55 pages • 1 hour read
Robert DarntonThe Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Darnton begins by briefly detailing the objective and methodology behind the book. In short, he is investigating the attitudes of ordinary individuals living in France during the 18th century. While many scholars view history as a series of political events and exchanges of power, Darnton is more interested in writing an histoire des mentalités, or “history of attitudes.” That’s because, in his view, most major historical events have a relatively minor effect on the lives of everyday individuals.
Given that most French citizens were illiterate in the 1700s, Darnton borrows tactics from anthropologists who study ancient peoples. As such, he relies on sources like folktales, police reports, and oral histories to paint a picture of 18th-century French life, both in the city and the countryside. Moreover, Darnton argues that the key to studying the attitudes of any past civilization involves spotting events and attitudes that seem to defy reason, like the mass slaughter of cats that gives the book its title. He sums up his methodology by writing, “When we cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are on to something” (5).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose”
Darnton offers a comparative analysis of the folktales shared among peasants across 18th-century Europe and of what these comparisons say about the attitudes of the French peasantry versus that of other regions. He begins with a retelling of an early French version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” aiming to question some commonly held interpretations of the tale. For example, prominent German psychologist Erich Fromm was convinced that the perceived menstrual symbolism of the red hood, along with the warnings delivered to the heroine by her mother, indicate that the story is clearly a moralistic fable designed to warn newly pubescent girls about the dangers of sex.
As the author points out, however, the early versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” shared by French peasants contain neither a red hood nor a warning from the mother. The torments inflicted upon the heroine by the wolf—which in this case include feeding her own grandmother to her and forcing her to perform a striptease—proceed from entirely arbitrary events. Listeners may well have interpreted the story as a warning of the grotesque dangers that await young women in the grim world of the French peasantry, but it offers no moral prescription for how to avoid them.
Nor is “Little Red Riding Hood” the only French folktale to include abhorrent and violent taboos, none of which are veiled by the kind of symbolism 20th-century psychologists like Carl Jung tend to apply to these stories. From “Sleeping Beauty” to “Cinderella,” French folktales are littered with examples of rape, sodomy, incest, and cannibalism that rarely survive their later transcriptions into the written word. To Darnton, this suggests that “the storytellers of eighteenth-century France portrayed a world of raw and naked brutality” (15).
For 18th-century French peasants, the world was raw and brutal indeed. From sunrise to sunset, men, women, and children labored on farms in a state of chronic malnutrition. Hunger was their main preoccupation, an assertion reflected in folktales by the fact that when heroes receive a magical wish, in most cases they wish for little more than a decent meal. Families did not own their land and thus were required to pay a variety of dues, ground rates, and taxes as part of the French system of seignorialism, a quasi-feudal system that dramatically inhibited upward mobility. Other major expenditures included tithes to the local church. It is therefore telling, Darnton writes, that the villains of French folktales often take the form of seignorial and ecclesiastical collectors.
This supports another of Darnton’s assertions about French folktales: that compared to German, Italian, and English versions of the same stories, French folktales reflect challenges and horrors found in real life, often with little or no supernatural elements surrounding them. Even the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood” reflects the very real threat of wild canines in the French countryside. The preponderance of stepmothers in French folktales, for example, is no accident. While life expectancies for everyone were low, French fathers were far more likely to remarry than French mothers. It also makes sense that primogeniture is a frequent source of conflict in French folktales like “Puss in Boots,” given that the laws and customs surrounding inheritance in France tended to over-favor firstborn sons. Moreover, considering the extent to which a new baby can financially decimate a peasant family, the abandoning, killing, and eating of children is a common theme in folktales as well. All of this, Darnton argues, suggests that French storytelling is less a form of escapism and more a way of coping with everyday life.
These harsh conditions are hardly unique to peasants in France, however. What sets French folktales apart—and what, in Darnton’s mind, best illustrates French attitudes—is how these stories are resolved compared to their counterparts in other European countries. One particularly instructive example is the story of “Godfather Death.” In the German version, the hero prevails over death through obedience and goodness. In the French version, however, the hero conquers death—at least for a time—through trickery and guile, which were a French peasant’s best and perhaps only tools to protect what little they had. A similar pattern can be seen in “The Basket of Figs.” The tale’s German protagonist is a kind and happy idiot who wields a magic wand. By contrast, the French hero survives primarily by his wits and cunning. Idiocy is almost never tolerated in French folk heroes and is generally reserved for villains like clergymen and stepmothers.
Nor is cunning ever denounced, morally or otherwise, in the denouements of French folktales. In fact, most French tales—like the French version of “Little Red Riding Hood”—depict a world as amoral and arbitrary as the one they wake up in every morning. Unlike the extreme piety of German folk heroes—which is counterbalanced by an extreme tendency toward the macabre—the protagonists of French folk heroes reflect a value system in which it is rarely possible for the weak to prevail over the powerful without the occasional lapse in ethics.
Darnton is careful to point out that despite the French tendency to depict heroes from the underclass outwitting the rich in relatively realistic ways, this should not be interpreted as signs of some incipient revolution brewing in the French countryside. Victories are usually modest and short-lived, and the status quo quickly preserved. Moreover, the tricksterism of the French folk hero generally works within the system of the Old Regime, thus confirming it.
From all these folk stories, Darnton attempts to hit upon a universal idea of Frenchness. He writes, “Frenchness makes for ironic detachment. It tends to be negative and disabused. [...] It is a defense strategy, well suited to an oppressed peasantry or an occupied country” (61).
Finally, at the end of the chapter, the author reprints the French and German versions of a folktale known as “The Three Gifts” to provide a side-by-side comparison. In the German version, the boy protagonist uses magic and cunning in a supposedly virtuous way to punish an unscrupulous Jew. By contrast, the French protagonist uses the same tools against authority figures like a clergyman and his miserly stepmother.
Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis
Before delving into the essays themselves, it is worth analyzing and interrogating the author’s methodology. In his Introduction, Darnton announces his book as an example of l’histoire des mentalités, which according to him has no English counterpart as of his writing of The Great Cat Massacre. These histories of attitudes can be traced to Marc Bloch’s 1924 essay Les Rois Thaumaturges, which explores the attitudes of individuals living in France and England during the Middle Ages by analyzing the widely held belief that the king could cure diseases with his touch. This approach prizes the experience of ordinary individuals as a way of revealing the cultural qualities of communities for which most big historical events and waves of intellectual thought feel very distant. In comparing l’histoire des mentalités to traditional history, Darnton writes, “Where the historian of ideas traces the filiation of formal thought from philosopher to philosopher, the ethnographic historian studies the way ordinary people make sense of the world” (3).
While the author’s approach is admirable in the attention it pays to ordinary individuals, it is not without significant limitations, some of which Darnton himself identifies. Again and again, he points out that the subjects of his research—from the participants of the cat massacre to the anonymous bourgeois—cannot be said to typify attitudes in 18th-century France because there may be no such thing as a typical 18th-century Frenchman or Frenchwoman. According to American historian Andrew Port, this issue of accurate representation—or rather misrepresentation—has helped precipitate a decline in the field of l’histoire des mentalités, which he calls microhistory, in the 21st century. Quoting historian Wendy Goldman, Port writes, “Today, historians seem more interested in identity, nationality, ethnicity, globalisation, and transnational histories, which reflect in turn preoccupations of our contemporary world.” (Port, Andrew. “History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory.” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. 2015.) Moreover, Darnton admits that because the book focuses on the more eccentric and idiosyncratic artifacts of 18th-century France, readers should not expect it to offer anything close to a comprehensive overview of attitudes found among all social and geographical groups living in France’s Old Regime, the period that extends roughly from the end of the Middle Ages to the French Revolution in 1789. With these limitations in mind, the reader can approach the book as a collection of curiosities that may or may not reflect broader patterns in the cultural history of 18th-century France to varying degrees.
Moving forward, Darnton begins his discussion of French folktales by reprinting an early French iteration of “Little Red Riding Hood” that predates the earliest printed version compiled by folklorist Charles Perrault. With its arbitrary acts of violence and sexual abuse set against a cruel and amoral world, “Little Red Riding Hood”—along with dozens of other tales the author mentions—reflects the reality faced by French peasants. Under the seigneurial system—in which 80% of the French population toiled from dawn until dusk only to pay extensive dues to landowners—the life of a peasant was impossibly brutal. That this brutality persisted virtually unabated for centuries reflects one of Darnton’s most important themes and a key principle underlying his methodology: That for the vast majority of individuals across history, most of the events that attract attention from historians have little effect on everyday life. The author writes, “Event history, histoire événementielle, generally took place over the heads of the peasantry, in the remote world of Paris and Versailles” (24).
These stories are one of Darnton’s chief pieces of evidence in his argument that folktales reflect the broader French attitude of “ironic detachment” (61) necessary for physical and emotional survival. The author’s blunt assertion that “Frenchness exists” (61) may strike some as stereotyping or even outright prejudice. Moreover, it seems to contradict the author’s earlier assertion that there is no such thing as a typical French peasant or bourgeois. Even he admits that “‘Frenchness’ may seem to be an intolerably vague idea” (61). At the same time, this quality of passive detachment emerges in a number of French literary and cultural forms. Perhaps the most famous is the flâneur. Popularized by French poet Charles Baudelaire, the flâneur is a “saunterer” who wanders the city as a passive observer, at once part of and separate from society. This trend of trenchant passivity arguably persists to this day, as evidenced by a 2018 BBC article in which a Frenchman expresses his philosophy on Americans versus the French: “You Americans live in the faire [to do]. The avoir [to have]. In France, we live in the être [to be].” (Monaco, Emily. “Why the French Don’t Show Excitement.” BBC, 5 Nov. 2018. http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181104-why-the-french-dont-show-excitement.)
How, then, does one square this passive, almost defeatist quality the author identifies among 18th-century peasants with the French Revolution, one of the most momentous events of social upheaval in world history? While none of Darnton’s subjects are seen at any time during or after the 1789 overthrowing of the French monarchy, the event looms over the entire book. The author writes that while some may be tempted to view the many folktales in which French heroes outsmart authority figures through trickery as reflective of revolutionary sentiments among peasants, this would be a mistake. To Darnton, a peasant’s conception of antiauthoritarian cunning is merely a holding pattern:
“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. It provided a way of coping with a harsh society instead of a formula for overthrowing it” (59).
This perspective—that the peasantry lacks a revolutionary spirit—may hold true given more recent revisionist scholarship on the French Revolution. While for much of the 19th and 20th centuries historians viewed the Revolution within a Marxist paradigm of the poor overthrowing the rich, scholars like Alfred Cobban characterize the conflict as a political revolution, not a social one. Under this view, the chief proponents of the Revolution were wealthy landowners and other members of the upper bourgeoisie who possessed economic power but envied the political power of the clergy and nobility. While the underclass undoubtedly played a role in the Revolution, the reordering of society that came in its wake largely benefited those who were already wealthy. Cobban further argues that the French Revolution does little to improve the lot of the peasantry and attaches more importance to the broader Industrial Revolution of the 19th century as a transformative force in the lives of France’s poor. This view also supports Darnton’s own contention about the stability of peasant life through centuries of war, plague, and even revolution.
