What about the bogeyman? Collective emotions, everyday life, and the search for a scapegoat: a Lotmanian reading of the digital sphere

Abstract

Since Georges Lefebvre’s foundational work of 1932, The Great Fear of 1789, we have learned that an emotion such as fear can be perceived at the group, community, class or even societal level, affecting the nation as a whole. Generated by a growing and diffuse anxiety linked to material issues (hunger, prolonged bad harvests, the peak of famine on the eve of the new wheat), the Great Fear of 1789 began to take shape by feeding on immaterial images of collective memory, that is, by rekindling the fear of ‘foreign pirates’ (Lefebvre [1932] 2014: 50–52). The rumour spread among peasant communities, soon materialising in the belief that a foreign enemy army would raid and plunder them. This nebulous threat eventually resulted in the conviction of an aristocratic conspiracy to starve the people, which represented the imaginary but emotionally real factor that triggered collective panic and, thus, mass actions with radical historical consequences.