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France and Culture
La gran matanza de gatos y otros episodios en la historia de la cultura francesa
1730’ların Paris’inde bir matbaanın çırakları kendi kurdukları mahkemelerde yargıladıkları kedileri ölümle cezalandırırlar. Bu hikâyeyi tekrar tekrar anlatan çıraklar her seferinde katılarak gülerler. Kedilerin katledilmesinde çırakları eğlendiren ne olmuştu? Nasıl olmuştu da “Kırmızı Başlıklı Kız” masalının 18. yüzyıl versiyonunda çocuk kurda yem olmuştu? Montpellierli biri, yaşadığı kentin tüm etkinliklerini detaylı bir şekilde yazarken aklından neler geçiyordu? Bunlar Robert Darnton’un, Aydınlanma çağındaki Avrupa’nın tarihine dair cevapladığı sorulardan bazıları. İlk olarak 1984’te yayımlanan Büyük Kedi Katliamı, toplumsal tarihyazımının başucu eserlerinden biri haline geldi; artık kültürel tarih alanında yazılmış bir klasik olarak anılıyor. Darnton, 18. yüzyılın sıradan insanlarının yaşamlarından çeşitli sahneleri inceleyerek bu dönemdeki insanlık durumunu, insanların olayları nasıl gördüğünü ve kurguladığını ele alıyor.
Robert Darnton, Harvard Üniversitesi Tarih Bölümü profesörü ve Harvard Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi’nin direktörü.
Robert Darnton, Harvard Üniversitesi Tarih Bölümü profesörü ve Harvard Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi’nin direktörü.
319 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
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About the author
Robert Darnton
57 books173 followersCarl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library
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November 21, 2019
The rating is for the first essay alone. This essay is on fairy tales from France that we mostly have versions of. I learned three things:
1. The French do not have nursery rhymes!
2. French fairy tales are often very bawdy indeed. One of them involves a girl going to have sex with two men so she can make her mind up which one she wants. This is a lot better than the UK passive princess is the reward the king, her father, gives to some handsome guy who can complete a load of stupid tasks.
3. The tales, once explained, are often rooted in real events or at least have contemporary cultural references that elucidate their meaning.
Brilliant and interesting essay, so 5 stars.
The second essay, the title of the book, is just a hook. The Great Cat Massacre was in truth a rebellion of printshop workers who were essentially denied promotion because of the restrictive practices before unionisation.
There was a craze at that time for print shops to have lots of cats around, so in retaliation to the print shop owners and their wives, they killed them all. Back then there were no societies for the protection of animals. They are still very rare outside of English-speaking countries. This is an extremely boring essay and has very little to do with cats about it and a lot to do with labour practices. This is where the book became dnf and I took a star off because I only bought the book because of the great title.
One of the signs of a flourishing ex-pat community is that underemployed British wives and girlfriends will set up a Humane Society wherever they go. Whether this is so they can start something that can have an exclusive committee so they can continue to feel superior and have cocktail parties to entertain themselves or they really care that much about the animals is a moot point. It probably serves both purposes.
They will not of course do anything for the animals themselves. They will employ local people do to the mucking out etc and never let them sit on the committees or invite them to the fund-raising social events. However, they will get their daughters to help out with the kitties and puppy-walking and exercising of horses.
So dnf, I like reading about fairy tales and cats, less so about the law and labour practices of 18thC France.
__________
Notes on reading:
1. The French do not have nursery rhymes!
2. French fairy tales are often very bawdy indeed. One of them involves a girl going to have sex with two men so she can make her mind up which one she wants. This is a lot better than the UK passive princess is the reward the king, her father, gives to some handsome guy who can complete a load of stupid tasks.
3. The tales, once explained, are often rooted in real events or at least have contemporary cultural references that elucidate their meaning.
Brilliant and interesting essay, so 5 stars.
The second essay, the title of the book, is just a hook. The Great Cat Massacre was in truth a rebellion of printshop workers who were essentially denied promotion because of the restrictive practices before unionisation.
There was a craze at that time for print shops to have lots of cats around, so in retaliation to the print shop owners and their wives, they killed them all. Back then there were no societies for the protection of animals. They are still very rare outside of English-speaking countries. This is an extremely boring essay and has very little to do with cats about it and a lot to do with labour practices. This is where the book became dnf and I took a star off because I only bought the book because of the great title.
One of the signs of a flourishing ex-pat community is that underemployed British wives and girlfriends will set up a Humane Society wherever they go. Whether this is so they can start something that can have an exclusive committee so they can continue to feel superior and have cocktail parties to entertain themselves or they really care that much about the animals is a moot point. It probably serves both purposes.
They will not of course do anything for the animals themselves. They will employ local people do to the mucking out etc and never let them sit on the committees or invite them to the fund-raising social events. However, they will get their daughters to help out with the kitties and puppy-walking and exercising of horses.
So dnf, I like reading about fairy tales and cats, less so about the law and labour practices of 18thC France.
__________
Notes on reading:
December 3, 2010
Given the peculiarities of the Irish educational system, at the end of 10th grade there was a forced choice between physics and history, so my formal study of history ended when I was 14. I was happy to be rid of it at the time - my brain did fine with analytical stuff like science and languages, but history was just too unruly to get a handle on and it always brought down my grade average. And, of course, at age 14 it was completely impossible to think of it as anything but useless.
Naturally, I've ended up regretting that particular gap in my education ever since. The Great Cat Massacre was one of the books that helped me overcome my aversion to reading about history ( I Claudius was another). It showed that history books didn't have to be dull and it re-awakened a curiosity I thought had been stifled. It also planted a strong suspicion that my previous difficulties with the subject were most likely due to the abysmal way in which it was taught. It seems silly now, but when I first read it (in 1985?) a "history" book that wasn't just a compilation of names, dates, battles and rebellions was (for me) an entirely novel concept. So I had fond memories of the book when I undertook a re-reading this past weekend. After 25 years, would it be as good as I remembered, or would it crumble to little more than that inspired title (which is pure genius, by any standards)?
A brief overview of the book's structure and content. It comprises six essays, each of which considers a very specific aspect of life in France during the first half of the 18th century, using a particular incident or set of documents as a point of departure. The cat massacre in the book's title stimulates an examination of the precarious state of labor relations in the printing industry in the 1730s. An extensive description of the town of Montpellier in 1768 by an anonymous (but solidly bourgeois) citizens provides a remarkable glimpse of the power structure, relationships between the different classes and prevailing attitudes. Part of the responsibility of Joseph d'Hemery, a Parisian police officer, was the tracking of potentially seditious documents and their authors - as a result he amassed an archive containing dossiers on 500 writers and intellectuals. Ten years of book orders from one resident of La Rochelle in the 1770s give some idea of reading habits at the time (Rousseau was the decade's Stephenie Meyer). In the remaining two chapters Darnton considers the particularly gruesome nature of French folk tales and the organization of Diderot's Encyclopedia respectively.
I suppose it was no great surprise to find that, although the book wasn't quite as brilliant or as fascinating as I remembered, it still held up pretty well. Darnton is very readable, though I found some of his inferences less persuasive on this second reading. The best essays are the title piece and the analysis of folktales; the glimpse into 18th century reading habits is also pretty irresistible. The other three essays were (for me) more problematic - there's an awful lot of listing going on, with Darnton's commentary being either perfunctory or unpersuasive, or both.
Overall, the flaws are still pretty minor. Darnton is an intelligent and engaging writer, and the three standout essays in the collection are more than worth the price of admission. Though I'm mentally giving it 3.5 stars this time around, I'm more than happy to round it back to the original 4 stars.
Naturally, I've ended up regretting that particular gap in my education ever since. The Great Cat Massacre was one of the books that helped me overcome my aversion to reading about history ( I Claudius was another). It showed that history books didn't have to be dull and it re-awakened a curiosity I thought had been stifled. It also planted a strong suspicion that my previous difficulties with the subject were most likely due to the abysmal way in which it was taught. It seems silly now, but when I first read it (in 1985?) a "history" book that wasn't just a compilation of names, dates, battles and rebellions was (for me) an entirely novel concept. So I had fond memories of the book when I undertook a re-reading this past weekend. After 25 years, would it be as good as I remembered, or would it crumble to little more than that inspired title (which is pure genius, by any standards)?
A brief overview of the book's structure and content. It comprises six essays, each of which considers a very specific aspect of life in France during the first half of the 18th century, using a particular incident or set of documents as a point of departure. The cat massacre in the book's title stimulates an examination of the precarious state of labor relations in the printing industry in the 1730s. An extensive description of the town of Montpellier in 1768 by an anonymous (but solidly bourgeois) citizens provides a remarkable glimpse of the power structure, relationships between the different classes and prevailing attitudes. Part of the responsibility of Joseph d'Hemery, a Parisian police officer, was the tracking of potentially seditious documents and their authors - as a result he amassed an archive containing dossiers on 500 writers and intellectuals. Ten years of book orders from one resident of La Rochelle in the 1770s give some idea of reading habits at the time (Rousseau was the decade's Stephenie Meyer). In the remaining two chapters Darnton considers the particularly gruesome nature of French folk tales and the organization of Diderot's Encyclopedia respectively.
I suppose it was no great surprise to find that, although the book wasn't quite as brilliant or as fascinating as I remembered, it still held up pretty well. Darnton is very readable, though I found some of his inferences less persuasive on this second reading. The best essays are the title piece and the analysis of folktales; the glimpse into 18th century reading habits is also pretty irresistible. The other three essays were (for me) more problematic - there's an awful lot of listing going on, with Darnton's commentary being either perfunctory or unpersuasive, or both.
Overall, the flaws are still pretty minor. Darnton is an intelligent and engaging writer, and the three standout essays in the collection are more than worth the price of admission. Though I'm mentally giving it 3.5 stars this time around, I'm more than happy to round it back to the original 4 stars.
December 10, 2010
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.
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.
August 8, 2010
Do social conditions determine popular beliefs? Robert Darnton challenges the widely held assumption that cultural systems derive from social orders, and takes the beetle's eye view, picking out quirky sources that reveal the viewpoint of the 'native', dissecting what they say to then draw conclusions about the world they lived in. A careful and rather long-winded examination of fairy tales throws light on the living conditions of peasants under the Old Regime. Their lives were nasty, brutish and short. The eponymous cat massacre is a kind of violent charivari that tells of the living conditions of urban artisans in the print trade and surely provided a basis for Parrot in the Peter Carey novel. A bourgeois gentilhomme's ordered description of Montpellier is analysed to show the difference between symbolic demonstrations of status and how that status was perceived by the educated man in the street.
My two favourite essays reflect my interest in literature, reading and writers. Joseph d'Hemery was an inspector of the book trade. In the five years from 1748 to 1753 he wrote 500 reports on any kind of writer that had published anything at all in Paris, from the most famous philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot to the most obscure hacks, struggling to turn out pieces of laudatory doggerel and gain the favour of the rich and influential. The essay on these reports gives a brilliant picture of the republic of letters at the very height of the Enlightenment, giving insight into how these men managed to survive. Only the lucky few (three!) could actually live by their pen, the others were dependent on alternative sources of income, mostly as teachers, lawyers and clerics, or on winning a financially well endowed bride, or by gaining the protection of someone who could pull strings for them. Fascinating. The other one I loved was based on the letters of a well-situated, well-educated Frenchman who had made friends at school with the man who went on to found the Société Typographique de Neuchatel, an important Swiss publisher of French books. Thus the Frenchman ordered his books from his friend, but not just in a plain business letter, but with a chatty exposé of his reading tastes and reactions, changing family situation and subsequent requirement of books to bring up baby, the eighteenth century equivalent of Dr. Spock. This illustrates the republic of letters from the reader's side, and gives a taste of the kind of adoration that readers developed for Rousseau.
Darnton is a true historian and is well aware of the flaws and limitations inherent in his approach, but remains at all times entertaining and smooth to read.
My two favourite essays reflect my interest in literature, reading and writers. Joseph d'Hemery was an inspector of the book trade. In the five years from 1748 to 1753 he wrote 500 reports on any kind of writer that had published anything at all in Paris, from the most famous philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot to the most obscure hacks, struggling to turn out pieces of laudatory doggerel and gain the favour of the rich and influential. The essay on these reports gives a brilliant picture of the republic of letters at the very height of the Enlightenment, giving insight into how these men managed to survive. Only the lucky few (three!) could actually live by their pen, the others were dependent on alternative sources of income, mostly as teachers, lawyers and clerics, or on winning a financially well endowed bride, or by gaining the protection of someone who could pull strings for them. Fascinating. The other one I loved was based on the letters of a well-situated, well-educated Frenchman who had made friends at school with the man who went on to found the Société Typographique de Neuchatel, an important Swiss publisher of French books. Thus the Frenchman ordered his books from his friend, but not just in a plain business letter, but with a chatty exposé of his reading tastes and reactions, changing family situation and subsequent requirement of books to bring up baby, the eighteenth century equivalent of Dr. Spock. This illustrates the republic of letters from the reader's side, and gives a taste of the kind of adoration that readers developed for Rousseau.
Darnton is a true historian and is well aware of the flaws and limitations inherent in his approach, but remains at all times entertaining and smooth to read.
December 20, 2015
Unconvincing and judgmental.
It promises an insight into people's mentalities in 18th c. France, complete with a "Great Cat Massacre", for "the general reading public, as well as for scholars". Unfortunately, while the first chapter was fun and the second was interesting, the book went downhill from there. The fifth chapter is nearly incomprehensible if you don't know your Locke and Acquinas, to be able to follow Darnton's points. Sometimes, he judges social categories which judged each other for judging each other.
However, aside from the assumption that his readers know all sorts of things they probably don't, Darnton's biggest fault is that of the post-modern humanist's: the attempt to judge all cultures as equal, and to judge them according to his own opinion which he suggests as Truth. The fact that his burgeois subject looked down on lower classes is judged through this contemporary post-modern lens, which, I believe, is a mistake. Also, he strikes me as over-interpreting on the basis of scant evidence.
Let me discuss chapter two, which gives the book its title: the episode and interpretation of "The Great Cat Massacre".
The summary of the cat massacre: a bunch of journeymen and other laborers worked in the printing shop of a rich "master" (this was a common arrangement at the time). They liked laughing, drinking, telling stories - and they weren't particularly educated or intellectual folk. Now, while they barely had enough money for their needs, the master was really rich and the mistress owned several cats, which, along with other cats in the neighborhood, meowed all night, thus not allowing the workers to sleep peacefully. One of them imitated the cats around the master's bedroom, until he and his wife couldn't sleep, either, which prompted the wife to order the workers to get rid of the cats, with the exception of her favorite grey one. The workers killed her cat (then hid its body to escape her wrath) and staged a ritual massacre of cats, which the mistress was scandalized by, but which they found really funny.
Darnton tries to explain the amusement of the situation by over-interpreting the episode until it becomes an act of revolt, of sexual insinuation, intertwined with symbolism of witchcraft, a metaphorical gang rape of the mistress, a grotesque show - and I'm wondering if I forgot some of its ascribed meanings.
His logic makes some sort of sense: cats were symbols related to witchcraft and sexuality; thus, the massacre was a symbolic gesture against the rich master and his wife (and her sexuality). However, I for one am not buying the evidence. Cats are associated with sexuality today, as well (Catwoman, anyone?), which doesn't mean that if I kick someone's cat, I'm attacking their sexuality. I might just hate the cat.
Not everything is clear-cut and obvious and I'm not convinced that 18th c. people would recognize themselves in Darnton's observations, especially since he seems locked in his academic ivory tower: the great cat massacre wasn't only amusing in a strange, distant past, with a vastly different culture. It would be amusing today to some groups of people: poor people, young people, cruel people.
To prove it, I'll recall a similar event I heard about in middle school: a group of teens visited one of their friends, who owned a hamster. While the host was away, one of the boys raped the hamster with a pencil, which led to its (non-immediate) death, to the distress of the host who didn't know what was wrong with the pet.
Make no mistake: this was funny. Maybe for the cruelty, maybe for the transgression, maybe for both. I think none of my old school mates would rape a hamster with a pencil today, but that's because we learn to be genteel in time and because our society really frowns on such acts. Attempting to explain the cruelty and subsequent amusement in a very rational manner, relating it to all sorts of symbols and modes of thinking might be too much of a stretch.
But Darnton goes on and on, making all sorts of assumptions which seem a bit of a stretch, which make me wonder how he selected his evidence and what he ignored to make his points, which are, as always, hidden by the academic pseudo-certain style.
It promises an insight into people's mentalities in 18th c. France, complete with a "Great Cat Massacre", for "the general reading public, as well as for scholars". Unfortunately, while the first chapter was fun and the second was interesting, the book went downhill from there. The fifth chapter is nearly incomprehensible if you don't know your Locke and Acquinas, to be able to follow Darnton's points. Sometimes, he judges social categories which judged each other for judging each other.
However, aside from the assumption that his readers know all sorts of things they probably don't, Darnton's biggest fault is that of the post-modern humanist's: the attempt to judge all cultures as equal, and to judge them according to his own opinion which he suggests as Truth. The fact that his burgeois subject looked down on lower classes is judged through this contemporary post-modern lens, which, I believe, is a mistake. Also, he strikes me as over-interpreting on the basis of scant evidence.
Let me discuss chapter two, which gives the book its title: the episode and interpretation of "The Great Cat Massacre".
The summary of the cat massacre: a bunch of journeymen and other laborers worked in the printing shop of a rich "master" (this was a common arrangement at the time). They liked laughing, drinking, telling stories - and they weren't particularly educated or intellectual folk. Now, while they barely had enough money for their needs, the master was really rich and the mistress owned several cats, which, along with other cats in the neighborhood, meowed all night, thus not allowing the workers to sleep peacefully. One of them imitated the cats around the master's bedroom, until he and his wife couldn't sleep, either, which prompted the wife to order the workers to get rid of the cats, with the exception of her favorite grey one. The workers killed her cat (then hid its body to escape her wrath) and staged a ritual massacre of cats, which the mistress was scandalized by, but which they found really funny.
Darnton tries to explain the amusement of the situation by over-interpreting the episode until it becomes an act of revolt, of sexual insinuation, intertwined with symbolism of witchcraft, a metaphorical gang rape of the mistress, a grotesque show - and I'm wondering if I forgot some of its ascribed meanings.
His logic makes some sort of sense: cats were symbols related to witchcraft and sexuality; thus, the massacre was a symbolic gesture against the rich master and his wife (and her sexuality). However, I for one am not buying the evidence. Cats are associated with sexuality today, as well (Catwoman, anyone?), which doesn't mean that if I kick someone's cat, I'm attacking their sexuality. I might just hate the cat.
Not everything is clear-cut and obvious and I'm not convinced that 18th c. people would recognize themselves in Darnton's observations, especially since he seems locked in his academic ivory tower: the great cat massacre wasn't only amusing in a strange, distant past, with a vastly different culture. It would be amusing today to some groups of people: poor people, young people, cruel people.
To prove it, I'll recall a similar event I heard about in middle school: a group of teens visited one of their friends, who owned a hamster. While the host was away, one of the boys raped the hamster with a pencil, which led to its (non-immediate) death, to the distress of the host who didn't know what was wrong with the pet.
Make no mistake: this was funny. Maybe for the cruelty, maybe for the transgression, maybe for both. I think none of my old school mates would rape a hamster with a pencil today, but that's because we learn to be genteel in time and because our society really frowns on such acts. Attempting to explain the cruelty and subsequent amusement in a very rational manner, relating it to all sorts of symbols and modes of thinking might be too much of a stretch.
But Darnton goes on and on, making all sorts of assumptions which seem a bit of a stretch, which make me wonder how he selected his evidence and what he ignored to make his points, which are, as always, hidden by the academic pseudo-certain style.
February 18, 2020
This is a re-read, I read it before in college as a beautiful example of historical social research/anthropology.
I loved the part where the author says that whenever we're dealing with old documents and encounter something we don't really understand, a joke or inside nod to something which seems to be funny to the author but we don't 'get it', that's our goldmine. That indicates a mentality shift that we need to dig into deeper.
There are two noteworthy parts of the book - one which analyzes traditional European (German / French) fairytales (which were later gathered and partially re-written by the Grimm brothers) and another which analyzes work relations in a printing workshop and the symbolic meanings of cats (hint: it's very Freudian). Both parts are lovely.
Overall the writing can seem a bit heavy on academic detail, but I really think it's interesting to lay people as well. :)
I loved the part where the author says that whenever we're dealing with old documents and encounter something we don't really understand, a joke or inside nod to something which seems to be funny to the author but we don't 'get it', that's our goldmine. That indicates a mentality shift that we need to dig into deeper.
There are two noteworthy parts of the book - one which analyzes traditional European (German / French) fairytales (which were later gathered and partially re-written by the Grimm brothers) and another which analyzes work relations in a printing workshop and the symbolic meanings of cats (hint: it's very Freudian). Both parts are lovely.
Overall the writing can seem a bit heavy on academic detail, but I really think it's interesting to lay people as well. :)
February 13, 2012
The first chapter was interesting and had me hooked on the idea of the "otherness" of people in the past. Plus, the fairy tales were wonderfully odd and interesting (okay, and quite disturbing).
The second chapter (The Great Cat Massacre) has a unique pretext and continues the "otherness" theme, although it's even more disturbing to modern sensibilities. Which is, I believe, the thesis of the book. It's gruesome, but of special interest for its insight into a typesetting shop of the period.
It's all down hill for me from that point on. All the counting and record-keeping...snooze! It's one of those books that I felt I had to finish in case it got any better, and it did a bit at the last chapter.
I like histories, but this one may be for the true Francophiles out there...
The second chapter (The Great Cat Massacre) has a unique pretext and continues the "otherness" theme, although it's even more disturbing to modern sensibilities. Which is, I believe, the thesis of the book. It's gruesome, but of special interest for its insight into a typesetting shop of the period.
It's all down hill for me from that point on. All the counting and record-keeping...snooze! It's one of those books that I felt I had to finish in case it got any better, and it did a bit at the last chapter.
I like histories, but this one may be for the true Francophiles out there...
April 19, 2012
This is an enterprise in ethnographic history. The author,a historian, borrows from anthropology in an attempt to reconstruct the view of the world of the 18th century Frenchman. It focuses on different documents originating from different environments so as to present the worldview from several perspectives. First, it's the peasants and their fairy tales. The authentic ones, not those rewrote by Perrault or the Grimms. Second, it's an accout of a cat massacre by some journeymen. The next chapters are about an anonymous description of Montpellier, a police inspector's records of writers in Paris, D'Alembert's Discourse preliminaire to the Encyclopedie and finally the letters of Rousseau's fans. Each of them is a gate through which Darnton tries to enter the mental world of the 18th century Frenchman. Some of the studied documents show a wish and need to organize reality, to make sense of things (the description of Montpellier, the inspector's files, the Discourse), while the others show a way of coping with a hostile world (tales or killing cats). It is a rather exotic journey.
November 5, 2017
Чудова книжка! Особливо крутий розділ про казки, про нещасних котиків і останній - про те, як люди XVIII ст читали (загалом це ж особлива тема - одна річ, що написано у тексті, інша - що людина там прочитає і зрозуміє, адже, коли ми читаємо текст, ми видіяємо з нього, конструюємо певні образи, смисли, ідеї, спираючись н власну культуру, досвід, освіту.... люди іншої культури дійсно ж могли бачити тойже текст по-іншому). Вся книга побудована на різних текстах і аналізі цих текстів за допомогою етнологічної методики насиченого опису (якщо б мені сказал пояснити дітям, що це таке, то я б сказала так: це коли у тескті на малозрозуміле/незрозуміле місце не махають рукою, продовжуючи описувати магістральну лінію своєї ідеї, а починають розкручувати цей сюжет, все глтбше і глибше занурюючись у культуру тих людей - і з*являються такі надзвичайні книги, над якими потім можна довго розмірковувати).
Read
May 18, 2024Essentially an attempt to recreate the mindset of the French proletariat and petit bourgeoisie during the 18th century. I thought it was enjoyable and interesting but then I love this sort of investigative history. Although I will admit the subject is a bit abstract and I can imagine for a lot of people it would be dull to tears. But screw tho An attempt to reconstruct the mindset of the various classes of pre-Revolutionary France from a variety of historical sources. Worth the re-read just to be reminded that all of the modern interpretations of fairy tales are basically bogus. se people, I dug it.
May 17, 2008
Probably a bit biased going into it, having absorbed much of the criticism against it by cultural osmosis, but a very interesting read. Methodologically flawed, but makes some interesting points about the intersection of social and cultural histories -- ie. that one does not precisely flow into the other, and understanding society does not necessarily mean that you will understand its culture.
Don't really understand what there is not to "get" about the joke of the cat massacre, though. Whoops, I mean, poor kitties. >:(
Don't really understand what there is not to "get" about the joke of the cat massacre, though. Whoops, I mean, poor kitties. >:(
May 5, 2022
yazarın üniversitede verdiği derslerden ortaya çıkan kitap; tarih, antropoloji gibi alanlardan okuma yapmak isteyenler için bence oldukça ilgi çekici bir konsepte sahip.
Aydınlanma ve Devrim süreçlerine salonlar dışından, sokaklardan bakma imkanı veriyor.
Aydınlanma ve Devrim süreçlerine salonlar dışından, sokaklardan bakma imkanı veriyor.
November 2, 2025
I really enjoyed the first two and last essays. It provided a great introduction and insight into small pockets of France in the early eighteenth century.
November 7, 2017
Kitap özünde bir tarih metodolojisi kitabı. Zaten önsözünde üniversite derslerinin notları olduğu belirtilmiş. Burjuva ve kent ile ilgili bölümü hariç tutarak -aşırı sıkıcı olması hasebiyle- çok keyifli ve ilgi çekici bir kitaptı. Tarih alanında yapılabilecek alternatif okuma biçimlerine herkese hitap edebilecek, okurken kendimizden de birşeyler katabileceğimiz hikayelerden örnekler veriyor. Bir kez daha bağlamın ne kadar önemli olduğunu ve sadece olguları arka arkaya dizmenin kitap yazımı için yeterli olmadığının sağlamasını yapmış oldum. Çünkü yakın zamanda okuduğum bir metodoloji kitabı bana iskoç eteğinin aslında bir gelenek olmadığı dışında hiçbir şey katmayarak metodoloji kitabı okumaktan soğutmuştu. İyi ki başarılı olanı sonraya bırakmışım.. Masalların okunması ve yorumlanması meselesinde söz konusu masalların zaten hepimizin bildiği masallar olması bir tarafa, her kültürde masallar üzerinden benzer tarihsel ve toplumsal okuma yapma çalışmaları görmek olağandır. Yine kitaba adını veren ikinci bölümde sosyal sınıflar arasındaki çatışmaların neden olduğu yaratıcı protesto biçimleri de her kültürde benzeri görülebilecek hadiselerdir. Örnekler hikaye edilirken bağlamı kaçırmamak, yine örnekler seçilirken genele hitab edebilecek konular seçmek, çok da zor değil sanki..
July 17, 2011
Historiographically speaking, the Great Cat Massacre is "old news": The profession has long since embraced the "pastness of the past" and sent its leading practitioners plunging into the archives to discover what was so "other" about the lost mentalités of 18th century French journeymen, 17th century pirates, &c. Nevertheless, the titular essay retains much of its original luster, given the high entertainment value of the story that's being examined (a massacre of cats, most notably the favorite cat "la grise," undertaken by printmakers to spite their mean old master) as well as the general information Darnton presents about how various animals were brutalized during folk rituals and religious festivals. The first essay in this collection, which places French fairy tales in a comparative perspective, is a bit dated but nonetheless offers a fine corrective to the lurid Freudian fantasies presented in Bettelheim's ridiculous (and, admittedly, ridiculously entertaining) the Uses of Enchantments while also providing a partial explanation for why French comedy often revolves around fart and dick jokes.
May 29, 2016
When I was an under-grad, my favorite history professor casually told us stories about mass cat killings in France. If she told us more about it, I don't remember but it caused me to pick this book up at the used book store.
This is a cultural history of pre-Revolution France. The author has given himself a hard job, trying to identify the Frenchman's "mentalité" and he does a decent enough job. I like cultural histories, so this was right in my wheelhouse. There's not a lot of conclusions to deal with, it's mostly just Darnton describing wat he read and some pretty cursory observations.
It's a pretty easy, quick read if you're familiar with general European history. The book goes into some cool thoughts and describes how much Rousseau's readers love him.
This is a cultural history of pre-Revolution France. The author has given himself a hard job, trying to identify the Frenchman's "mentalité" and he does a decent enough job. I like cultural histories, so this was right in my wheelhouse. There's not a lot of conclusions to deal with, it's mostly just Darnton describing wat he read and some pretty cursory observations.
It's a pretty easy, quick read if you're familiar with general European history. The book goes into some cool thoughts and describes how much Rousseau's readers love him.
September 25, 2020
Interesting - but I feel like some of the ‘meanings’ behind the cat-killings are a bit of a stretch? Could the printers really have killed the cats because they wanted to make their master miserable in order to make him an associate, and to thus restore a mystical past when masters and workers worked side by side and ate at the same table? Did they really massacre the cats in order to sexually shame the mistress (as cats were seen as a symbol of female sexuality)? I mean possibly... but Darnton doesn’t even mention more ‘simple’ reasons why the printers could have killed the cats; for example, that they hated them with a passion because they howled all night which prevented them from going to sleep.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
⭐️⭐️⭐️
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 16, 2009
Really well written, although a bit long-winded at times, as if the author had way too much research to actually compress into a readable article and had to laundry-list the information at times to squeeze it all in. Two main comments: (1) cultural history is the best history EVER, and (2) the French are really sick, twisted weirdos -- or at least they were in all their history. If you love cats, don't read book's eponymous chapter, just skip right over it and read the rest.
February 12, 2018
This is collection of essays, albeit all serving a common purpose, and it would be sufficiently interesting to write a review discussing any one of them.
Each chapter is built around a contemporary record or document, of which a sample is given at the close of the chapter. The first obtains insights into the way French peasants may have thought about their world in the middle 18th Century, by examining the stories they told their children. These have been preserved in written form, altered to serve the different interests of the literate, and they have been transferred to other countries where they have been changed or added to – often beyond recognition – to serve the different interests of other cultures. But it remains possible to excavate a primitive version of the stories in at least some cases. ”The peasant tellers of tales did not merely find them amusing or frightening or functional. They found them “good to think with”. They reworked them in their own manner, using them to piece together a picture of reality and to show what that picture meant for persons at the bottom of the social ladder.” p64. The second essay looks at the way artisans (workers in a printing shop) interpreted their world, their own economic prospects and the different interests of their employers, in a period prior to the industrial revolution, though with early capitalist formations altering their landscape. ”The boundaries within which this jesting had to be contained suggest the limits to working-class militancy under the Old Regime. The printers identified with their craft rather than their class. Although they organized in chapels, staged strikes and sometimes forced up wages, they remained subordinate to the bourgeois. The master hired and fired men as casually as he ordered paper, and he turned them out onto the road when he sniffed insubordination... By seeing the way a jest worked in the horseplay of a printing shop two centuries ago, we may be able to recapture that missing element – laughter, sheer laughter, the thigh-slapping, Rabelaisian kind, rather than the Voltairian smirk with which we are familiar.” [p101]
In the third chapter, a bourgeois author had put together an ambitious account of the social composition of his home city, Montpellier, and this enables Robert Danton to examine the assumptions this reveals about social order and hierarchy. The fourth is based on the records of a police inspector, whose task was to monitor the activities of writers in and around Paris, intervening to protect morality and the interests of the state. He took a humane interest in both the writers and their work, producing as a result a survey of their conditions in a society where it was not yet possible to make a living by selling one’s work, and writers either enjoyed economic independence for other reasons or survived entirely through patronage. ”The dignity of men of letters and the sanctity of their calling had already emerged as a leitmotif in the works of the philosophes but no such theme can be found in d’Hemery’s reports. Although the police recognised a writer when they saw one and sorted him out from other Frenchmen by giving him a place in d’Hemery’s files, they did not speak of him as if he has a profession or a distinct position in society. He might be a gentleman, a priest, a lawyer or a lackey. But he did not possess a qualite or condition that set him part from nonwriters. [p172] This chapter, incidentally, has interesting remarks to make about the existence of a police state and political control over writers in a period earlier than the French Revolution. It suggests that the police were fully aware of a growing distance between the King and his people, and also an emerging threat to traditional religious beliefs with the growth of secular thought.
The Encyclopedie of Diderot and d’Alembert is discussed in a stimulating chapter concerned primarily with the history of ideas, which points out that most of the encyclopedie’s content would ruffle no feathers at that time. What marked it out from others was the theoretical overview supplied in the form of a tree of knowledge, in which Theology was relegated from its primary status as the highest branch of human knowledge, and assigned a very minor and incidental role at the margins. Knowledge, instead, is said to emerge from our senses by means of reasoning.
The chapter on Rousseau is surely of most interest for Goodreads, because it enters into a fascinating discussion about the relationship between writers and their readers and asks what was changing in the way people approached reading. It describes and then challenges accepted wisdom. It suggests from the records that Rousseau’s achievement was to invent a new kind of writing for which he was successful in calling forth a new type of reader. The discussion is too interesting to paraphrase.
Overall, then Robert Danson’s achievement in this book has been to offer a sample of French cultural life in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, at each level of the social hierarchy, and to tease out from the evidence a convincing insight in the way people thought at that time and place. While he confirms that this was very different to our own way of thinking, he nevertheless draws us in to this fascinating environment in a way that is thoroughly entertaining and at the same time relevant and surprisingly challenging to our modern concerns. It’s a magical book.
Each chapter is built around a contemporary record or document, of which a sample is given at the close of the chapter. The first obtains insights into the way French peasants may have thought about their world in the middle 18th Century, by examining the stories they told their children. These have been preserved in written form, altered to serve the different interests of the literate, and they have been transferred to other countries where they have been changed or added to – often beyond recognition – to serve the different interests of other cultures. But it remains possible to excavate a primitive version of the stories in at least some cases. ”The peasant tellers of tales did not merely find them amusing or frightening or functional. They found them “good to think with”. They reworked them in their own manner, using them to piece together a picture of reality and to show what that picture meant for persons at the bottom of the social ladder.” p64. The second essay looks at the way artisans (workers in a printing shop) interpreted their world, their own economic prospects and the different interests of their employers, in a period prior to the industrial revolution, though with early capitalist formations altering their landscape. ”The boundaries within which this jesting had to be contained suggest the limits to working-class militancy under the Old Regime. The printers identified with their craft rather than their class. Although they organized in chapels, staged strikes and sometimes forced up wages, they remained subordinate to the bourgeois. The master hired and fired men as casually as he ordered paper, and he turned them out onto the road when he sniffed insubordination... By seeing the way a jest worked in the horseplay of a printing shop two centuries ago, we may be able to recapture that missing element – laughter, sheer laughter, the thigh-slapping, Rabelaisian kind, rather than the Voltairian smirk with which we are familiar.” [p101]
In the third chapter, a bourgeois author had put together an ambitious account of the social composition of his home city, Montpellier, and this enables Robert Danton to examine the assumptions this reveals about social order and hierarchy. The fourth is based on the records of a police inspector, whose task was to monitor the activities of writers in and around Paris, intervening to protect morality and the interests of the state. He took a humane interest in both the writers and their work, producing as a result a survey of their conditions in a society where it was not yet possible to make a living by selling one’s work, and writers either enjoyed economic independence for other reasons or survived entirely through patronage. ”The dignity of men of letters and the sanctity of their calling had already emerged as a leitmotif in the works of the philosophes but no such theme can be found in d’Hemery’s reports. Although the police recognised a writer when they saw one and sorted him out from other Frenchmen by giving him a place in d’Hemery’s files, they did not speak of him as if he has a profession or a distinct position in society. He might be a gentleman, a priest, a lawyer or a lackey. But he did not possess a qualite or condition that set him part from nonwriters. [p172] This chapter, incidentally, has interesting remarks to make about the existence of a police state and political control over writers in a period earlier than the French Revolution. It suggests that the police were fully aware of a growing distance between the King and his people, and also an emerging threat to traditional religious beliefs with the growth of secular thought.
The Encyclopedie of Diderot and d’Alembert is discussed in a stimulating chapter concerned primarily with the history of ideas, which points out that most of the encyclopedie’s content would ruffle no feathers at that time. What marked it out from others was the theoretical overview supplied in the form of a tree of knowledge, in which Theology was relegated from its primary status as the highest branch of human knowledge, and assigned a very minor and incidental role at the margins. Knowledge, instead, is said to emerge from our senses by means of reasoning.
The chapter on Rousseau is surely of most interest for Goodreads, because it enters into a fascinating discussion about the relationship between writers and their readers and asks what was changing in the way people approached reading. It describes and then challenges accepted wisdom. It suggests from the records that Rousseau’s achievement was to invent a new kind of writing for which he was successful in calling forth a new type of reader. The discussion is too interesting to paraphrase.
Overall, then Robert Danson’s achievement in this book has been to offer a sample of French cultural life in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, at each level of the social hierarchy, and to tease out from the evidence a convincing insight in the way people thought at that time and place. While he confirms that this was very different to our own way of thinking, he nevertheless draws us in to this fascinating environment in a way that is thoroughly entertaining and at the same time relevant and surprisingly challenging to our modern concerns. It’s a magical book.
August 24, 2010
I read this for the essay on Perrault. The title essay was good as well. The rest were somewhat boring.
August 25, 2018
In The Great Cat Massacre: and other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984), historian Robert Darton attempted to reconstruct and understand the mental world of early modern French peasants through their folktales. He began with the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” as told around firesides in peasant cottages during long winter evenings in eighteenth-century France. It’s a little different than the version you may have been told. The story went as follows:
A young girl was instructed to bring some milk and bread to her grandmother’s house. While walking down a path through the woods, a wolf stopped her and asked her where she was going. She told him, and the wolf took off down a second path. The wolf, “arrived first at the house. He killed grandmother, poured her blood into a bottle, and sliced her flesh onto a platter. Then he got into her nightclothes and waited in bed…”
When the young girl arrived, the wolf (disguised as her grandmother) offered her meat and wine from the pantry. “So the little girl ate what she was offered; and as she did, a little cat said, ‘Slut! To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your grandmother!’ Then the wolf said, ‘Undress and get into bed with me.’”
After a prolonged scene in which the young girl is instructed to undress and toss her clothes into the fire, the conclusion proceeds in the now familiar manner until, at the very end, the wolf eats the girl. No hunter comes to her rescue in the original version.
The version as we know it today, according to Darton, was taken by the Grimm brothers from Charles Perrault, a popular writer at the turn of the seventeenth century, who changed the stories to suit the tastes of the Paris elites. The ending we are familiar with, in which the hunter rescues Little Red and kills the wolf, was added by Jeannette Hassenpflug, the Grimm’s neighbor, from a popular German story “The Wolf and the Kids.”
Through an examination of folktales like “Little Red Riding Hood”, Darton hoped to unlock the mentalité of the French peasant during that time period. “Folktales are historical documents,” he argued. “They have evolved over many centuries and have taken different turns in different cultural traditions… they suggest that mentalités themselves have changed. We can appreciate the distance between our mental world and that of our ancestors if we imagine lulling a child of our own to sleep with the primitive peasant version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’”
The hardship of the physical world the peasants inhabited shaped their mental world. Story after story contained, by today’s standards, shocking brutality and sexuality. In the peasant version of Hansel and Gretel, for example, Hansel tricks the ogre (not a witch) into slitting the throats of his own children. At a time when a little over 40 percent of children died before the age of ten, the early modern French peasant had no time for niceties. “Far from veiling their message with symbols,” Darton elaborated, “the storytellers of eighteenth-century France portrayed a world of raw and naked brutality.”
What environment allowed the French peasant to find it acceptable to tell such stories to their young children? “The peasants of early modern France inhabited a world of stepmothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed,” Darton explained. “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.”
Mentalités, or mental worlds, are derived from and shaped by a person’s daily experiences, as well as cues he or she takes from friends, family, and neighbors. A mentalité can change over time until individuals can no longer empathize with the previous generation’s worldview. Consider how the American mentalité has changed―some cartoons once considered funny are now shunned as embarrassingly racist, and most contemporary Americans are unable to understand or share in the joke. Of course, more than one mental world can exist in any given culture at any given time.
While the unforgiving folktales of early modern French peasants stemmed from the harsh conditions of peasant life, the refined tastes of the elites prevented them from appreciating or understanding such tales. Born into relative security, they considered the original stories too harsh. So their “cleaned up” versions of folktales reflected a softer worldview.
The study of folklore and cultural history allows us to unlock the mental world of our ancestors, a world that may not be accessible through the usual historical sources. The stories people share, their meaning and morals, helps paint a more complete picture of the past. Robert Darton’s unique way of studying history remains compelling because he challenged us to examine past cultures from their own perspective, a perspective that is often foreign, strange, and incomprehensible.
A young girl was instructed to bring some milk and bread to her grandmother’s house. While walking down a path through the woods, a wolf stopped her and asked her where she was going. She told him, and the wolf took off down a second path. The wolf, “arrived first at the house. He killed grandmother, poured her blood into a bottle, and sliced her flesh onto a platter. Then he got into her nightclothes and waited in bed…”
When the young girl arrived, the wolf (disguised as her grandmother) offered her meat and wine from the pantry. “So the little girl ate what she was offered; and as she did, a little cat said, ‘Slut! To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your grandmother!’ Then the wolf said, ‘Undress and get into bed with me.’”
After a prolonged scene in which the young girl is instructed to undress and toss her clothes into the fire, the conclusion proceeds in the now familiar manner until, at the very end, the wolf eats the girl. No hunter comes to her rescue in the original version.
The version as we know it today, according to Darton, was taken by the Grimm brothers from Charles Perrault, a popular writer at the turn of the seventeenth century, who changed the stories to suit the tastes of the Paris elites. The ending we are familiar with, in which the hunter rescues Little Red and kills the wolf, was added by Jeannette Hassenpflug, the Grimm’s neighbor, from a popular German story “The Wolf and the Kids.”
Through an examination of folktales like “Little Red Riding Hood”, Darton hoped to unlock the mentalité of the French peasant during that time period. “Folktales are historical documents,” he argued. “They have evolved over many centuries and have taken different turns in different cultural traditions… they suggest that mentalités themselves have changed. We can appreciate the distance between our mental world and that of our ancestors if we imagine lulling a child of our own to sleep with the primitive peasant version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’”
The hardship of the physical world the peasants inhabited shaped their mental world. Story after story contained, by today’s standards, shocking brutality and sexuality. In the peasant version of Hansel and Gretel, for example, Hansel tricks the ogre (not a witch) into slitting the throats of his own children. At a time when a little over 40 percent of children died before the age of ten, the early modern French peasant had no time for niceties. “Far from veiling their message with symbols,” Darton elaborated, “the storytellers of eighteenth-century France portrayed a world of raw and naked brutality.”
What environment allowed the French peasant to find it acceptable to tell such stories to their young children? “The peasants of early modern France inhabited a world of stepmothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed,” Darton explained. “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.”
Mentalités, or mental worlds, are derived from and shaped by a person’s daily experiences, as well as cues he or she takes from friends, family, and neighbors. A mentalité can change over time until individuals can no longer empathize with the previous generation’s worldview. Consider how the American mentalité has changed―some cartoons once considered funny are now shunned as embarrassingly racist, and most contemporary Americans are unable to understand or share in the joke. Of course, more than one mental world can exist in any given culture at any given time.
While the unforgiving folktales of early modern French peasants stemmed from the harsh conditions of peasant life, the refined tastes of the elites prevented them from appreciating or understanding such tales. Born into relative security, they considered the original stories too harsh. So their “cleaned up” versions of folktales reflected a softer worldview.
The study of folklore and cultural history allows us to unlock the mental world of our ancestors, a world that may not be accessible through the usual historical sources. The stories people share, their meaning and morals, helps paint a more complete picture of the past. Robert Darton’s unique way of studying history remains compelling because he challenged us to examine past cultures from their own perspective, a perspective that is often foreign, strange, and incomprehensible.
August 1, 2024
The cat massacre in Paris, late 1730, was a workers revolt. The cats in the printing shop, some 25 of them, were given better food and sleep than the workers, so one day they simply hung them from their necks.
“The killing of the cats expressed a hatred for the bourgeois that had spread among all the workers: The masters love cats; consequently (the workers) hate them. After masterminding the massacre, Léveillé became the hero of the shop.”
Many Historians tend to treat this period of the workshop as a prelude to industrialization, with some comparing the workshop to an extended family in which master and workers labored together. Yet in the second half of the century the government eliminated most small shops in favor of an oligarchy of masters.
“Crowds made bonfires, and threw into them objects with magical power, hoping to avoid disaster and to obtain good fortune during the rest of the year. A favorite object was cats - cats tied up in bags, cats suspended from ropes, or cates burned at the stake. Parisians liked to incinerate cats by the sackful, and some crowds preferred to chase a flaming cat through the streets. Faire le chat, was to tear fur from a cat to make it howl. The Germans called charivaris Katzenmusik, a term that may have been derived from the howls of tortured cats. Overall, the torture of animals by all sorts of people, young and old, especially cats, was popular amusement throughout early modern Europe. A popular expression being, “patient as a cat whose claws are being pulled out.””
“During the Reformation in London, a Protestant crowd shaved a cat to look like a priest, dressed it in mock vestments, and hanged it on the gallows at Cheapside. The examples are endless. The point is clear: there was nothing unusual about the ritual killing of cats.”
The point is clear: there was nothing unusual about the ritual killing of cats (the examples are just too numerous). But what significance did early modern Europe attribute to cats?
First and foremost, cats suggested witchcraft. To cross one at night in virtually any corner of France was to risk running into the devil or one of his agents or a witch abroad on an evil errand. White cats could be as satanic as the black, in the daytime as well as at night. To protect yourself from sorcery by cats there was one, classic remedy: maim it. Cut its tail, clip its ears, smash one of its legs, tear or burn its fur, and you would break its malevolent power. A cat entering a bakery could prevent the bread from rising.
“To protect a new house, Frenchmen enclosed live cats within its walls - a very old rite, judging from cat skeletons that have been exhumed from the walls of medieval buildings.” Similarly, or not, skeletons of aborted babies were also found in numerous places…
Finally, the power of cats was also concentrated on the most intimate aspect of domestic life: sex. Le chat, la chatte, le minet mean the same thing in French slang as “pussy” does in English. From this we can argue that cats were tortured also due to their femininity, much like babies are bombed today because of their lack of masculinity.
“The first thing they go for is la grise, Madame's pussy. Léveillé stuns it with a quick blow on the kidneys, and Jerome finishes it off.”
“The killing of the cats expressed a hatred for the bourgeois that had spread among all the workers: The masters love cats; consequently (the workers) hate them. After masterminding the massacre, Léveillé became the hero of the shop.”
Many Historians tend to treat this period of the workshop as a prelude to industrialization, with some comparing the workshop to an extended family in which master and workers labored together. Yet in the second half of the century the government eliminated most small shops in favor of an oligarchy of masters.
“Crowds made bonfires, and threw into them objects with magical power, hoping to avoid disaster and to obtain good fortune during the rest of the year. A favorite object was cats - cats tied up in bags, cats suspended from ropes, or cates burned at the stake. Parisians liked to incinerate cats by the sackful, and some crowds preferred to chase a flaming cat through the streets. Faire le chat, was to tear fur from a cat to make it howl. The Germans called charivaris Katzenmusik, a term that may have been derived from the howls of tortured cats. Overall, the torture of animals by all sorts of people, young and old, especially cats, was popular amusement throughout early modern Europe. A popular expression being, “patient as a cat whose claws are being pulled out.””
“During the Reformation in London, a Protestant crowd shaved a cat to look like a priest, dressed it in mock vestments, and hanged it on the gallows at Cheapside. The examples are endless. The point is clear: there was nothing unusual about the ritual killing of cats.”
The point is clear: there was nothing unusual about the ritual killing of cats (the examples are just too numerous). But what significance did early modern Europe attribute to cats?
First and foremost, cats suggested witchcraft. To cross one at night in virtually any corner of France was to risk running into the devil or one of his agents or a witch abroad on an evil errand. White cats could be as satanic as the black, in the daytime as well as at night. To protect yourself from sorcery by cats there was one, classic remedy: maim it. Cut its tail, clip its ears, smash one of its legs, tear or burn its fur, and you would break its malevolent power. A cat entering a bakery could prevent the bread from rising.
“To protect a new house, Frenchmen enclosed live cats within its walls - a very old rite, judging from cat skeletons that have been exhumed from the walls of medieval buildings.” Similarly, or not, skeletons of aborted babies were also found in numerous places…
Finally, the power of cats was also concentrated on the most intimate aspect of domestic life: sex. Le chat, la chatte, le minet mean the same thing in French slang as “pussy” does in English. From this we can argue that cats were tortured also due to their femininity, much like babies are bombed today because of their lack of masculinity.
“The first thing they go for is la grise, Madame's pussy. Léveillé stuns it with a quick blow on the kidneys, and Jerome finishes it off.”
November 15, 2025
5 / 5
Excellent book
Robert Darnton provides an exquisite selection of chapter-essays that dive into the various levels of 18th century French mentalités. I thoroughly enjoyed getting at least a smidgen of insight on how the common man viewed the world around him as well as how the various social strata and structures interacted with one another.
This book provides the reader with a compelling introductory knowledge about 18th century France and I am keen to dive into similar styled informal-esque works to this one in the near future.
Great for 18th century French world-building research.
Excellent book
Robert Darnton provides an exquisite selection of chapter-essays that dive into the various levels of 18th century French mentalités. I thoroughly enjoyed getting at least a smidgen of insight on how the common man viewed the world around him as well as how the various social strata and structures interacted with one another.
This book provides the reader with a compelling introductory knowledge about 18th century France and I am keen to dive into similar styled informal-esque works to this one in the near future.
Great for 18th century French world-building research.
January 13, 2026
Kačių skerdynės vaizduojamos tarsi nerealus, sapniškas įvykis. Pats autorius atskleidžia XVIII amžiaus Prancūzijos kultūros egzotiką ir kasdienybės banalybes, kartu kviesdamas skaitytoją apmąstyti, kodėl vienos Paryžiaus spaustuvės darbininkams kačių skerdynės tapo didžiausia pramoga ir kaip tokios išdaigos veikė amatininkų gyvenimą senojo režimo laikotarpiu. Ši knyga labiau primena fantastinę pasaką nei dokumentinę tikrovę, tačiau aprašomi įvykiai iš tiesų buvo realūs ir atskleidžia, kokiomis formomis žmonės anuomet ieškojo pramogų.
May 19, 2025
I learned a lot from this academic history of 18th century French Culture. The overall theme that we as modern readers and thinkers need to try and understand that people of the past did not read and think like we do was fascinating. I mean it seems obvious, but it is not something we often think about. Lots of great anecdotes in here but a bit dry.
October 15, 2025
Magnífica exploración cultural sobre la Francia del siglo XVIII, articulada desde una mirada antropológica que Robert Darnton despliega a lo largo de una serie de ensayos tan variados como fascinantes, dotados de una peculiaridad remarcable. Sería difícil elegir un capítulo favorito, aunque el de Jean Ranson me resultó particularmente entrañable.
November 12, 2023
i was forced to read this book for university. it was all against my will. my teacher forced me. i had no choice
(only the first 2 chapters are relatively okay-ish though he writes very boringly. the third chapter is the most boring thing i've read in my life, the fourth is ?, the fifth is pure hell that i had to skip over, and sixth is just.......whatever, i guess? i feel like i wasted half of my life bc of this book)
(only the first 2 chapters are relatively okay-ish though he writes very boringly. the third chapter is the most boring thing i've read in my life, the fourth is ?, the fifth is pure hell that i had to skip over, and sixth is just.......whatever, i guess? i feel like i wasted half of my life bc of this book)
March 18, 2023
fuck xevi no vull veure’t mai més a la vida
March 18, 2023
crec que no vull veure un gat mai més
November 14, 2023
3,5 - måtte lese den for historia cultural de la edad moderna, men den var faktisk ganske spennende!
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