# data[].attributes.body
The great fear

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Great Fear | Revolution, Peasants & Terror

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Great Fear, (1789) in the French Revolution, a period of panic and riot by peasants and others amid rumours of an "aristocratic conspiracy" by the king and the privileged to overthrow the Third Estate. The gathering of troops around Paris provoked insurrection, and on July 14 the Parisian rabble

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Great Fear (French: la Grande Peur) was a wave of panic that swept the French countryside in late July and early August 1789. Fearful of plots by aristocrats to undermine the budding French Revolution (1789-1799), peasants and townspeople mobilized, attacking manorial houses. The unrest contributed to the passage of the August Decrees, which abolished feudalism in France.

The Great Fear and its associated riots only lasted for roughly three weeks but set the stage for some of the most important developments of the Revolution. French historian Georges Lefebvre proposed some possible causes of the Great Fear being the breakdown in communication due to unrest in Paris, high tensions set off by food shortages and widespread unemployment, and fears of violent retaliation by the nobility and foreign powers meant to undermine the people. Other historians have argued that one possible cause could be the peasants' consumption of ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus.

Hunger & Despair

Lefebvre opens his 1932 book The Great Fear of 1789, still regarded as the seminal work on the topic, with a quote from French critic Hippolyte Taine: "The people are like a man walking in a pond of water up to his mouth: the slightest dip in the ground, the slightest ripple, makes him lose his footing - he sinks and chokes" (Lefebvre, 6). Taine's quote wonderfully illustrates the precarious position of the French lower classes in the Ancien Régime. Even in the best of times, one poor harvest could mean disaster for the farmers and industrial workers alike.

By 1789 the poorest were spending up to 80% of their income solely on bread.

Since the late 1760s, harvests had become increasingly uncertain, and yields fluctuated sharply. Partly resulting from the 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland, harvests across France became progressively worse, reaching a low point in 1788, when summer hailstorms killed many crops, and a subsequent August draught killed much of the rest. For urban workers, this meant bread prices skyrocketed, and by 1789 the poorest were spending up to 80% of their income solely on bread.

Unemployment also rose sharply, with 8-11 million people, or roughly a third of the population, either unemployed or lacking other forms of support. France's rapidly growing population, having increased by 2-3 million since 1770, added to the strain on resources. In one of their cahiers, or grievances, written before the Estates-General of 1789, the villagers of La Caure succinctly described the population problem by writing, "the number of our children plunges us into despair" (Lefebvre, 9). While many flocked to the cities looking for jobs, lots of people also flooded the countryside, desperate to find work on farms. However, by the late 18th century, many peasant farms were barely large enough to support even a single family. Due to the practice of splitting the land evenly amongst sons upon inheritance, many farmers were left with minuscule and often unfertile tracts of land. This led many landless peasants to seek work on the large farming estates owned by the nobility. Since these grand estates were often only able to provide work in the harvest season, laborers suffered in perpetual poverty the rest of the year.

Many of the landless and unemployed people who flooded the countryside were unable to find work, forcing some to turn to begging. Travelling from farm to farm, often in groups, these vagrants would ask for crusts of bread or places to sleep for the night. While some farmers were sympathetic, many others were distrustful or outright fearful of them. Word began to spread that bands of vagabonds were knocking down fences or setting fire to farmers' fruit trees after being denied help, while some vagrants were allegedly swarming cornfields and cutting down unripe stalks of corn, threatening another year's harvest. Some farmers nervously wrote to nearby towns, asking for soldiers to be sent to protect their fields, while others blamed the church for not providing for the impoverished with the money collected from tithes.

Salt smugglers took advantage of the countryside chaos by travelling from farm to farm, bullying and terrorizing farmers into buying their contraband goods. These smugglers would often be followed by the gabelous, the hated tax collectors contracted by the French government. The gabelous were often little better than thugs themselves and would beat and rob farmers suspected of purchasing black market salt, occasionally even hauling them off to jail. Meanwhile, as towns erupted into bread riots, townsfolk also made expeditions out to farms where they forced farmers to sell them their goods.

The paralysis of royal authority following the rise of the National Assembly and the Storming of the Bastille meant that farmers could not rely on police or soldiers. In the spring and summer of 1789, many began to arm themselves and look to one another for protection. By July, farmers had banded together to defend their villages, with some even standing guard at roads or bridges for weeks at a time. However, many of the reports of violence were merely the result of rumors. As reliable news from Paris became less frequent because of the revolutionary excitement occurring there, rumors in the countryside increased in intensity; one such story told of the residents of Lyons fighting off hundreds of brigands which included marauding Savoyards and escaped galley slaves. Another tale told of a British squadron of warships haunting the channel, waiting for brigands to invade the port city of Le Havre and throw open the gates to them. As these rumors heightened tensions, many looked for a more tangible enemy to blame and found one in the clergy and aristocracy.

Conspiracies & Malcontents

Many across France had long blamed the privileged classes for plotting against them. Stretching back to at least the time of the Flour War, a major bread riot that swept the Paris region in 1775, the conspiracy theory known as the Pacte de Famine began to gain traction. Subscribers to this theory believed that the bad harvests and food shortages plaguing France had been orchestrated by the nobility in order to better subjugate and control the people. They allegedly achieved this by hoarding foodstuffs in monasteries and in their manorial castles. Whether or not King Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-1792) was involved in the conspiracy remained a point of division; some believed he was a benevolent king being tricked and misled by his devious ministers, while others thought he was the mastermind behind the whole plot.

Evidence for some kind of upper-class plot appeared to sprout in the early summer of 1789, as the proceedings of the Estates-General began to turn in favor of the Third Estate, which proclaimed a National Assembly on 17 June. By 1 July, the king had summoned 30,000 soldiers to the Paris region, many of them foreign troops, and on the 11th, he dismissed his chief minister, Jacques Necker, seen by many as one of the primary defenders of the people. These acts appeared to be counter-revolutionary measures, taken to thwart the National Assembly and kill the Revolution in its crib. Riots in Paris led to the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July, and although the king withdrew the troops and reinstated Necker, the seeds of distrust had been planted.

On 16 July, the Comte d'Artois, the king's youngest brother and one of the most outspoken enemies of the Revolution, fled Versailles along with a large entourage of relatives and supporters. It was unknown where he had gone; some believed he had fled to Spain, others Turin. But it was widely believed that Artois would soon return to France at the head of a foreign army. There was no shortage of enemies of the Revolution who would be willing to give him one, after all. The kingdoms of Spain, Naples, and Sicily were all controlled by the Bourbons, while the Holy Roman Emperor was the brother of Queen Marie Antoinette (1755-1793).

Across France, towns began arming themselves by calling up defensive militias, pledging to defend the National Assembly from any threat, foreign or domestic. In Montpellier, every male of fighting age except for priests and monks was ordered to prepare to take up arms, while the small town of Orgelet in the Jura wrote to Versailles and promised to "sacrifice their peace, their possessions, everything down to the last drop of blood" to defend the Assembly (Lefebvre, 81).

Anger against the nobility only intensified after Artois' flight. On 16 July, citizens of Le Havre stopped shipments of grain and flour from being sent to Paris, for fear that they would be used to feed royal troops. The same day, a citizens' militia in Dijon seized the chateau and armories, imprisoned their military governor, and confined all nobles and clergy to their homes. Members of the ministry that was to have replaced Necker's government were harassed, imprisoned, or in some cases brutally murdered: in Paris, the mouth of the severed head of one minister, Foulon, was stuffed with grass to signify his alleged involvement in the famine plot.

As paranoia took hold in many towns, revolutionary cockade wearing became compulsory, with those commoners who were judged hostile to the people's cause forbidden from wearing one. Around this time, it became commonplace, when meeting a new person, to ask, "Are you for the Third Estate?" (Lefebvre, 88). Although the Great Fear gained momentum in the towns of France, it would reach its apex in the countryside, where its target was not individual nobles but the system of feudalism itself.

Panic & Revolt

Already on edge from the rumors of violent bandits, countryside peasants had been watching events in Paris closely. The actions of 14 July and the subsequent arming of townships only confirmed their suspicions that there was indeed an aristocratic plot against them. Yet many of these peasants had even greater reason to believe they were in danger than the townsfolk did. As farmers, many of them paid feudal dues to local seigneurs and knew their lords' nature well enough to understand they would never willingly give up their privileges. Furthermore, those peasants with knowledge of history understood that most previous uprisings against feudal lords had ended in bloodshed. With this perspective, the peasants realized they were in danger as soon as the Estates-General had been summoned.

Sign up for our free weekly email newsletter!

Bands of armed peasants invaded seigneurial estates, breaking into barns & reclaiming the goods they had paid in manorial dues.

It was only natural, therefore, that rage was turned toward the lords who were, even in this period of famine and financial difficulty, "ever busy sucking their blood" (Furet, 75). The tipping point was reached on 19 July, when an explosion destroyed the Chateau de Quincey, home of one of the more hated landlords in the Franche-Comté region, killing five people and injuring several others. The explosion, while likely an accident caused by a drunken dinner guest stumbling too close to a powder keg with a flaming torch, nonetheless alarmed the peasants, who believed the nobility would use it as an excuse to crack down on them.

Immediately after the explosion at Quincey, the peasants of Franche-Comté arose in revolt. Bands of armed peasants invaded seigneurial estates, breaking into barns and reclaiming the goods they had paid in manorial dues. Muniment rooms, which contained records of feudal obligations, were ransacked and torched, and other symbols of feudalism such as wine presses and mills owned by nobles, were likewise attacked. In some cases, the chateaux themselves were invaded and plundered. If the local seigneur happened to be in residence during the attack, he would likely be accosted by the peasants who would force him to renounce his feudal privileges. Abbeys and monasteries, too, were raided in search of hoarded goods, and entire parishes banded together to refuse to pay their tithes.

The Franche-Comté riots were eventually subdued by detachments of cavalry, but the Great Fear had already caused similar revolts to break out all over the country, most significantly in the regions of Hainault, Alsace, Normandy, and the Mâconnais. In the last weeks of July 1789, bands of peasants harassed nobles and raided their estates. Carriages were pushed into rivers and nobles were harassed, humiliated, and, in some cases, beaten. Despite this, it is generally agreed that the countryside revolts during the Great Fear were relatively bloodless, and murders were few and far between. A few chateaux were burned or razed to the ground, as was the case with an estate owned by the Talleyrand family, but this too was rare.

Many of the peasants claimed to be acting on behalf of the king, who had recently accepted a revolutionary cockade and was perceived by some to be in favor of the Revolution. In the Mâconnais, an official claimed that he had seen a letter in the king's name that authorized "all the people in the country to enter all the chateaux of the Mâconnais to demand their title deeds and if they are refused, they can loot, burn and plunder; they will not be punished" (Lefebvre, 96). On 21 July, residents of Strasbourg and Cherbourg refused to pay the market price for bread, claiming that the king intended all his subjects to be equally provided for. Just as seigneurial estates were raided in the countryside, houses of those believed to be thwarting the king's will were also attacked in the towns.

As the name suggests, the Great Fear was a period of mass hysteria. As the chaos of the Revolution had begun to cause gaps in communication, it was difficult to know which news was true and what was fake. Tales were told of British and German mercenaries burning the countryside, while witnesses swore that they had seen Artois return from Spain with a 50,000-man army at his back. The brigands who had supposedly started the havoc were believed to be agents in the pay of British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, while English traveler Arthur Young was told by Frenchmen he had believed to be "otherwise quite intelligent" that Queen Marie Antoinette was planning to poison the king and replace him with Artois, rumored to be her lover (Schama, 436).

The sight of smoke emanating from the peasants' raids on nobles' properties convinced other peasants that they were under brigand attack, adding even further layers to existing fears. Scholar Simon Schama tells an anecdote of no less than 3,000 men in southern Champagne arming themselves to drive off a band of bandits, only to discover upon closer inspection that what they thought had been a group of dangerous thugs from a distance was nothing more than a herd of cattle (432).

End of the Fear & Legacy

By early August, the National Assembly had decided it was not in their best interests to have bands of panicked peasants roving the countryside. To restore calm to the provinces, the Vicomte de Noailles put forth the radical idea of abolishing the privileges of the nobility. This idea would lead to the passage of the August Decrees on the night of 4 August, which dismantled feudalism in France and abolished the Gallican Church's right to collect tithes. The August Decrees were monumental and, combined with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that came soon after, were some of the most significant achievements of the entire Revolution. The decrees also seemed to placate the countryside; as abruptly as it had begun, the Great Fear had mostly fizzled out by 6 August.

Although most peasants who had participated in the revolts returned to their homes, large numbers had either been arrested during the unrest or at some point shortly afterward. In most places where the revolts had ended on their own, few people were sentenced. However, in areas like Alsace, Hainault, and Franche-Comté, where the military had ended the riots, many peasants were hanged or sentenced to service as galley slaves.

The Great Fear was, in conclusion, a puzzling moment in the history of the French Revolution, having long confused historians with its bizarre nature. Although peasant revolts were hardly a unique phenomenon, the Great Fear stands out due to both its scope and its brevity; barely lasting three weeks, the unrest enveloped large portions of French towns and the countryside. It was predicated almost entirely on rumors or exaggerated stories, turning bands of wandering beggars down on their luck into fearsome brigands in the pay of foreign powers. If such groups of marauders indeed existed, they were certainly not large or threatening enough to justify the panic that set in; and yet the panic caused by a mostly imagined threat led to the abolition of one of the most ancient institutions in France.

The seeds of distrust planted by the Great Fear lasted far longer than the event itself. Some of the nobility and clergy became further embittered toward the Revolution for the destruction of their privileges. Meanwhile, although the countryside unrest ended, the general fear remained. Hunger was still prevalent, and the threat of foreign intervention in the Revolution was ever-looming. Of course, these latter fears would eventually be realized when, in the course of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), France found itself at war with most of the rest of Europe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Great Fear (French: la Grande Peur) was a wave of panic that swept the French countryside in late July and early August 1789. Fearful of plots by aristocrats to undermine the budding French Revolution...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Library of Congress does not own rights to material in its collections. Therefore, it does not license or charge permission fees for use of such material and cannot grant or deny permission to publish or otherwise distribute the material.

Ultimately, it is the researcher's obligation to assess copyright or other use restrictions and obtain permission from third parties when necessary before publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in the Library's collections.

For information about reproducing, publishing, and citing material from this collection, as well as access to the original items, see: Popular Graphic Arts Collection - Rights and Restrictions Information

Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.

Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-pga-03047 (digital file from original print) LC-USZ62-22399 (b&w film copy neg.)

Call Number: PGA - White & Bauer--Great fear ... (D size) [P&P]

Obtaining Copies

If an image is displaying, you can download it yourself. (Some images display only as thumbnails outside the Library of Congress because of rights considerations, but you have access to larger size images on site.)

Alternatively, you can purchase copies of various types through Library of Congress Duplication Services.

1. If a digital image is displaying: The qualities of the digital image partially depend on whether it was made from the original or an intermediate such as a copy negative or transparency. If the Reproduction Number field above includes a reproduction number that starts with LC-DIG..., then there is a digital image that was made directly from the original and is of sufficient resolution for most publication purposes.

2. If there is information listed in the Reproduction Number field above: You can use the reproduction number to purchase a copy from Duplication Services. It will be made from the source listed in the parentheses after the number.
If only black-and-white ("b&w") sources are listed and you desire a copy showing color or tint (assuming the original has any), you can generally purchase a quality copy of the original in color by citing the Call Number listed above and including the catalog record ("About This Item") with your request.

3. If there is no information listed in the Reproduction Number field above: You can generally purchase a quality copy through Duplication Services. Cite the Call Number listed above and include the catalog record ("About This Item") with your request.

Price lists, contact information, and order forms are available on the Duplication Services Web site.

Access to Originals

Please use the following steps to determine whether you need to fill out a call slip in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room to view the original item(s). In some cases, a surrogate (substitute image) is available, often in the form of a digital image, a copy print, or microfilm.

1. Is the item digitized? (A thumbnail (small) image will be visible on the left.)

Yes, the item is digitized. Please use the digital image in preference to requesting the original. All images can be viewed at a large size when you are in any reading room at the Library of Congress. In some cases, only thumbnail (small) images are available when you are outside the Library of Congress because the item is rights restricted or has not been evaluated for rights restrictions.
As a preservation measure, we generally do not serve an original item when a digital image is available. If you have a compelling reason to see the original, consult with a reference librarian. (Sometimes, the original is simply too fragile to serve. For example, glass and film photographic negatives are particularly subject to damage. They are also easier to see online where they are presented as positive images.)

No, the item is not digitized. Please go to #2.

2. Do the Access Advisory or Call Number fields above indicate that a non-digital surrogate exists, such as microfilm or copy prints?

Yes, another surrogate exists. Reference staff can direct you to this surrogate.

No, another surrogate does not exist. Please go to #3.

3. If you do not see a thumbnail image or a reference to another surrogate, please fill out a call slip in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room. In many cases, the originals can be served in a few minutes. Other materials require appointments for later the same day or in the future. Reference staff can advise you in both how to fill out a call slip and when the item can be served.

To contact Reference staff in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room, please use our Ask A Librarian service or call the reading room between 8:30 and 5:00 at 202-707-6394, and Press 3.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The great fear of the period That Uncle Sam may be swallowed by foreigners : The problem solved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1 print : lithograph. | Print shows a one panel, three scene cartoon showing, in the first scene, an Irish man with the head of Uncle Sam in his mouth and a Chinese man with the feet of Uncle Sam in his mouth, in the second scene they consume Uncle Sam, and in the third the Chinese man consumes the Irish man; on the landscape in the distant background are many railroads.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Great Fear ( grande peur in French) was one of the stranger episodes in the French Revolution - a period known for being pretty crazy. For about two weeks in July 1789, almost the entirety of France became swept up in what can best be described as a craze.

But what exactly was this panic about, and why did it begin in the first place? To answer those questions, we need to being our narrative in the days of Louis XIV.

In the years leading up to the French Revolution, the French king, Louis XVI, was in a bad a way. He was an absolute monarch of one of Europe's most powerful kingdoms... but his predecessor and grandfather, Louis XIV, had spent France into the ground. In order to establish the absolutism at home and the power at arms abroad that propped up the Bourbons for the better part of a century, Louis XIV had spent enormous amounts of money. And, while that was fine and dandy for him, it came back to haunt his grandson.

Eventually, France's financial woes brought Louis XVI to his wits' end and the king felt forced to summon France's representative body, the Estates General. This was the first time in over a century this body had been called into action. Those who were chosen as representatives were ecstatic. The nobility who came in with power hoped to grab a hold of even more of it, while the lower classes aimed at securing true representation for themselves within the halls of government.

Unfortunately, France's social caste system of the time did not readily allow for the less well off to get their piece of the power pie. A system known as the Three Estates, France's population was split into three groups: First Estate (clergy), Second Estate (nobility), Third Estate (everyone else). The Estates General was composed of elected members of these three classes, theoretically giving the French people fair representation. But, in the real world, the first two estates ganged up on the third and won every decision.

Tired of the hypocrisy (and having been literally locked out of the Estates General) members of the Third Estate began meeting on their own, calling themselves the National Assembly. And so the French Revolution began.

The elation the people of France felt over the founding of the National Assembly quickly gave rise to anxiety and fear. Rumors began to spread throughout Paris that the king was mounting a counter attack on the National Assembly, keen on restoring his firm control of the kingdom. The panic this rumor created reached such a high level that on July 14, 1789, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille, a medieval, mostly out of use, prison in the heart of the city. After the Bastille was taken, the people of Paris took it apart brick by brick - literally. ¹

While most people were probably pretty excited to hear that the old prison for political enemies of the king had been destroyed, this did not last long. Soon, just as the people of Paris had feared reprisals for the forming of the National Assembly, the rest of revolutionary France feared that the nobility would launch a counter attack throughout the provinces.

On top of all this civil unrest emanating out of the capital, France was going through something of a demographic issue. For close to two decades, the kingdom had suffered from unpredictable harvests. This meant that every summer, as the year's crops began to ripen, the Third Estate held its collective breath, hoping it would be able to eat this year. The uneven nature of these harvests also caused food prices to surge, increasing by as much as 25% in some areas of France. Then, to keep piling on, between 1770 and 1790, France's population increased by 2 million people. ²

By the time 1789 rolled around, France found itself hungry, and getting hungrier. This seemed to lead to a dangerous combination of anger at the status quo and anxiety over where their next meal was going to come from.

Cue the Great Fear. Or in French, cue the grande peur.

Much of the Great Fear revolved around groups of 'brigands' wandering the countryside. Both sides of the French political spectrum feared the coming of these armed mobs. The aristocrats were afraid their homes and lands would suffer the same fate as the Bastille at the hands of armed peasants. The common folks and peasants were worried that aristocrats were seeking revenge against the Third Estate for having the gaul to rise up in revolution.

The fear of these brigands spread so fast, that towns even went through the trouble of arming themselves and building fortifications. One anonymous contemporary remembered the Great Fear spreading through the countryside as follows:

"Everybody took up arms because of the rumors of brigands pillaging the seigneurs' châteaux. People were said to be blocking or closing wells for fear that they would be poisoned. Bells were rung throughout the Michaeille as were fires to warn everybody to be alert for the brigands."³

Trouble is, while one can underside the anxieties that played on everyone's mind in this pretty insane time, the brigands weren't actually real. They were phantoms produced by the mass hysteria that the first few months of the French Revolution had brought on.

But, while the brigands weren't real, there were people roaming the French countryside. During the eighteenth-century in France, where food shortages were common, it wasn't unheard of for groups of landless peasants to go from town to town in search of work, shelter, or food. And, as result of another poor harvest, more people than normal had to take the roads in search of food in 1789.

As fear of revolution or counter-revolution (depending on your Estate) spread through France, the appearance of these wanderers may have been the root cause of the bigrands rumors. Unlike the fabled brigands, though, these groups of landless peasants were not seeking to ransake farms or châtueax - they simply sought a little charity.

Though marauding groups of brigands never actually appeared over the horizon, the militias that were formed when townspeople mobilized in response to these rumors didn't go to waste. Emboldened by the news of revolutionary victories in Paris, villagers across the kingdom began making stands of their own.

Some started out peaceably enough. In certain areas, peasants began refusing to pay tithes to the Church and feudal privileges to local aristocrats, known as seigneurial dues. A priest in one such town recorded how:

"When the inhabitants heard that everything was going to be different they began to refuse to pay both tithes and dues, considering themselves so permitted, they said, by the new law to come." ⁴

In other areas, the first two estates did not get off so easy. In many regions, manors had their barns raided, as peasants sought to repossess the food the aristocratic classes had already taken from them as part of old, feudal dues. While this was bad for the aristocrats, in the French provinces of Normandy, Burgundy, Hainault, Alsace, Franche Comté, and Dauphiné it got even worse.

The above regions have become famous for the raids and peasant revolts that their populations perpetrated against the castles and manors of the aristocratic families. Interestingly, these weren't simple smash and grab operations. These peasant riots that rose up against the holdings of the Second Estate were concentrated attacks meant to further the cause of the French Revolution.

Once the villagers in these regions breached the manorial walls, they made straight for the symbols and records of France's feudal past. They destroyed wine-presses, seigneurial ovens (in the medieval era, French peasants couldn't own their own ovens and were forced to rely upon local feudal lords to bake their bread), and other symbols of wealth and oppression. They also tried to sever their connections with local lords forever by burning records of feudal privileges and obligations that had kept their families in service to aristocrats for generations. ⁵

The Duke of Montmorency's steward, writing from a town northeast of Paris, recorded how:

The populace, attributing to the lords of the kingdom the high price of grain, is fiercely against all that belongs to them. All reasoning fails: this unrestrained populace listens only to it own fury and, in all our province, the vassals are so outraged that they are prepared to commit the greatest excesses...

Some of these excesses, according to the steward, included stealing "the titles of rents and allowances of the seigneurial [French lord], and demolished her dovecotes." Following this destruction the steward noted that the peasant mob left "a receipt for theft signed The Nation." ⁶

Though the Great Fear largely amounted to widespread rural panic over fictitious mobs that lasted for just a few weeks, it highlights the tensions at play during this period of the French Revolution.

On the one side, you had aristocrats who felt their power slipping away. Power, it should be noted, that many of their families had wielded for centuries. And, when you're used to being on top, while having to put in little to no work to stay there, it's probably easy to feel threatened by Third Estate intellectuals declaring the rights of all mankind from the capital.

On the other side, you had farmers and peasants who yearned for greater freedoms. It was their families, after all, that the aristocratic class had held in serfdom and poverty for all those centuries. So, when word got out that a revolution was on, some feared reprisal from their feudal lord while others shot their shot at overthrowing the ancien régime.

Thus, it was the tension between the entrenched feudal status quo and the oncoming of a more modern, representative republic that defined the Great Fear.

Want learn more about the French Revolution? Check out book recommendations by us and our friends at The Archive!

Sources on the Great Fear and the French Revolution

1. "Great Fear," britannica.com

2. Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 8-9.

3. Peter McPhee, Living the French Revolution, 1789-99 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 41.

4. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, Second Edition (New York, Oxford University Press, 2002), 114.

5. Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 115.

6. McPhee, Living the French Revolution, 44-45.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why the Great Fear Happened During the French Revolution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Great Fear was a fascinating period of the French Revolution when everyone in France shared a delusion that mobs were coming for them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France on JSTOR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This major work, graphically describes the panic, paranoia, and social chaos that sparked the Revolution. One of France's great historians analyzes the cau...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Post Waterloo: Napoleon’s clandestine messages

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The “Great Fear” in the United Kingdom, 1802-1805

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Les années 1802-1805 en Grande-Bretagne furent en leur temps qualifiées de « grande peur » en raison de la menace d’invasion par les troupes françaises et des engins militaires massés face à la côte Sud de l’Angleterre (à seulement 27 milles et une marée de recul). Cet article passe en revue les ten…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower.
by David Caute.
Simon & Schuster. 697 pp. $14.95.

Most accounts of the post-World War II period used to assign to the Soviet Union a major share of responsibility for the coming of the cold war, and assign to Senator Joseph McCarthy a central role in promoting the aggressive concern for internal security that reflected the impact of the cold war on American politics in the early 1950's. For several years now, revisionist historians have been reinterpreting this picture, placing greater emphasis on the responsibility of the United States in initiating the cold war-in many circles, American culpability is now taken as an established fact-and arguing that McCarthyism was nothing but a continuation of the anti-Communist policies inaugurated by liberal Democrats as far back as the Truman administration. The logic that emerges from these studies would seem to point ultimately to an analysis of the cold war that would altogether ignore the role of the Soviet Union in causing the conflict, deny the existence of a Communist problem in the United States, and eliminate McCarthy and McCarthyism as a decisive force in the development of anti-Communism in the early 1950's. While David Caute's The Great Fear does not quite meet all of these criteria, it comes close.

The Great Fear purports to be a comprehensive account of anti-Communist internal-security policies in the period from 1945 to 1960. Drawing on manuscript sources, interviews, and secondary works, David Caute provides a great deal of information on congressional investigating committees, the FBI informer system, judicial decisions, the federal loyalty program of 1947 and the Attorney General's list, state anti-subversive laws, the deportation of aliens, passport policy, and attempts to identify Communists in trade unions, universities, schools, journalism, and show business. Although much of this information is familiar, there is an undeniable value in bringing together in summary form the principal facts about internal-security policies, and for such limited purposes a book like Caute's could prove useful as a reference. Yet The Great Fear is offered not as a compendium but as a serious history of the problem, and judged in this light it is very seriously flawed.

Caute's thesis is simple enough: the great fear of Communism in America led to a great purge-and a purge not mainly of Communists, but of fellow-travelers, radicals, and "dissenters." To the official and unofficial administrators of the purge, disagreement with government policy was subversive and un-American, and dissenting opinions were to be ruthlessly suppressed. As a consequence, a staggering number of people in and out of government suffered wrongs and injustices. Citizens were fired or denied employment because of their political beliefs; radical aliens were deported and artists and scientists denied entry into the United States; radicals and liberals were vilified, driven out of organizations, smeared as disloyal, and sometimes physically assaulted.

Caute states at the outset that the anti-Communist purge in the United States was different from purges which have occurred in European countries. In France, Italy, and Germany it was blood that flowed, in the United States it was mainly tears. Yet after rendering this obeisance to common sense, Caute goes on to describe the injustices and wrongs done in the name of anti-Communism as though they were every bit as bad as what goes on in totalitarian countries. The metaphor of tears rapidly gives way to the metaphor of blood. Thus, he writes of the provision for detention included in the Internal Security Act of 1950 that it promised "a feast of blood" to divert "the cannibal's appetite." The execution of the Rosenbergs "covered a whole nation with blood." Pressure groups like the American Legion were foremost among those "baying for blood." As just this small sample alone demonstrates, Caute's style in The Great Fear is shrill and tendentious, a defect that is made all the more grave by his tasteless attempts at cleverness (reworking a famous Latin line, "Nothing human is alien to me," Caute says of the head of the immigration service that his motto could have been: "Nothing alien is human to me").

But it is not just Caute's style that is tendentious. His entire picture of the period is so overdrawn as to border on the perniciously false. The failures of the book range from concrete misreadings of law to a historically naive view of the Soviet Union and a willful misconstruing of the nature of anti-Communism in this country.

_____________

Caute, to begin with, has an inadequate understanding of the history of civil liberties in the United States and the laws governing their exercise. He says, for example, that the Smith Act of 1940 departed from the honored tradition of punishing only actions rather than words, but in fact no such tradition existed in internal-security matters at the time the Smith Act was passed. Rather, something very close to the older bad-tendency test-that is, whether speech or writing had a tendency to threaten subversion of the government-still applied in those days, although references to "clear and present danger" obscured the matter. Again, Caute states that the Supreme Court failed to protect the right to work regardless of political belief; yet there was no such right in constitutional law, which regarded government employment as a privilege rather than a right. Similarly, he condemns the loyalty program of 1947 as beyond the law, ignoring the ways in which it introduced elements of due process and procedural safeguards not found in earlier security policies.

Further misunderstandings abound. Disregarding the fact that congressional investigations and administrative actions are by definition not judicial in nature, Caute criticizes internal-security officials for not adhering to the standards of due process required in a courtroom. In condemning government by exposure, he also fails to consider that the American constitutional system gives broad latitude to legislative fact-finding-a latitude that liberal committees had used in the 1930's to attack business leaders-and that the unusual nature of Communist political activity may have made what Earl Latham has called "prescriptive publicity" at least a plausible technique.

These smaller misunderstandings and errors evolve into larger distortions. So jaundiced, indeed, is Caute's view of cold-war America that he is at a loss to explain any judicial or administrative decisions that protected the rights of radicals or Communists. When an anti-Communist operative is charged with breaking and entering the home of a Communist, Caute remarks: "Unaccountably, he was actually convicted in court. . . ." When a radical secures employment at the United Nations despite previous suspicion of Communism, Caute describes it as "one of those lapses still possible in 1947. . . ." If a radical is permitted to read his statement to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, it is by a "quirk of fate."

Caute implies that once the kinks were ironed out, no one accused of being a Communist could secure justice. Yet his own evidence disproves this preposterous notion. He spends seven pages explaining how one Gustave Duran, a sometime employee in the State Department, struggled as though "haunted by the curse of Sisyphus" to clear himself of Communist charges. Yet Duran was at length cleared. Caute calls the result "astonishing," for he cannot believe that American officials acted fairly in any dealings with suspected Communists. Similarly, he notes at one point that 40 per cent of the decisions in cases of suspected disloyalty in private industry went against the grievant, but he does not seem to recognize what this means, namely, that 60 per cent of the time the radicals were vindicated. And so forth and so on.

_____________

On the question of who caused the cold war, Caute says he will not take sides. In fact, however, he pins the blame squarely on the United States. Describing American foreign policy after World War II, he states that Americans generally and American liberals in particular sought to impose a "Pax Americana" on the world. By 1945, Caute asserts, a cultural and moral imperialism was well established, on the basis of which the United States tried to "offer" itself as a model for the future of world civilization. In seeking this goal, the United States was unwilling to tolerate any challenge, such as that presented by the Soviet Union through its very existence. The result was the cold war, which by plain implication would never have occurred but for America's liberal imperialism.

As for the Soviet Union, Caute is reticent on the subject of Russian intentions and does not mention Stalinism. Only twice does he refer to Stalin himself in any substantive way, once to say that he was "intractable" and a second time to advance a curious and odious interpretation of Stalin as a hypocrite.

If Caute all but ignores the Soviet Union's role in the cold war, he cannot overlook the Communist party of the United States. Yet his view of the party is so uncritical and so unhistorical as to make his account almost worthless. We are given familiar facts about the party, such as that its membership was very small and subject to heavy turnover, that only 29 per cent of the party were industrial workers, and that a large proportion of Communists lived in the area of New York City. With regard to Communist political strategy, Caute argues that although the party repudiated the Popular Front and resumed a Marxist-Leninist position in 1945, it did not entertain or endorse any unrealistic revolutionary schemes. While he concedes that one could not know what the attitude and actions of American Communists would be in the event of war, he is certain that no real danger existed because no contingency plans have ever been uncovered to sabotage American industrial centers!

The Communist party of the United States was merely "a flea on the dog's back," Caute writes, and the government used a sledgehammer to kill it. One need not subscribe to exaggerated fears about the danger of Communist subversion to reject this assessment. In fact, as Joseph Starobin points out in his history of the American CP, the party was not swimming against the tide from 1945 to 1950, it was swimming in turbulent waters. With a modest amount of historical imagination it is possible to see how, in the context created by events such as the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, Russian success in achieving atomic power, and the discovery of Soviet spies in the West, Americans in the early 1950's could have reached the conclusion that a Communist problem existed and that the party and its sympathizers bore watching. Caute says the government simply smashed the party, but it is worth pondering Starobin's judgment that the Communist party, rather than being the victim of political and legal measures aimed at isolating it, destroyed itself through its ideological bondage to the Soviet Union and the world Communist movement.

_____________

Naive in his view of American Communists and fellow-travelers, Caute displays mean-spirited cynicism and disdain in his view of the social classes and groups that supported anti-Communist measures. In explaining the causes of the great purge he begins with the paradox that a nation of immigrants feared and was intolerant of immigrants: it was the foreign background of many Americans which impelled them toward an exaggerated patriotism.

Anti-Communism, in Caute's view, was also rooted in the anxieties of the petite bourgeoisie, who at once resented Eastern, Ivy League style and privilege and feared encroachment from the lower classes. Middle-class America, further, identified Americanism with free-enterprise capitalism, and in the years following World War II looked with alarm on the kind of socialization that was occurring in Great Britain. Caute recognizes that Soviet repression in Eastern Europe gave certain ethnic and religious groups a legitimate reason to be anti-Communist, but to him this fact is of minor importance. In essence, Caute sees anti-Communism as an irrational, socially pathological movement. Bourgeois anxieties and fears created a need for scapegoats-hence anti-Communism, and hence the expedient politicians who capitalized on popular fears and relentlessly pursued the Communist issue in an attempt to gain power.

If Caute in these pages does not quite explain away Communism as a reality, he does manage to suggest that it existed almost solely in the mind of its opponents. And when it comes to those opponents, Caute's historical understanding is once again seriously flawed. It is certainly relevant to note, as he does, the fragmented, heterogeneous nature of American society and the tendency toward strident nationalism that continuous immigration encouraged. The important point, however, is that in this centrifugal, bewilderingly diverse society, lacking the usual sources of national unity such as religion, culture, immemorial custom, or history, Americans tended to identify themselves with reference to political ideas and institutions: government by consent, local self-determination, equal citizenship, an open and free social order. Since the sense of America as a nation depended on these ideas, it was reasonable for people to be concerned about political and social movements that repudiated or undermined them; it was reasonable, in other words, peculiar as the notion may seem to us, to be concerned about "un-American" ideas, especially when, as in the case of the Communist party, proponents of those ideas sought to implement them by conspiratorial and totalitarian means.

_____________

We come finally to Caute's interpretation of McCarthyism. If the Soviet Union shows up only on the margins of his revisionist canvas, and American Communism is but a tiny element involved in only a passive way, Senator McCarthy all but disappears from the frame. Caute's description of McCarthy himself is conventional enough: a crude and exploitative politician who traded on the public's irrational fears and fed the plebeian appetite for summary justice. But if McCarthy's style was primitive, the purpose and methods of his anti-Communism were, for Caute, the same as those of the liberal anti-Communists who began the purge under Truman. McCarthy's only "mistake," Caute writes, was to take anti-Communism to such an extreme that he threatened to discredit the entire effort. Having turned their own weapon against the liberal anti-Communists, he had to be stopped. We should in fact be grateful to McCarthy, Caute argues, because his "objective historical role" was a healthy one; he showed that liberty is indivisible.

This interpretation, treating McCarthy as an unimportant figure, and blurring the distinction between liberal anti-Communism and McCarthyism, amounts to nothing less than sheer blindness to the plain meaning of the documentary record. American opinion from 1945 to 1950 was not swept up in anti-Communist hysteria. A legitimate Communist problem existed in American government, and the Truman administration tried to deal with it in a way that respected individual civil liberties. (Even the radical-tending American Friends Service Committee acknowledged that the loyalty program of 1947 had the narrowly defined objective of preventing espionage and sabotage.) The revelations that then emerged from the Hiss and Rosenberg cases, in conjunction with the Communist revolution in China, the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb, and the Korean war, stirred a deep apprehension in the American public and in turn created a situation in which McCarthy's kind of anti-Communism could find widespread support. The essence of McCarthyism, however, lay not in the coarse and primitive energy that animated McCarthy's attacks, but rather in his willingness to use any means to achieve his ends, his tendency toward a spirit of lawlessness. By his refusal to be bound by the normal rules of political behavior and civility, McCarthy threatened constitutional democracy.

The reason Caute-and other cold-war revisionists-have relegated McCarthy to a kind of benign insignificance in the anti-Communist movement is not far to seek: their hatred of liberalism requires that they blame liberals for the cold war and its attendant evils. Yet the historical record shows that while the meaning of McCarthyism was a subject of great controversy in the early 1950's, no one at the time-including the radicals from whom revisionist historians draw inspiration-doubted its significance in promoting virulent anti-Communist sentiment, and none saw McCarthy as a mere epigone. Some radicals interpreted McCarthyism as a fascist reaction, others regarded it as a platform for attacking liberal reform. In conservative eyes, McCarthy was to be appreciated for spearheading the effort to enforce a national consensus that excluded Communism. In the center were anti-Communist liberals, who viewed McCarthyism as an irresponsible form of anti-Communism that threatened the maintenance of a democratic order.

_____________

What policy ought the government to have adopted toward the Communists? Generally speaking there were two positions on this question. Some held that Communists had the right to take whatever political views and say whatever they pleased, no matter how disagreeable or antithetical to democratic theory and practice. Others denied that Communists, or the supporters of any totalitarian movement, possessed any such constitutional right. They reasoned that the government must uphold the fundamental ends and purposes of the constitutional order; that not all ends and purposes are legitimate, especially those that anticipate the destruction of constitutional democracy; and that the means used to promote the principles of American government should not be treated as absolutes to be maintained even at peril to those principles. In this view, Communist political activity might, under certain circumstances, be tolerated, but Communists could not be said to have a right to pursue their purposes under the protection of the Constitution.

With each side accusing the other of heresy, the conflict between these two positions aroused profound hostility. The reason it did so was that at the bottom of the controversy lay the question of the nature and tendency of American institutions, and hence of American nationality. Radicals argued that specific civil liberties such as freedom of speech constituted the essence of American nationality. Anti-Communist liberals and conservatives, in contrast, regarded commitment to the substantive end or principle of a free society as the basis of the American national idea.

Public policy during the cold war mediated between these two positions. Through formal statutes and administrative procedures, as well as through social sanctions, Communists and fellow-travelers were proscribed and ostracized because they repudiated the national consensus on which a free society rested. At the same time, some procedural safeguards were extended to suspected Communists on a prudential, expedient basis. In other cases, however, public policy went further toward endorsing the idea that Communists had constitutionally protected rights like any other group of dissenting or nonconformist individuals, and that only when a clear and present danger existed as a result of Communist activity could the government restrict Communists in their political actions. While this approach was relied on less frequently than the method of de facto proscription, it was more important in the long run because it was written into constitutional law (in the Dennis and Yates cases).

_____________

As a popularization of the revisionist historical outlook, The Great Fear joins several other recent works dealing with Communism-Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time, Jessica Mitford's A Fine Old Conflict, Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism -in an effort at what might be called the establishment of innocence by association. By arguing that American Communists were the innocent victims of a great purge, Caute helps to promote the idea that the main source of danger in the political world of that time-and by extension, in our own time as well-was not those who served Moscow but those who served Washington.

What the consequences of the revisionist outlook may be in the formation of our own political ideas today remains an open question, although the attraction of a new isolationism and the cordial acceptance of Eurocommunism among the Left and liberal intellectuals may provide a clue. Seen in this particular light, The Great Fear, with the egregious failure of historical imagination that it displays in its uncritical treatment of the Soviet Union and American Communism, and in its willful conflation of liberal anti-Communism and McCarthyism, is not only a flawed but a politically pernicious work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Great Fear, by David Caute - Herman Belz, Commentary Magazine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Revising the 50's The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower. by David Caute. Simon & Schuster. 697 pp. $14.95. Most

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France. By Georges Lefebvre. Translated by Joan White. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. Pp. 234, $7.95.) - The Men of the First French Republic: Political Alignments in the National Convention of 1792. By Alison Patrick. (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972. Pp. 407. $15.00.) | American Political Science Review | Cambridge Core

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France. By Georges Lefebvre. Translated by Joan White. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. Pp. 234, 15.00.) - Volume 70 Issue 4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
French Revolution: Estates General to Great Fear

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mike Duncan's Revolutions - 3.12 - The Great Fear

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
WC Flip #42 The DORMac, The Great Fear, and the Night of August the 4th