<P> Historian Mary K. Matossian argued that one of the causes of the Great Fear was consumption of ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus . In years of good harvests, wheat contaminated with ergot was discarded, but when the harvest was poor, the peasants could not afford to be so choosy . </P> <P> Peasant revolt was clearly not a phenomenon new to late eighteenth - century France: the fourteenth century saw the Jacquerie in the Oise Valley, and the seventeenth century saw the Croquant rebellions . Yves - Marie Bercé, in History of the Peasant Revolts, concludes "peasant revolts of the years 1789--92 had much in common with their seventeenth - century counterparts: unanimity of the rural community, rejection of new taxation to which they were unaccustomed, defiance of enemy townsmen and a belief that there would be a general remission in taxes, particularly when the king decided to convene the estates general . In spite of all that is suggested by the political history of the period, the peasant disturbances at the beginning of the French Revolution did not depart from the typical community revolt of the preceding century ." </P> <P> The usual cause of communal violence was "an assault launched from outside upon the community as a whole" whether that outsider be those profiting from unfairly high bread prices, marauding bandits, witches, or magistrates abusing power . This statement about sixteenth - and seventeenth - century uprisings appears, at first, to apply equally to the Great Fear of 1789 . However, one distinctive aspect of the latter was fear of an ambiguous outsider at the outset of the disturbance . Whether the brigands were English, Piedmontese or merely vagabonds was not easily determined and, when the Great Fear had spread to its largest expanse, it was a system, feudalism, rather than a specific person or group, at which its animosity was directed . Earlier revolts had not been subversive, but rather looked to a golden age that participants wished to see reinstated; the socio - political system was implicitly validated by a critique of recent changes in favour of tradition and custom . The Cahiers des doléances had opened the door to the people's opinion directly affecting social circumstances and policy, and the Great Fear evidenced this change . </P> <P> The most glaring difference between the Great Fear of 1789 and previous peasant revolts was its scope . Spreading from a half - dozen or so separate nuclei across the countryside, almost all of France found itself in rural uproar . In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, revolt was almost always contained within the borders of a single province . This change in magnitude reflects to what extent social discontent was with the entire governmental system (and its ineffectiveness) rather than with anything particular to a locality . While, as Tackett argues, the specific manifestation of the fear of brigands (who they were, and what they were most likely to attack) may have been contingent upon local contexts, the fact that the brigands were perceived as a genuine threat to the peasants across the country in a wide - variety of local contexts speaks to a more systemic disorder . </P>

Where was the largest peasant rebellion in eastern europe occur before 1789