The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984)

Most history of the early modern period written more than a generation ago was what Robert Darnton identifies as "top-down" history: it is the history of royalty, nobles, and the intellectual elites whose ideas largely defined the times. But this contribution, along with Natalie Zemon Davis' "The Return of Martin Guerre" and Carlo Ginzburg's "The Cheese and the Worms," is essential in introducing a more egalitarian, social, "bottom-up" history that emphasizes regular people. The book contains five chapters loosely interwoven around an attempt to carve out this special niche in historiography.

The opening chapter, "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose" gives a close historical reading to many of the fairy tales that we remember reading with innocent delight as children. Darnton scours the interpretations of Bettelheim and Fromm, dismissing them for not paying enough attention to the historical circumstances of their construction and their telling. Little did they even realize that their readings, based on the Grimm's compilation instead of Perrault's, were bowdlerized of most of the blood, violence, and scatological humor that existed in the originals, probably because of the reading demands of a growing European moralistic bourgeois. Why are some of these seventeenth and eighteenth-century fairy tales so gory? His answer is, quite simply, that our shock is just a function of how much times have changed. These were times in which children (this is before the birth of childhood as we know it) were subjected to backbreaking dawn-to-dusk labor (reminiscent of Rumpelstiltskin); in which peasants, unable to feed another child, were forced to abandon newborns (Hansel and Gretel); and, in a peculiar demography in which one of every five Norman men re-wed after the death of his first wife, stories of stepmothers abounded (Cinderella). Once familiar with these details, the innocence we thought we knew is quickly upset. These stories were the work of imagination and whim, but Darnton does a superb job of detailing the degree to which they were very social products of social history as it was happening "on the ground."

The eponymous chapter details many aspects of the growing print culture in the Ancien Regime. Master printmakers would hire journeymen to come into their shop and learn their craft. But one day in a Paris shop, these journeymen slaughtered hundreds of cats, much to their amusement, and repeated the episode in mock trials no less than a dozen different times over the next few months. As in the chapter on fairy tales, why we no longer see this as humorous, and indeed see it as barbaric, tells us just how much, as Darnton says, the "ontological position" of the cat has changed. The journeymen were upset that younger, much less experienced workers were being brought in to perform their work for almost nothing while the masters would retire to their personal rooms and lounge, eat, sleep, and take care of their cats. In a sort of Rabelasian logic of social carnival, the journeymen saw the murder of the cats as retribution meted out for the wrongs perpetrated against them.

The book has three other chapters: one on a police inspector who keeps a personal file on French intellectuals, ensuring that their thinking never becomes too freewheeling, another with one man's, and largely one culture's, growing obsession with the work of Rousseau (why was "La Nouvelle Heloise" such a big seller, anyway?), and the somewhat less interesting "A Bourgeois Puts His World In Order: The City As Text." Each of these renders very important and insightful ideas for those readers who are as interested in the caprices of history-telling and historiography as they are the events of history themselves. ( )

Honestly, as a scholar and a University instructor, I used to believe that academic "disciplines" had become way too rigid. After reading this book, I now believe that scholars should not start blurring the disciplinary lines until they fully understand what has already been done in disciplines other than their own. This book is not bad academic work--in fact it's quite interesting--but it's clearly a history scholar trying to put together a Rubik's Cube from the fields of sociology, anthropology and literary studies--and working it right there in the public press. It's earnest, hard-working scholarship, but I still kind of feel bad for him..... ( )

The subtitle is 'and other episodes in French cultural history' and the best way to describe it is a book of essays, each one focusing on a detail of eighteenth-century France and using that detail very cleverly to try and illustrate wider points about the France of that time. So the first is about French folktales, and how they differed from the contemporary tradition in other parts of Europe (they are sharper and prize cunning more than a good heart) and the later variants of the same tales (they are harsher and more gruesome).

The second essay looks at an odd incident where some apprentices tortured and killed a number of cats, and parses it as a complex way of using various symbols and beliefs of the time to rebel against their harsh masters. Three more essays examine individual texts - the notebook kept by a police inspector who was charged with keeping an eye on 'intellectuals', a description of the power structure of a town, the structure of the Encyclopédie. Darnton's aim is to "shake {us} out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to administer doses of culture shock" and make us realise just what a different country the past is. As he says:

The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish and short. That is why we need to reread Mother Goose.

The essays are very well-written, and Darnton has a good eye for an interesting detail. The chapter on the intellectuals' files is particularly entertaining, as he highlights the perceptions and prejudices of the policeman keeping the notes ("writers' wives never appeared as intelligent, cultured or virtuous in the reports; they were either rich or poor... 'He married an unimportant girl from his village, who has neither birth nor wealth. Her sole merit is that she is related to the wife of the former Procureur Général..."). The only shortcoming is that the subject matter is so distant from anything I know about that it was impossible to really engage with the arguments - I had no way of supporting or backing them up from outside knowledge. ( )

What's that? A cat massacre in Paris?

Yup. That's what this book is about. It also contains a great many leg-wetting facts about other aspects of life in France during the 'ancien regime'.

Fascinating reading! Solomon sez: "Do it!" ( )

An analysis of French culture in the 18th century, with embarrassingly funny introductory stories about subjects like massacring cats. Basically, you know from the title whether you'll like this book and find it interesting; I'm one of those who did. ( )