The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History Paperback – May 12, 2009

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.

Darnton's command of primary-source documents of 18th century France allows him to take anthropologist Clifford Geertz's interpretive "culture-as-text" approach--literally. And in the first chapter, which examines peasant fairy tales, Darnton follows Geertz in dismissing any possible value in a Freudian interpretive approach. But, given those times of hunger and malnutrition, it is not surprising that the tales are predominantly "oral-sadistic" (ogres devour children, etc.)--obviously manifesting repressed cannibalistic temptations (as in, for cross-cultural comparison, the Algonkian "Witiko" delusion). Such tales also obviously exhibited ambivalence toward children (hungry mouths to feed), if not outright bitter hatred, with their terror-inducing content. In chapter 2, Darnton examines an "anecdotal" manuscript which purports to recount a "cat massacre" conducted by lowly, exploited print-house workers--who, in carnival-esque abandon, gleefully tormented and killed all the cats in the neighborhood. Conceding that animal torture was exceedingly common in early modern Europe, Darnton still insists that the cat was first and foremost symbolic--of witchcraft, female sexuality, and the pampered habits of the idle owners. But since Darnton also acknowledges the partly- fictional nature of tale, one suspects that a limited prank was elaborated into a colorfully rebellious, entertaining "cat massacre" tale--the sadistic humor of which is not as "alien" to our current sensibility as Darnton assumes (as in the extreme--and insouciant--violence and torture seen in many popular movies). One might speculate as well that proliferating stray cats may have been viewed as an urban "pest": how many people, then or now, might be pleased to hear of a "great rat massacre"? The chapter on Diderot's "Encyclopedia," which incisively examines how and why the project was perceived as radical at the time, nonetheless to my mind also illustrates the limits of Darnton's cultural-history approach. The reader needs to understand the actual political situation--the harsh theocratic nature of the absolutist State at that time (the draconian Counter-Reformation, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, blasphemy punished by torture and/or the stake(!), "education" largely monopolized by the political Jesuits). By encouraging individual scientific understanding and thought, Diderot's project--which followed the advances made in Protestant England decades earlier (Bacon, Newton, Locke, Chambers' "Cyclopedia")--directly confronted authoritarian subordination on behalf of the free-thinking, inquiring individual.

Going into this book, I was expecting to be told one story, however that is very much not the case. While in fact, you are being told the overall story of French life in the 18th century, it encompasses many small seemingly unrelated details about a wide variety of classes, occupations, locations and economic statues. The author, Robert Darnton, clearly has written this as a way to prove to people that learning about history in innovative, detail-oriented ways can be just as beneficiary than the classic government, big idea technique often taught in schools and in textbooks. I feel the same amount of content is discussed in this storytelling approach as would be in a flat textbook style writing on the same region and same time period. This is a success on Darnton's part, and helps intrigue the reader as the twists of each chapter-essay continues. I do recommend this book to those curious for insightful bits of random facts and knowledge that can then be pieced together to draw important conclusions regarding the historical significance of France as a country in the Age of Enlightenment. However, I warn against it if you are looking for structural, highly political and extremely credible information, for that is not the intentions of the book to begin with. As for colorful recollections of the average people all the way up the social scale, this book is a clear winner. The objectives one desires to get out of their knowledge of early modern France will all be important things to keep in mind when deciding whether or not to read this book. If you're looking for a specific historical context of French provincial life, this book will give you just that, along with allowing you to take the information given and run with it in the interpretation of your choosing, something Darnton intends for his readers.

In his brilliant ‘History of Histories’ (2007) the late John Burrow recommended this book as a leading example of microhistory, along with Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘Cheese and the Worms’, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s ‘Montaillou’ and Eamonn Duffy’s ‘Voices of Morebath’; but it differs from the others in that it is not just about one individual, or place. In fact ‘The Great Cat Massacre’ is only one of six episodes in 18th century French cultural history, studied here by Robert Darnton. It is indeed a classic of its kind, which is intellectual history or 'mentalités', as the 'Annalistes' would have it. The common theme is that we should not assume that people in the past thought the same way as we do, and we should avoid the use of hindsight. So, one might assume that, since all the individuals in question lived before the French Revolution of 1789, and since times and conditions for all but the aristocracy and bourgeoisie were hard, the book would tell us something about why that seminal event in Western history took place when it did, and what it was all about. Not a bit of it. Darnton’s chapter on ‘Peasant Tales’ tells us that these stories reflected the desire of the poor and downtrodden to make fun of, and get the better of, their masters metaphorically, not a desire to physically overthrow them. The chapter about the Great Cat Massacre is also entitled ‘Workers Revolt’, but its subject is not a revolt but a gruesome charivari. The eponymous Bourgeois in ‘The City as Text’ describes his town of Montpellier in terms of the three traditional estates, and other marks of status, rather than in terms of class. The Police Inspector, who sorts his files regarding potential opponents of the Ancien Regime in chapter 4, does not file them according to ideology, but according to his tastes in literature. And so on. Nowhere is there the faintest whiff of revolution, or revolutionaries, and the reason, according to Darnton, is clear: in the middle of the 18th century, men simply did not think of the world in the same way as they came to think of it after 1789, and especially after the writings of Karl Marx became widely known. This is a brilliant study; and one wonders how much would be left of the traditional idea that Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau were in any sense responsible for the French Revolution, if Darnton were to turn his attention to the subject in full. Even more intriguing, what would remain of Christopher Hill’s thesis in ‘Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution’, that men gained courage to overthrow Charles I by reading the works of Bacon, Ralegh and Coke.

Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre, though it's not entirely new (first published: 1985), surely represents a landmark in cultural history. It isn't just that it is hugely entertaining. Its approach is fascinatingly different. Darnton focuses on the narrowly particular, or appears to do so, and yet draws parallels of the widest breadth. The Great Cat Massacre consists of the analysis of six cultural artefacts, all from eighteenth-century France, layered by social group of origin and level of sophistication. Thus the book starts with peasants' Mother Goose rhymes, goes on to urban workers (the cat massacre), and to the philosophers' encyclopaedia, via a captivating chapter based on police reports.What makes Darnton's book unique is that it doesn't start with, or even much deal in, concepts. This is controversial: historians have criticised Darnton, though for his work on `grub street' (the Paris pamphleteers) more than for the Cat Massacre. But his approach avoids preconceptions and anachronisms. It also makes its object spring from the page. Ancien régime France appears in its full foreignness, an odd and alien world that seems the blinding proof that the past indeed is a different country. No one can think about Louis XVI's reign or the French Revolution in the same way after having read the Cat Massacre: it simply happened to different people than one had originally thought. Beyond this, Darton's book serves as both inspiration and warning to anyone interested in history. A warning because it is a reminder one can't assign modern mentalities to actors buried deep in the historical past. An inspiration because there must be so much more for historians to work on along similar lines in various periods.

I am French. And of course, I was a bit dubious a US academic would get his spiel about France right. He did.A brilliant job. As a well-read Frenchman, I learned few general facts, but boy did I learn a lot of small ones, and how I had to admire the way this man is absolutely spot-on about my country's history.Warmly recommended.

Muito bom, o livro é de ótima qualidade e foi enviado dentro do prazo. Por ser importado o papel é padrão estado unidense, inferior ao brasileiro.

Convoluted way of expressing himself