The Great Fear of 1789

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Great Fear of 1789"

Stuff You Missed in History Class – iHeartPodcasts
Hosts: Tracy V. Wilson & Holly Frey
Release Date: November 3, 2025

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Overview

This episode explores The Great Fear ("La Grande Peur") of 1789, a wave of panic, conspiracy, and rural uprising that swept across much of France in the early period of the French Revolution. Tracy and Holly detail the underlying social and economic crises, how rumors of aristocratic plots fueled mass paranoia, and the ways this episode changed both the course of the Revolution and the rural landscape of France. They also discuss recent scholarly research on how misinformation spread during the Great Fear and its parallels to the modern age.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Precarious State of Rural France

(02:27 – 10:16)

• Longstanding Hardship: Most poor and working-class French people lived in constant precarity: "If everything went well, most people got by, but only barely. And if anything happened to throw things off balance, people quickly went from kind of making ends meet to basically starving." (Tracy, 04:09)
• Bread as Sustenance: Even small fluctuations in bread or grain prices could spark riots: “For a lot of people, bread was their biggest source of nourishment in a day. Consequently, even a tiny increase in bread prices could lead to food riots.” (Holly, 04:43)
• Land Ownership Complexities: While peasants controlled a third of French land, land divisions over generations left most with plots too small to subsist on (05:19–06:20).
• Socio-Economic Hierarchies: Both landowners and landless people faced a tangled web of feudal dues to local “seigneurs,” church tithes, and local courts (06:20–08:01).

2. Factors Fueling Crisis and Unrest

(09:16 – 12:09)

• Population Growth: Lower adult mortality increased competition for scarce land and food (09:45).
• Natural Disasters & Trade Disruptions: Bad harvests (influenced in part by Iceland's Laki volcanic eruption), economic fallout from continental wars, and unfavorable trade policies devastated the market and jobs, especially in textiles (10:16–11:58).

3. Immediate Lead-up to the Great Fear

(16:34 – 24:21)

• Financial Crisis & Political Stalemate: France’s attempt to tax the wealthy failed, leading to the assembling of the Estates General (16:34–17:25).
• Revolution Ignites: Disagreements about voting representation led the Third Estate (commoners) to proclaim itself the National Assembly, followed by iconic actions like the Tennis Court Oath and the storming of the Bastille (19:03–19:41).
• Information Gaps: News traveled slowly and inconsistently through rural France, filtered by local officials and further distorted by illiteracy and dialect barriers (20:44–22:07).
• Conspiracy Theories: Rooted in the "pacte de famine," widespread belief in an aristocratic plot to starve and repress the poor gained traction, fueled by previous experiences like the “Flour War” of 1775 (22:07–24:21).

4. Spark and Spread of the Great Fear

(24:53 – 39:58)

• Rumors of Brigands & Aristocratic Plots: “Rumors also spread that mobs of brigands were marauding all around the countryside ... people thought these brigands were being sheltered or enabled by the aristocracy.” (Tracy, 24:53)
• Local Militias & Panic: Villagers began arming themselves, frequently mistaking neighbors, travelers, and even authorities for hostile forces (26:47–27:11).
• The Tipping Point—July 19 Incident: The explosion at Château de Quincey, likely accidental, spread as a rumor of aristocratic treachery, triggering uprisings in the region (32:09–33:10).
• Cycle of Alarm & Violence: Standardized reactions followed: ringing alarm bells ("tocsin"), sending runners, arming militias, mutual attacks, and escalating rumors (34:09–35:58).
• Targets and Outcomes: Attacks focused on manorial records, feudal infrastructure, and symbols of aristocratic power; however, actual violence against landlords was limited—only three landlords were killed (35:58).

5. Impact on Society and Revolution

(39:58 – 42:25)

• Reforms Forced by Crisis: The National Constituent Assembly issued the August Decrees, abolishing the feudal system and noble privileges (38:58).
• Social and Organizational Shifts: The Great Fear united villages in self-defense, shaping subsequent revolutionary organization and administration (39:58).
• Swift Conclusion: “By August 6th, two days after the 1st of the August Decrees, the Great Fear had basically ended. But the communities where it had taken place had also changed.” (Tracy, 39:58)
• Uneven Justice: Most participants faced no repercussions, but in regions where troops were present, some faced execution or forced labor (41:27).

6. Research on Misinformation and the Great Fear

(42:25 – 44:54)

• Epidemiological Models Applied: Recent research used disease-spread modeling to chart how rumors traveled, finding a “viral” R0 of 1.5—meaning each person spread the rumor to 1.5 others on average (43:00).
• Factors in Rumor Spread: Risk was highest in larger, more literate, and wealthier communities—particularly those with significant land ownership and high wheat prices (43:43).
• Modern Parallels: The researchers compare the rumor-driven Great Fear to modern viral misinformation and uprisings, showing similar contagious networks, despite modern instant communication (44:12–44:54).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the ease of famine and panic:
  “If everything went well, most people got by, but only barely. And if anything happened to throw things off balance, people quickly went from kind of making ends meet to basically starving.”
  — Tracy V. Wilson (04:09)

• On rumors as a contagion:
  “They found that the quote viral misinformation that was driving this really did spread a lot like an actual infectious disease. It had an R naught value of 1.5 ... Like a contagious illness, the misinformation spread largely along main roads and postal routes.”
  — Tracy V. Wilson (43:00)

• On the transformation of rural France:
  “By August 6th, two days after the 1st of the August Decrees, the Great Fear had basically ended. But the communities where it had taken place had also changed.”
  — Tracy V. Wilson (39:58)

• Chilling violence in Paris:
  “[Foulon]’s rumored to have said that if people had no bread, then they could eat hay, much like Marie Antoinette supposedly having said, let them eat cake ... The crowd unsuccessfully tried to hang him, then beheaded him, and they paraded his head around with his mouth stuffed with hay and excrement.”
  — Holly Frey (37:30)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:27–04:43: Rural precarity and crises
• 10:16–11:58: Weather and trade shocks
• 16:34–19:41: Estates General and early Revolution
• 22:07–24:21: Rise of conspiracy and proclamations of aristocratic plots
• 32:09–34:09: The July 19th explosion and start of widespread panic
• 35:58–36:40: Scale and selectivity of violence during uprisings
• 38:58: August Decrees and their immediate impact
• 43:00–44:12: Scientific study on the spread of rumors

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Tone & Style

Throughout the episode, the hosts maintain a sympathetic and analytical tone, blending narrative storytelling with keen social analysis. They balance measured humor with seriousness around the violence and suffering, and they frequently reference prior episodes and research for context.

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Conclusion

The Great Fear of 1789 emerges here as both a product of deep-seated structural problems and a dramatic example of how fear, rumor, and structural inequity can drive rapid, widespread change. The episode not only recounts a pivotal moment in French history but offers a thought-provoking lens on how rumors and panic travel—then and now.

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For further exploration:

• Georges Lefebvre, La Grand Peur de 1789
• Recent Nature journal article applying epidemiological models to the spread of the Great Fear

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(Listener mail with adorable cat photos closes out the show; contact info and credits at 45:02–51:38.)

Transcript

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Holly Frey]

This episode is brought to you by pbs Home of Ken Burns his newest film, the American Revolution, reveals the untold stories of people, some familiar, many forgotten, who risked everything to change the course of history. It's a story of a war that was bloody, complex and profoundly consequential. Ken Burns and co directors Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt shine a light on how this historic fight for independence lit the spark for freedom that still burns today. The American Revolution premieres Sunday, November 16 at 8, 7 Central on PBS and the PBS app. Don't miss it.

[Kal Penn]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

I'm Ed Helms.

[Kal Penn]

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[Holly Frey]

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[Holly Frey]

Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Frey]

And I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

One of the papers that I had bookmarked to to maybe talk about in our most recent installment of Unearthed was about the great fear of 1789, which took place over just a few weeks in the early part of the French Revolution. We have talked about the French Revolution in quite a few Episodes, and some of them have focused on other things that also happened in 1789, like the women's March on Versailles, which took place in October of that year. But I don't think we've ever seen specifically gotten into this one thing. A lot of our French Revolution episodes have also been mostly focused on things that were happening in Paris or in Versailles. And the Great Fear really moved primarily through the countryside and small towns and villages. The specifics of exactly what happened could vary from place to place, but the common thread across all of it was this chaos that developed was rooted in people's belief in a conspiracy theory.

[Holly Frey]

So it can be tempting to sum up the French Revolution as an uprising of the common people, many of whom were struggling against an out of touch privileged monarchy. And that was, of course, definitely part of it, maybe even the easiest part to visualize and explain, especially if you're focusing on the period of the Revolution that took place before the Reign of Terror. But the French Revolution had so many layers and moving parts and contributing factors. And even if we focus just on that one aspect, which we largely are today, there were a lot of different issues feeding into the struggles of the common people. And a lot of those issues fed into the Great Fear.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Basically, most people on the poorer end of the economic spectrum in France had been in a precarious position for decades. If everything went well, most people got by, but only barely. And if anything happened to throw things off balance, people quickly went from kind of making ends meet to basically starving. Anything that affected people's livelihoods or the cost of living had the potential to just cause chaos. Even if that shift seemed like something minor or if it wasn't something that was happening anywhere near France, one of.

[Holly Frey]

The go to examples here is the price of bread. Most people did not have a way to bake bread at home, so they purchased it. And for a lot of people, bread was their biggest source of nourishment in a day. Consequently, even a tiny increase in bread prices could lead to food riots. This was interconnected with the price of grain, efforts to boost grain prices to help the farmers who were growing. It also made bread more expensive. So while farmers might theoretically be doing better after they sold their harvest, people who were subsisting on bread wound up doing worse.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, and sometimes those were the same people. And the increased amount of money from the harvest wasn't enough to offset the increased prices of bread. A lot of our prior episodes about things like peasant uprisings or famines, including the Great Famine in Ireland, have talked about predatory and exploitive landlords as a major factor. But taken as a whole, the peasant class in France actually owned a significant amount of land in the 18th century, maybe as much as a third of the land in the country. But owning land didn't necessarily put people in a better financial position than being a tenant did. By the late 18th century, a lot of families had been dividing up their land among their heirs for generations. As a result, the average farm plot had become extremely small. It was too small to comfortably live off the proceeds of, and in a lot of cases, too small to even just subsist on.

[Holly Frey]

Everyone owned land, though, and the percentage of landless people really varied from one part of France to another. So in some places, maybe 20% of the peasantry was landless, but in others, it was 60% or more. Unlike in many other parts of Europe, some landlords in France were willing to lease small homesteads to people, and that made it somewhat easier for landless people to find a place to live and land to farm. These tenant farmers had to pay dues to their seigneur, who played a similar role to kind of like a feudal lord. Some of the seigneurs were nobles, and others were members of the bourgeoisie. And in some areas, the church acted as a seigneur.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So these dues could include both cash and a portion of the crop. And seigneurs also required their tenants to do unpaid labor on their own estates, or at least they had the right to make their tenants do that. And owning land did not completely free people from paying dues or dealing with the seigneur either. People also had to pay things like market dues when selling their crops. And both landless and landowning people in France were expected to pay a tithe to the church. Seigneurs were also the people who usually owned the machinery, like the grain mills and the wine presses. And people had to use that machinery on the seigneur's terms. Often the ovens that were used to bake the bread for the community were also owned by the seigneur as well. Sineurs had their own courts that people on their estates were beholden to, and they had a lot of leeway in how those courts were run.

[Holly Frey]

So both landless and land owning people were part of this hierarchical system, and both wound up in the same basic struggle of not being able to support themselves on the land that was available to them. A lot of farmers were doing other jobs in addition to farming, like running an inn or a tavern, or selling eggs, or doing paid agricultural labor on a big estate. In addition to the work on their own farm, some towns and villages had become home to other industries that provided additional jobs, some of which could be done from home, like spinning and weaving.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Trying to scrape together a living on a farm that was too small for the family, while also doing other jobs to make ends meet just sounds difficult. And it was not possible for a significant portion of the population to do that. About a tenth of the population of rural France had no other option but begging. And in some areas, that number could go even higher. The vast majority of people who were living off of begging were elderly or disabled, or they were widows who were trying to take care of young children or orphans with no adults to care for them.

[Holly Frey]

And then there were landless laborers who could only find work during some parts of the year, like during the harvest. For the rest of the year, they didn't really have anywhere else to go or any other way to earn a living, because the harvest was the one time that farm workers had some leverage over landowners. There was often labor unrest around the time of harvest, and if the harvest was poor and there wasn't as much of a need for labor. And issues with vagrancy skyrocketed.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

By the mid to late 18th century, a situation that was already really precarious had started getting worse. Standards of living had actually increased and adult mortality had gone down as a result. This seems like a good thing. Fewer people dying, that seems good. But that also meant that the population of France had grown significantly, and that had led to more demand for the food and land that had already been in. In really short supply.

[Holly Frey]

The food crisis got worse as many parts of France experienced a series of bad harvests starting around the 1760s. The 1783 Laki fissure eruption in Iceland, which we covered on the show in July of 2024, caused acidic rain and cooling temperatures, and that contributed to bad harvests across much of the northern hemisphere in 1788, bad weather, including hail storms, ruined a lot of that year's crops.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Also in 1788, the Habsburgs went to war against the Ottoman Empire. France was not directly involved in this conflict. Their monarch was a Bourbon. But some of its allies and its trading partners were. Parts of the Mediterranean became unsafe for shipping. Some of the places where France sold its exports essentially closed to trade. And Spain also banned imports of French cloth. So even though France was not one of the active belligerents in this war, this added to the disruption and the economic stresses that the common people were facing.

[Holly Frey]

England and France had also signed a trade agreement in 1786, which was intended to foster competition between English and French industries and encourage French industries to adopt English manufacturing and production methods. What wound up happening was that a lot of French workers in these industries lost their jobs in the face of inexpensive goods being imported from England. The textile industry was particularly hard hit, putting a lot of those people who had been spinning and weaving at home out of work.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

All of this fed into both the French Revolution and the Great Fear, which we will talk about after a sponsor break.

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[Holly Frey]

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[Kal Penn]

Hey, I'm Kalpen, and on my new podcast, Here We Go Again, we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions, like, are we heading towards another financial crash? Like in 08, is non monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands, like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lilly Singh, and Bill Nye.

[Holly Frey]

When you start weaponizing outer space, things.

[Kal Penn]

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[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

I live below a cult leader and I fear I've angered her.

[Dakota (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Well, wait a minute, Sophia, how do you know she's a cult leader?

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime podcast, so you'll find out soon. This person writes, my neighbor's been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals and now my sister ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they may be part of a cult.

[Dakota (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Hold up, Sophia. A real life cult? And what is a dirt ritual?

[Holly Frey]

No clue.

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

But according to this person, contractors are tearing down the patio to find out what's going on with her ceiling, and her neighbors are not happy.

[Dakota (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Well, she needs to report them asap.

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

She did, and now they've been confronting her in really creepy ways all the time.

[Dakota (OK Storytime Podcast)]

So do we find out if this person survives their neighborhood cult or not?

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Before the break, we were focused on the issues that were facing France's peasant class. But of course, the nation as a whole was also having some problems. In 1787, France's Comptroller General of finances arranged a meeting to try to reform the French economy and manage a severe financial crisis. This meeting was not successful. Among other things, the proposed plan would have involved increasing taxes on the rich, and the rich did not want to do that. So In August of 1788, King Louis XVI announced that he was summoning the Estates General to meet at Versailles and work all this out. The Estates General was made up of representatives from the three estates. Those were the nobility, the clergy and the commoners, and it had not convened since 1614.

[Holly Frey]

The king had asked each of the three estates to submit lists of grievances. People all across France were given the opportunity to submit their grievances, and roughly 40,000 Cahiers de d' Orleans were created before the assembly convened. The Third Estate's grievances had three prevailing themes. That France's tax system was unfair, that the seigneuro system needed to be abolished or reformed, and that the payments they were required to make to the Church were burdensome.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The three estates did have some points of agreement in their lists of grievances, like, obviously, the clergy, the nobility and the commoners. They had different priorities, but there were points of overlap, and that included overall support for creating a French constitution and moving toward a more representative system of government. But when the Estates General finally met on May 5, 1789, they strongly disagreed on how to vote. There were 600 deputies representing the commoners, and then 300 each for the nobility and the clergy. If each estate as a body got one vote, then the nobility and the clergy could team up and outvote the commoners. But if each delegate got a vote, then the commoners had the largest number of votes. They would be more powerful than either of the other two estates. It would be easier to rally some support among the nobility and the clergy than to outvote united fronts that were united against them.

[Holly Frey]

This led to one of the moments that is sometimes marked as the beginning of the French Revolution. The assembly was at an impasse over this voting question, and on June 17, the commoners declared themselves to be the national assembly and said they would be meeting and voting without the other two estates, if necessary. They had some support among the clergy, including parish priests. Royal officials locked them out of their meeting room three days later, prompting the national assembly to meet in the Tennis Court and swear an oath that they would continue to meet until a written constitution had been created for France.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The King tried and failed to disperse the assembly, and he ultimately asked the nobility and the clergy, who had not already done so, to join with the National Assembly. Together, they formed the National Constituent Assembly. But the King also summoned troops to Paris. And two days after the establishment of the National Constituent assembly, he dismissed Finance Minister Jacques Necker. Some of the economic problems that France was dealing with were ones that had been caused or exacerbated by Nicair's policies. But he was also perceived as being on the side of the common people. He had, for example, taken steps to try to deal with the food shortages and crop failures that had started really affecting farmers in 1788. His dismissal provoked an uprising that included Parisian commoners storming the Bastille on July 14, 1789. And afterward, members of the nobility started fleeing from France.

[Holly Frey]

Meanwhile, in the country, people were getting news about this, often delayed by at least a day or two. The idea of a daily newspaper was still a pretty new thing. The first daily newspaper in France was the Journal de Paris, established in 1777. Most rural people did not have access to newspapers, and while literacy rates were increasing, many people spoke local and regional dialects of French that would not be comprehensible to someone speaking Parisian, French or vice versa. In some regions, people spoke other languages entirely, including Breton, Catalan, Basque and Alsatian, among others. So people got the news through letters from bailliage or bailiffs who wrote to the jurisdictions that they were responsible for. And those letters were then read aloud in the town hall or the public square, in addition to the time that it took for the letter to get to the community. If the bailiff didn't send a letter or if that letter didn't make it to its recipient, people often just had no other way to get information.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. We can also assume that not everyone was at that meeting or at the public square, and so they were hearing things passed through word of mouth from having heard the letter.

[Holly Frey]

Right. If one bailiff like, has a bad day or doesn't have their act together that week, nobody gets any information.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Right. So all the issues that we talked about before the break, combined with getting somewhat delayed news of what was happening in Paris and Versailles, and rumors started to spread across the countryside that the aristocracy was plotting against the commoners. This was not a completely new idea. The idea of a pact de famine went at least as far back as the early to mid 18th century. This was the idea that the monarchy or the nobility or some other privileged class of people was intentionally keeping food from the commoners for some self serving or nefarious reason.

[Holly Frey]

This conspiracy theory had surged during the 1775 flower war, which was a series of food riots across much of France that were sparked by increases in Bread and grain prices, as well as food shortages. These issues had been caused in part by reforms to French agriculture and trade, including the abolition of guilds and a move to a free trade system for grain. It was easy for people to believe that these changes had been made with the intent of making people suffer. And since the king was responsible for making sure his subjects were fed, it was also easy for people to believe that his failure to do so was deliberate.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Almost 15 years after the Flower War, the pacte de famines still had a ring of truth to a lot of people. People also understood that popular uprisings often ended in violence or some other retribution against the poorest people who had risen up. Before the convening of the Estates General. Aristocrats had refused to agree to economic reforms that would have increased their taxes, while hopefully making things easier for the poor. The king had tried to disperse the assembly, and there were still aristocrats who wanted to disband it. Various levels of the French government were also known to let problems lie, or even to make problems worse if they thought the ends justified the means. There was just a lot that would make people think this was true.

[Holly Frey]

So in the wake of the national assembly and the Tennis court oath and the storming of the Bastille and skyrocketing bread prices, people started to believe that the aristocracy was hoarding all the food as leverage over the commoners, and that they would ruin the harvest to try to starve the Third Estate into compliance. One of the nobles who had fled from France was the Comte d', Artois, who would much later become King Charles X of France. And people believed that he was coming back with a foreign army to pacify the commoners.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This conspiracy theory collided with actual problems that the rural parts of France really were facing. And one of those was large numbers of landless, unemployed people who were roaming around the countryside. This went beyond that roughly 10% of the rural population who were subsisting through begging. These were mostly farm workers who could not find employment, and textile workers who had been put out of work by that trade agreement with England in the late summer of 1789. They were going from farm to farm, demanding food and sometimes harassing people if they didn't get any or didn't get enough. Some of them took food from the fields before it was fully ripe, or they took firewood from the forests, or they even robbed people. So rumors also spread that mobs of brigands were marauding all around the countryside. They were stripping the fields completely bare, destroying orchards, ruining farms, and completely clearing the forests of all of their firewood, and people thought that these brigands were being sheltered or enabled by the aristocracy.

[Holly Frey]

Communities started sending word to Paris or nearby outposts to ask for help defending themselves against the perceived threat. But because of what was happening in Paris, there just wasn't much help available. When help was dispatched, it could arrive long after it was really needed. For example, Thomas Alexandre Dumas, who was the subject of our most recent Saturday classic, arrived in the town of Villers Cotterets with his unit on August 15, having been summoned to protect both the chateau and the villagers from a supposed mob of brigands. But by that point, the great fear was over, and Dumas mostly wound up being the pampered guest of his host family.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So with help often coming too late to be of any use, or not coming at all, farmers started arming themselves and trying to form their own defense forces to guard their land. Small towns and villages ordered their residents to take up arms and to be prepared to defend themselves or to go to the defense of the Third Estate at the National Constituent assembly if it was necessary.

[Holly Frey]

There was an increasing sense of panic and paranoia in small towns and villages around Paris, and common people started greeting one another and outsiders with the question, are you for the third estate? On July 16, residents of Le Havre stopped a grain and flour shipment that was being prepared for Paris because people were afraid it was going to be used to feed soldiers who they thought were preparing to attack the common people.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

All of this really came to a head on July 19, which we will get to after a sponsor break.

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[Holly Frey]

This episode is brought to you by pbs, home of Ken Burns. Ken Burns films aren't just documentaries, they're national events. And his latest, the American Revolution, is the one you've been waiting for. When you think American Revolution, you probably picture tea crates in Boston harbor, founders signing documents in Philadelphia, redcoats marching into battle. But Ken Burns, along with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt, takes us so much deeper. This was a revolution that was bloody, complicated and unbelievably consequential. It's a story of people, some you know and many you don't, who risked everything to change the course of history. Their fight for independence lit a spark for freedom that still burns today. George Washington called it the cause of mankind, and John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, posterity, you will never know what it cost us to preserve your freedom. Freedom with the American Revolution. Ken Burns and his team bring us a story that's vast, human, and deeply relevant. A story that belongs to all of us. Check out the American Revolution. Stream the American Revolution on the PBS app. Don't miss it.

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Here we go.

[Kal Penn]

Hey, I'm Cal Penn, and on my new podcast, Here We Go Again, we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and, as of like, 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions, like, are we heading towards another financial crash? Like in 08? Is non monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands, like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lilly Singh, and Bill Nye.

[Holly Frey]

When you start weaponizing outer space, things.

[Kal Penn]

Can potentially go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now, because it is. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to Here We Go Again with Kal Penn on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

I live below a cult leader and I fear I've angered her.

[Dakota (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Well, wait a minute, Sophia, how do you know she's a cult leader?

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime Podcast. So you'll Find out soon. This person writes, My neighbor's been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals and now my ceiling is collapsing. I tried to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they may be part of a cult.

[Dakota (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Hold up Sofia. A real life cult? And what is a dirt ritual?

[Holly Frey]

No clue.

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

But according to this person, contractors are tearing down the patio to find out what's going on with her ceiling and her neighbors are not happy.

[Dakota (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Well, she needs to report them asap.

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

She did, and now they've been confronting her in really creepy ways all the time.

[Dakota (OK Storytime Podcast)]

So do we find out if this person survives their neighborhood cult or not?

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

On July 19, 1789, some soldiers from the Vezur garrison in the Franche Comte region of France arrived at Chateau de Quincey. This was home to Monsieur de Mamey, Seigneur of Quincy and a particularly hated landlord. These soldiers said that they had been invited and a servant let them in and gave them some drinks. And then at about 11pm when they were leaving and were apparently intoxicated, there was an explosion in the basement of the chateau. Five men were killed and a lot of other people were injured.

[Holly Frey]

Today this is all believed to have been an accident, that one of the soldiers or maybe another guest was either lost in the house or was looking for food or money and got too close to a barrel of gunpowder while carrying a torch or a candle. But a rumor spread that members of the third Estate had been lured into the chateau in order to kill them.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Monsieur de Mamey was not at home at the time. He had been facing hostility from the area's commoners and he had already fled. He was away, staying with his mother in law over the next day. So on the 20th, in retaliation for what people believed was an intentional explosion at the chateau, peasants rose up in Franche Comte, looting and burning many of the properties that he owned.

[Holly Frey]

While fear and unrest had been increasing in the countryside ahead of this, the uprising after the explosion is marked as the start of the great fear which spread over most of France. The places that were mostly unaffected were almost entirely along the coasts or along the border with what's now Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. Some of those areas had just been through some other agrarian uprising in the months before the fear, and there's some speculation that this might have affected how susceptible they were to this misinformation.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In most of the rest of rural France. The same basic pattern played out over and over. First, people would notice something that they thought was the aristocracy's army of brigands coming for them. They would sound the toxin or the alarm bell. They would send runners to their neighbors or to neighboring villages to warn them and to call for help. People would arm themselves with things like pitchforks, halberds and pikes. If soldiers or armed peasants arrived in response to that call for help, the local people would mistake them for attackers and try to fight them off. People on the neighboring farms or neighboring towns or villages would see the smoke or hear the commotion, and that cycle would start again.

[Holly Frey]

This played out in tandem with uprisings against the aristocracy, which were interconnected with the Great Fear, but in some ways were also a separate phenomenon. People broke into manor houses to burn the records that were used to determine people's seniorial dues or to reclaim the crops they had used to pay those dues. They attacked the seniors, wine presses and grain mills. Whole communities went to their local monasteries demanding their tithes be returned to them, or they just refused to pay their tithes. Nobles and aristocrats were subject to attacks, vandalism and public humiliation, or they were driven off their estates. When people saw smoke from these attacks, or large groups of people moving through the countryside to attack a manor or take back their tithes from a monastery, they would raise the alarm, thinking that they were seeing was that supposed brigand army burning something down or coming to destroy their harvest.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Not everywhere that was struck by the Great Fear also rose up against the aristocracy. And it does seem like in places that there were these uprisings, people were at least somewhat selective about it. Only three landlords are known to have been killed during the Great Fear. Obviously, it is not great that three landlords were killed, but this was not like a widespread massacre of all the landlords. This was also not a situation of like every manor in rural France being torn or burned to the ground. Some of them were burned, but this was not like it didn't level the aristocratic estates of France across the board.

[Holly Frey]

But the atmosphere across the French countryside was so paranoid and suspicious that people raised the alarm over things that were completely innocuous. This included herds of livestock, raising clouds of dust as they were being moved along the road, or making a lot of noise as they were driven through a forest or smoke from ordinary work, like burning off unwanted vegetation or running lime kilns.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In Paris, those letters people had written to ask for help were read before the National Constituent assembly. And word of those letters being read made its way back to the rural communities. This wound up reinforcing the idea that there really were hordes of brigands who were funded and enabled by the aristocrats, and they were coming to attack the farms.

[Holly Frey]

While the Great Fear and its interconnected uprisings are often described in terms of the country, there was violence in Paris as well. On July 22, Comptroller General of Finances Joseph Foulon de Douet was captured by peasants and taken to the Hotel de Ville. Foulon was widely hated and believed to be uncaring and merciless toward the poor. He's rumored to have said that if people had no bread, then they could eat hay, much like Marie Antoinette supposedly having said, let them eat cake. This quote is also unsubstantiated, but it does seem to be a rumor that was circulating at the time, and it speaks to how people thought about him. The crowd unsuccessfully tried to hang him, then beheaded him, and they paraded his head around with his mouth stuffed with hay and excrement.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

There wasn't really any kind of centralized leadership or organizational structure for what the peasants were doing in the country, whether they were trying to defend themselves from a perceived threat or attacking the nearest seniorial manor. There also wasn't a figurehead like Rebecca during the Rebecca riots or Ned Ludd during the Luddite uprising. Instead, the Great Fear was something that seemed to grow and recur almost spontaneously, kind of organically, largely following the lines of communication and trade all across France.

[Holly Frey]

Although troops were deployed to some areas, including Franche Comte, where this first started, there was no practical way for authorities to try to put down such a widespread, scattered uprising with force. There were just too many outbreaks of panic, violence and destruction happening in too many places at once. So the National Constituent assembly and its members had to find some way to restore calm, which they did in part by addressing some of the third estate's grievances. On August 4, 1789, the assembly issued the first of what would come to be known as the August Decrees, abolishing the feudal system in France. There would ultimately be 19 decrees, which also ended noble and clerical privilege and abolished the tithe. This fundamentally changed multiple aspects of French society and the French economy, dismantling or changing systems and structures that had been in place since the middle ages.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

By August 6th, two days after the 1st of the August Decrees, the Great Fear had basically ended. But the communities where it had taken place had also changed. Very broadly speaking, the Great Fear and the conspiracy theory that was connected to it really amped up people's hatred of the rich and of the nobility. It also prompted villages and rural areas to organize themselves and to do that quickly. This newfound organization is seen as an influence on the way the French Revolution progressed from this point and on the functioning of the French Republic after the abolition of the monarchy.

[Holly Frey]

But it's tricky to pin down the long term influence of the Great Fear in France in really specific terms, beyond the immediate events like the August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which was created by the National Constituent assembly and then ratified by the King. The King ratified the Declaration almost exactly a month after the Great Fear was over. So much other stuff happened after that, and a lot of it was truly monumental, including the creation of France's first constitution in 1791, the executions of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793, to the Reign of Terror, which ended in 1794, to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became first consul in 1799 and of course, eventually declared himself Emperor of the French.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, a lot of those core issues that people were dealing with also were still there. Like we have that prior episode about the Women's March on Versailles that was connected to bread prices and food shortages. Still an issue after the Great Fear had kind of come to a close. And since the Great Fear largely came to an end without some kind of massive military response across the whole country, for the most part, the common people who were part of it did not face a lot of consequences when it was over, especially in a lot of the more outlying areas, a lot of people just went back home without ever being charged with anything or facing any kind of trial. But in places where troops had been deployed, people were more likely to face trial, and those who were convicted for their involvement were either executed or they were sentenced to serve as galley slaves. This mainly affected people in places like Alsace, Hanoi and Franche Comte.

[Holly Frey]

The paper we mentioned at the top of the show which inspired this episode was about how the Great Fear spread and it was published in the journal Nature. Researchers used historical records of both the peasant uprisings and the rumors of aristocratic plots. They also incorporated the work of French historian Georges Lefebvre, whose 1932 La Grand Peur de 1789 was the first book length examination of the Great Fear. That book was translated into English in 1973, and it is still considered to be a foundational text on the Great Fear.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The researchers then used epidemiological models to track the spread of misinformation over the course of the Great Fear. They found that the quote viral misinformation that was driving this really did spread a lot like an actual infectious disease. It had an R naught value of 1.5. That's the average number of people that an infected person spreads a disease to. The Great Fear spread almost exponentially until it peaked on July 30, and then it declined before coming to an end on August 4th. Like a contagious illness, the misinformation spread largely along main roads and postal routes.

[Holly Frey]

This paper also identified risk factors for the areas which seem to have the highest risk of transmitting this information. They included having a higher population, which is similar to infectious diseases that need enough hosts to be able to spread effectively, as well as places being more literate and wealthier. Communities at the highest risk were also ones that had higher concentrations of land ownership and higher wheat prices.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The researchers concluded the paper by comparing the Great Fear to the role of rumors in uprisings today or within the last couple of decades, when information can spread almost instantaneously over social media rather than having to travel along trade and mail routes by people who are carrying physical copies of letters or other media. But there's other research showing that even today, when we do have access to like almost instant information, these kinds of rumors can still spread along very similar patterns to the way contagious diseases do.

[Holly Frey]

Yeah, do you have listener mail that hopefully involves no contagious diseases or horrible uprisings?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I do have listener mail. I don't think it involves any of those things, but it's been fully two hours since I reread it, so I could be forgetting something. This email is from Mads, Mads wrote after our episode on Anna Maria von Sherman, and the email touches on other episodes as well, Mads wrote. Hi Tracy, Hi Holly. Longtime listener and not first time writer, though it's been a while since I've last written in. I've been listening to your podcast for about a decade now and you've accompanied me through so many hours of commuting, doing chores and taking walks, but also calms my nerves during one of my most dreaded and anxiety inducing modes of travel, AKA flying on a plane and recovering from surgery. I was just listening to your episode on Anna Maria von Sherman when you mentioned two places I have connections to, the first of all Cologne. Or I'm not gonna try to say this in German because I feel like I will not do a good job, but it's spelled differently from Cologne how we say it in English, which is very close to my hometown of Bonn and a city that is near and dear to my heart because of that. This alone would not have gotten me so excited that I would write in about the episode. No, it was the mention of eastern Westphalian town Hereford that got me. I've spent a lot of time there since my ex girlfriend was from that area and I still have two very dear friends who live in the vicinity of it. However, Hereford is not really a well known place unless you are from around there, and the small town in which my ex girlfriend lived is basically a complete unknown, which meant that I would have had pretty much the exact same conversation every time I went to visit her and got asked where she lives and from there it's sort of a an explanation of increasingly small towns that are close to Hereford. In Germany there is a very popular joke slash meme conspiracy theory that this city simply doesn't exist and it's just a hoax made by the government or whoever to fool people. I believe that joke originated at some student party after a lot of drinks. I'm skipping ahead just a touch. The mention of Hereford did remind me though of another episode I had meant to write in about, and that's the episode about Jon Arsen, the last Catholic Bishop of Iceland. What does he have to do with Hereford? Well, the fact that the first Catholic Bishop of Iceland was in fact sent to Hereford to study and spent some years of his life there before being appointed Bishop of Iceland. He I actually wanted to say even more, but it's late and I should really go to sleep. So I'll probably send you my other thoughts next time I get a random connection to something slash place I know. Well, I will pause the email for just a second. I don't remember if we mentioned in that episode about Jan Arison, but sending Catholic clergy members or people who thought they might join the clergy in Iceland, sending them to Germany to to study was like sort of the thing to do at the time. A lot of the Catholic clergy went to Germany to study during that era. Returning to the reason that I just really wanted to read this email in particular today. Attached you will find pictures of my two kitties, Peter and Furby as pet tacks when I adopted both of them from the shelter. They're both pretty anxious and weary and skittish, especially Furby. I was in fact warned by the shelter he might never be really comfortable with being touched and that he might never really warm up to the company of humans. Well, it took him about three weeks to turn into a super sweet cuddlebug and total mama's boy. He's a Silly goose who manages to pretty much appear hair ties out of the air no matter how I hide them, Playing with strings and laying in the most silly positions. Also, he has big round eyes and he looks at you with an expression I can only describe as and then it's the big round eye emoji. Peter is my wonderful void creature. He does look like someone who tried to draw a cat who has never seen a cat before. He is a shape. I adore him. There's some more details about these cats. It is very sweet, but I feel like we are gonna run short on time so I want to describe these pictures. We have kind of tabby cat. I'm looking directly at yawning mouth and toe beans. It is incredibly cute. Black void kitty. Incredibly cute. Also, the thing that made me go I love this picture so much and I want to read this email today is there is a picture of the black cat. The black cat was the one who was named Peter. Peter is standing on the open door of the dishwasher and the top rack of the dishwasher is pulled out as though it is being either loaded or unloaded. This dishwasher looks really clean, so I think maybe we are about to unload it. But Peter is standing there on the open dishwasher door and it makes me laugh because one of my cats is really fixated on when I put the detergent pod into the dishwasher. If she hears me open the dishwasher door and then open the cabinet door where we keep those things, she will run into the kitchen and try to like put her paw on the dishwasher pod. I don't know why she wants to do this. She has never tried to bite it or sniff it or eat it or anything like that. This is some cat ritual all of her own involving the pod and so having another black cat standing on the open dishwasher door I was extremely tickled by. So thank you Mads for sending this email. I really enjoyed the email even though I abridged bits of it. This is also an email from August, so I'm sorry it took me a while to read it. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast where it hits history [e-mail] and you can also subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show goes.

[Johnny Knoxville]

Johnny Knoxville here. Check out Crimeless Hillbilly Heist, my new true crime podcast from Smartless Media, Campside Media and big money players. It's the true story of the almost perfect crime and the nimrods who almost pulled it off.

[Kal Penn]

It was kind of like the perfect storm in a sewer. That was dumb. Do not follow my example.

[Johnny Knoxville]

Listen to Crimeless Hillbilly Heist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

I live below A cult leader and I fear I've angered her.

[Dakota (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Wait a minute, Sophia, how do you know she's a cult leader?

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime Podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my neighbor has been blasting music every day and doing dirt rich rituals and now my ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they might be part of a cult.

[Dakota (OK Storytime Podcast)]

Hold up a real life cult. And what is a dirt ritual?

[Sophia (OK Storytime Podcast)]

No clue, Dakota. Find out how it ends. Listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Hell in Heaven Podcast Narrator]

Two rich young Americans move to the Costa Rican jungle to start over. But one of them will end up dead and the other trying to for murder three times. It starts with a dream, a nature reserve and a spectacular new home. But little by little, they lose it.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

They actually lose it.

[Holly Frey]

They sort of went nuts until one.

[Hell in Heaven Podcast Narrator]

Night, everything spins out of control. Listen to Hell in Heaven on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Crying Wolf Podcast Narrator]

Chicago A white woman's murder. A black man behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.

[Lowe's Advertisement]

90 years for killing somebody I have never seen.

[Crying Wolf Podcast Narrator]

The Crying Wolf podcast is the story of a corrupt detective. Two men bound by injustice and the quest for redemption, no matter the price. Listen to the Crying Wolf podcast on the I iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This is an iHeart podcast.