Epidemiology models explain rumour spreading during France’s Great Fear of 1789

The Great Fear of 1789, a wave of panic and unrest in rural France fuelled by the spreading of rumours, was an important moment at the onset of the French Revolution, marking the collapse of feudalism and the rise of the new regime1. The Great Fear provides a vivid example of the role the spreading of rumours has in driving political changes that might be relevant today2,3. Here, we collect existing historical records related to the Great Fear and use epidemiology tools and models4 to reconstruct the network of its transmission from town to town. In this way, we quantify the spatiotemporal spread of the rumours and compute key epidemiological parameters, such as the basic reproduction number. Exploiting information on the structure of the road network in eighteenth century France5, we estimate the most probable diffusion paths of the Great Fear and quantify the distribution of spreading velocities. By endowing the nodes in our reconstructed network with indicators related to the institutional, demographic and socio-economic conditions of the time6, including literacy, population size, political participation, wheat prices7,8, income and ownership laws9, and the unequal distribution of land ownership, we compute factors associated with spread of the Great Fear. Our analysis sheds light on unresolved historiographic issues on the significance of the Great Fear for the French Revolution, providing a quantitative answer to the unresolved debate between the role of emotions and rationality in explaining its diffusion.