518
PARTISAN REVIEW
To travel from Clermont in Beauvaisis to the Seine - a distance of
about fifty kilometers - it took twelve hours of daylight; it traveled
the five hundred kilometers from Rutfec to Lourdes in nine days; its
speed here was lesser by a half, but it obviously moved more slowly at
night. During the day, it seems to have gone at about four kilometers
an hour.
It
moved from Livron to Aries - a hundred and fifty
kilometers - in forty hours, which makes four kilometers an hour,
night and day.
La Tour-du-Pin got its warning on the 27th at three o'clock,
Bourgoin at five o'clock, Virieu, the Bievre plain and the Cote–
Saint-Andre
all
the same time. The fear rushed down all the valleys of
the Bas-Dauphine towards the Rhone valley, from Lyons to Saint–
Vallier. Towards the South, it went by the Voiron road to reach the
Isere at Moirans, and whilst it went up one side to reach Grenoble by
eleven o'clock, it went down the other side
to
pass through Saint–
Marcellin at midnight; it was in Romans at three in the morning on
the 28th, moving from here to Tain, then Valence: it was now well
established and on that same day the chateaux of the lower Dauphine
began to burn.
The motive was revenge. The peasants not only destroyed the
archives. "It was," writes Lefebvre, "the desire to punish the
seigneur
through the goods which were so precious to him and which were the
symbol and the basis of his power." Such an expression of vengeance will
in turn give rise to feelings of guilt, anxiety, and fears of retaliation. As
Lefebvre put it, "fear walked abroad," there was a "general feeling of
anxiety." He observed that "fear of brigands and fear of aristocrats always
managed to occur simultaneously in the mind of the people." He is ex–
plicit that this fear was a delusion: "To admit that the brigands existed
and might appear at any moment was one thing;
to
imagine that they
were actualJy there was another."
Recently, Peter Paret suggested that
The Great Fear of
1789 "would
not have been significantly improved by its author's comprehension of
psychoanalysis." I would argue that an understanding of the sudden col–
lapse of order, the projection of aggressive intent and talion fears of re–
venge and retaliation are precisely the dynamic concepts that are missing
from Lefebvre's classic account. There is an oedipal element in the peas–
ants' overthrow of the seigneurial paternal authority and the fear of the
vengeful return of that authority. The peasants feared that the aristocrats
were going to do to them exactly what they had already done or were
about to do to the nobility in late July and early August 1789.
The time of this anxiety is crucial. The harvests of the previous two
years had been especially poor. "At the end ofJuly," says Lefebvre, "the
general feeling of insecurity was so much more frightening than it had
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