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Protests are infectious: mapping rural unrest in Revolutionary France

Researchers have used epidemiological models to determine whether the wave of riots in 1789 known as the Great Fear spread through irrational panic or rational protest.
By
  1. Jack A. Goldstone

    1. Jack A. Goldstone is in the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia 22201, USA.

Ever since the French Revolution of 1789, historians have debated how and why protests spread across rural France in the summer of that pivotal year. Writing in Nature, Zapperi et al.1 address this problem using models from epidemiology that treat protest like an ‘infection’ that spreads from place to place. Their quantitative analysis reveals that there was logic to how protests spread that was neither random nor irrational.

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Nature 646, 290-291 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02526-6

References

  1. Zapperi, S., Varlet-Bertrand, C., Bastidon, C., La Porta, C. A. M. & Parent, A. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09392-2 (2025).

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  2. Tudoroiu, T. New Polit. Sci. 36, 346–365 (2014).

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  3. Bonnasse-Gahot, L. et al. Sci. Rep. 8, 107 (2018).

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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