Simien, Côme

Rumors and Revolution: The season of massacres in September 1792 - 2020.


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The pairing of “rumor/Revolution” has been well known to historians since the pioneering work by Georges Lefebvre on the Great Fear of 1789. The role of unverified information or “fake news” in the outbreak of the September Massacres of 1792 in Paris itself has been established by Pierre Caron, and more recently, by Timothy Tackett. In the wake of these reflections, this article studies the “rumor crisis” of the summer of 1792, among the most important of the Revolution: the nature of the hearsay in circulation, the means of its dissemination geographically and socially, its magnification, the consequences of the search for such information... By confronting the Parisian situation (the best known) with the “season” of massacres that France experienced from mid-July to the beginning of October 1792 (less well known), a portrait of a country emerges, one affected by multiple rumors, even though no direct articulation between them necessarily existed (except for a fear of plots), their broad degree of credibility in society, where violent acts erupted, their connection with reality, and the non-negligible nature of the link between rumor and collective violence.