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

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.

This is a series of cultural events, each chapter focused on a different French cultural piece of history. Cats, folklore, books, and authors. Instead of seeing history as a series of major events, like wars, or about very important people, we get to see it from the people's point of view. Even if the people are burning witches, killing cats and being stupid. Enjoy the book!

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 protes

One other reviewer used the term "between academia and pop nonfiction". I suppose accurate pop non fiction was what I was looking for as I was trying to get an overview of the mind set or zeitgeist of prerevolutionary France. It was a little narrower in it's scope than I expected but in hind sight accomplished it's goal in giving me a feeling for that period which in turn helps putting the revolution in context. For me this book complimented "Holy Madness : Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871"by Adam Zamoyski I would recommend the book for those interested in folk stories and fairy tales. I enjoyed the comparisons of the same themes expressed the folk literature of Germany, England, Italy etc.

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