What I Am Reading: "The Great Cat Massacre" by Robert Darnton
This book is my triumphant return to both French history, and, though the connection is not explicitly made, to the same microhistory as last seen in The Cheese and the Worms. In fact, as I backtrack, I think that I was led to this book by a link on the Wiki page of Ginzburg’s book.
This book is an investigation of several elements of, and episodes in, 18th century French cultural history, in order to better access the mentalité of the participants. In other words, it is an anthropological study of history through stories and storytelling, in order to approach the impossible task of thinking like someone from a different century. The six chapters are siloed essays and are not continuous, though they share some overlap. The book has a lot to say about conceptualization of social structures, and this comes across in the book’s own framing: it covers peasants in one chapter, artisans in the next, then the so-called bourgeoise of the day, then philosophers themselves, first from the outside then the inside. It then comes full circle and investigates how common-ish people, literate urban-dwellers at least, interacted with the intellectual output that characterized pre-revolutionary France at the height of the Enlightenment.
Darnton (an American) seeks to enter the culture of the past at its most opaque: if we can “get the joke,” being the massacre of cats in a printing shop, which seems completely alien to our modern sensibilities, then we will have gained a foothold in the minds of those vanished people. It is important to investigate and seek to understand their mental symbolism, and each essay to some extent is a study of what things symbolized and how those symbols interacted. The studies aren’t meant to be generalizable, but mostly focus on the interior life of a single subject; the person isn’t representative, though they are often a normal person and not a historically significant figure.
In looking at the 18th century peasantry, the book tackles folk tales. Folk tales are widely psychoanalyzed; since everyone knows them from their childhood, they gain something from “learning” and passing on that Little Red Riding Hood is about the loss of sexual innocence, and the red hood symbolizes menstruation, and so on and so forth. Many of these folk tales in English come from Mother Goose, which is translated from the work of Charles Perrault. He collected (likely from nursemaids, nannies, and so on) these tales and published them in 1697, in a volume intended to appeal to the upscale Parisian salon audiences that made up his own social milieu. Darnton tells us that, based on the work of folklorists of the Third Republic, who captured the last vestiges of oral tradition as peasant France passed over into modern France, Perrault’s tales are heavily sanitized and gussied up in literary allusions. The red hood in fact did not exist until later writers, not original oral storytellers, invented it. Authentic folktales, as passed down through oral history, are much order (as proven through comparisons and written records) and almost Hobbesian in their brutality. They also show an impressive consistency across time, being resistant to “pollution” from other sources.
I would like to pause briefly to note that though Darnton says that this book is for general audiences, it contains in every section reference to academic works that he seems to expect a reader to be familiar with. I have mostly not recorded those citations, on the theory that someone who (for some reason) wants a longer version of this blog post can just read the book (please do, it’s very good). There are a few exceptions, such as when I next tell you that folk tales are comparable through the use of the Aarne and Thompson index of folk tale types; thus a sentence might read something like “the French tale of Quoi Pas is very similar to the German tale of Was Nicht, both of which are Folk Tale 105.” The book thus is able to compare folk tales across cultures, and analyze them for cultural styles and tones. There are a few comparisons that come up. Some of these are mildly contradictory, but I assume that there are enough tales to choose from that there are room for multiple interpretations. The French tell tales of humor and domesticity, while the Germans tell tales of horror and fantasy. The English tell in a more whimsical or droll style, much like their nursery rhymes (which do not exist in French culture). The Italian style is comedic, the Germans as noted are horrific, and the French can be dramatic in style. The Germans, while telling the same tales as the French, incorporate elements that are more supernatural, poetic, exotic, and violent, and tend to focus on the value of hard work. The French make these tales more realistic, earthy, bawdy, and comical, and focus on the importance of trickery.
These tales are meant to communicate to the peasant listeners that they live in a cruel, uncaring world, and they must navigate it ruthlessly using what resources they have at their disposal. This squares with the world that peasants lived in in the 18th century. French peasants were slaves to Malthusian cycles: they could not grow enough crops to feed the livestock necessary to produce the fertilizer needed to create the crop surplus that would allow them some breathing room, some ability to do more than subsist. Under the seigneurial system, they owed the landlord dues every year, and they could not experiment with their fields because they were worked collectively; they thus had no recourse other than crop rotation that left fields necessarily fallow to recharge. Their lives involved hard work, malnutrition, and death. Parents died, leaving orphans; wives especially tended to die, often in childbirth, leading to the proliferation of family units incorporating stepmothers. Everyone was looking for an advantage, and life was violent. Folklore reflected these lives, showing infanticide, competition over resources, stepmothers, food as the protagonist’s end goal. They were set in the two worlds peasants knew, the village or the road.
These tales were meant to tell peasants how the world was, and how they should cope with it. The French idolized the trickster. Other cultures certainly had tricksters, but the French set him or her in the everyday world, not off in a magic land. Tricksters were not revolutionary figures, they set off to humiliate the upper ranks, perhaps (government officials or rich peasants), but not to overthrow them. These tales likely had many other meanings that we could never comprehend or reconstruct, but we can understand some aspects of peasant lives by this culture that they consumed.
The book then shifts to the city, and to the life of artisans. This second chapter gave Darnton his title: it is about a massacre of cats by a group of apprentices and journeymen working in a print shop on the rue Saint-Severin in Paris in the 1730s; as related in the memoir of one, Nicolas Contat. The story that Contat relates is that the apprentices (subject to miserable conditions and abuse by their master, the “bourgeoise” who owned their print shop) were kept up all of their short night by alley cats. After they decided to extend this torment to the master by screeching outside of his window, the master’s wife ordered them to kill all of the alley cats. They and the journeymen seized upon this task with gusto, and chased down and beat to death every cat in the area, including the mistress’ own pet. Those that survived the first assault were subject to a mock trial and hanging, which the master walked in upon and dismissed as an excuse to avoid work. The apprentices found the whole situation so funny that it was retold and reenacted frequently in the printing house, to uproarious laughter.
Again, this is Darnton’s point of entry of history at its most opaque: how could this have been so funny? The book covers the economic and social status of artisans: they have their own fraternities, complete with half-serious rituals involving feasts whereby apprentices pass into full journeyman status. Apprentices had been in a sort of liminal state of adolescence, where they push social boundaries and are ritually hazed during their four years of work. Things were always tough for apprentices, who were barely paid and fed, but the entire Parisian printing industry in the 1730s was a difficult scene economically. The profession had been reduced by statute from having a low three-digit number of masters to only three dozen, and these positions were inherited. Additionally, journeymen were swamped by cheap day-labor of those who could not rise in the profession. Each workplace was volatile and had high turnover, many employees, journeymen or otherwise, were hired only for one job. An “ancient” was someone who had worked in the same shop for an entire year. In his memoir, Contat rhapsodizes about a mythical earlier time where everyone in the industry worked in harmony and brotherhood, and they could all retire fat and happy. In his own time, everyone was sinking.
On to the grotesquerie. Much as artisan life was marked by ritual, so was French society at large, including the carnivalesque social inversion that took place before lent every year. Some of these celebrations involved the ritualized killings of cats, including through beheadings or through cooking on a bonfire, or other mob-like drunken activity in the streets. In addition to the ritualistic killings, Darnton also looks at the vast archive of French folktales, superstitions, proverbs, and popular medicinal information to analyze the symbolism of cats at the time. They were often considered a symbol of witchcraft or the occult (and the way to protect one’s self from a witch-cat was to maim it, thus removing its power). They were often associated with the mistress of a given household, and their nocturnal activities could symbolize sex, including predatory sex such as rape or cuckolding.
Contat cites all of these symbols in his work, and all of them come out in the cat massacre. This “charivari” is imbued with symbolism of the journeyman / apprentice resentment of their master, who beyond his harsh treatment is scorned for sleeping in all morning (as they are not allowed to by the cat noise) and eschewing his role in the work. It also shows the resentment of his wife, struck at through the killing of her favorite pet; but plausible deniability is provided by the fact that the master misses this symbolism, thinking only of the shirking of work. The mock trial of the cats is a labor trial of the pets the masters care about, and witch hunt (or slut shaming) for the disliked mistress, who has her own nocturnal activities that the shop knows about but her husband does not. The cats symbolize, or are a scapegoat for, all of these sources of resentment. The reason the print shop artisans find the event funny enough to continually recount is both that they did it and that they got away with it, without their master being privy to his own condemnation.
The bourgeoise is glimpsed in this chapter, but is investigated more closely in the subsequent chapter. The third chapter is about an obsessive description of the city of Montpellier written by an anonymous citizen who is easily identifiable as a member of the city’s bourgeoise. The bourgeoise were often centered in histories of the 18th century, but scholarship at the time of Darnton’s first writing (in the mid-‘80s) showed that the bourgeoise often did not exist as conceptualized by later sociologists. They were less likely to be the factory owners who heralded the next century than they were to be artisans and shopkeepers who had the economic goal of becoming rentiers ASAP and living off their landholdings. These were the people who drove commerce and consumed literature, the “bourgeoise d’ancien regime,” a pre-modern class rather than the first industrialists.
The anonymous author of the description is easily identifiable as a member of this class, at least going by his sympathies. Montpellier was a small (pop: 25,000), prosperous city in the provinces at the time of writing (1768). It was a regional administrative center, and thus had a class of government bureaucrats in addition to its commercial elite. It did have a bit of small, traditional manufacturing, of woolens and copper pigments, but again nothing resembling the early industrial revolution.. The description starts by recounting a procession, a social occasion when the elite marched ritually through the city. The author gives a detailed description of one of these, down to the different symbolism of the colors of the marchers. They represent the three estates of ancien régime France: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners (mostly the first two). However, the bourgeoise conceptualizations of the author did not match up with the official social order, which is what makes an analysis of this document valuable.
The author investigates his fellow citizens less as individuals and more as members of the “corporate offices” they hold, their ranks and hierarchy. He likes and respects professors and the educated, but does not have much use for monks; typical Enlightenment pro-intellectualism and anti-clericalism. He appreciates that his city runs on commerce in the modern world; but found that prestige and income were often mismatched, as some of the rich were in the second estate and some in the third. Rank was reflected complexly in the procession, as some groups marched out of order, or merged across estates, or were excluded entirely. Social hierarchy didn’t hold up perfectly, but mixed.
This comes out even more in the second half, with the author’s own conceptualization of the social structure. He moved away from the official three estates and substitutes his own arrangement: his first estate was made up of the nobles. Many of the city’s nobility had purchased their ranks rather than inheriting them through their ancestors’ feudal military prowess. Montpellier was a city of tinkers and tailors, with few soldiers and spies. His second estate was vaguely defined as the bourgeoisie as we categorize them. This was more of a negative definition: people who were not nobles but were not commoners. The third estate were the artisans, be they those who worked with their minds, with their mechanical knowledge, or generally with other labor. Listed but not categorized were domestic servants and the unemployed poor.
The author, like a bourgeoise, appreciated and valued wealth, but again it was wealth from traditional sources. In fact, he did not like or appreciate manufacturing, and was glad that Montpellier’s industry was only modest. He did not have what we would recognize as a capitalist outlook, interested in making commercial risks or pursuing expansion. He hated the nobility for their idleness and uselessness; his more austere views that they should seek social value spilled over into, as mentioned, dislike of their domestic servants, and he was glad that the trend was to only have a few. Meanwhile, he was deeply afraid of the commoners, whom he found to be lazy, violent debtors. Despite his dislike for the nobility, the author was not a revolutionary, he liked the social hierarchy and he liked his place in the middle of it.
The third part of the description shifts again, and describes a sort of culture war that would be identifiable in our own day: the snobs versus the slobs. He describes the dress, the food, the amusements of the commoners, and finds them wanting. In his conceptualization, society has fortunately moved away from a structure where everyone took place in the same street festivals and brawls and other amusements into one where, under the lead of the bourgeoise, the upper crust has become more tasteful and refined, spending their time reading or going to the theater. This has drawn the nobility in as well, as they now model their lives after the bourgeoise, and are less decadent and opulent. This is the sort of class mixing that the author likes, the fusing of the two upper elements; he fears infiltration from below, and even opposes education for members of the working class. Overall, even as the work spirals into class hatred and paranoia, it is an interesting cultural artifact because it shows a mind working (imperfectly) to grapple with a changing world and with his place in it.
The second half of the book moves into the terrain of the Enlightenment, and many of its famous luminaries. It starts with the ground troops, the philisophes who first formulated the social category of “intellectual.” The window into this investigation is provided by Joseph d’Hémery, the chief inspector of Paris’ book trade, who kept a file of detailed dossiers on the writers active during his years on the job, 1748-53. The information in these alphabetical files came from acquired journals, spies, gossip, interrogations, and snitches. They aren’t quite as systematized as modern police files would be, as they contain many transcribed anecdotes, observations based on the pseudoscience of physiognomy, and d’Hémery’s own jokes and literary judgements. The files contain notes on 501 total individuals, of whom around 450 were active writers, and of whom a number in the mid-300s had identifiable demographic info. Many were from the Parisian area, and they skewed upscale, with many originating in the clergy or in professional or administrative jobs; and many working as journalists, secretaries, and tutors. Some were of lower social standing, though none were peasants. There were sixteen women, mostly wealthy.
Beyond this social snapshot, it is possible to see how the world, or at least this one police officer (only a few rungs above those who inspected cargo), viewed the rising intellectual class. D’Hémery did not conceive of them as such a social group, though the philisophes were beginning to see themselves that way. He viewed them as members of their larger social orders: a monk who writes, a landowner who writes. They were individuals, there was no group with emergent properties to discern. He respected them as the practitioners of an art, though. He was, being a police officer, a believer in order and hierarchy, and especially in the importance of religion. However, he valued some cleverness, some deviance and boundary-pushing, and had his opinions on their written work. He was not a witch hunter, and was not a modern cop: his role was to send information to his superiors on the functioning of society, to gather data for the absolutist government to rationalize. It was an Enlightenment occupation. His files were usually fodder for reports to higher-ups; many are dated at the beginning of months or years, and clearly d’Hémery had dates set aside to work on them.
Mostly, the reports situated writers within the context of client networks. French society at the time was a constant struggle for protection and sinecure, everyone was trying to find a patron. Some people wrote in order to praise one bigwig or slander another, in order to achieve (or increase) social standing through patronage. This is why many writers were placed as secretaries, newspaper writers, tutors, or academics. Those down and out wrote for subsistence, producing a defamatory pamphlet as easily as pornography, or working as a book smuggler or a spy who informed on book smugglers or writers of deviant works. Many people were informed upon to d’Hémery in order to damage their patron in the never-ending social and political struggles. Only a few managed to make their livings purely through book sales, as the book sellers and publishers often did not offer royalties.
Most of d’Hémery’s work therefore concerned libels, attacks on important subjects whether profound of not. He protected his own patrons, and protected the king most of all; as a loss of confidence in him, whether because of his policies or his sex life, would result in a breakdown of social order. As noted though, d’Hémery was not humorless. Some of his entries were very dramatic, or showed fondness for certain writers (even those he had to bring in). He tracked their relationships, and judged them when they did not marry to further their careers. Even though they came from somewhat stable backgrounds, many writers lived in garrets, or the gutter, for a while before (if) they found a patron, and thus some marriages were to washerwomen or prostitutes. Clearly, the writers d’Hémery had charge of lived variegated lives, and the fact that he didn’t see them as a distinct social group gave him a clear view of that variance, perhaps clearer than ours.
Even if d’Hémery didn’t have a concept of an “intellectual,” the intellectuals themselves were developing one. This was especially true for those with a mission, and the most famous mission of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, is the subject of the fifth chapter. The book, on one level just an encyclopedia that told one the uses of various plants and such, was revolutionary because of its classification scheme. There had been many “trees of knowledge” in the past, dating back to medieval times, but the Encyclopédie, while drawing on its predecessors, trimmed some branches, and differentiated through things empirically knowable and things, including many religious and superstitious items, that were unknowable, and thus not much use in putting in an encyclopedia.
Epistemology is of course the study of the ordering of knowledge, and where thinkers draw borders that separate categories. Darnton, calling back to the folklore section a bit, notes how taboo and frightening subjects are those that cross borders: rats are feared while squirrels aren’t because rats are rodents that cross the border of the home; occult rituals use feces, hair, and fingernails because they are products of the body but no longer a living a part of it. Those who re-draw these intellectual borders, he says, are socially risky. This comparison doesn’t fit perfectly into the chapter’s flow, but I liked it anyway.
As I alluded to earlier, I scoff at the idea that this book was written for a general audience; this chapter has a lot of philosophical explanation that I don’t really have enough foundation laid to fully understand. The writers of the Encyclopédie drew heavily from Francis Bacon, but changed his classification to center philosophy as the all-encompassing trunk of the tree of knowledge (as Darnton tells it) instead of having it as just a branch; and gave a bigger role to “literary” (meaning intellectual) history and natural history than Bacon’s “ecclesiastical history.” Theologically, instead of separating revealed (i.e. inducted) and natural theology as Bacon does, they group both of them together and “subject them to reason,” resulting in the non-explicit dismissal of many theological arguments from authority. The Encyclopédie focused heavily on that which can be empirically proven.
Historically speaking, the writers of the Encyclopédie had a clear agenda, and it came across in their writings on history. My light background in the area tells me that much history before this was essentially biography of rulers; the Encyclopédie is also a Great Man story, but they subordinate all to philosophers. They view the path of the study of observed phenomena as running mainly through Bacon, René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, though they have to twist the thoughts and biographies of a few of these men to make this fit. From there, they move on to supporting luminaries, such as Huygens and Galileo. Overall their narrative is one of the forward march of progress, one which they themselves are heirs to. They created the cult of the philosophe, though that idea was only starting to disseminate into wider society. Darnton relates the story of a duel fought between two intellectuals at a theater; when the authorities come across it, they do not let it play out as they would a gentleman’s duel because they have no concept of a fight over the honor of writers; the two duelists both ended up in jail. Thus, society did not conceive of the philosophes the way they themselves did, though it was on its way. Importantly, the cult of the philosophe excluded clergy, as one of their primary drives was against the received wisdom of religion. This chapter is the counterpart to the previous on how intellectuals conceived of themselves, this time from the inside looking out.
The final chapter moves back down the ladder of historical importance a bit, as it concerns how 18th century Frenchmen read all of these books that were being produced. It concerns a man named Jean Ranson, a bourgeoise merchant from La Rochelle. He was a normal upper-middle-class dude, a pillar of his community who made a decent income and had many children. He was also an enormous fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ranson’s information comes from chatty letters he wrote to STN, a Swiss publisher (also glimpsed in the chapter on the print shop). These letters were book orders, but they were also a correspondence with Frédéric-Samuel Ostervald, an old professor of his who worked there. Ranson provided details of his family life and what Darnton is interested in: details of his reading habits.
Ranson liked to have finely-printed books, with good typesetting and paper quality (highly variable in an artisanal economy. He was interested mainly in four types of books:
Those on pedagogy or for teaching children, because he was part of a changing world where information was disseminated through such intellectualism instead of through traditional folk knowledge;
Those on religion, as he was a religious man; he was not a theologian though, he was more interested in Calvinist sermons;
Those general nonfiction works on history and travel and the like, what I think of as un-challenging dad books: critical of some aspects of society but not radical, more moralistic; and
Belles-lettres, especially those by Rousseau.
Ranson was not the only Rousseau fan; in fact, if this book were written now, in 2021, I would hope that it would compare Rousseau fans to modern literary fandoms. This popularity came about as a result of Rousseau’s ideas on writing or reading. He thought that readers should absorb entire books into their way of life, not just treat them as amusements. Darnton discusses the idea that in the 18th century people switched from intensive reading, where they read deeply of a few books, to extensive reading, where readers hurried from book to book. He rejects this as a concept, as Rousseau was part of the economy of the latter, but advocated reading in the manner of the former. The comparison is made a couple of times that Rousseau wants his readers to read every book as if it is the Bible. He wants them to absorb the entire book into their life, and thus learn to live in the way he suggests.
The book that eared Rousseau his acclaim is Julie; or, The New Héloïse. It is an epistolary novel about two provincial teens who fall in love. It doesn’t have much of what we would recognize as a plot (apparently), but is highly sentimental, as the teens fall in love, sin, suffer, and redeem themselves. Rousseau presents the letters as real, though he raises and then dances around criticism that he made it all up. He instead asks his readers to look beyond the deception to the true emotions presented, emotions that his readers can all relate to.
The presentation isn’t the only thing that Rousseau had to square. He was highly condemnatory of high culture, viewing Parisian high society, le monde, as decadent and corrupt. How, then, could he have written a novel? He was able to because this novel was a workaround of the high culture. It was not a sophisticated novel meant to be examined for layered meaning, it was a novel that connected his soul to the reader, who again was to read it deeply instead of discarding it and moving on to the next work. Rousseau told his readers that right way to live was as a provincial recluse or a child, as the characters in his novel; and the right way to read is contemplatively, and alone. Darnton quotes Rousseau to call me out on p. 372, when he says, “when one lives alone, one does not hurry through books to parade one’s reading; one varies them less and meditates on them more.”
This impartation of values worked very well for Rousseau’s literary career. He received (and saved for posterity) reams of letters of people from all literate stations of life enthusing over Héloïse, and how it made them sob and feel such emotion, how they connected so deeply with the book just as he had wanted, and how they shaped their own lives based on what it taught them. Women sought him out, sure that, even if the work was fiction, it came from a real place within Rousseau. One of his fans was Jean Ranson. Beyond his interest in Rousseau’s works, his novels and his theories on child-rearing and inculcating virtue in children, Ranson was very interested in the man himself. His professor, Ostervald, met Rousseau on occasion during his book-related travels in Paris, and Ranson was always asking for his latest work, the best editions of his work, and any scraps of gossip or anything. Regardless of one’s feelings on Rousseau and the Romanticism that he inspired in reaction to the Enlightenment, it is easy to be touched by Ranson’s sincere puppy-dog enthusiasm, and his sadness upon the death of “l’Ami Jean-Jacques” in 1778. Many people must have been sad at the death of the author who opened his soul to them. Darnton uses this enthusiasm and Rousseau’s clearly-delineated theories on reading to examine how people must have read in the era.
Those are the six episodes of 18th century French cultural history investigated. At the time of the book’s writing, history (in French studies, anyway) was based around the idea that culture arose from the social order, which itself arose from the conditions imposed by economics and demographic pressures. The French worked through this prism on quantifying culture in a structuralist or Marxist way, though things never quite clicked and the reason behind, for example, the quantifiable reduction in prayers made in church, was open to interpretation. Darnton therefore argues for a turn to anthropological methods instead. He admits that some of the evidence he provides may also be open to interpretation, and the individual examples cannot be proven to be representative, but he thinks it is a worthwhile investigation nonetheless. Historians should accommodate the fuzziness and lack of certainty, and he suggests that, as he did, they look for the greatest points of opacity to enter. If they can figure out why a mass execution of cats is funny, they may be able to enter the minds of people long dead in a world long dead. Isn’t that all any of us are looking for with history?
I thought that this book was great, though a quick outside skim tells me that some elements and theories are contested. I have become a big fan of this micro-history genre (though again it doesn’t mention Ginzburg or anything), and I am excited to see where I can follow it next. Perhaps even to the United States?