The Great Cat Massacre And Other Episodes In French Cultural History – Robert Darnton, 1984 ★★

How the Past Is a Foreign Country

As a product of the 20^th century who finds himself deep into the 21^st, I know a little about temporal dislocation. Whether it’s the politics, the music, or adjusting to casual swearing, mobile texting, or calorie-count signs at McDonalds, it’s like my head is in then; my body in now.

Imagine trying to make sense of a time that exists entirely outside living memory. This is the challenge Robert Darnton takes on in this collection of historical-anthropological essays looking back at 18^th century France.

Darnton employs everything from Mother Goose to Jean-Jacques Rousseau to examine what constitutes the past, beyond chronology itself. His conclusion centers on different people who carried with them unfathomably different mindsets, or as he calls them, mentalitiés. This he lays out in his book’s introduction:

[N]othing is easier than to slip into the comfortable assumption that Europeans thought and felt two centuries ago just as we do today – allowing for the wigs and wooden shoes. We constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to be administered doses of culture shock.

How much shock does Darnton think we need? Check out that title!

The anecdote involving the cat massacre is taken from the memoir of a Parisian printing-shop worker, Nicolas Contat, featured in one of the six essays collected here. Other essays focus on an anonymous bourgeois writer who took it upon himself to list the various types of people in Montpellier; and a police inspector who kept tabs on hundreds of French writers, including famous ones like Diderot and Montesquieu.

Not only does Darnton’s focus wander by design; he is unnaturally leery of connecting dots.

In his cat-massacre essay Darnton details life in Contat’s printing shop as a daisy-chain of cruelty. The printer and his wife ruled over all with a lazy hauteur, earning Contat’s enmity. The only creature the printer’s wife favored with kindness was la grise, her grey female cat. When the workers saw a chance to revenge themselves, they took it out on la grise and other cats around the shop, which they dragged from rooftops and lynched. The carnage, Darnton writes, left its perpetrators “delirious” with joy and laughter.

Does this strike you as a preview of the blood-soaked French Revolution? Darnton hedges:

It would be absurd to view the cat massacre as a dress rehearsal for the September Massacres of the French Revolution, but the earlier outburst of violence did suggest a popular rebellion, though it remained restricted to the level of symbolism.

Restricted to symbolism? Tell that to the poor cats!

Darnton’s first essay here, “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning Of Mother Goose,” is similarly leery of making connections, in this case between the often-gruesome fairy tales people told for amusement and the Hobbesian misery of their daily lives.

Among the many illustrations in The Great Cat Massacre is this image by French illustrator Gustave Doré of Little Red Riding Hood visiting "grandma." Darnton writes: "We can appreciate the distance between our mental world and that of our ancestors if we imagine lulling a child of our own to sleep with the primitive peasant version of 'Little Red Riding Hood.'" http://www.dw.com/en/why-little-red-riding-hood-is-caught-between-innocence-and-sexuality/a-36559200

He is specifically dismissive of those drawing psychological or sexual connections from stories like that of Little Red Riding Hood, who in the original version was invited to sleep with a wolf which then ate her. “Far from veiling their message with symbols, the storytellers of eighteenth-century France portrayed a world of raw and naked brutality,” Darnton writes.

This brutality is central to the original stories, Darnton adds, brutal because of the time they came from:

The peasants of early modern France inhabited a world of stepmothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed. The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short.

The point in “Peasants Tell Tales” is a good one; what shaped our past can shape us while remaining entirely alien to our sensibilities. Still I found myself getting more lost as I continued reading.

Part of my problem lies with the academic nature of this book. At the time a professor at Princeton University, Darnton based his essays on classroom lectures. His lecture audience no doubt were people who had done a great deal of reading about the topics Darnton delves into, or else they wouldn’t have been in Princeton. He often seems to reference secondary reading, what would have been material supplemental to the primary sources of classwork.

With “Peasants Tell Tales,” there is an assumption the reader is already familiar with the stories peasants told. Hence they are referenced only briefly, sometimes with only a title or catalog number.

Another problem is a sense of a diminishing thesis. “Peasants Tell Tales” casts a wide net by examining stories told throughout Europe, including Germany, England, and Italy. Then the other essays deal exclusively with France.

Similarly, the brutalization aspect so central to “Peasants Tell Tales” and “The Great Cat Massacre” doesn’t carry over to the other essays. These are more concerned with the epistemological nature of society as it registered in different parts of pre-Revolutionary France, particularly once you get past the rural and urban poor.

No hard feelings: Author Robert Darnton and friend pose around the time of The Great Cat Massacre's publication, when he was a Princeton history professor. Image from https://www.skoob.com.br/autor/3784-robert-darnton.

I found the latter four essays especially dry. As an academic, Darnton’s focus on scholarship over storytelling means he is more interested in how his subjects interacted with their environments than what they had to say. Thus, with “A Bourgeois Puts His World In Order,” about how an anonymous Montpellier resident itemized the various social orders of his city, Darnton relates each of the many orders individually, pausing here and there for a pungent observation but mostly just pondering the schematic nature of the writer’s approach:

For we can never disentangle interpretation and facts. Nor can we fight our way past the text to some hard and fast reality beyond it.

Police inspector Joseph D’Hémery kept notes on writers both famous and obscure as part of his official duties. Darnton analyzes these in examining how the role of writer was perceived by French society.

Though those observed often had unpleasant things to say about king and church, Darnton again warns against interpreting D’Hémery’s experience as a precursor for the French Revolution. “Nothing could be more anachronistic than to picture him as a modern cop or to interpret his police work as witch-hunting,” Darnton writes. “It really represents something less familiar and more interesting: information gathering in the age of absolutism.”

D’Hémery’s comments are interesting, at times. Voltaire, for example, is described as “tall, dry, and the bearing of a satyr.” But there is a hole at the center of this narrative: Darnton offers no hint of what action, if any, resulted from D’Hémery’s files, or even if they were shared with his superiors. He was indeed a secret policeman, one whose career remains largely a secret to history.

The last two essays also deal with 18^th century France. I mention them in passing mostly to note they feel out of place.

The first, “Philosophers Trim The Tree Of Knowledge,” details work done by several leading writers on what became a towering edifice of the Age of Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie. It’s the one essay that doesn’t center on first-person source material. Instead, we get a bland account of the philosophical goals of Diderot and the other Encyclopédie writers, with a repetitive focus on their secularism:

Diderot and d’Alembert did not seek out the hand of God in the world but rather studied men at work, forging their own happiness.

Similarly repetitious, and only a bit more interesting, is the last essay, an account of the impact Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Julie, Or The New Heloise, had on French society in the mid-1700s. Here we return to first-person source material, in writings by Rousseau and those who read him with an avidity unprecedented for its time.

Wrote one: “I dare not tell you the effect it made on me. No, I was past weeping. A sharp pain convulsed me. My heart was crushed. Julia dying was no longer an unknown person. I believed I was her sister, her friend, her Claire. My seizure became so strong that if I had not put that book away I would have been as ill as all those who attended that virtuous woman in her last moments.”

In essence, Darnton suggests in both essays that French society became the first to elevate reading from mere skill into a kind of participatory art, forming a basis for society not unlike the fairy tales with which his book began.

Yet the thread of this idea is hardly consistent. What’s worse, Darnton’s introductory concept, that the past is another country, an “alien mentality” we need to embrace on its own terms, is merely repeated:

To get the joke in the case of something as unfunny as a ritual slaughter of cats is a first step toward “getting” the culture.

The deeper Darnton plumbs the filigree of 18^th century French life, the less interesting and more recondite his book becomes, until I found myself beginning to wonder: How many dead cats does it take to make a point? For Darnton, the answer would seem to be a lot.