49. The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton
peculiar and interesting bits of 18th century French cultural history
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. London: Little, Brown. 2009. First published 1984.
I'm more familiar with Darnton's work on book culture in pre-Revolutionary 18th century France and on censorship both then and more generally. The Great Cat Massacre is a peculiar and peculiarly interesting attempt to engage with the history of ideas and the history of mentalités as found in the French Annales school of historiography. (The Annales school has had a strong influence on history-writing, particularly social and economic history, though its influence was more direct a generation ago.) Darnton is at once sympathetic to and in argument with the history of mentalités, and an argument about how to do cultural history frames his interrogation of 18th-century French culture through a snapshot series of texts or collections of texts.
The first of these and the most shocking is the cat massacre of the title, an account from a former journeyman printer of how hilarious it was to round up and slaughter all the local cats, most especially the cat belonging to his master's wife: a joke worthy of re-enactment, producing much laughter. This alien violence in fact reveals a great deal about the world of the journeymen and apprentices: a world in which the mistress's cat is treated far better than they are. Other episodes include a discussion of an early version of Red Riding Hood in which the girl is eaten by the wolf, comparing it with certain other fairy-tales; a guide to Montpellier by a member of its merchant class; letters from a merchant in La Rochelle ordering books from Neufchatel; a dossier from someone in the Paris police recording writers and assessing them for how dangerous they are to society; and a discussion of the Encyclopédie, the great and controversial project of many luminaries of the 18th-century French literary scene.
While the texts that Darnton considers are very different from each other, that's part of the point. Both topics and writers are diverse in their concerns, but Darnton has chosen them to provide a vivid, albeit at times disturbing, window into some of the cultural concerns and mores of France in the 18th century. That said, one has to bring a lot of one's own energy and ability to Darnton's work if one wants to find common concerns shared among most of these texts.
It's a very readable and interesting introduction to 18th century French cultural history, even if I prefer Darnton's later work for being a bit more intensively argued.