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The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History

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Darnton's book is a series of essays on the life of the common folk in Enlightenment France. Its topics are superb, ranging from fairy tales to cat massacres. Darnton is thorough in his approach and writes well, keeping his audience entertained.

As a result of the book's essays and the conclusions we make about their participants, we realize that 18th century Frenchmen were vastly different from their contemporary progeny, yet also remarkably human. It's the kind of work that leaves Goosebumps as the author's arguments stack neatly into place, and a formerly incomprehensible event suddenly becomes clear.

The book does have an identity problem. It's caught between academia and pop nonfiction. Some chapters are fascinating-especially the chapter which shares the book's title, "The Great Cat Massacre"-others are tedious in that academic way, citing works, exhausting every possible angle, and so on.

I first read this book in a high school history class, and then recently reread it-over ten years later. In the atmosphere of a class, it was a witty, exciting alternative to standard texts, and thrilled us by revealing how the study of history can give insight into human nature. Outside class, however, I skipped over passages, skimmed conclusions, and failed to give it the same attention I had in class.

I read this book many years ago, and still remember it as one of the best, most interesting books I ever read. Based on the premise that all the books that state that the Enlightnment mind (pre French Revolution)was very similar to ours are wrong, this book sets out to prove, through glimpses of each class, (monarchy, peasant, the growing craftsman class, etc.) that there was a huge difference in the way they thought, and through that manner of thought, lived their lives. VERY worth reading.

Whereas I enjoyed most of this book, I found it somewhat uneven with some chapters written in a far more academic manner than others.

In the first chapter, Darnton explores the folk tale with the argument that a full exploration of such tales gives insight into the social construction of reality and thought in previous generations and eras and we can thus explore better the vast differences between modern thought and thought from the Middle Ages. Darnton ridicules the psychoanalytic interpretations of folk tales offered by Bettelheim and Fromm. However he just glosses over the archtypal interpretations of Jung or the structural interpretations of Levi-Strauss. After pages and pages of half told folk tales he concludes that folk tales conveyed conventional wisdom to common folk in a time of great economic and social uncertainty. Life was fragile and this was reflected in these odd tales. Of course some tales have as the moral that we should be kind to strangers and other folk tales have as the moral that we should be careful around strangers, but what the heck, Darnton thinks there are lessons to be learned from them all. He observes that common sense varies from culture to culture and is basically a social construct. I am not sure if I totally agree with him. I would think in all cultures it is best not to argue with a drunk man who holds a gun. However, for some phenomena, Darnton may be correct, common sense differs from culture to culture and era to era. He does point out an observation from study of folk tales across Europe. He finds that Italian and French folk tales are more playful, full of trickstes who jest and humble the powerful; whereas German folk tales are more dark and more often violent. We are immediately struck by the weakness of Darnton's work, which is the issue of sampling. Does he select a random sample of such tales, or all tales, or just the ones he wishes to discuss? I found his arguement that for many peasants who toiled continually in the fields, that history was not conceived as a series of political events to which they were not privy. This is an interesting thought but I suspect that common villagers made up for this with a sense of seasonal history based on planting, harvesting, and storing crops; religious history based on multiple Saint days and other Christian holidays throughout the year; and personal history as one experiences births, marriages, childhoods, deaths in families and friends. Another interesting item from Darnton is that when someone is given a wish in a folk tale, they ask for food. He relates this to the lack of food during much of Europe's history. On this point, I think he wins.

The second chapter is an analysis of a printer's journal where he relates a story from his youth where he and other workers beat to death neighborhood cats. Darnton first puts this story in a context of general cruelty to animals, especially cats. However he then gives it a particular interpretation of social protest by young worker men against the rich employers, many of whom owned cats. He documents well the deterioration of the old guild system and the effect this had on the lowest level workers. Whereas I found his analysis of the killing of the cats to be somewhat of an economic statement during class-warfare, I wish Darnton had commented more on the sadistic cruelty of human beings, particularly males between 13-19.

The third chapter was one of my favorites, though far less dramatic than the first and second chapters. Darnton analyzes a description of a town procession written by an upper-middle class middle-ages male observer who put social annotations throughout the description. The desire of the middle class to emulate the upper class and find many social distinctions between themselves and the the lower classes is perfectly displayed here in this interesting case study.

The fourth chapter also analyzes the work of a single man, however this time it is the extensive files of a spy who maintained records on the intelligensia during the Enlightenment. One reason this chapter is interesting is that writters we now consider to be primary thinkers of the Enlightenment were suspects to this well organized and thoughtful policeman for the social order.

The fifth chapter is the most academic but is very interesting. We learn about the tree of knowledge that Diderot used to construct his theory of human knowledge for the Encyclopedia. We get a delightful story from Borges about categorization which sets the tone of the chapter. We see how the assumptions and work of Descartes, Locke, and Bacon greatly influenced the taxonomy of human knowledge and expereince which created the structure for the Enlightenment thought as well as the structure for this major publication.

The sixth chapter got tiresome as we read about Rousseau and one of his devoted reading fans.

Overall a good book with some unique and thoughtful observations and generalizations. I liked his method,using texts to gain insight into the consciousness of another time and place.

One other reviewer used the term "between academia and pop nonfiction". I suppose accurate pop non fiction was what I was looking for as I was trying to get an overview of the mind set or zeitgeist of prerevolutionary France. It was a little narrower in it's scope than I expected but in hind sight accomplished it's goal in giving me a feeling for that period which in turn helps putting the revolution in context.

For me this book complimented "Holy Madness : Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871"by Adam Zamoyski
I would recommend the book for those interested in folk stories and fairy tales. I enjoyed the comparisons of the same themes expressed the folk literature of Germany, England, Italy etc.

Little Red Riding, of the Brothers Grimm, is really French, 17th century. The Huguenots brought folk tales to Germany when fleeing the prosecution of Louis XIV. Folk tales are historical documents. They have evolved over many centuries. There was a golden age of folklore research in France between the years of 1870 and 1914. Folklore is a nineteenth century neologism. Oral traditions have enormous staying power. Continuities in form and style outweigh variation of details.

Village life, being a peasant, was a struggle in early modern France. Marriages lasted an average of fifteen years, terminated by death. The peasants lived in a world of stepmothers and orphans. The tales present a Malthusian picture. In the 1690's plague and famine decimated northern France when Perrault wrote 'Tom Thumb'. Wishing takes one form, the wishing for food. Meat is an extravagance. Fulfillment of the wish takes place in the everyday world. It is not an escape fantasy, but survival. In the tales daughters must be married off and sons may explore life on the road. There may be no land, no food, no work. There was danger on the road. English tales tend to be whimsical, French tales bawdy, realistic, comical, German tales supernatural, violent. French folk tales told the peasants how the world was put together and how to cope with it. In France, despite the distinction of social rank, there was a common stock of tales.

The apprentice printers, who staged a cat massacre, delighted in performing the affair again and again--copies. Masters loved cats and, therefore, apprentices hated them. In the second half of the seventeenth century there was an oligarchy of printing masters. It was difficult for journeymen to rise to the rank of masters. The wail of a cat could mean witchcraft, cuckoldry. Killing the mistress's cat was a metonymic insult. The cat massacre was put into writing by Nicholas Contat. In the massacre one of the apprentices imitated a cat.

A description of a French city, Montpellier, was written in 1768. The anonymous writer had an obsession with completeness. A sense of place is fundamental to our sense of orientation in life. The bourgeois was the owner of the modes of production and acquired class-consciousness. Except in Lille and a few other areas, a self-conscious industrializing class was absent prior to the Revolution. Thinkers belonged to the traditional elite. Montpellier was an administrative center. It had a commercial oligarchy. It was underdeveloped and wealthy people dominated the social and cultural life. It had a music academy and there was interest shown in science and technology. There were cabinets containing private natural history collections and private libraries. The ideal of the honest man had, in 1768, a bourgeois coloring.

The author relates that a police officer in Paris, Joseph d'Hemery, inpected the book trade and the men who wrote books. In five years, 1748-1753, he wrote five hundred reports. Clergymen constituted twelve percent of the authors. Seventy percent came from the third estate. Ten percent were doctors or lawyers. Thirty six percent were journalists, tutors, librarians, secretaries. Many careers went from the garret to the gutter. Everyone in the files was seeking or dispensing protection. The police did not question influence peddling. Police agents picked up sedition talk. Diderot was singled out for atheism.

Rousseau described reading and experienced it. He saw literature as an element of a power system. Rousseau initiated a new conception of an author--Prometheus. LA NOUVELLE HELOISE was probably the best seller of the century. Readers believed that Jean-Jacques had made them see deeper into the meaning of their lives. In thinking of how people read five centuries ago, it may be important to keep in mind the distinction between extensive reading and intensive reading. Rousseau taught readers to digest books and literature became absorbed in life.

The notes at the back of the book are interesting and varied.

I thought this was a great book. Granted I'm a French major, but I think history buffs and other people interested in cultural history would enjoy it as well. Darnton's writing is easy to digest and the subjects of his essays are always interesting. While some essays can be very academic in nature at times, on the whole this book is for everyone, regardless of whether or not they are in academia.

Leon Trotsky in his classic three-volume History of the Russian Revolution spent some time describing the small unresolved contradictions of everyday life that had accrued in pre-1917 Russia and that formed the underlying premises for that huge social explosion. Trotsky, using classic Marxist terminology, called that process the molecular process of the unfolding revolution. By that he meant that for long periods the unanswered grievances at the base of society (in that case, like in the French, an overwhelmingly peasant-based society in the process of facing some major changes) not only go unresolved but unnoticed to the naked eye. However, in retrospect it became easy to see that certain changes almost dictated that a social explosion was in the making. Robert Darnton in the present book makes that same kind of retrospective analysis of some unnoticed points on the pre- French revolutionary cultural map that led up to 1789.

That said, it is rather ironic that Darnton himself is unaware of what he has uncovered. In his introduction and throughout his painstakingly documented work Darnton downgrades the effect that the material he has presented on that later event, the French Revolution. Intellectually, we can argue that point all day- the extent that the cultural superstructure of the old society when under attack can bring forth organizations, cultural phenomena, etc. that form the basis for a many times unconscious `oppositional' cultural structure that can form the basis of a new social outlook. But, we are still nevertheless looking at that old friend, the molecular process.

Darnton has presented six different episode of cultural expression beginning in the early 18th century but most of the episodes coalesce around mid-century. In the course of this exploration he investigates the transformations of `fairy tales' the oral tradition of the peasantry to see what changes are wrought there over time and location. A key episode is the essay from which the book takes its title on the artisan response to changes in the structure of work as the pre-pre industrial age begins to take hold in France. In short, a look at the class struggle at the base that will reach its height in the emergence of the sans culottes in the 1790's. Thereafter Darnton investigates an old regime bourgeois's attempt to make sense out of a world (his city of Montpellier) that is starting ever so slightly to crumble and that can only be called a masterwork of organization and sociological insight for the period.

The last three episodes detail the emergence of the modern intelligentsia that has since played a key role in many revolutions (and counter-revolutions, as well). Darnton, as is necessary when discussing the creation of a self-conscious intelligentsia tips his hat to Diderot and Rousseau the two emerging poles of intellectual discourse.In probably his most insightful essay Darnston describes the new reading habits of the provincial bourgeois- the very type whose break from the old regime is decisive in the early stages of the revolution. One, hopefully, can see by this summary what I mean when I state that Darnton does not fully appreciate the tremendous work that he has uncovered in search of the molecular process of revolution. Kudos, Professor.

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.

Robert Darton explains in a most interesting way the origin of many children's stories and other tales from French history. To understand the origin and reasoning behind The Great Cat Massacre unlocks the mystery of the period. Fascinating!

The most fascinating thing about the book is the way Darnton can extract context and detail for the story from legal tomes and employment ledgers, and from the stories we come to know a way of thinking common to 18th century France which looks quite foreign now.