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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

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

One of the papers that I had bookmarked 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 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. 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 in moving parts and contributing factors.

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,

...