The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History

“And so it goes, from rape and sodomy to incest and cannibalism. Far from veiling their message with symbols, the storytellers of eighteenth-century France portrayed a world of raw and naked brutality.”

This quote expresses the extent to which French folklore reflects the harsh reality of peasant life in 18th-century France. More than that, the fact that peasants refused to veil some of the most graphic elements of their stories in symbolism and innuendo suggests that efforts by 20th-century psychologists to parse these tales for hidden messages of the collective unconscious were done in vain. Finally, this example offers a counterpoint to Contat’s cat massacre, which by necessity is rich with symbolism and hidden meanings.

“Event history, histoire événementielle, generally took place over the heads of the peasantry, in the remote world of Paris and Versailles. While ministers came and went and battles raged, life in the village continued unperturbed, much as it had always been since times beyond the reach of memory."

The author’s histoire des mentalités approach sits in opposition to event history, in which history is sorted by major happenings like wars, rebellions, and deposed monarchs. While he doesn’t explicitly dismiss event history outright, Darnton criticizes its usefulness in determining the attitudes of ordinary individuals. While this is especially true of the peasantry, whose lives were marked by stable misery for centuries, later chapters show that the attitudes of other individuals like the anonymous bourgeois also fail to fit neatly into the historical narratives that often emerge from scholarship devoted to event history.

“In most of the tales, wish fulfillment turns into a program for survival, not a fantasy of escape.”

Darnton comments on the extent to which the heroes of French folktales, when presented by a magical creature with three wishes, are hardly ambitious in their requests. Rather, they tend to wish for little more than a decent meal. This reflects both the degree to which hunger dominated the life of the French peasant and how resigned the peasantry was to its lot in life.

“By out-tricking the tricksters, he arrives at the same point that his German counterpart reached by hard work, obedience, and self-degradation."

At times it can seem as if the differences between French and other European folktales are more trivial than Darnton suggests. Not here, however, for there is a strong and undeniable divide between the values exhibited by French folk heroes versus German folk heroes. This elevation of tricksterism as the ultimate trait reflects, in Darnton’s mind, a universal idea of Frenchness that is expressed across the entire social structure of 18th-century France and beyond.

“Disaster strikes fortuitously. Like the Black Death, it cannot be predicted or explained. it must simply be endured. More than half of the thirty-five recorded versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” end like the version recounted earlier, with the wolf devouring the girl. She had done nothing to deserve such a fate; for in the peasant tales, unlike those of Perrault and the Grimms, she did not disobey her mother or fail to read the signs of an implicit moral order written in the world around her. She simply walked into the jaws of death.”

Across French folktales there runs an enormously strong current of amorality and arbitrariness. From many of them, few practical or moral lessons can be obtained, reflecting once again the resignation of the French peasant class. To the extent that lessons exist as all, they generally reflect the harshness of rural peasant life or showcase the value of tricksterism in navigating it.

“Tricksterism is a kind of holding operation. It permits the underdog to grasp some marginal advantage by playing on the vanity and stupidity of his superiors. But the trickster works within the system, turning its weak points to his advantage and therefore ultimately confirming it. Moreover, he may always meet someone trickier than himself, even in the ranks of the rich and powerful. The out-tricked trickster demonstrates the vanity of expecting a final victory. Ultimately then, tricksterism expressed an orientation to the world rather than a latent strain of radicalism”

Given that the French Revolution inevitably looms over any discussion of 18th-century France, Darnton feels it necessary to point out that despite the prevalence of French folk narratives in which the weak defeat the strong, this should not be confused for a revolutionary tenor among the peasant class. Resignation is the ultimate tone taken on by these tales, an attitude reflected in the fact that the rural peasantry played a marginal role in the 1789 Revolution. Considering how little their lives improved following the French Revolution, that sense of resignation was not misplaced.

“Frenchness exists. As the awkwardness of the proverbs’ translations suggests, it is a distinct cultural style; and it conveys a particular view of the world—a sense that life is hard, that you had better not have any illusions about selflessness in your fellow men, that clearheadedness and quick wit are necessary to protect what little you can extract from your surroundings, and that moral nicety will get you nowhere. Frenchness makes for ironic detachment. It tends to be negative and disabused. Unlike its Anglo-Saxon opposite, the Protestant ethic, it offers no formula for conquering the world. It is a defense strategy, well suited to an oppressed peasantry or an occupied country.”

Some readers may view the author’s invocation of a universal idea of Frenchness as problematic. For one, it seems to contradict Darnton’s earlier assertion that there are no typical Frenchmen or Frenchwomen. Moreover, the label may strike some as stereotypical or outright prejudicial. At the same time, this air of ironic detachment and the enormous value placed on cleverness can be seen across the book, particularly in d’Hémery’s evaluations of various authors and even in Diderot and d’Alembert’s epistemological strategies.

“Our own inability to get the joke is an indication of the distance that separates us from the workers of preindustrial Europe. The perception of that distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation, for anthropologists have found that the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize that you are not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. By getting the joke of the great cat massacre, it may be possible to ‘get’ a basic ingredient of artisanal culture under the Old Regime.”

Darnton elaborates on the methodology he introduced earlier with respect to the great cat massacre. In studying civilizations, whether hundreds or thousands of years old, Darnton believes strongly that a scholar must maintain an acknowledgement of the otherness of these people. To assume their thought or behavioral patterns resembled our own in a significant way is to make a critical error in our attempts to understand the past. Therefore, incomprehensible events like the cat massacre should not be ignored or swept under the rug as aberrations but rather probed and dissected with sincerity and rigor.

“It showed that workers could manipulate symbols in their idiom as effectively as poets did in print.”

This is yet another example of how qualities traditionally applied to certain classes in 18th-century France were far more fluid than most people realize. One does not expect to see one of the most vivid uses of symbolism to emerge from the artisan class, for example. In turn, a modern observer may be surprised to find the police inspector of the fourth essay to be such an accomplished amateur literary critic. Yet these and other examples reflect a varied richness in 18th-century France that resists any attempt to be sorted along traditional boundaries of the era’s social structure.

“Nowhere, except perhaps in Lille and one or two sectors of other cities, did the social historians find the dynamic, self-conscious, industrializing class imagined by the Marxists.”

Darnton frequently criticizes the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution and French society more generally. In his view, Marxists paint an inaccurate portrait of the bourgeoisie in 18th-century France that has little in common with reality. While Darnton is perhaps right to find fault with Marxist conceptions of the bourgeois as a vibrant industrial class, it should be noted that Karl Marx’s interpretation was based not only on 18th-century France but also the early 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution did in fact create a large bourgeois population of industry captains.

“Our author used an antiquated set of categories, emptied them of their old meanings, and rearranged them in such a way as to convey the shape of a social order like the one that would emerge openly in the nineteenth century: a society of ‘notables’ dominated by a mixture of the old elite and the nouveaux riches; a Balzacian society in which the basic force was wealth, but wealth was derived from traditional sources—land, offices, rentes, and trade—rather than from an industrial revolution.”

While the anonymous bourgeois’s conception of 18th-century French social order diverges significantly from reality, it is important to Darnton because it shapes how the bourgeois views himself. This is a critical question in determining the causes and intended function of the French Revolution and casts doubt on the notion that the Revolution was fed by a sincere desire to help the underclass. Rather, it was an effort to build a world where power was conferred by wealth as opposed to birth, and one in which men of means like the anonymous bourgeois could expect to thrive.

“D’Hémery had a more intimate knowledge of the eighteenth-century world of letters than any historian can hope to acquire. His reports provide the earliest known survey of writers as a social group, and they do so at a critical moment of literary history.”

Darnton again effectively justifies his unorthodox methodology by highlighting the extent to which one of the greatest troves of information for understanding the intellectual scene in the mid-18th century comes from an incredibly unlikely source. While a traditional event historian may be expected to pore over the works of Rousseau and Diderot in an effort to understand this particular moment in Western thought, Darnton seeks out less expected documents, specifically the police dossier of Inspector d’Hémery. Moreover, by looking at an outsider’s take on the Enlightenment, Darnton comes to a better understanding of how that movement’s ideas percolated through ordinary communities.

“Favart sets out to make his fortune like a hero from the fairy tales. He is small, poor, and clever (‘Signalement: short, blond, and with a very pretty face.’) After all kinds of adventures in the land of giants—and the maréchal de Saxe was probably the most powerful man in France, aside from the king, in the 1740s—he wins the girl and they live happily ever after in the Comédie Italienne. The structure of the story corresponded to that of many popular tales.”

In a clever bit of symmetry, Darnton points out how the life story of a Parisian intellectual reflects the narrative of various French folktales. Like the heroes of these stories, Favart ultimately prevails using his wits and cleverness, and like the peasants of the first essay, d’Hémery does not judge his subject for ethical lapses committed in the process of winning over the nobleman’s wife. As such, these parallel tales offer more evidence of Darnton’s earlier assertion regarding the existence of Frenchness.

“D’Alembert urged all philosophes to embrace a life of chastity and poverty. But d’Hémery knew that that was more than flesh would bear.”

Despite his piety, d’Hémery is surprisingly sympathetic toward the materialism and lasciviousness of various authors. Rather than judge them for their misdeeds, he frequently praises them for the cleverness with which they navigated the unforgiving, nascent literary marketplace in 18th-century France. In addition to reflecting once again the ideal of Frenchness, d’Hémery’s attitude is perhaps not what a modern reader might expect from a bureaucrat in the 1700s and is therefore of great interest to Darnton.

“The police could not situate the writer within any conventional category because he had not yet assumed his modern form, freed from protectors, integrated in the literary marketplace, and committed to a career. Given the conceptual cloudiness surrounding this uncertain position, what sort of status did he have?”

In commenting on the intellectual’s murky position within the social structure of 18th-century France, Darnton reveals how the boundaries of the Old Regime’s supposedly stratified society were far more blurred than readers might expect. With fathers who often came from the lower levels of the Third Estate, and with protectors who belonged to the First and Second, writers occupied a strange social netherworld that is difficult to classify. This further complicates the conventional historiography of the French Revolution, given that these very intellectuals were the ones whose ideas were so influential to the rebellion’s participants.

“D’Alembert presented history as the triumph of civilization and civilization as the work of men of letters. The last section of the Discours préliminaire propounded a kind of great-man view of history in which all the great men were philosophers.”

In many ways d’Alembert’s epistemological strategy is anathema to a historian like Darnton, for whom great men are of much less importance than ordinary individuals. Nevertheless, it is crucial for him to unpack d’Alembert’s approach, given the contrast between d’Alembert and Rousseau that Darnton explores in the following essay. The cult of the philosopher that d’Alembert sought to erect had the consequence of making philosophy a fashionable pursuit, which in turn led Rousseau to all but abandon the Enlightenment community.

“D’Alembert acknowledged the existence of real generals waging real wars, but he wrote as if there were no history but intellectual history and the philosophes were its prophets.”

Having effectively subjugated religion in his and Diderot’s diagram of knowledge, d’Alembert pushes things even further in his preface. In his view philosophers should displace not only priests and clergymen atop the epistemological hierarchy but also generals and heads of state. Given the fiercely ideological and philosophical tenor of the revolutionaries, one can see how d’Alembert’s strategy played out in 1789 and the years that followed during the French Revolution.

“It succeeded in dethroning the ancient queen of the sciences and in elevating philosophy to her place. Far from being a neutral compendium of information, therefore, the modern Summa shaped knowledge in such a way as to remove it from the clergy and to put it in the hands of intellectuals committed to the Enlightenment. The ultimate triumph of this strategy came with the secularization of education and the emergence of the modern scholarly disciplines during the nineteenth century. But the key engagement took place in the 1750s, when the Encyclopedists recognized that knowledge was power and, by mapping the world of knowledge, set out to conquer it.”

Here Darnton draws the most direct line between the work of Diderot and d’Alembert and the French Revolution. He almost seems to frame the publication of The Encyclopédie as the opening shot of the Revolution, the bullet that sparked the long process of secularization in France and Europe more broadly. As stated earlier, the fifth essay may feel out of place with the rest of the book, which is more concerned with ordinary individuals. Yet by effectively conveying the extent to which The Encyclopédie challenged the natural social order, Darnton captures how an ordinary individual living in 18th-century France might have reacted to it.

“It does not amuse, instruct, improve, or help to while away the time: by the imbrication of narrative and the cacophony of sound, it protects souls.”

Darnton explores the role of reading in Balinese funereal rituals. While this may not seem to fit into his broader narrative of 18th-century France, it is relevant for expressing the diverse and often unexpected roles that reading occupied in past civilizations. The opaque Balinese reading ritual reminds modern observers that the thought patterns of ancient Southeast Asians and 18th-century French individuals alike cannot always be easily divined or compared to our own attitudes and behaviors, which is a key theme of the book.

“Instead of hiding behind the narrative and pulling strings to manipulate the characters in the manner of Voltaire, Rousseau threw himself into his works and expected the reader to do the same. He transformed the relationship between writer and reader, between reader and text.”

Darnton places huge importance on Rousseau’s ability to forge a lateral relationship between himself and his readers. For one, it starkly contrasts with d’Alembert’s elevation of himself and other philosophers above both the reading public and the clergy, the nobility, and virtually anyone else who lays claim to the sphere of knowledge. More importantly, it situates Rousseau as the bridge between the more reserved, empirical, and methodical tenets of the Age of Enlightenment and the unfettered sincerity and emotion of the Romantic Era.

“These distinctions have a social and political edge to them, for Rousseau saw literature as an element in a power system peculiar to the Old Regime. He rejected it, all of it, belles-lettres along with the beau monde; and in doing so he broke with the philosophes. In his eyes, Diderot, d’Alembert, and the other Encyclopedists belonged to the fashionable world of theaters and salons. Philosophy itself had become a fashion, the ultimate in Parisian sophistication; and as it spread beyond Paris, it endangered the healthiest segments of the body politic.”

Darnton neatly encapsulates the reasons behind Rousseau’s break with the luminaries of the French Enlightenment. Philosophy, in Rousseau’s mind, was of far more use to the common class, who braved enormous challenges in their everyday lives that were entirely foreign to the fashionable set ensconced in their salons and reading rooms. It was this very migration of philosophy away from the everyday and onto a pedestal exaltation that arguably caused Rousseau to view the field as an agent in the expression of tyranny against the underclass.

“He asked the reader to suspend his disbelief and to cast aside the old way of reading in order to enter into the letters as if they really were the effusion of innocent hearts at the foot of the Alps. This kind of reading required a leap of faith—of faith in the author, who somehow must have suffered through the passions of his characters and forged them into a truth that transcends literature.”

By demanding a leap of faith from readers, Rousseau positioned them to read his work less like traditional novels that offered entertainment and distraction and more as they would the Bible. In Darnton’s telling, it is by this method—a strategy not unlike the one used by d’Alembert—that Rousseau inspired such deep fervor and devotion among his readers. It also reflects Darnton’s assertion that the way individuals read is often as important as what they read.

“I admit in the end that I do find [Ranson] exemplary, not because he conforms to any statistical pattern but because he was exactly the ‘other’ addressed in Rousseau’s writing. He embodied both the ideal reader envisioned in the text and the real reader who bought the books. And the way he brought those roles together demonstrated the effectiveness of Rousseauistic rhetoric.”

From Darnton’s characterization of Ranson as “exemplary,” one can draw a number of conclusions related to the book’s themes and preoccupations. The author calls Ranson “ideal” for Rousseau’s purposes, but by extension he is also ideal for Darnton. As an “other” who did not necessarily conform to conventional notions of the attitudes of bourgeois readers, Ranson is a perfect subject for Darnton's stated methodology. At the same time, Ranson supports the author’s contention that there was no such thing as a typical bourgeois or peasant in 18th-century France.