The Great Cat Massacre

The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History is an influential collection of essays on French cultural history by the American historian Robert Darnton, first published in 1984. The book's title is derived from its most famous chapter which describes and interprets an unusual source detailing the "massacre" of cats by apprentice printers living and working on Rue Saint-Séverin in Paris during the late 1730s. Other chapters look at fairy tales, the writing of the Encyclopédie and other aspects of French early modern history.

The Great Cat Massacre
First edition
AuthorRobert Darnton
Original titleThe Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
CountryUnited States
SubjectEarly modern France
GenreHistoire des mentalités, Cultural History
Published1984
PublisherBasic Books
ISBN0-465-02700-8
OCLC749134561
LC ClassDC33.4 D37 1984

Methodology

Darnton, influenced by his colleague, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, aimed to gain greater insight into the period and social groups involved by studying what he perceived to be something which appeared alien to the late modern mind – the fact that killing cats might be funny.

The book containing this account, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, has become one of Darnton's most popular writings; it has been published in eighteen languages.[1]

Darnton describes how, as the apprentices suffered hard conditions, they came to resent the favours which their masters gave to their cats, and contrived to deal with the nuisance cats by slaughtering them so as to distress their masters. Darnton interprets this as an early form of workers' protest.[2][3] (As may the wife in the story, who says she believes that "they were threatened by a more serious kind of insubordination" beyond the simple stoppage of work.)[4]

The cats were a favourite of the printer's wife and were fed much better than the apprentices, who were in turn served 'catfood' (rotting meat scraps). Aside from this, they were mistreated, beaten and exposed to cold and horrible weather. One of the apprentices imitated a cat by screaming like one for several nights, making the printer and his wife despair. Finally, the printer ordered the cats rounded up and dispatched. The apprentices did this, rounded up all the cats they could find, beat them half to death and held a 'trial'. They found the cats guilty of witchcraft and sentenced them to death by hanging.

Darnton's approach to the historical texts he uses, both in the Cat Massacre chapter and others in the volume, has been criticised since shortly after the work's appearance for its simplistic assumptions. An early exchange between Darnton and French cultural historian Roger Chartier was subjected to a scathing analysis by Dominic LaCapra of the 'Great Symbol Massacre' involved.[5] Harold Mah in 1991 focused directly on Darnton's account of the 'Massacre', arguing ultimately that the author had 'suppressed' the actual nature of the source in pursuit of an engaging interpretation.[6]

gollark: We can generally react to ongoing present things.
gollark: No. We can infer the past from things other than memory.
gollark: In what way?
gollark: Interesting.
gollark: Morning. We've retroactively altered time by 73 minutes.

See also

References
  1. Faculty, Harvard University Department of History, 2015. Accessed 2015-12-10.
  2. Robert Darnton (1985). The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. Vintage Books. ISBN 0-394-72927-7.
  3. Mark Levene, Penny Roberts (1999). The Massacre in History. Berghahn Books. ISBN 1-57181-934-7.
  4. Robert Darnton (1989). "The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History".
  5. LaCapra, D. (1988). Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre. The Journal of Modern History, 60(1), 95-112. Retrieved May 17, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/1880407
  6. Harold Mah, “Suppressing the Text:The Metaphysics of Ethnographic History in Darnton's Great Cat Massacre," History Workshop 31 (spring 1991), 1–20

Further reading
  • Mah, Harold (Spring 1991). "Suppressing the Text: The Metaphysics of Ethnographic History in Darnton's Great Cat Massacre". History Workshop. 31: 1–20. doi:10.1093/hwj/31.1.1. JSTOR 4289048.
  • Palmer, William (November 1986). "The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History by Robert Darnton". Theory and Society. 15 (6): 918–21. JSTOR 657413.
  • Stewart, Philip (Winter 1985–1986). "The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. by Robert Darnton". Eighteenth-Century Studies. 19 (2): 260–264. JSTOR 2738646.
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