French Revolution. We have
(00:32):
talked about the French Revolution in quite a few episodes,
and some of them have focused on other things that
also happened in seventeen eighty nine, like the Women's March
on Versailles, which took place in October of that year.
But I don't think we've ever specifically gotten into this
one thing.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
A lot of our.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
French Revolution episodes have also been mostly focused on things
that were happening in Paris or in Versailles, and the
Great Fear really moved primarily through the countryside and small
towns and villages. The specifics of exactly what happened could
vary from place to place, but the common thread across
all of it was this chaos that developed was rooted
(01:14):
in people's belief in a conspiracy theory, So it.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Can be tempting to sum up the French Revolution as
an uprising of the common people, many of whom were
struggling against an out of touch, privileged monarchy, and that was,
of course, definitely part of it, maybe even the easiest
part to visualize and explain, especially if you're focusing on
the period of the revolution that took place before the
(01:39):
Reign of Terror. But the French Revolution had so many layers,
in moving parts and contributing factors. Even if we focused
just on that one aspect, which we largely are today,
there were a lot of different issues feeding into the
struggles of the common people, and a lot of those
issues feed into the Great Fear.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Basically, most people on the poorer end of the economic
spectrum in France had been in a precarious position for decades.
If everything went well, most people got by, but only barely,
and if anything happened to throw things off balance, people
quickly went from kind of making ends meat to basically starving.
(02:20):
Anything that affected people's livelihoods or the cost of living
had the potential to just cause chaos, even if that
shift seemed like something minor, or if it wasn't something
that was happening anywhere near France.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
One of the go to examples here is the price
of bread. Most people did not have a way to
bake bread at home, so they purchased it, and for
a lot of people, bread was their biggest source of
nourishment in a day. Consequently, even a tiny increase in
bread prices could lead to food riots. This was interconnected
with the price of grain. Efforts to boost grain prices
(02:57):
to help the farmers who were growing it also made
bread more expensive. So while farmers might theoretically be doing
better after they sold their harvest, people who were subsisting
on bread wound up doing worse. Yeah, and sometimes those
were the same people, and the increased amount of money
from the harvest wasn't enough to offset the increased price
(03:17):
of bread. A lot of our prior episodes about things
like peasant uprisings or famines, including the Great Famine in Ireland,
have talked about predatory and exploitive landlords as a major factor,
but taken as a whole, the peasant class in France
actually owned a significant amount of land in the eighteenth century,
(03:40):
maybe as much as a third of the land in
the country. But owning land didn't.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Necessarily put people in a better financial position than being
a tenant did. By the late eighteenth century, a lot
of families had been dividing up their land among their
heirs for generations. As a result that a rich farm
plot had become extremely small. It was too small to
comfortably live off the proceeds of and in a lot
(04:07):
of cases, too small to even just subsist on. Everyone
owned land, though, and the percentage of landless people really
varied from one part of France to another. So in
some places maybe twenty percent of the peasantry was landless,
but in others it was sixty percent or more. Unlike
in many other parts of Europe, some landlords in France
(04:28):
were willing to lease small homesteads to people, and that
made it somewhat easier for landless people to find a
place to live and land to farm. These tenant farmers
had to pay dues to their signeur, who played a
similar role.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
To kind of like a feudal lord. Some of the
signors were nobles and others were members of the bourgeoisie,
and in some areas the church acted as a signeur, so.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
These dues could include both cash and a portion of
the crop, and signors also required tenants to do unpaid
labor on their own estates, or at least they had
the right to make their tenants do that, and owning
land did not completely free people from paying dues or
dealing with the signior either. People also had to pay
(05:15):
things like market dues when selling their crops, and both
landless and land owning people in France were expected to
pay a tithe to the church. Signiors were also the
people who usually owned the machinery like the grain mills
and the wine presses, and people had to use that
machinery on the senior's terms. Often the ovens that were
(05:37):
used to bake the bread for the community were also
owned by the seignior as well. Seniors had their own
courts that people on their estates were beholden to, and
they had a lot of leeway in how those courts
were run. So both landless and land owning people were
part of this hierarchical system, and both wound up in
(05:58):
the same basic struggle of not being able to support
themselves on the land that was available to them. A
lot of farmers were doing other jobs in addition to farming,
like running an inn or a tavern, or selling eggs,
or doing paid agricultural labor on a big estate. In
addition to the work on their own farm, some towns
(06:18):
and villages had become home to other industries that provided
additional jobs, some of which could be done from home,
like spinning and weaving. Trying to scrape together a living
on a farm that was too small for the family
while also doing other jobs to make ends meet just
sounds difficult, and it was not possible for a significant
(06:40):
portion of the population to do that. About a tenth
of the population of rural France had no other option
but begging, and in some areas that number could go
even higher. The vast majority of people who were living
off of begging were elderly or disabled, or they were
widows who were trying to take care of young children
(07:02):
or orphans with no adults to care for them. And
then there were landless laborers who could only find work
during some parts of the year, like during the harvest.
For the rest of the year, they didn't really have
anywhere else to go or any other way to earn
a living. Because the harvest was the one time that
farm workers had some leverage over landowners. There was often
(07:25):
labor unrest around the time of harvest, and if the
harvest was poor and there wasn't as much of a
need for labor, issues with vagrancy skyrocketed. By the mid
to late eighteenth century, a situation that was already really
precarious had started getting worse. Standards of living had actually increased,
(07:46):
and adult mortality had gone down as a result. This
seems like a good thing, fewer people dying. That seems good,
but that also meant that the population of France had
grown significantly, and that had led to more demand for
the food and land that had already been in really
short supply. The food crisis got worse as many parts
(08:08):
of France experienced a series of bad harvests starting around
the seventeen sixties. The seventeen eighty three Lockey fissure eruption
in Iceland, which we covered on the show in July
of twenty twenty four, caused acidic rain in cooling temperatures,
and that contributed to bad harvests across much of the
northern Hemisphere. In seventeen eighty eight, bad weather, including hailstorms,
(08:32):
ruined a lot of that year's crops. Also, in seventeen
eighty eight, the Habsburgs went to war against the Ottoman Empire.
France was not directly involved in this conflict. There monarch
was Bourbon, but some of its allies and its trading
partners were Parts of the Mediterranean became unsafe for shipping,
(08:55):
Some of the places where France sold its exports essentially
closed to trade, and Spain also banned imports of French cloth.
So even though France was not one of the active
belligerents in this war, this added to the disruption and
the economic stresses that the common people were facing. England
(09:16):
and France had also signed a trade agreement in seventeen
eighty six which was intended to foster competition between English
and French industries and encourage French industries to adopt English
manufacturing and production methods. What wound up happening was that
a lot of French workers in these industries lost their
jobs in the face of inexpensive goods being imported from England.
(09:40):
The textile industry was particularly hard hit, putting a lot
of those people who had been spinning and weaving at
home out of work. All of this fed into both
the French Revolution and the great fear, which we will
talk about after a sponsor break. Before the break, we
(10:07):
were focused on the issues that were facing France's peasant class,
but of course the nation as a whole was also
having some problems. In seventeen eighty seven, France's Controller General
of Finances arranged a meeting to try to reform the
French economy and manage a severe financial crisis. This meeting
(10:27):
was not successful. Among other things, the proposed plan would
have involved increasing taxes on the rich, and the rich
did not want to do that. So in August of
seventeen eighty eight, King Louis the sixteenth announced that he
was summoning the Estates General to meet at Versailles and
work all this out. The Estates General was made up
(10:48):
of representatives from the three estates. Those were the nobility,
the clergy, and the commoners, and it had not convened
since sixteen fourteen. The king had asked each of the
three estates to submit lists of grievances. People all across
France were given the opportunity to submit their grievances, and
roughly forty thousand kaye de dollons were created before the
(11:10):
Assembly convened. The third Estate's grievances had three prevailing themes
that France's tax system was unfair, that the signorro system
needed to be abolished or reformed, and that the payments
they were required to make to the church were burdensome.
The three estates did have some points of agreement in
(11:31):
their lists of grievances, like obviously the clergy, the nobility,
and the commoners. They had different priorities, but there were
points of overlap, and that included overall support for creating
a French constitution and moving toward a more representative system
of government. But when the Estates General finally met on
(11:52):
May fifth, seventeen eighty nine, they strongly disagreed on how
to vote. There were six hundred Depts representing the commoners,
and then three hundred each for the nobility and the clergy.
If each estate as a body got one vote, then
the nobility and the clergy can team up and outvote
(12:13):
the commoners. But if each delegate got a vote, then
the commoners had the largest number of votes, they would
be more powerful than either of the other two estates.
It would be easier to rally some support among the
nobility and the clergy than to outvote united fronts that
were united against them.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
This led to one of the moments that is sometimes
marked as the beginning of the French Revolution. The Assembly
was at an impasse over this voting question, and on
June seventeenth, the commoners declared themselves to be the National
Assembly and said they would be meeting and voting without
the other two estates if necessary. They had some support
(12:55):
among the clergy, including parish priests. Royal officials locked them
out of their meeting room three days later, prompting the
National Assembly to meet in the Tennis court and swear
an oath that they would continue to meet until a
written constitution had been created for France. The king tried
and failed to disperse the Assembly, and he ultimately asked
(13:17):
the nobility and the clergy, who had not already done so,
to join with the National Assembly. Together they formed the
National Constituent Assembly. But the king also summoned troops to Paris,
and two days after the establishment of the National Constituent Assembly,
he dismissed Finance Minister Jacques Nickaire. Some of the economic
(13:40):
problems that France was dealing with were ones that had
been caused or exacerbated by Nickcair's policies, but he was
also perceived as being on the side of the common people.
He had, for example, taken steps to try to deal
with the food shortages and crop failures that had started
really affecting farmers in seventeen eight. His dismissal provoked an
(14:03):
uprising that included Parisian commoners storming the Bastille on July fourteenth,
seventeen eighty nine, and afterward members of the nobility started
fleeing from France. Meanwhile, in the country, people were getting
news about this, often delayed by at least a day
or two. The idea of a daily newspaper was still
(14:25):
a pretty new thing. The first daily newspaper in France
was the Jeanald de Barrie, established in seventeen seventy seven.
Most rural people did not have access to newspapers, and
while literacy rates were increasing, many people spoke local and
regional dialects of French that would not be comprehensible to
someone speaking Parisian French, or vice versa. In some regions,
(14:49):
people spoke other languages entirely, including Breton, Carolin, Bosque, and Alsatian.
Among others. So people got the news through letters from
Balliage or Baile who wrote to the jurisdictions that they
were responsible for, and those letters were then read aloud
in the town hall or the public square, in addition
to the time that it took for the letter to
(15:11):
get to the community. If the bailiff didn't send a letter,
or if that letter didn't make it to its recipient,
people often just had no other way to get information.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yeah, we can also assume that not everyone was at
that meeting or at the public square, and so they
were hearing things passed through word of mouth from having
heard the letter, right, And if one bailiff has a
bad day or doesn't have their act together that week,
nobody gets any information. Right. So all the issues that
we talked about before the break combined with getting somewhat
(15:45):
delayed news of what was happening in Paris and Versailles,
and rumors started to spread across the countryside that the
aristocracy was plotting against the commoners. This was not a
completely new idea. The idea of a packed de famine
went at least as far back as the early to
mid eighteenth century. This was the idea that the monarchy
(16:09):
or the nobility, or some other privileged class of people
was intentionally keeping food from the commoners for some self
serving or nefarious reason. This conspiracy theory had surged during
the seventeen seventy five Flower War, which was a series
of food riots across much of France that were sparked
(16:29):
by increases in bread and grain prices, as well as
food shortages. These issues had been caused in part by
reforms to French agriculture and trade, including the abolition of
guilds and a move to a free trade system for grain.
It was easy for people to believe that these changes
had been made with the intent of making people suffer,
(16:50):
and since the king was responsible for making sure his
subjects were fed, it was also easy for people to
believe that his failure to do so was deliberate. Almost
fifteen years after the Flower War, the paxstafamines still had
a ring of truth to a lot of people. People
also understood that popular uprisings often ended in violence or
(17:14):
some other retribution against the poorest people who had risen up.
Before the convening of the Estates General, aristocrats had refused
to agree to economic reforms that would have increased their
taxes while hopefully making things easier for the poor. The
king had tried to disperse the Assembly, and there were
(17:34):
still aristocrats who wanted to disband it. Various levels of
the French government were also known to let problems lie,
or even to make problems worse if they thought the
ends justified the means. There was just a lot that
would make people think this was true.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
So in the wake of the National Assembly and the
Tennis Court oath, and the storming of the Bastille and
skyrocketing bread prices, people started to believe that the aristocracy
was hoarding all the food as leverage over the commoners,
and that they would ruin the harvest to try to
starve the third estate into compliance. One of the nobles
who had fled from France was the Comte d'Artois, who
(18:15):
would much later become King Charles the Tenth of France,
and people believed that he was coming back with a
foreign army to pacify the commoners.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
This conspiracy theory collided with actual problems that the rural
parts of France really were facing, and one of those
was large numbers of landless, unemployed people who were roaming
around the countryside. This went beyond that roughly ten percent
of the rural population who were subsisting through begging. These
(18:46):
were mostly farm workers who could not find employment and
textile workers who had been put out of work by
that trade agreement with England in the late summer of
seventeen eighty nine. They were going from farm to farm
demanding food and sometimes harassing people if they didn't get
any or didn't get enough. Some of them took food
(19:06):
from the fields before it was fully ripe, or they
took firewood from the forests, or they even robbed people.
So rumors also spread that mobs of brigands were marauding
all around the countryside. They were stripping the fields completely bare,
destroying orchards, ruining farms, and completely clearing the forests of
(19:29):
all of their firewood. And people thought that these brigands
were being sheltered or enabled by the aristocracy. Communities started
sending word to Paris or nearby outposts to ask for
help defending themselves against the perceived threat. But because of
what was happening in Paris, there just wasn't much help available.
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When help was dispatched, it could arrive long after it
was really needed. For example, Toma Alexandle Dumat, who was
the subject of our most recent Saturday classic, arrived in
the town of Villere Couterret with his unit on August fifteenth,
having been summoned to protect both the chateau and the
villagers from a supposed mob of brigands. But by that
(20:12):
point the great fear was over and Duma mostly wound
up being the pampered guest of his host family. So,
with help often coming too late to be of any
use or not coming at all, farmers started arming themselves
and trying to form their own defense forces to guard
their land. Small towns and villages ordered their residents to
(20:33):
take up arms and to be prepared to defend themselves
or to go to the defense of the Third Estate
at the National Constituent Assembly if it was necessary. There
was an increasing sense of panic and paranoia in small
towns and villages around Paris, and common people started greeting
one another and outsiders with the question are you for
(20:53):
the Third Estate? On July sixteenth, residents of Lajare stopped
a grain and flowershipment that was being prepared for Paris
because people were afraid it was going to be used
to feed soldiers who they thought were preparing to attack
the common people. All of this really came to a
head on July nineteenth, which we will get to after
(21:14):
a sponsor break. On July nineteenth, seventeen eighty nine, some
soldiers from the Visual Garrison in the Franche Comte region
of France arrived at Chateau de Quinsy. This was home
(21:36):
to Monsieur de Mimee, signor of Quincy, and a particularly
hated landlord. These soldiers said that they had been invited
and a servant let them in and gave them some drinks,
and then at about eleven PM, when they were leaving
and were apparently intoxicated, there was an explosion in the
(21:57):
basement of the chateau. Men were killed and a lot
of other people were injured.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Today, this is all believed to have been an accident
that one of the soldiers or maybe another guest, was
either lost in the house or was looking for food
or money and got too close to a barrel of
gunpowder while carrying a torch or a candle. But a
rumor spread that members of the third Estate had been
lured into the chateau in order to kill them.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Monsieur de mi May was not at home at the time.
He had been facing hostility from the area's commoners, and
he had already fled. He was away, staying with his
mother in law over the next day. So on the twentieth,
in retaliation for what people believed was an intentional explosion
at the Chateau, peasants rose up in Franche Comti, looting
(22:49):
and burning many of the properties that he owned.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
While fear and unrest had been increasing in the countryside
ahead of this, the uprising after the explosion is marked
as the start of the Great Fear, which spread over
most of France. The places that were mostly unaffected were
almost entirely along the coasts or along the border with
what's now Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. Some of those areas
(23:14):
had just been through some other agrarian uprising in the
months before the fear, and there's some speculation that this
might have affected how susceptible they were to this misinformation.
In most of the rest of rural France, the same
basic pattern played out over and over. First, people would
notice something that they thought was the aristocracy's army of
(23:37):
brigands coming for them. They would sound the tocsin or
the alarm belt. They would send runners to their neighbors
or to neighboring villages to warn them and to call
for help. People would arm themselves with things like pitchforks, halberds,
and pikes. If soldiers or armed peasants arrived in response
to that call for help, the local people would stake
(24:00):
them for attackers and try to fight them off. People
on the neighboring farms or neighboring towns or villages would
see the smoke or hear the commotion, and that cycle
would start again. This played out in tandem with uprisings
against the aristocracy, which were interconnected with the Great Fear,
but in some ways were also a separate phenomenon. People
(24:23):
broke into manor houses to burn the records that were
used to determine people's signorial dues, or to reclaim the
crops they had used to pay those dues. They attacked
the signor's wine presses and grain mills. Whole communities went
to their local monasteries demanding their tithes be returned to them,
or they just refused to pay their tithes. Nobles and
(24:46):
aristocrats were subject to attacks vandalism and public humiliation, or
they were driven off their estates. When people saw smoke
from these attacks, or large groups of people moving through
the countryside to attack back of manner or take back
their tithes from a monastery, they would raise the alarm,
thinking that they were seeing was that supposed brigand army
(25:09):
burning something down or coming to destroy their harvest.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Not everywhere that was struck by the Great Fear also
rose up against the aristocracy, and it does seem like
in places that there were these uprisings, people were at
least somewhat selective about it. Only three landlords are known
to have been killed during the Great Fear. Obviously it
is not great that three landlords were killed, but this
(25:36):
was not like a widespread massacre of all the landlords.
This was also not a situation of like every manner
in rural France being torn or burned to the ground.
Some of them were burned, but this was not like.
It didn't level the aristocratic estates of France across the board.
But the atmosphere across the French countryside was so paranoid
(26:00):
and suspicious that people raised the alarm over things that
were completely innocuous. This included herds of livestock, raising clouds
of dust as they were being moved along the road,
or making a lot of noise as they were driven
through a forest, or smoke from ordinary work like burning
off unwanted vegetation or running lime kilns. In Paris, those
(26:22):
letters people had written to ask for help were read
before the National Constituent Assembly, and word of those letters
being read made its way back to the rural communities.
This wound up reinforcing the idea that there really were
hordes of brigands who were funded and enabled by the aristocrats,
(26:43):
and they were coming to attack the farms. While the
Great Fear and its interconnected uprisings are often described in
terms of the country, there was violence in Paris as well.
On July twenty second, Controller General of Finances Joseph Foulon
de Due was ruptured by peasants and taken to the
Hotel de Ville. Foulon was widely hated and believed to
(27:06):
be uncaring and merciless toward the poor. He's rumored to
have said that if people had no bread, then they
could eat hay, much like Marie Antoinette supposedly having said
let them eat cake. This quote is also unsubstantiated, but
it does seem to be a rumor that was circulating
at the time, and it speaks to how people thought
about him. The crowd unsuccessfully tried to hang him, then
(27:30):
beheaded him, and they paraded his head around with his
mouth stuffed with hay and excrement. There wasn't really any
kind of centralized leadership or organizational structure for what the
peasants were doing in the country, whether they were trying
to defend themselves from a perceived threat or attacking the
(27:50):
nearest scenurial manner. There also wasn't a figurehead like Rebecca
during the Rebecca Riots or Ned Ludd during the Luddite uprising. Instead,
the Great Fear was something that seemed to grow and
recur almost spontaneously, kind of organically, largely following the lines
of communication and trade all across France. Although troops were
(28:15):
deployed to some areas, including Franche Compte where this first started,
there was no practical way for authorities to try to
put down such a widespread, scattered uprising with force. There
were just too many outbreaks of panic, violence and destruction
happening in too many places at once, So the National
Constituent Assembly and its members had to find some way
(28:37):
to restore calm, which they did in part by addressing
some of the Third Estate's grievances. On August fourth, seventeen
eighty nine, the Assembly issued the first of what would
come to be known as the August Decrees, abolishing the
feudal system in France. There would ultimately be nineteen decrees,
which also ended noble and clerical privilege and abolished the tithe.
(29:01):
This fundamentally changed multiple aspects of French society and the
French economy, dismantling or changing systems and structures that had
been in place since the Middle Ages. By August sixth,
two days after the first of the August Decrees, the
Great Fear had basically ended, but the communities where it
(29:22):
had taken place had also changed. Very broadly speaking, the
Great Fear and the conspiracy theory that was connected to
it really amped up people's hatred of the rich and
of the nobility. It also prompted villages and rural areas
to organize themselves and to do that quickly. This new
found organization is seen as an influence on the way
(29:44):
the French Revolution progressed from this point and on the
functioning of the French Republic after the abolition of the monarchy.
But it's tricky to pin down the long term influence
of the Great Fear in France in really specific terms
beyond the immediate events like the August Decrees and the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,
(30:05):
which was created by the National Constituent Assembly and then
ratified by the King. The King ratified the Declaration almost
exactly a month after the Great Fear was over. So
much other stuff happened after that, and a lot of
it was truly monumental, including the creation of France's first
Constitution in seventeen ninety one, the executions of King Louis
(30:27):
the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette in seventeen ninety three, to
the Reign of Terror which ended in seventeen ninety four,
to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became First Consul
in seventeen ninety nine and of course eventually declared himself
Emperor of the French. Yeah, a lot of those core
issues that people were dealing with also were still there,
(30:48):
Like we have that prior episode about the Women's March
on Versailles. That was connected to bread prices and food
shortages still an issue after the Great Fear had kind
of come to a close, and since the Great Fear
largely came to an end without some kind of massive
military response across the whole country, for the most part,
(31:08):
the common people who were part of it did not
face a lot of consequences when it was over. Especially
in a lot of the more outlying areas. A lot
of people just went back home without ever being charged
with anything or facing any kind of trial. But in
places where troops had been deployed, people were more likely
to face trial, and those who were convicted for their
(31:29):
involvement were either executed or they were sentenced to serve
as galley slaves. This mainly affected people in places like Alsace,
Hanault and franche Comte.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
The paper we mentioned at the top of the show
which inspired this episode was about how the Great Fear spread,
and it was published in the journal Nature. Researchers used
historical records of both the peasant uprisings and the rumors
of aristocratic plots. They also incorporated the work of French
historian George Lefebre, whose nineteen thirty two La grampel To
(32:02):
seventeen eighty nine was the first book length examination of
the Great Fear. That book was translated into English in
nineteen seventy three, and it is still considered to be
a foundational text on the Great Fear. The researchers then
used epidemiological models to track the spread of misinformation over
(32:22):
the course of the Great Fear. They found that the
quote viral misinformation that was driving this really did spread
a lot like an actual infectious disease. It had an
ar not value of one point five, that's the average
number of people that an infected person spreads. The disease
to the.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Great Fear spread almost exponentially until it peaked on July thirtieth,
and then it declined before coming to an end on
August fourth. Like a contagious illness. The misinformation spread largely
along main roads and postal routes. This paper also I
identified risk factors for the areas which seem to have
(33:03):
the highest risk of transmitting this information. They included having
a higher population, which is similar to infectious diseases that
need enough hosts to be able to spread effectively, as
well as places being more literate and wealthier communities at
the highest risk were also ones that had higher concentrations
(33:23):
of land ownership and higher wheat prices. The researchers concluded
the paper by comparing the Great Fear to the role
of rumors in uprisings today or within the last couple
of decades, when information can spread almost instantaneously over social media,
rather than having to travel along trade and mail routes
(33:47):
by people who were carrying physical copies of letters or
other media. But there's other research showing that even today,
when we do have access to almost instant information, these
kind of rumors can still spread along very similar patterns
to the way contagious diseases.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Do tum Yeah. Uh, do you have listener mail that
hopefully involves no contagious diseases or horrible uprisings. I do
have listener mail. I don't think it involves any of
those things, but it's been fully two hours since I
reread it, so I could be forgetting something.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
This email is from Mad's, Mads wrote after our episode
on Anna Maria von Sherman, and the email touches on
other episodes as well. Mads wrote, Hi, Tracy high Holly,
longtime listener and not first time writer, though It's been
a while since I've last written in. I've been listening
to your podcast for about a decade now, and you've
accompanied me through so many hours of commuting, doing chores
(34:50):
and taking walks, but also calms my nerves during one
of my most dreaded and anxiety inducing modes of travel
aka flying on a plan and recovering from surgery. I
was just listening to your episode on Anna Marie von
Sherman when you mentioned two places I have connections to,
the first of all, Cologne or I'm not going to
(35:13):
try to say this in German because I feel like
I will now I'll not do a good job. But
it's spelled differently from Cologne how we say it in English,
which is very close to my hometown of Bonn and
a city that is near and dear to my heart.
Because of that, this alone would not have gotten me
so excited that I would write in about the episode. No,
(35:35):
it was the mention of eastern Westphalian town Herford that
got me. I've spent a lot of time there since
my ex girlfriend was from that area, and I still
have two very dear friends who live in the vicinity
of it. However, Herford is not really a well known
place unless you are from around there, and the small
town in which my ex girlfriend lived is basically a
(35:56):
complete unknown, which meant that I would have had pretty
much the exact same conversation every time I went to
visit her and got asked where she lives and from there.
It's sort of an explanation of increasingly small towns that
are close to Herford. In Germany, there is a very
popular joke slash meme slash conspiracy theory that this city
(36:18):
simply doesn't exist and it's just a hoax made by
the government or whoever to fool people. I believe that
joke originated at some student party after a lot of drinks.
I'm skipping ahead just a touch. The mention of Herford
did remind me, though, of another episode I had meant
to write in about, and that's the episode about Joan Arson,
the last Catholic Bishop of Iceland.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
What does he have to do with Herford?
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Well, the fact that the first Catholic Bishop of Iceland
was in fact sent to Herford to study and spent
some years of his life there before being appointed Bishop
of Iceland. I actually wanted to say even more, but
it's late and I should really go to sleep, so
I'll probably send you my other thoughts next time I
get a random connection to some thing slash place I know, well,
I will pause the email for just a second. I
(37:05):
don't remember if we mentioned in that episode about jan Arison,
but sending Catholic clergy members or people who thought they
might join the clergy in Iceland, sending them to Germany
to study was like sort of the thing to do
at the time. A lot of the Catholic clergy, Yeah,
(37:25):
went to Germany to study during that era. Returning to
the reason that I just really wanted to read this
email in particular today, attached you will find pictures of
my two kiddies, Peter and Ferby as pet tax when
I adopted both of them from the shelter. They're both
pretty anxious and weary and skittish, especially Ferby. I was
(37:46):
in fact warned by the shelter he might never be
really comfortable with being touched and that he might never
really warm up to the company of humans. Well, it
took him about three weeks to turn into a super
sweet cuddle bug in total Mama's boy. He's a silly
goose who manages to pretty much appear hair ties out
of the air no matter how I hide them, playing
with strings and laying in the most silly positions. Also,
(38:07):
he has big round eyes and he looks at you
with an expression I can only describe as and then
it's the big round eye emoji. Peter is my wonderful
void creature. He does look like someone who tried to
draw a cat who has never seen a cat before.
He has a shape. I adore him. There's some more
details about these cats. It is very sweet, but I
(38:28):
feel like we are gonna run short on time, so
I want to describe these pictures. We have a kind
of tabby cat. I'm looking directly at yawning mouth and toebeans.
It is incredibly cute, black void kitty, incredibly cute. Also,
(38:49):
the thing that made me go I love this picture
so much and I want to read this email today
is there is a picture of the black cat. The
black cat was the one who was named Peter. Peter
is standing on the open door of the dishwasher and
(39:10):
the top rack of the dishwasher is pulled out as
though it is being either loaded or unloaded. This dishwasher
looks really clean, so I think maybe we are about
to unload it, but Peter is standing there on the
open dishwasher door. And it makes me laugh because one
of my cats is really fixated on when I put
the detergent pod into the dishwasher. If she hears me
(39:35):
open the dishwasher door and then open the cabinet door
where we keep those things, she will run into the
kitchen and try to like put her paw on the
dishwasher pod. I don't know why she wants to do this.
She has never tried to bite it or sniff it,
or eat it or anything like that. This is some
(39:58):
cat ritual all of her own, involving the pod and
so having another black cat standing on the open dishwasher door,
I was extremely tickled by. So thank you Mads for
sending this email. I really enjoyed the email, even though
I abridged bits of it. This is also an email
from August, so I'm sorry it took me a while
(40:18):
to read it. If you would like to send us
a note about this or any other podcast, where at
History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can also
subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere
else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed
(40:40):
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. One of the papers that I
had bookmarked to maybe talk about in our most recent
installment of Unearthed was about the Great Fear of seventeen
eighty nine, which took place over just a few weeks
in the early part of the French Revolution. We have
(00:32):
talked about the French Revolution in quite a few episodes,
and some of them have focused on other things that
also happened in seventeen eighty nine, like the Women's March
on Versailles, which took place in October of that year.
But I don't think we've ever specifically gotten into this
one thing.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
A lot of our.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
French Revolution episodes have also been mostly focused on things
that were happening in Paris or in Versailles, and the
Great Fear really moved primarily through the countryside and small
towns and villages. The specifics of exactly what happened could
vary from place to place, but the common thread across
all of it was this chaos that developed was rooted
(01:14):
in people's belief in a conspiracy theory, So it.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Can be tempting to sum up the French Revolution as
an uprising of the common people, many of whom were
struggling against an out of touch, privileged monarchy, and that was,
of course, definitely part of it, maybe even the easiest
part to visualize and explain, especially if you're focusing on
the period of the revolution that took place before the
(01:39):
Reign of Terror. But the French Revolution had so many layers,
in moving parts and contributing factors. Even if we focused
just on that one aspect, which we largely are today,
there were a lot of different issues feeding into the
struggles of the common people, and a lot of those
issues feed into the Great Fear.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Basically, most people on the poorer end of the economic
spectrum in France had been in a precarious position for decades.
If everything went well, most people got by, but only barely,
and if anything happened to throw things off balance, people
quickly went from kind of making ends meat to basically starving.
(02:20):
Anything that affected people's livelihoods or the cost of living
had the potential to just cause chaos, even if that
shift seemed like something minor, or if it wasn't something
that was happening anywhere near France.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
One of the go to examples here is the price
of bread. Most people did not have a way to
bake bread at home, so they purchased it, and for
a lot of people, bread was their biggest source of
nourishment in a day. Consequently, even a tiny increase in
bread prices could lead to food riots. This was interconnected
with the price of grain. Efforts to boost grain prices
(02:57):
to help the farmers who were growing it also made
bread more expensive. So while farmers might theoretically be doing
better after they sold their harvest, people who were subsisting
on bread wound up doing worse. Yeah, and sometimes those
were the same people, and the increased amount of money
from the harvest wasn't enough to offset the increased price
(03:17):
of bread. A lot of our prior episodes about things
like peasant uprisings or famines, including the Great Famine in Ireland,
have talked about predatory and exploitive landlords as a major factor,
but taken as a whole, the peasant class in France
actually owned a significant amount of land in the eighteenth century,
(03:40):
maybe as much as a third of the land in
the country. But owning land didn't.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Necessarily put people in a better financial position than being
a tenant did. By the late eighteenth century, a lot
of families had been dividing up their land among their
heirs for generations. As a result that a rich farm
plot had become extremely small. It was too small to
comfortably live off the proceeds of and in a lot
(04:07):
of cases, too small to even just subsist on. Everyone
owned land, though, and the percentage of landless people really
varied from one part of France to another. So in
some places maybe twenty percent of the peasantry was landless,
but in others it was sixty percent or more. Unlike
in many other parts of Europe, some landlords in France
(04:28):
were willing to lease small homesteads to people, and that
made it somewhat easier for landless people to find a
place to live and land to farm. These tenant farmers
had to pay dues to their signeur, who played a
similar role.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
To kind of like a feudal lord. Some of the
signors were nobles and others were members of the bourgeoisie,
and in some areas the church acted as a signeur, so.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
These dues could include both cash and a portion of
the crop, and signors also required tenants to do unpaid
labor on their own estates, or at least they had
the right to make their tenants do that, and owning
land did not completely free people from paying dues or
dealing with the signior either. People also had to pay
(05:15):
things like market dues when selling their crops, and both
landless and land owning people in France were expected to
pay a tithe to the church. Signiors were also the
people who usually owned the machinery like the grain mills
and the wine presses, and people had to use that
machinery on the senior's terms. Often the ovens that were
(05:37):
used to bake the bread for the community were also
owned by the seignior as well. Seniors had their own
courts that people on their estates were beholden to, and
they had a lot of leeway in how those courts
were run. So both landless and land owning people were
part of this hierarchical system, and both wound up in
(05:58):
the same basic struggle of not being able to support
themselves on the land that was available to them. A
lot of farmers were doing other jobs in addition to farming,
like running an inn or a tavern, or selling eggs,
or doing paid agricultural labor on a big estate. In
addition to the work on their own farm, some towns
(06:18):
and villages had become home to other industries that provided
additional jobs, some of which could be done from home,
like spinning and weaving. Trying to scrape together a living
on a farm that was too small for the family
while also doing other jobs to make ends meet just
sounds difficult, and it was not possible for a significant
(06:40):
portion of the population to do that. About a tenth
of the population of rural France had no other option
but begging, and in some areas that number could go
even higher. The vast majority of people who were living
off of begging were elderly or disabled, or they were
widows who were trying to take care of young children
(07:02):
or orphans with no adults to care for them. And
then there were landless laborers who could only find work
during some parts of the year, like during the harvest.
For the rest of the year, they didn't really have
anywhere else to go or any other way to earn
a living. Because the harvest was the one time that
farm workers had some leverage over landowners. There was often
(07:25):
labor unrest around the time of harvest, and if the
harvest was poor and there wasn't as much of a
need for labor, issues with vagrancy skyrocketed. By the mid
to late eighteenth century, a situation that was already really
precarious had started getting worse. Standards of living had actually increased,
(07:46):
and adult mortality had gone down as a result. This
seems like a good thing, fewer people dying. That seems good,
but that also meant that the population of France had
grown significantly, and that had led to more demand for
the food and land that had already been in really
short supply. The food crisis got worse as many parts
(08:08):
of France experienced a series of bad harvests starting around
the seventeen sixties. The seventeen eighty three Lockey fissure eruption
in Iceland, which we covered on the show in July
of twenty twenty four, caused acidic rain in cooling temperatures,
and that contributed to bad harvests across much of the
northern Hemisphere. In seventeen eighty eight, bad weather, including hailstorms,
(08:32):
ruined a lot of that year's crops. Also, in seventeen
eighty eight, the Habsburgs went to war against the Ottoman Empire.
France was not directly involved in this conflict. There monarch
was Bourbon, but some of its allies and its trading
partners were Parts of the Mediterranean became unsafe for shipping,
(08:55):
Some of the places where France sold its exports essentially
closed to trade, and Spain also banned imports of French cloth.
So even though France was not one of the active
belligerents in this war, this added to the disruption and
the economic stresses that the common people were facing. England
(09:16):
and France had also signed a trade agreement in seventeen
eighty six which was intended to foster competition between English
and French industries and encourage French industries to adopt English
manufacturing and production methods. What wound up happening was that
a lot of French workers in these industries lost their
jobs in the face of inexpensive goods being imported from England.
(09:40):
The textile industry was particularly hard hit, putting a lot
of those people who had been spinning and weaving at
home out of work. All of this fed into both
the French Revolution and the great fear, which we will
talk about after a sponsor break. Before the break, we
(10:07):
were focused on the issues that were facing France's peasant class,
but of course the nation as a whole was also
having some problems. In seventeen eighty seven, France's Controller General
of Finances arranged a meeting to try to reform the
French economy and manage a severe financial crisis. This meeting
(10:27):
was not successful. Among other things, the proposed plan would
have involved increasing taxes on the rich, and the rich
did not want to do that. So in August of
seventeen eighty eight, King Louis the sixteenth announced that he
was summoning the Estates General to meet at Versailles and
work all this out. The Estates General was made up
(10:48):
of representatives from the three estates. Those were the nobility,
the clergy, and the commoners, and it had not convened
since sixteen fourteen. The king had asked each of the
three estates to submit lists of grievances. People all across
France were given the opportunity to submit their grievances, and
roughly forty thousand kaye de dollons were created before the
(11:10):
Assembly convened. The third Estate's grievances had three prevailing themes
that France's tax system was unfair, that the signorro system
needed to be abolished or reformed, and that the payments
they were required to make to the church were burdensome.
The three estates did have some points of agreement in
(11:31):
their lists of grievances, like obviously the clergy, the nobility,
and the commoners. They had different priorities, but there were
points of overlap, and that included overall support for creating
a French constitution and moving toward a more representative system
of government. But when the Estates General finally met on
(11:52):
May fifth, seventeen eighty nine, they strongly disagreed on how
to vote. There were six hundred Depts representing the commoners,
and then three hundred each for the nobility and the clergy.
If each estate as a body got one vote, then
the nobility and the clergy can team up and outvote
(12:13):
the commoners. But if each delegate got a vote, then
the commoners had the largest number of votes, they would
be more powerful than either of the other two estates.
It would be easier to rally some support among the
nobility and the clergy than to outvote united fronts that
were united against them.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
This led to one of the moments that is sometimes
marked as the beginning of the French Revolution. The Assembly
was at an impasse over this voting question, and on
June seventeenth, the commoners declared themselves to be the National
Assembly and said they would be meeting and voting without
the other two estates if necessary. They had some support
(12:55):
among the clergy, including parish priests. Royal officials locked them
out of their meeting room three days later, prompting the
National Assembly to meet in the Tennis court and swear
an oath that they would continue to meet until a
written constitution had been created for France. The king tried
and failed to disperse the Assembly, and he ultimately asked
(13:17):
the nobility and the clergy, who had not already done so,
to join with the National Assembly. Together they formed the
National Constituent Assembly. But the king also summoned troops to Paris,
and two days after the establishment of the National Constituent Assembly,
he dismissed Finance Minister Jacques Nickaire. Some of the economic
(13:40):
problems that France was dealing with were ones that had
been caused or exacerbated by Nickcair's policies, but he was
also perceived as being on the side of the common people.
He had, for example, taken steps to try to deal
with the food shortages and crop failures that had started
really affecting farmers in seventeen eight. His dismissal provoked an
(14:03):
uprising that included Parisian commoners storming the Bastille on July fourteenth,
seventeen eighty nine, and afterward members of the nobility started
fleeing from France. Meanwhile, in the country, people were getting
news about this, often delayed by at least a day
or two. The idea of a daily newspaper was still
(14:25):
a pretty new thing. The first daily newspaper in France
was the Jeanald de Barrie, established in seventeen seventy seven.
Most rural people did not have access to newspapers, and
while literacy rates were increasing, many people spoke local and
regional dialects of French that would not be comprehensible to
someone speaking Parisian French, or vice versa. In some regions,
(14:49):
people spoke other languages entirely, including Breton, Carolin, Bosque, and Alsatian.
Among others. So people got the news through letters from
Balliage or Baile who wrote to the jurisdictions that they
were responsible for, and those letters were then read aloud
in the town hall or the public square, in addition
to the time that it took for the letter to
(15:11):
get to the community. If the bailiff didn't send a letter,
or if that letter didn't make it to its recipient,
people often just had no other way to get information.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
Yeah, we can also assume that not everyone was at
that meeting or at the public square, and so they
were hearing things passed through word of mouth from having
heard the letter, right, And if one bailiff has a
bad day or doesn't have their act together that week,
nobody gets any information. Right. So all the issues that
we talked about before the break combined with getting somewhat
(15:45):
delayed news of what was happening in Paris and Versailles,
and rumors started to spread across the countryside that the
aristocracy was plotting against the commoners. This was not a
completely new idea. The idea of a packed de famine
went at least as far back as the early to
mid eighteenth century. This was the idea that the monarchy
(16:09):
or the nobility, or some other privileged class of people
was intentionally keeping food from the commoners for some self
serving or nefarious reason. This conspiracy theory had surged during
the seventeen seventy five Flower War, which was a series
of food riots across much of France that were sparked
(16:29):
by increases in bread and grain prices, as well as
food shortages. These issues had been caused in part by
reforms to French agriculture and trade, including the abolition of
guilds and a move to a free trade system for grain.
It was easy for people to believe that these changes
had been made with the intent of making people suffer,
(16:50):
and since the king was responsible for making sure his
subjects were fed, it was also easy for people to
believe that his failure to do so was deliberate. Almost
fifteen years after the Flower War, the paxstafamines still had
a ring of truth to a lot of people. People
also understood that popular uprisings often ended in violence or
(17:14):
some other retribution against the poorest people who had risen up.
Before the convening of the Estates General, aristocrats had refused
to agree to economic reforms that would have increased their
taxes while hopefully making things easier for the poor. The
king had tried to disperse the Assembly, and there were
(17:34):
still aristocrats who wanted to disband it. Various levels of
the French government were also known to let problems lie,
or even to make problems worse if they thought the
ends justified the means. There was just a lot that
would make people think this was true.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
So in the wake of the National Assembly and the
Tennis Court oath, and the storming of the Bastille and
skyrocketing bread prices, people started to believe that the aristocracy
was hoarding all the food as leverage over the commoners,
and that they would ruin the harvest to try to
starve the third estate into compliance. One of the nobles
who had fled from France was the Comte d'Artois, who
(18:15):
would much later become King Charles the Tenth of France,
and people believed that he was coming back with a
foreign army to pacify the commoners.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
This conspiracy theory collided with actual problems that the rural
parts of France really were facing, and one of those
was large numbers of landless, unemployed people who were roaming
around the countryside. This went beyond that roughly ten percent
of the rural population who were subsisting through begging. These
(18:46):
were mostly farm workers who could not find employment and
textile workers who had been put out of work by
that trade agreement with England in the late summer of
seventeen eighty nine. They were going from farm to farm
demanding food and sometimes harassing people if they didn't get
any or didn't get enough. Some of them took food
(19:06):
from the fields before it was fully ripe, or they
took firewood from the forests, or they even robbed people.
So rumors also spread that mobs of brigands were marauding
all around the countryside. They were stripping the fields completely bare,
destroying orchards, ruining farms, and completely clearing the forests of
(19:29):
all of their firewood. And people thought that these brigands
were being sheltered or enabled by the aristocracy. Communities started
sending word to Paris or nearby outposts to ask for
help defending themselves against the perceived threat. But because of
what was happening in Paris, there just wasn't much help available.
(19:49):
When help was dispatched, it could arrive long after it
was really needed. For example, Toma Alexandle Dumat, who was
the subject of our most recent Saturday classic, arrived in
the town of Villere Couterret with his unit on August fifteenth,
having been summoned to protect both the chateau and the
villagers from a supposed mob of brigands. But by that
(20:12):
point the great fear was over and Duma mostly wound
up being the pampered guest of his host family. So,
with help often coming too late to be of any
use or not coming at all, farmers started arming themselves
and trying to form their own defense forces to guard
their land. Small towns and villages ordered their residents to
(20:33):
take up arms and to be prepared to defend themselves
or to go to the defense of the Third Estate
at the National Constituent Assembly if it was necessary. There
was an increasing sense of panic and paranoia in small
towns and villages around Paris, and common people started greeting
one another and outsiders with the question are you for
(20:53):
the Third Estate? On July sixteenth, residents of Lajare stopped
a grain and flowershipment that was being prepared for Paris
because people were afraid it was going to be used
to feed soldiers who they thought were preparing to attack
the common people. All of this really came to a
head on July nineteenth, which we will get to after
(21:14):
a sponsor break. On July nineteenth, seventeen eighty nine, some
soldiers from the Visual Garrison in the Franche Comte region
of France arrived at Chateau de Quinsy. This was home
(21:36):
to Monsieur de Mimee, signor of Quincy, and a particularly
hated landlord. These soldiers said that they had been invited
and a servant let them in and gave them some drinks,
and then at about eleven PM, when they were leaving
and were apparently intoxicated, there was an explosion in the
(21:57):
basement of the chateau. Men were killed and a lot
of other people were injured.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Today, this is all believed to have been an accident
that one of the soldiers or maybe another guest, was
either lost in the house or was looking for food
or money and got too close to a barrel of
gunpowder while carrying a torch or a candle. But a
rumor spread that members of the third Estate had been
lured into the chateau in order to kill them.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Monsieur de mi May was not at home at the time.
He had been facing hostility from the area's commoners, and
he had already fled. He was away, staying with his
mother in law over the next day. So on the twentieth,
in retaliation for what people believed was an intentional explosion
at the Chateau, peasants rose up in Franche Comti, looting
(22:49):
and burning many of the properties that he owned.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
While fear and unrest had been increasing in the countryside
ahead of this, the uprising after the explosion is marked
as the start of the Great Fear, which spread over
most of France. The places that were mostly unaffected were
almost entirely along the coasts or along the border with
what's now Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany. Some of those areas
(23:14):
had just been through some other agrarian uprising in the
months before the fear, and there's some speculation that this
might have affected how susceptible they were to this misinformation.
In most of the rest of rural France, the same
basic pattern played out over and over. First, people would
notice something that they thought was the aristocracy's army of
(23:37):
brigands coming for them. They would sound the tocsin or
the alarm belt. They would send runners to their neighbors
or to neighboring villages to warn them and to call
for help. People would arm themselves with things like pitchforks, halberds,
and pikes. If soldiers or armed peasants arrived in response
to that call for help, the local people would stake
(24:00):
them for attackers and try to fight them off. People
on the neighboring farms or neighboring towns or villages would
see the smoke or hear the commotion, and that cycle
would start again. This played out in tandem with uprisings
against the aristocracy, which were interconnected with the Great Fear,
but in some ways were also a separate phenomenon. People
(24:23):
broke into manor houses to burn the records that were
used to determine people's signorial dues, or to reclaim the
crops they had used to pay those dues. They attacked
the signor's wine presses and grain mills. Whole communities went
to their local monasteries demanding their tithes be returned to them,
or they just refused to pay their tithes. Nobles and
(24:46):
aristocrats were subject to attacks vandalism and public humiliation, or
they were driven off their estates. When people saw smoke
from these attacks, or large groups of people moving through
the countryside to attack back of manner or take back
their tithes from a monastery, they would raise the alarm,
thinking that they were seeing was that supposed brigand army
(25:09):
burning something down or coming to destroy their harvest.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Not everywhere that was struck by the Great Fear also
rose up against the aristocracy, and it does seem like
in places that there were these uprisings, people were at
least somewhat selective about it. Only three landlords are known
to have been killed during the Great Fear. Obviously it
is not great that three landlords were killed, but this
(25:36):
was not like a widespread massacre of all the landlords.
This was also not a situation of like every manner
in rural France being torn or burned to the ground.
Some of them were burned, but this was not like.
It didn't level the aristocratic estates of France across the board.
But the atmosphere across the French countryside was so paranoid
(26:00):
and suspicious that people raised the alarm over things that
were completely innocuous. This included herds of livestock, raising clouds
of dust as they were being moved along the road,
or making a lot of noise as they were driven
through a forest, or smoke from ordinary work like burning
off unwanted vegetation or running lime kilns. In Paris, those
(26:22):
letters people had written to ask for help were read
before the National Constituent Assembly, and word of those letters
being read made its way back to the rural communities.
This wound up reinforcing the idea that there really were
hordes of brigands who were funded and enabled by the aristocrats,
(26:43):
and they were coming to attack the farms. While the
Great Fear and its interconnected uprisings are often described in
terms of the country, there was violence in Paris as well.
On July twenty second, Controller General of Finances Joseph Foulon
de Due was ruptured by peasants and taken to the
Hotel de Ville. Foulon was widely hated and believed to
(27:06):
be uncaring and merciless toward the poor. He's rumored to
have said that if people had no bread, then they
could eat hay, much like Marie Antoinette supposedly having said
let them eat cake. This quote is also unsubstantiated, but
it does seem to be a rumor that was circulating
at the time, and it speaks to how people thought
about him. The crowd unsuccessfully tried to hang him, then
(27:30):
beheaded him, and they paraded his head around with his
mouth stuffed with hay and excrement. There wasn't really any
kind of centralized leadership or organizational structure for what the
peasants were doing in the country, whether they were trying
to defend themselves from a perceived threat or attacking the
(27:50):
nearest scenurial manner. There also wasn't a figurehead like Rebecca
during the Rebecca Riots or Ned Ludd during the Luddite uprising. Instead,
the Great Fear was something that seemed to grow and
recur almost spontaneously, kind of organically, largely following the lines
of communication and trade all across France. Although troops were
(28:15):
deployed to some areas, including Franche Compte where this first started,
there was no practical way for authorities to try to
put down such a widespread, scattered uprising with force. There
were just too many outbreaks of panic, violence and destruction
happening in too many places at once, So the National
Constituent Assembly and its members had to find some way
(28:37):
to restore calm, which they did in part by addressing
some of the Third Estate's grievances. On August fourth, seventeen
eighty nine, the Assembly issued the first of what would
come to be known as the August Decrees, abolishing the
feudal system in France. There would ultimately be nineteen decrees,
which also ended noble and clerical privilege and abolished the tithe.
(29:01):
This fundamentally changed multiple aspects of French society and the
French economy, dismantling or changing systems and structures that had
been in place since the Middle Ages. By August sixth,
two days after the first of the August Decrees, the
Great Fear had basically ended, but the communities where it
(29:22):
had taken place had also changed. Very broadly speaking, the
Great Fear and the conspiracy theory that was connected to
it really amped up people's hatred of the rich and
of the nobility. It also prompted villages and rural areas
to organize themselves and to do that quickly. This new
found organization is seen as an influence on the way
(29:44):
the French Revolution progressed from this point and on the
functioning of the French Republic after the abolition of the monarchy.
But it's tricky to pin down the long term influence
of the Great Fear in France in really specific terms
beyond the immediate events like the August Decrees and the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen,
(30:05):
which was created by the National Constituent Assembly and then
ratified by the King. The King ratified the Declaration almost
exactly a month after the Great Fear was over. So
much other stuff happened after that, and a lot of
it was truly monumental, including the creation of France's first
Constitution in seventeen ninety one, the executions of King Louis
(30:27):
the sixteenth and Marie Antoinette in seventeen ninety three, to
the Reign of Terror which ended in seventeen ninety four,
to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became First Consul
in seventeen ninety nine and of course eventually declared himself
Emperor of the French. Yeah, a lot of those core
issues that people were dealing with also were still there,
(30:48):
Like we have that prior episode about the Women's March
on Versailles. That was connected to bread prices and food
shortages still an issue after the Great Fear had kind
of come to a close, and since the Great Fear
largely came to an end without some kind of massive
military response across the whole country, for the most part,
(31:08):
the common people who were part of it did not
face a lot of consequences when it was over. Especially
in a lot of the more outlying areas. A lot
of people just went back home without ever being charged
with anything or facing any kind of trial. But in
places where troops had been deployed, people were more likely
to face trial, and those who were convicted for their
(31:29):
involvement were either executed or they were sentenced to serve
as galley slaves. This mainly affected people in places like Alsace,
Hanault and franche Comte.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
The paper we mentioned at the top of the show
which inspired this episode was about how the Great Fear spread,
and it was published in the journal Nature. Researchers used
historical records of both the peasant uprisings and the rumors
of aristocratic plots. They also incorporated the work of French
historian George Lefebre, whose nineteen thirty two La grampel To
(32:02):
seventeen eighty nine was the first book length examination of
the Great Fear. That book was translated into English in
nineteen seventy three, and it is still considered to be
a foundational text on the Great Fear. The researchers then
used epidemiological models to track the spread of misinformation over
(32:22):
the course of the Great Fear. They found that the
quote viral misinformation that was driving this really did spread
a lot like an actual infectious disease. It had an
ar not value of one point five, that's the average
number of people that an infected person spreads. The disease
to the.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Great Fear spread almost exponentially until it peaked on July thirtieth,
and then it declined before coming to an end on
August fourth. Like a contagious illness. The misinformation spread largely
along main roads and postal routes. This paper also I
identified risk factors for the areas which seem to have
(33:03):
the highest risk of transmitting this information. They included having
a higher population, which is similar to infectious diseases that
need enough hosts to be able to spread effectively, as
well as places being more literate and wealthier communities at
the highest risk were also ones that had higher concentrations
(33:23):
of land ownership and higher wheat prices. The researchers concluded
the paper by comparing the Great Fear to the role
of rumors in uprisings today or within the last couple
of decades, when information can spread almost instantaneously over social media,
rather than having to travel along trade and mail routes
(33:47):
by people who were carrying physical copies of letters or
other media. But there's other research showing that even today,
when we do have access to almost instant information, these
kind of rumors can still spread along very similar patterns
to the way contagious diseases.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Do tum Yeah. Uh, do you have listener mail that
hopefully involves no contagious diseases or horrible uprisings. I do
have listener mail. I don't think it involves any of
those things, but it's been fully two hours since I
reread it, so I could be forgetting something.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
This email is from Mad's, Mads wrote after our episode
on Anna Maria von Sherman, and the email touches on
other episodes as well. Mads wrote, Hi, Tracy high Holly,
longtime listener and not first time writer, though It's been
a while since I've last written in. I've been listening
to your podcast for about a decade now, and you've
accompanied me through so many hours of commuting, doing chores
(34:50):
and taking walks, but also calms my nerves during one
of my most dreaded and anxiety inducing modes of travel
aka flying on a plan and recovering from surgery. I
was just listening to your episode on Anna Marie von
Sherman when you mentioned two places I have connections to,
the first of all, Cologne or I'm not going to
(35:13):
try to say this in German because I feel like
I will now I'll not do a good job. But
it's spelled differently from Cologne how we say it in English,
which is very close to my hometown of Bonn and
a city that is near and dear to my heart.
Because of that, this alone would not have gotten me
so excited that I would write in about the episode. No,
(35:35):
it was the mention of eastern Westphalian town Herford that
got me. I've spent a lot of time there since
my ex girlfriend was from that area, and I still
have two very dear friends who live in the vicinity
of it. However, Herford is not really a well known
place unless you are from around there, and the small
town in which my ex girlfriend lived is basically a
(35:56):
complete unknown, which meant that I would have had pretty
much the exact same conversation every time I went to
visit her and got asked where she lives and from there.
It's sort of an explanation of increasingly small towns that
are close to Herford. In Germany, there is a very
popular joke slash meme slash conspiracy theory that this city
(36:18):
simply doesn't exist and it's just a hoax made by
the government or whoever to fool people. I believe that
joke originated at some student party after a lot of drinks.
I'm skipping ahead just a touch. The mention of Herford
did remind me, though, of another episode I had meant
to write in about, and that's the episode about Joan Arson,
the last Catholic Bishop of Iceland.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
What does he have to do with Herford?
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Well, the fact that the first Catholic Bishop of Iceland
was in fact sent to Herford to study and spent
some years of his life there before being appointed Bishop
of Iceland. I actually wanted to say even more, but
it's late and I should really go to sleep, so
I'll probably send you my other thoughts next time I
get a random connection to some thing slash place I know, well,
I will pause the email for just a second. I
(37:05):
don't remember if we mentioned in that episode about jan Arison,
but sending Catholic clergy members or people who thought they
might join the clergy in Iceland, sending them to Germany
to study was like sort of the thing to do
at the time. A lot of the Catholic clergy, Yeah,
(37:25):
went to Germany to study during that era. Returning to
the reason that I just really wanted to read this
email in particular today, attached you will find pictures of
my two kiddies, Peter and Ferby as pet tax when
I adopted both of them from the shelter. They're both
pretty anxious and weary and skittish, especially Ferby. I was
(37:46):
in fact warned by the shelter he might never be
really comfortable with being touched and that he might never
really warm up to the company of humans. Well, it
took him about three weeks to turn into a super
sweet cuddle bug in total Mama's boy. He's a silly
goose who manages to pretty much appear hair ties out
of the air no matter how I hide them, playing
with strings and laying in the most silly positions. Also,
(38:07):
he has big round eyes and he looks at you
with an expression I can only describe as and then
it's the big round eye emoji. Peter is my wonderful
void creature. He does look like someone who tried to
draw a cat who has never seen a cat before.
He has a shape. I adore him. There's some more
details about these cats. It is very sweet, but I
(38:28):
feel like we are gonna run short on time, so
I want to describe these pictures. We have a kind
of tabby cat. I'm looking directly at yawning mouth and toebeans.
It is incredibly cute, black void kitty, incredibly cute. Also,
(38:49):
the thing that made me go I love this picture
so much and I want to read this email today
is there is a picture of the black cat. The
black cat was the one who was named Peter. Peter
is standing on the open door of the dishwasher and
(39:10):
the top rack of the dishwasher is pulled out as
though it is being either loaded or unloaded. This dishwasher
looks really clean, so I think maybe we are about
to unload it, but Peter is standing there on the
open dishwasher door. And it makes me laugh because one
of my cats is really fixated on when I put
the detergent pod into the dishwasher. If she hears me
(39:35):
open the dishwasher door and then open the cabinet door
where we keep those things, she will run into the
kitchen and try to like put her paw on the
dishwasher pod. I don't know why she wants to do this.
She has never tried to bite it or sniff it,
or eat it or anything like that. This is some
(39:58):
cat ritual all of her own, involving the pod and
so having another black cat standing on the open dishwasher door,
I was extremely tickled by. So thank you Mads for
sending this email. I really enjoyed the email, even though
I abridged bits of it. This is also an email
from August, so I'm sorry it took me a while
(40:18):
to read it. If you would like to send us
a note about this or any other podcast, where at
History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can also
subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere
else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed
(40:40):
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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