The Great Fear

3 Key excerpts on "The Great Fear"

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  Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism

  The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror

  • Joseph Crawford(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  villages took up arms to defend themselves, or fled their homes in search of safety from these imaginary enemies. 4 The Great Fear was only the most obvious manifestation of that sense of heightened anxiety and dread which was so widespread in the years that followed the fall of the Bastille, in Britain as well as France; yet the moment at which the Revolution itself started to be seen as something fearful came at different points for different individuals. For some, such as Burke, the breaking point came as early as 5 October 1789, when the Parisian market-women and their allies marched on Versailles, murdered several guards, and compelled the royal family to return with them to Paris, proving to unsympathetic eyes that France was not a true constitutional monarchy governed by the rule of law, but a fallen state in which true power now lay in the hands of an anarchic mob. For others it came after the Flight to Varennes on 20 June 1791, following which Louis XVI was held under guard and the illusion of concord between the royalty and people of France was shattered forever, or else during the chaotic months of mid-1792, when France declared war on Prussia and Austria, imprisoned the royal family, and ultimately abolished the monarchy entirely and declared itself a republic on 21 September 1792. British popular opinion swung heavily against the Revolution after the massacres of September 1792, the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793, and the subsequent French declaration of war with Britain

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  Narratives of Dictatorship in the Age of Revolution

  Emotions, Power and Legitimacy in the Atlantic Space

  • Moisés Prieto(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  60

  Similar fear phenomena, but with considerable differences due to its particular context are claimed by Manuel Chust and Claudia Rosas Lauro for the Spanish American revolutions. Hence, for instance, the fears of slaves seizing power as this had happened in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in the 1790s show that the perception of the Caribbean revolution was stronger than the Parisian one. Not only fears of mutinies, rebellions, conspirations and disorder but also fears of alterity were present in a world region seeking freedom from the Spanish Crown, yet after having reached it, the Creole elites longed for the past colonial order.61 Despite the insistence to focus on and search a sort of Latin American genuineness beyond a Eurocentric view, another parallel may be seen in Bolívar’s guerra a muerte (Engl. “war to the death”) as a radicalization of the bellicose efforts again the Spaniards in 1813 uttered as a decree allowing atrocities against those who were born in Spain, thus opening the door to excesses of violence and terror.62

  In Paraguay, fear assumed particular traits, linked very much to the person of the dictator himself. The failed conspiracy of 1820 to assassinate the Supreme Dictator was the source of a wave of repression targeting the elites.63 In fact, despotism had reached already in January of 1818 a considerable degree, when, according to John Hoyt Williams, Francia ordered the arrest of José Ignacio Almagro for publicly calumniating the ruler of Paraguay.64 Then, the repression went on with eventual executions in front of a fire squad. The discontent among the Creole elite grew stronger. Secret meetings in the family estancia of Colonel Yegros on the countryside, who had shared the government of the Republic with Francia as co-consul, took place. The dictator became aware of them and put the suspects under surveillance. When the arrest of the conspirers was ordered, a fifth man, Juan Bogarín, could escape, but caught by fear decided to look for this confessor and to confess the entire plan of assassination and seizure of power, which foresaw also Yegro’s assumption of the civil power of the Republic of Paraguay.65 The priest instructed the penitent to reveal the entire plot to the Supreme Dictator. Immediately, Francia ordered the arrest of the implicated people. Thus, within a week, the prisoners amounted to more than a hundred. Within the following months, judicial torture enlightened further details, names and roles of the plotters. Some of them died in prison. Yegros, Captain Montiel, Dr Juan Arestigui and five more were executed by fire squad on 17 July 1821 in the courtyard of the Government House.66 In this context of general suspicion and state of alert, the case of Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858) reached notoriety. Bonpland who had accompanied Alexander von Humboldt during a five-year voyage to Central and South America,67 had now settled down just on the trade route, close to Ytapúa, on the border to Paraguay. There, he had built up an establishment for the cultivation of yerba mate

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  International Conflict in the Twentieth Century

  A Christian View

  • Herbert Butterfield(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The student of history needs to consider this question, therefore. Some aspects of the past—and these perhaps the ones most related to men's minds and moods—are particularly difficult to recapture. The atrocities of our own day, for example, are naturally more vivid to us than those of a century ago. The world tends to judge a present-day revolution merely by its atrocities and an ancient one much more by its ideals and purposes. This is partly because the sufferings and terrors of a former generation are more easily overlooked. We need to possess something of the art of the dramatist in order to enter into the sensations of other people—to recover, for example, the "feel" of some terror that once possessed a nation or a ministry. And it must not be said that we ought to leave our imagination out of our history, for the minds of men, and even the mood of society, may have their part in accounting for human conduct. Even when the student of the past is really bent on analysis, he must recapture the fear, and the attendant high pressure, which so greatly affect the actions of men and the policy of governments. Yet the historical imagination is never so defective as when it has to deal with the apprehension and insecurity of frightened people. It is a point to remember, therefore, that the historian, surveying the past (like the statesman surveying rival powers in his own contemporary world), is apt to do less than justice to the part played by fear in politics, at any rate so far as concerns governments other than his own.

  We do not always realize—and sometimes we do not like to recognize—how often a mistaken policy, an obliquity in conduct, a braggart manner, or even an act of cruelty, may be traceable to fear. What is true of individual people is likely to be still more true of great agglomerations of humanity, where further irrational factors always come into play. With nations, even more than with individuals, in fact, the symptoms of fear may be unlike fear—they may even be the result of an attempt to convince us of the reverse. Apart from all this, fear may exist as a more constant and less sensational factor in life, perpetually constricting very reasonable people in their conduct in the world. It may curb their natural desire to react against injustice, or (if only by the production of wishful thinking) prevent them from recognizing the crimes of their own government. It can lead to small compliances and complicities, the production of "yes men," the hardening of inherited orthodoxies and accepted ideas. It may cause a man to halt in the course of his own speculations, and shrink from the dreadful audacity of pushing his thought to its logical conclusion. Even in the field of scholarship, writers may be too frightened of one another; historians may be too anxious to play safe. There can also be a generalized fear that is no longer conscious of being fear, and hangs about in the form of oppressive dullness or heavy cloud, as though the snail had retreated into its shell and forgotten the reason, but had not the spirit to put out its feelers any more.

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