About book The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes In French Cultural History (1985)
Given the peculiarities of the Irish educational system, at the end of 10th grade there was a forced choice between physics and history, so my formal study of history ended when I was 14. I was happy to be rid of it at the time - my brain did fine with analytical stuff like science and languages, but history was just too unruly to get a handle on and it always brought down my grade average. And, of course, at age 14 it was completely impossible to think of it as anything but useless.Naturally, I've ended up regretting that particular gap in my education ever since. The Great Cat Massacre was one of the books that helped me overcome my aversion to reading about history ( I Claudius was another). It showed that history books didn't have to be dull and it re-awakened a curiosity I thought had been stifled. It also planted a strong suspicion that my previous difficulties with the subject were most likely due to the abysmal way in which it was taught. It seems silly now, but when I first read it (in 1985?) a "history" book that wasn't just a compilation of names, dates, battles and rebellions was (for me) an entirely novel concept. So I had fond memories of the book when I undertook a re-reading this past weekend. After 25 years, would it be as good as I remembered, or would it crumble to little more than that inspired title (which is pure genius, by any standards)?A brief overview of the book's structure and content. It comprises six essays, each of which considers a very specific aspect of life in France during the first half of the 18th century, using a particular incident or set of documents as a point of departure. The cat massacre in the book's title stimulates an examination of the precarious state of labor relations in the printing industry in the 1730s. An extensive description of the town of Montpellier in 1768 by an anonymous (but solidly bourgeois) citizens provides a remarkable glimpse of the power structure, relationships between the different classes and prevailing attitudes. Part of the responsibility of Joseph d'Hemery, a Parisian police officer, was the tracking of potentially seditious documents and their authors - as a result he amassed an archive containing dossiers on 500 writers and intellectuals. Ten years of book orders from one resident of La Rochelle in the 1770s give some idea of reading habits at the time (Rousseau was the decade's Stephenie Meyer). In the remaining two chapters Darnton considers the particularly gruesome nature of French folk tales and the organization of Diderot's Encyclopedia respectively. I suppose it was no great surprise to find that, although the book wasn't quite as brilliant or as fascinating as I remembered, it still held up pretty well. Darnton is very readable, though I found some of his inferences less persuasive on this second reading. The best essays are the title piece and the analysis of folktales; the glimpse into 18th century reading habits is also pretty irresistible. The other three essays were (for me) more problematic - there's an awful lot of listing going on, with Darnton's commentary being either perfunctory or unpersuasive, or both. Overall, the flaws are still pretty minor. Darnton is an intelligent and engaging writer, and the three standout essays in the collection are more than worth the price of admission. Though I'm mentally giving it 3.5 stars this time around, I'm more than happy to round it back to the original 4 stars.
Do social conditions determine popular beliefs? Robert Darnton challenges the widely held assumption that cultural systems derive from social orders, and takes the beetle's eye view, picking out quirky sources that reveal the viewpoint of the 'native', dissecting what they say to then draw conclusions about the world they lived in. A careful and rather long-winded examination of fairy tales throws light on the living conditions of peasants under the Old Regime. Their lives were nasty, brutish and short. The eponymous cat massacre is a kind of violent charivari that tells of the living conditions of urban artisans in the print trade and surely provided a basis for Parrot in the Peter Carey novel. A bourgeois gentilhomme's ordered description of Montpellier is analysed to show the difference between symbolic demonstrations of status and how that status was perceived by the educated man in the street. My two favourite essays reflect my interest in literature, reading and writers. Joseph d'Hemery was an inspector of the book trade. In the five years from 1748 to 1753 he wrote 500 reports on any kind of writer that had published anything at all in Paris, from the most famous philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot to the most obscure hacks, struggling to turn out pieces of laudatory doggerel and gain the favour of the rich and influential. The essay on these reports gives a brilliant picture of the republic of letters at the very height of the Enlightenment, giving insight into how these men managed to survive. Only the lucky few (three!) could actually live by their pen, the others were dependent on alternative sources of income, mostly as teachers, lawyers and clerics, or on winning a financially well endowed bride, or by gaining the protection of someone who could pull strings for them. Fascinating. The other one I loved was based on the letters of a well-situated, well-educated Frenchman who had made friends at school with the man who went on to found the Société Typographique de Neuchatel, an important Swiss publisher of French books. Thus the Frenchman ordered his books from his friend, but not just in a plain business letter, but with a chatty exposé of his reading tastes and reactions, changing family situation and subsequent requirement of books to bring up baby, the eighteenth century equivalent of Dr. Spock. This illustrates the republic of letters from the reader's side, and gives a taste of the kind of adoration that readers developed for Rousseau.Darnton is a true historian and is well aware of the flaws and limitations inherent in his approach, but remains at all times entertaining and smooth to read.
Do You like book The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes In French Cultural History (1985)?
A very entertaining read. I was undecided at first whether the premise was a bit of windmill-tilting, but I think ultimately it doesn't matter. What the book does is take some of the fun that can be had with historical research and bring it to the fore. Back in school these were the kinds of things you hoped your professor would mention in class to ease the textbook pain, the sweet reward for having forced down a hundred nourishing but tasteless pages of facts. I will confess to having skimmed the details of the cat chapter, and found that the least thorough of Darnton's readings.For my purposes, the chapters on the bourgeois and the inspector were fascinating and very useful. I would recommend the inspector chapter to any budding writer: however ****ty the domestic publishing market is today, we do not have to write gushy poems for our supper nor do we have to fear having our ears cut off. Hurrah for ears!
—Jennifer Uhlich
The first chapter was interesting and had me hooked on the idea of the "otherness" of people in the past. Plus, the fairy tales were wonderfully odd and interesting (okay, and quite disturbing).The second chapter (The Great Cat Massacre) has a unique pretext and continues the "otherness" theme, although it's even more disturbing to modern sensibilities. Which is, I believe, the thesis of the book. It's gruesome, but of special interest for its insight into a typesetting shop of the period.It's all down hill for me from that point on. All the counting and record-keeping...snooze! It's one of those books that I felt I had to finish in case it got any better, and it did a bit at the last chapter. I like histories, but this one may be for the true Francophiles out there...
—Karen
Historiographically speaking, the Great Cat Massacre is "old news": The profession has long since embraced the "pastness of the past" and sent its leading practitioners plunging into the archives to discover what was so "other" about the lost mentalités of 18th century French journeymen, 17th century pirates, &c. Nevertheless, the titular essay retains much of its original luster, given the high entertainment value of the story that's being examined (a massacre of cats, most notably the favorite cat "la grise," undertaken by printmakers to spite their mean old master) as well as the general information Darnton presents about how various animals were brutalized during folk rituals and religious festivals. The first essay in this collection, which places French fairy tales in a comparative perspective, is a bit dated but nonetheless offers a fine corrective to the lurid Freudian fantasies presented in Bettelheim's ridiculous (and, admittedly, ridiculously entertaining) the Uses of Enchantments while also providing a partial explanation for why French comedy often revolves around fart and dick jokes.
—Oliver Bateman
