Darnton, Great Cat Massacre

Robert Darnton. The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.



             Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre is a series of essays, discursive analyses, that probe the cultural imagination of Old Regime French men and women. In the tradition of the French histoires des mentalités, Darnton examines a series of folktales, memoires, police files and canonical French Enlightenment works as entry points into a vast cultural landscape of meaning, signs and practices which is so distant from our own and, perhaps, ultimately unknowable. Nevertheless, Darnton endeavors, cautiously but effectively, to tease from his documents the evidence of shared meaning that shed light on the manner in which our early modern “other” thought, felt, understood and acted. This exercise creates, in effect, a collection of early modern worldviews, which likewise demonstrates a growing berth between popular and elite culture.

 Darnton’s first chapter is dedicated to the Contes de ma mère l’oye and their implications for the nature of peasant culture. Yet, more than peasant culture, it is a uniquely French peasant culture that Darnton seeks to expose through a comparative analysis with derivative tales from Germany and England. He discovers a mundaneness to the “fantasies” of French storytellers that reflected real-world desires for food, security and land which stood in contrast to foreign versions of the tales. Moreover, it was the settings of the tales and the manner in which protagonists navigated through them that are particularly revealing. Darnton writes that “By showing how life was lived…the tales helped orient the peasants. They mapped the ways of the world and demonstrated the folly of expecting anything more than cruelty from a cruel social order (38).”  In many ways, the tales represented realism, within the narrative frameworks we are able to peek into the fears, beliefs and coping strategies of the eighteenth-century peasant class.

 The second, titular, chapter moves from the countryside to the city and sets out to uncover how it was that a group of printing journeymen found the riotous killing of their master’s beloved cats to be so utterly sidesplitting. What plays out is a subversive performance—incorporating traditions of mock trial, charivari and witchcraft accusation—that gives vent to the men’s frustrations with their master and his wife and roasts the bourgeois couple in a manner that, by virtue of its indirectness, defies retribution while being deeply-satisfying for its participants. Darnton writes that “by executing the cats with such elaborate ceremony, they condemned the house and declared the bourgeois guilty—guilty of overworking and underfeeding his apprentices, guilty of living in luxury while his journeymen did all the work…the guilt extended from the boss to the house to the whole system (98). In the end, Darnton sees the beginning of a tradition of upheaval that presages the Revolution. The claim is tenuous, yet this conclusion renders no less rich the insight into the web of associations that ordered the journeymen’s world and gave meaning to an otherwise incomprehensible act.

 The next two chapters move up the social ladder to examine the bourgeoisie and an emergent class of intellectuals. In a bourgeois’ ordering of his city, one can glimpse a shift in the relative importance—from the bourgeois perspective—of the clergy and “lower” third estate vis-à-vis the merchant and professional class. The moneyed bourgeoisie—as aristocrats in the making—began to differentiate themselves from the dregs of the third estate while likewise lowering the relative position of a non-productive, socially-parasitic clergy, a mindset evident in the bourgeois’ re-ordering of the city’s “estates.”  In the following chapter, a police dossier of gens de lettres serves as evidence of the rise and contours of the new intellectual class, a subject on which Darnton explicates in his The Literary Underground and the Old Regime. The inspector’s files allow Darnton to outline a system of protection and patronage as well as a troubling—to the inspector—decline in religiosity that came to define the nascent group.  Finally, Darnton examines Diderot’s Encyclopédie and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse to get at the manner in which knowledge was understood and ideas were transmitted. An analysis of Diderot’s compendium reveals a new construction of knowledge as deeply rational, empirical and exclusionary (of the empirically-unknowable divine). The arts and sciences were highly-esteemed under the new construction and philosophy took pride of place as the root of all observable, verifiable knowledge. This comes as no surprise, as the philosophes cum gens de lettres were responsible for the re-ordering, though it nevertheless reflected a very real rise in their social influence. Rousseau’s work, and the collected responses to its evocative power, is at once a testament to the authority of the gens de lettres and the way that French men and women read and derived meaning from their texts. What unfolds in Darnton’s analysis is a deep, emotional communion between author and reader, which renders the author knowable to his audience on an intimate level. Rousseau became, for many, a beacon of virtue, whose prose directly impacted the way that his readers chose to live their lives. The authoritative power of text within Old Regime culture resonates throughout the analysis.