The Great Fear (in French, Grande Peur) was a wave of peasant riots and violence that swept through France in July and August 1789. These riots were sparked by economic concerns, rural panic and the power of rumour.
Context....MUCH MORE
Already excited by the summer’s political developments, France’s peasants heard and shared rumours about roving bands of brigands, possibly paid by royalists.
These brigands, it was reported, were rampaging through the countryside, raiding villages and stealing grain.
These rumours appeared in different places, took different forms and invoked different responses.
Many peasants responded by arming themselves and mobilising to defend their property. Some went further and engaged in revolutionary violence, taking to the road, looting the châteaux of landed aristocrats and destroying feudal contracts. The peasants, it seems, became the destructive brigands they had initially feared.
While few people were killed during the Great Fear, property worth millions of livres was either stolen or destroyed. The Great Fear certainly had an impact on political events, contributing to the National Assembly’s abolition of feudalism on August 4th.
Background
The story of the Great Fear begins with paranoia about outsiders. Peasant communities were, by their nature, insular and suspicious of outsiders. They regarded strangers and newcomers with a suspicious eye. Some of this was because new arrivals might compete for labour, food and charity provided by the local parish.
By the late 1780s, peasants in many regions were accustomed to outsiders arriving in their village, usually in the middle of the year when good weather made travel easier.
Some of these outsiders were landless labourers or destitute townspeople in search of paid work. Others were beggars, vagrants and outcasts, who decided that living off the land or seeking the charity of farmers was a better option than starving in the cities.
The hunger of 1789
The situation became critical in the spring of 1789 as France endured its worst food crisis in years. While thousands in the cities starved or handed over almost all their wages for even, even the peasants’ own small stores of grain were dwindling.
According to John Albert White, who translated Georges Lefebvre‘s pivotal study of the Great Fear, the numbers of itinerants in rural areas reached levels never seen before:
“Unemployed workers, displaced by the crisis in industry, were everywhere in search of jobs… Vagrants and beggars, always a source of concern to the small rural proprietor, choked the roads and threatened reprisals against householders who refused to give them shelter or a crust of bread. Hungry men and women invaded forests and fields and stripped them of firewood or grain, before the harvest was ripe to the gathered.”
