The Great Fear of 1789: How French Revolution Rumors Went Viral Before Social Media

Friday, September 26, 2025.

When panic traveled by horse instead of hashtag — and why 2025 feels disturbingly like 1789.

What Was the Great Fear of 1789?

In July of 1789, while Paris still buzzed from the storming of the Bastille, a different kind of insurrection swept rural France.

Villages across the countryside heard whispers of brigands on the march — marauders allegedly hired by nobles to destroy crops, punish rebellious peasants, and starve whole regions into submission.

The rumors spread like wildfire.

Farmers dropped their tools, armed themselves with scythes and muskets, stormed manors, and torched feudal records. The aristocracy’s centuries-old paperwork — the ledgers of obligation, the lists of dues and rents — went up in flames. The brigands themselves never materialized.

This episode, remembered as the Great Fear of 1789, has long been dismissed as irrational peasant hysteria. But new research published in Nature suggests the panic wasn’t so simple.

These French Revolution rumors spread in ways that look strikingly similar to how viral misinformation moves today.

Why French Revolution Rumors Spread Like Wildfire

Researchers Stefano Zapperi and colleagues gathered archival records of brigand rumors, then mapped them onto 18th-century roads and postal networks. The patterns looked eerily like an epidemic:

• Rumor Velocity: Tales of brigands traveled at about 45 kilometers per day — roughly the speed of a horse.

• Super-Spreader Hubs: Towns with postal relays were first to erupt, functioning like TikTok influencers of the age.

• Susceptibility Factors: Literate, wealthier towns with high bread prices and concentrated land ownership were far more likely to “catch” the panic.

This upends the lazy cliché of the ignorant peasant. It wasn’t isolation or stupidity that fueled panic. It was literacy, connectivity, and economic stress.

Rational Panic, Irrational Results

Let’s look at context. The fear was not as irrational as it seems. Bread prices had doubled. Harvests were poor. Nobles still demanded their feudal dues.

So when a rider arrived claiming brigands were torching fields, villagers didn’t laugh — they believed. Panic was, in a twisted way, a rational response.

The consequences were dramatic.

Villagers turned their fear against local elites, storming manors and burning records. Within weeks, the National Assembly abolished feudal dues entirely. The brigands never appeared, but the rumor utterly reshaped French society.

Viral Misinformation in History

The Great Fear shows that the history of viral misinformation stretches back centuries.

Long before Twitter, rumors spread through taverns, markets, and relay stations. What mattered wasn’t truth but conditions: inequality, scarcity, distrust.

The parallels to today are obvious.

• 1789: Rumors took days to move from village to village.

• 2025: A meme can circle the globe in seconds.

The velocity has changed. Human nature has not.

Modern Examples of Viral Panic

To see how little we’ve evolved since Great Fear 1789, look at these case studies:

COVID-19 Conspiracies

Pandemic panic produced rumors of miracle cures, vaccine microchips, and secret plots. These thrived not because people were ignorant, but because they were scared, suspicious, and desperate — the same conditions that primed French villagers to fear brigands.

QAnon and Political Rumors

Like the French Revolution rumors, QAnon’s power wasn’t in its accuracy but in its plausibility to anxious audiences. The core story — the powerful are conspiring against you — never needed proof to spread.

Financial Panic and Bank Runs

In 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed after whispers of instability spread on social media. Clients withdrew billions in hours. The rumor caused the very crisis it predicted — just as fear of brigands triggered peasants to destroy feudal ledgers.

From Brigands to Algorithms

The brigands never came, but the fear of them toppled feudalism. Today’s misinformation rarely features phantom raiders, but it can still destabilize governments, wreck banks, and fracture trust.

• Then: farmers, hunger, a horse, and a postal relay.

• Now: citizens, economic strain, a smartphone, and an algorithm designed to monetize outrage.

The lesson is blunt: infrastructure determines the speed, but fear determines the spread.

Lessons for Today

History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it sometimes it rhymes. Here are a few lessons the Great Fear 1789 offers for a world drowning in misinformation:

• Rumors flourish in scarcity.
  Hunger and inequality primed French peasants to believe in phantom brigands. Today, financial stress, housing crises, and climate anxiety prime us to click “share” on conspiracies. Fixing the conditions reduces the rumor’s grip.

• Connectivity is a double-edged sword.
  The 18th-century postal relay made communication faster — and panic contagious. Social media does the same, only exponentially faster. Infrastructure isn’t neutral; it shapes what spreads.

• Distrust is the accelerant.
  Rumors spread where people feel abandoned by authority. In 1789, peasants distrusted their lords. In 2025, citizens distrust governments, corporations, and media. Restoring trust is as important as debunking lies.

• Panic can produce real change.
  The brigand scare helped topple feudal dues. Today, misinformation can shape elections, policy, and markets. The danger isn’t just belief — it’s action taken on shaky ground.

Why the Great Fear Still Matters

The new research reframes panic in historical events as something more than mass hysteria.

Panic is not stupidity; it’s a predictable outcome when stress, inequality, and mistrust meet rumor.

That’s why the Great Fear of 1789 matters today. It reminds us that humans don’t need Twitter to fall for rumors. We only need sufficient fear.

So the next time you laugh at villagers chasing shadows with pitchforks, remember: centuries from now, someone will be puzzling over how whole societies once convinced themselves that vaccines contained microchips, or that hurricanes could be turned aside by thoughts and prayers.

And their readers will laugh at us — until they refresh their own feeds and realize the cycle never ends.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Zapperi, S., Perrot, N., & Bailyn, J. (2025). Epidemiology models explain rumour spreading during France’s Great Fear of 1789. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09392-2

Hotz, R. L. (2025, September 12). Panic-Inducing Rumors Went Viral Ahead of the French Revolution. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/science/french-revolution-economic-fears-epidemiology-53285662