Great Fear - Comparison To Previous Peasant Revolts

Comparison To Previous Peasant Revolts

Peasant revolt was clearly not a new phenomenon in late eighteenth-century France: the fourteenth-century saw the Jacquerie in the Oise Valley, the sixteenth-century saw the and the seventeenth-century Croquants rebellions. Yves-Marie Bercé, in History of the Peasant Revolts, concludes "peasant revolts of the years 1789–92 had much in common with their seventeenth-century counterparts: unanimity of the rural community, rejection of new taxation to which they were unaccustomed, defiance of enemy townsmen and a belief that there would be a general remission in taxes, particularly when the king decided to convene the estates general. In spite of all that is suggested by the political history of the period, the peasant disturbances at the beginning of the French Revolution did not depart from the typical community revolt of the preceding century.

The usual cause of communal violence was “an assault launched from outside upon the community as a whole” whether that outsider be those profiting from unfairly high bread prices, maurading bandits, witches or magistrates abusing power. This statement about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century uprisings appears, at first, to apply equally to the Great Fear of 1789. However, a distinctive aspect of the latter was an ambiguous outsider at the outset of disturbance. Whether the brigands were English, Piedmontese or merely vagabonds was not easily determined and, when the Great Fear had spread to its largest expanse, it was a system, feudalism, rather than a specific person or group, at which its animosity was directed. Earlier revolts had not been subversive, but rather looked to a golden age that they wished to be reinstated; the socio-political system was implicitly validated by a critique of recent changes in favour of tradition and custom. The Cahiers des doléances had opened the door to the people’s opinion directly affecting social circumstances and policy and the Great Fear evidences this change.

The most glaring difference between the Great Fear of 1789 and previous peasant revolts is its scope. Spreading from a half-dozen or so separate nuclei across the countryside, almost all of France found itself in rural uproar. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, revolt was almost always contained within the borders of a single province. This change in magnitude reflects to what extent social discontent was with the entire governmental system (and its ineffectiveness) rather than with anything particular to a locality. While the specific manifestation of the fear of brigands (who they were, what they were most likely to attack) may have been contingent upon local contexts, as Tackett argues, nevertheless, that the brigands were perceived as a genuine threat to the peasants across the country in a wide-variety of local contexts speaks to a more systemic disorder.

Comparing the peasant revolts of the Tard Avisés with the Great Fear of 1789 demonstrates some key similarities and differences. From 1593–1595, in Limousin and Périgord, groups of peasants rose up against armed forces that occupied the countryside and raised funds by levying taxes and ransom. In a series of assemblies, the Croquants, as they were derogatively called, worked on a military plan for action and successfully expelled the garrisons from their lands. The letters between these assemblies justified their armed resistance as opposition to unjust claims on their property. When the chaotic political situation was stabilized with the coronation of Henry IV, the revolts ended and the peasants were eventually accorded the tax rebate they had demanded earlier. The Tard-Avisés had specific goals and achieved them; the same cannot be said of the participants in the Great Fear.

The Great Fear of 1789 broke with another pattern typical of peasant revolts in earlier centuries. The panic lasted for more than a few weeks and during the most labour-intensive months of the year. The Tard-Avisés and other revolts of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries occurred during the Spring months when the peasants had spare time. The panic of brigands destroying the harvest was so great in 1789 that peasants actually forwent working on the harvest in late June and July. The pragmatism of the previous revolts, which had produced real results, had disappeared by the end of the Ancien Régime.

Communal violence was but one tactic out of many for opposing an enemy and the peasants of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, drawing on a heritage of communal justice, might rise up to prevent enclosement of a communal grazing space, like a marsh, to demand lower bread prices, or to evade their taxes. During the reign of Louis XIV, however, popular revolt became less and less of a viable option for reform as the state became better able to respond to insurgency and addressed many of the issues at the heart of peasant revolt. Reforms in the military structure prevented French soldiers from plundering French soil and armed conflict with other powers was not fought at home. Thus, the threat of roaming bandits was a particularly poignant one – it evoked an era of lawlessness which the French monarchy had successfully countered in previous years.

There was much in common between the peasantry in the Great Fear of 1789 and the peasants of the revolts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but they were not unmalleable nor unchanged by the experience of Bourbon rule and its subsequent dissolution. Without the monarchy or a replacement government to administer and protect the people, the harvest, and with it, life itself, was in grave danger.