The Ideology of the Great Fear: The Soissonnais in 1789.

Clay Ramsay presents us with the first book-length study of the Great Fear of 1789 since the publication of Georges Lefebvre's La Grande Peur in 1932. Ramsay shares Lefebvre's definition of the events of that July: a collective panic triggered by rumors that roving bands of thousands of brigands were coming to destroy fields and crops. Villagers and townspeople responded to this news by rallying to arm themselves, forming militias, and setting out to protect their communities. Lefebvre's work isolated and sketched six major independent eruptions of the Fear throughout France. In sixty years only Henri Dinet has discovered a seventh current in the Hurepoix.(1) Now, Ramsay focuses on a particular region--the Soissonnais in the Paris Basin north-west of the capital--that contained two points of origin of the Fear. This more detailed analysis enables him to delve deeply into the context in which the Great Fear erupted, to chart carefully its course and characteristics, and as a consequence, to corroborate and critique aspects of Lefebvre's long-standing argument.

Like Lefebvre's, Ramsay's Great Fear involved "the sudden closing of ranks in communities . . . at a moment of extreme stress involving food shortages and economic, social and political turmoil". The panic in the Soissonnais provoked the coalescence of rich and poor, town and village, rulers and ruled around shared assumptions about grain production, subsistence, authority, and perceptions of threat. The Soissonnais Fear erupted during a particular conjuncture. Ramsay finds that the rural roots of cohesion lay in the communal system of cultivation that relied on a triennial rotation system. He argues that even a society as polarized as the Soissonnais--with its large-scale, land-concentrating tenant farmers and small-scale landholders increasingly threatened with expropriation--retained a commitment to the triennial system because it served all interests. More generally, elites and common people, village and town authorities continued to embrace moral economic values that encouraged confronting subsistence crises in an interventionist way. Ramsay details the workings of an "institutional market" in which municipalities "turned grain merchant" to assist their deficit-ridden communities wracked by high prices and hungry poor by selling grain at subsidized prices. Moreover, Soissonnais communities accepted begging as a legitimate means to stave off local impoverishment in a society insufficiently endowed with charitable institutions and desperately in need of a local labor force. All of this, Ramsay stresses, contributed to an intensely parochial perspective that encouraged a fear of outsiders as real threats to local well-being, a fear that could, in the right circumstances, transcend tensions among classes and between town and village. As Lefebvre also noted, those communities situated on borders between forest and arable lands formed the most likely geographical stress points for the Great Fear.

Precisely these shared assumptions made possible a powerful fear of brigands: brigands who plotted to destroy crops in the field and attack towns. Ramsay emphasizes that we should understand "brigands" not as vagabonds or the poor, but as a portmanteau word that "blurred distinctions and confounded groups" and that "left a sense of illegality and exteriority regarding society and its norms", and that could thus carry the Fear "between classes and estates, from country to town and back". This, Ramsay claims is what made the Great Fear an expression of Old Regime ideology because it surfaced a deeply held consensus and masked social classes and tensions. Interestingly, in opposition to Lefebvre's evidence, Ramsay finds no fear of an "aristocratic plot" that underpined events in the Soissonnais.

Ramsay argues that we should see the Fear not as a "moment of disruption or breakdown, but of triumph of the Old Regime's possibilities of organization". By confronting the external threat of brigands, the Fear brought together three overlapping, but partially independent and frequently conflicting realms of authority: rural communities, local authorities with multiple sources of legitimacy, and the central government. Although many places had formed new militias before the eruption of the Great Fear, the panic tested local alliances everywhere and mobilized people who had not involved themselves in the previous events of 1788-89. Ramsay validates Lefebvre's observation that the Great Fear was most likely to erupt in areas untouched by earlier upheavals.

Ramsay concludes with Lefebvre that the Great Fear had significant consequences. Although revolutionary and nineteenth-century historians might squabble with Ramsay about how much the Fear caused municipalities to lose "their traditional place in the public order as brokers between the powers of enforcement and popular demands" and readers of Lefebvre might dispute whether Ramsay's brigands are now not sufficiently rooted in actual experiences of brigandage at the end of the eighteenth century, most will accept his arguments that the Great Fear became a "nucleus of politicization . . . that enlisted localities in a progression of events linked to the national Revolution". Moreover, by providing us with a fine monograph of the Soissonnais, he continues research on an issue that Lefebvre had only intended to introduce (as his introduction to his book indicates). In doing so, his work not only confirms but also challenges some of Lefebvre's findings, thus carrying on and hopefully encouraging other historical investigations of this kind.

ENDNOTE 

1. "La Grande Peur en Hurepoix, Juillet 1789," Paris et I'lle-de-France 18-19 (1967-68): 99-204.

Cynthia A. Bouton Texas A&M University