"The great fear, like the threat of upheaval and expropriation that inspires it," David Caute oddly writes in the first sentence of his introduction, "has been a recurrent phenomenon in the history of the bourgeoisie since the French Revolution." The sentence is odd because the grande peur of 1789 broke out in a feudal, not a bourgeois, society; because it began among the peasants, not the bourgeoisie; because it was inspired, not by the threat of upheaval and expropriation, but by the fear that the nobility would crush the incipient revolution; and, most of all, because in the two centuries thereafter the grande peur has been the most sepctacularly exemplified not in bourgeois but in totalitarian societies-Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China.