We saw in an earlier lecture how the drawing up of the cahiers de doléances and the elections of the Estates-General had electrified rural France and raised hopes among the great mass of the population that things might just change. One of the reasons for the passionate involvement of the mass of the French people in the political upheavals of 1789 is that people are living at the end of a harvest crisis. This is a graph that shows the price of wheat in France across the 18th century. And wheat and other cereal crops are the staple diet of rural as well as urban people. Whenever the price of wheat got above 20 pounds for a sack of wheat there was mass hunger in the countryside. There'd been a series of such crises across the 18th century. The one at the end of the 1780s is one of the most dramatic. Across the country side in late 1788 and early 1789, there are food riots. At the same time that people are drawing up their lists of grievances, electing deputies to the Estates-General and so on. This adds to the sense of urgency that people feel across the country. Earlier, we met the English agronomist Arthur Young when he was over in western France in the city of Nantes, and saying how involved the middle class mercantile and legal elite were in the great political debates of 1788 and 1789. He comes back to France, in 1789 and, in July, he's over in the eastern province of Lorraine. His diaries are an extraordinarily rich source for us because he records in great detail the conversations that he had, the observations that he'd make about what's going on. He encounters when he's in Lorraine, a woman rather like this, a peasant woman walking on one of the roads of the rural area. And this is what he writes in his diary: Walking up a long hill to ease my mare, I was joined by a poor woman, who complained of the times and that it was a sad country. On my demanding her reasons, she said her husband had but a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet he had a sack, a 42-pound sack of wheat, and three chickens to pay as a quit-rent, a harvest due, to one seigneur or lord; and four sacks of oats, one chicken and a shilling to pay another, beside very heavy tailles, that's the state tax, and other taxes. She had seven children, and the cow's milk helped to make the soup. It was said at present, and this is where Young was so impressed with what she said that he underlined it, in his diary, something was to be done by some great folks for such poor ones, but she did not know who or how, but God send us better, and then he wrote what she said in French, because the taxes and the feudal dues are crushing us. This woman, at no great distance, might have been taken for 60 or 70, her figure was so bent and her face so furrowed and hardened by labor; but she said she was only 28. Notice the date of the entry in Young's diary, the 12th of July. Two days later, of course, the working people of Paris seized the Bastille fortress, a revolutionary act. What are to be the repercussions, the resonances of that act in rural France, when news of the storming of the Bastille reaches the country side? And it reaches the countryside at a critical moment because July, 1789 is the time when the new harvest is just about to be brought in. It looks good. Unlike the harvest of 1788, the harvest of 1789, ripening in the fields in July, looks abundant. People are expectant. They're also anxious because they've heard about the political goings on at Versailles and then in Paris. They're worried that the actions of the third estate deputies, inspirational as they are, may lead to acts of revenge by the privileged orders, particularly the nobility. Across the countryside, there were people like this man a rural policeman whose job it is to watch over the fields and make sure that peasant cows aren't getting into someone else's fields and all the rest of it. But they're on the lookout as well to make sure that the bands of beggars who are wandering the roads of France looking for work at a time of economic crisis, that they don't get up to any good. They start to worry that some of the people they can see on the roads who were wandering through the fields looking for something to eat might just be people in the pay of the nobility. There is an anxiety that starts to sweep across the country, which only adds to that feeling of expectation that has been accentuated already by hunger. What happens when news of the Bastille reaches the countryside is extraordinary, unprecedented. It's the object of one of the great works of history on the French Revolution by this man, Georges Lefebvre, who in 1932 wrote a book entitled The Great Fear of 1789. And what he found was extraordinary, because almost simultaneously, from six epicenters, where the black dots are, across most of the country, panics fanned out as those rural policemen saw people who they thought were up to no good, perhaps even cutting down wheat that wasn't quite ripe, and started to panic that maybe this was the first sign of what people were frightened of, that the nobility might try and find some way of exacting revenge on the commoners for the boldness of their deputies, and for the boldness of what had happened in storming the Bastille. Who could be more vulnerable than starving people in the countryside anxiously waiting for the crop to ripen? Rumors of what's happening in the fields spread like wildfire. In fact, Lefebvre calculates that it travels at about four kilometers an hour from the epicenters of the rumors. And of course, like all rumors, it becomes more and more accentuated, more exaggerated with distance. What starts off as a few evil intentioned people, perhaps cutting down some wheat in a village, becomes, within a couple of days, whole battalions of beggars in the pay of aristocracy setting fire to peasant crops. Across the country, rural communities arm themselves however they can. Of course, they're not allowed to bear arms, that's a noble privilege, but they find some way of arming themselves with pitchforks, with farm implements and so on. They get ready for attacks that never come. And when they don't come, what they do instead is the next great act of revolution. They turn their weapons on the feudal system itself. Across most of the country, the Chateau belonging to the seigneur and occupied by them or their stewards are besieged. We have very few visual representations of this great fear, of this great peasant revolt of 1789. This is one of the few that we do have, and it's misleading, because it suggests that across the country, peasant bands are simply setting castles on fire. They don't do that, there are very few instances of that. What they do is besiege them, is take nobles or their farm stewards hostage and insist that they give them food and wine, but not just food and wine. Because what becomes apparent in this great rural revolt, is that peasants too have a political and social agenda. Look at this extraordinary document which is a letter written by the farmed steward of the Duke of Montmorency, an eminent noble who's at the Estates-General himself, to the south of Montmorency in Paris. Early in August the Farm Steward writes to his master, and says that brigandage and pillage is going on everywhere. The populace, attributing the high price of grain to the seigneurs, the lords of the kingdom, is hostile to all that belongs to them. No argument avails, the vassal population, the peasantry, is in such a state of rebellion that it is ready to commit the greatest excesses. And then he says this: At the moment I was going to end my letter, I learned that about 300 brigands, peasants, from all the areas connected with the vassals of Madame the Marquise de Longaunay had carried off the titles of the dues and the rents of the seigneurie, and destroyed the dovecot. That's to say they'd insisted that she give them all of the feudal titles, the feudal dues, they had to pay, and they seized them and they took them away to destroy them. They destroyed the dovecot because it was a privilege that really rankled with the peasantry, that only the seigneur had the right to allow birds to feast on the crops of the peasantry, the lord alone was allowed to have a dovecot. They destroyed the dovecot and then, and most strikingly, he said this: They, the peasants, then gave an acknowledgement of what they had carried off, signed in the name of 'the Nation'. Somehow, rural people involved in a revolutionary act like this, an act of unprecedented boldness, confronting a great lord, and insisting that they be given the feudal registers to destroy, destroying the dovecot, breaking the law in extraordinary ways, should then be so bold as to say we are the nation. Somehow the political debates of 1788 and 1789, had resonated into rural communities across the country. That peasants who had been socialized into a position of deference and respect for their social betters, by the middle of 1789 had transformed their political identity to the extent that they could say we represent the nation. The issue then becomes, how the National Assembly in Versailles will respond as news comes pouring in of acts of rebellion like this going on across the country. What is to be the response of the deputies of the three orders of the realm who now form the national assembly? We'll look at that in my next lecture.
