JUST SAY NON!
Russell Buchanan and researcher Mary Matossian examine Le Grande Peur
For
three blood-soaked weeks in the summer of 1789 panic-stricken
peasants rampaged wild-eyed through the French countryside burning chateaux,
slaughtering land owners, and generally creating a serious law-enforcement problem.
Armed with pitchforks, clubs and rocks, the peasants struck such fear into the
heart of the aristocracy that measures were immediately taken to abolish what
was left of the ancient regime, France's pre-revolution social order. La
Grande Peur (The Great Fear) of 1789 has come to be known as a major turning
point in the French Revolution. But historians are at a loss to explain the
how and why of this strange period.
Why, for instance, did the lunacy affect only certain parts of France? Why was the mood of the peasants more that of panicked paranoia than revolutionary zeal? And stranger still, how did the craziness manage to beset villages simultaneously, rather than shack to shack, hamlet to hamlet? According to Mary Kilbourne Matossian, University of Maryland historian and author of Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics and History, the answer lies in a fungus called ergot - LSD in its natural form. Acid is a weird drug. You never know how it will affect you.
(For instance, back in my musician days I played bass for an enormously popular teen idol. We were four shows into my first tour and I was feeling pretty comfortable with the material. So when Tom the sax player suggested that we eat two and a half hits of microdot forty minutes before the show, I said "What a grand idea!" or something to that effect. We had timed it perfectly. Midway into the intro song I began to feel that unmistakable hollow feeling in my stomach, the metallic taste in my mouth. I couldn't tell if I was hallucinating yet because we were in absolute darkness; the stage and house lights would come on when the star took the stage. Fortunately, I was having no problem at all with my bass parts. In fact, the band and I were sounding pretty darned good. This was going to be fun. We crescendoed into the entrance. The lights switched on as the sparkly teen idol ran to center stage. As usual, the screams were deafening. I looked back at the horn section to give Tom a knowing smile but what I saw quickly removed my smile.
Tom was standing in the middle of the horn section, wide-eyed and frozen, his face a mask of abject horror. He wasn't even playing his saxophone. Then I heard the chanting. "BOBBY, BOBBY, BOBBY, BAHHHBY" But these were not the usual prepubescent femaletype chants. These sounded more like Charles Laughton in the "Water! Water!" scene from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." "BOBBY, BOBBY, BAHHHHHHBYŠ" I spun around to see what had petrified my sax player. It was "Children's Hospital Night" at the concert. It had to be the largest fleet of wheelchairs ever assembled under one roof. The first thirty rows, it appeared, were reserved for boys and girls suffering from cerebral palsy, facial deformities and mental retardation. And I was now BLAZING on evil Tom's drugs. "BOBBY, BAHHHHBY!"
Good God. I tried to keep my mind on the music, but that was not to be. At first I was terrified. The acid was distorting and amorphizing these little faces that were distorted and amorphic to begin with. It was a nightmare. But then I began to feel- deeply-for these tortured little minds and bodies in front of me: the mean irony of these little kids in bicycle helmets, drooling, arms flailing, trying with every ounce of their being to pronounce Bobby's name. Worshiping his perfect, blow-dried presence as he danced gracefully before them, singing vapid lyrics, and focusing on the 31st row and beyond. Aaaargh! Fortunately, the gleeful screams from the audience were loud enough to mask the fact that I had long since stopped playing. But none of that mattered; my thoughts were lost in those kids. What does all this have to do with rampaging peasants? Nothing. But it does say something about LSD.
And that's my point. LSD seems to magnify whatever happens to be occupying the user's mind at the moment. It doesn't necessarily make the tripper more violent, as it did with the peasants of the Grande Peur. Not once did I have an urge to attack the kids with a pitchfork. But, because the peasants were already pissed off at the ruling class, the acid merely ratcheted up their ill will to the point that they couldn't help gnawing on the femurs of the guys with beauty marks and powdered wigs.
Matossian argues that ergot, a mold that grows on rye during particular weather conditions, was not only responsible for the Grande Peur, but may also have contributed to the odd behavior surrounding other historical free-for-alls such as the Black Plague and the Salem witch hunts. Reviewing records of these events, Matossian discovered these pertinent facts: at the time of each event the people's diet consisted mainly (if not exclusively) of rye bread. Peasants of the Grande Peur, for example, consumed as much as three pounds of the stuff per day. Also, the climatic conditions during the growing season prior to each disturbance were highly conducive to ergot growth. And, the hallucinations, delusions and utter terror experienced by the people were precisely what one would expect from a bunch of peasants who had been unwittingly feeding themselves massive doses of a powerful hallucinogen every day for a few weeks. (Which we are not advocating. Unless it's something you like to do. — Ed.)
