THE GREAT FEAR OF 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France

by George Lefebvre ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 27, 1973

A masterful study of the origins and proliferation of a terrifying rumor which swept large portions of rural France on the eve of the French Revolution precipitating spontaneous peasant risings and spreading endemic panic which accelerated the pace of political events in Paris and led to the arming of the countryside. The rumor at its starkest shouted out the brigands are coming! -- to expropriate the harvest, bum the villages and murder women and children. Lefebvre, one of France's most distinguished historians, traces its precise boundaries in time and space: it began on July 20th in the west and ended on August 6th in the south; he establishes beyond a question that The Great Fear was different in kind and degree from the chronic peasant jacqueries of the 18th century. Frequently it was spread by the authorities themselves, and it had several distinct points of origin; the aristocracy blamed it on the Third Estate, convinced that unleashing the peasantry was part of an anarchistic plot against the seigneurs; the Third Estate blamed it on the forces of counterrevolution; the peasants blamed it on the capital, on the priests and on the hordes of vagrants and menacing beggars who constituted the redundant agricultural population. Everywhere the panic stoked up class hatred and led to the forming of local militias; chateaus were razed and manorial records destroyed. First published in France in 1932, The Great Fear has hitherto been unavailable in English; and like Louis Chevalier's Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes (p. 29) which appeared in English for the first time a month ago, it is one of the earliest studies to look at the irrational currents of popular imagination and protest ""from below.

Pub Date: April 27, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION