Great Fear

A countryside on edge

The summer of 1789 found the French countryside hungry and hopeful at once. The harvest of 1788 had failed, grain was dear, and the roads were full of beggars and labourers looking for work or bread. In the spring the villages had drawn up their lists of grievances for the Estates-General, and many peasants now expected the dues and tithes of the Ancien Régime to be swept away. Waiting for the new harvest, they feared for it most of all.

Then came the news from Paris. The king had dismissed Necker, troops had gathered around the capital, and on 14 July the people had taken the Bastille. To many it looked as though the court had tried a coup and failed — and that the nobles, beaten in Paris, would take their revenge on the countryside.

How the fear spread

The spark was usually trivial: a cloud of dust on the road, a band of harvesters from another village, a herd of cattle glimpsed at dusk. Someone saw brigands, the church bell rang the tocsin, and riders set off to warn the next villages — and to ask for help. Each village that armed itself alarmed the next, and within hours the story had grown from a few vagrants into an army burning its way across the province. Townsmen formed militias, and local nobles sometimes took command of them.

The panic did not start in one place. In his classic study of 1932, Georges Lefebvre traced a handful of main currents, each spreading from its own centre: one from Franche-Comté, for instance, and another from Ruffec, in the Angoumois, which from 28 July ran across the whole southwest. Between 20 July and 6 August they covered much of the kingdom.

From fear to revolt

When the brigands failed to appear, the villagers were left armed, gathered and angry. In several regions they turned on the lords they suspected of the plot. They marched to the château and demanded the terriers — the registers that recorded what each household owed its lord — and burned them in the courtyard. Where the lord or his steward resisted, the château itself was sometimes sacked or set on fire. The worst of it came in Franche-Comté, the Mâconnais and Dauphiné, and abbeys were attacked too, since many of them were great landlords.

The violence was aimed at paper and property more than at people, and few lives were lost in the countryside. In Paris the same fear of a famine plot proved deadlier: on 22 July the crowd hanged Joseph-François Foullon de Doué, newly named to the king’s ministry, and killed his son-in-law, the intendant Bertier de Sauvigny.

The Assembly’s answer

At Versailles, letters from the provinces told the deputies of burning châteaux. Some wanted troops sent to restore order, but turning the king’s army on the peasants would have put the Assembly back in the hands of the court it had just defied. A group of liberal nobles, meeting with deputies of the Breton Club, chose another way: to give up of their own accord what the peasants were already taking by force.

On the evening of 4 August the Vicomte de Noailles and the Duc d’Aiguillon opened the debate, and by two in the morning the Assembly had renounced privilege after privilege. This was the Night of 4 August. The decree drafted over the following week opened with the sentence the villages had been waiting for.

Why it matters

The Great Fear was a panic, not a plan: there was no aristocratic plot behind the brigands, and no revolutionary one behind the peasants. Lefebvre’s study showed how hunger, hope and the fear of revenge could set a whole countryside moving at once. Its effects lasted. It put the question of the lords’ dues before the Assembly at once, and it made the peasants a force the Revolution had to reckon with from then on.