The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History

The conventional description of the social order in France’s Old Regime is downright draconian in its simplicity. The class structure included three Estates: the 130,000 members of the clergy were slotted into the First Estate, which made up 0.5% of the total population. The nobility and royalty—aside from the king who stood above all—were sorted into the Second Estate, which made up around 1.5% of the population. The remaining 27 million individuals were members of the Third Estate. That included the professionals, merchants, and rentiers of the bourgeoisie, artisans, day laborers, peasant farmers, and indigents.

Yet again and again, Darnton sees reflected in his subjects a dramatic blurring of these lines. Take for instance Contat’s characterization of his tyrannical master as a “bourgeois.” Technically speaking, the master belonged to the artisan class. Despite this, his wealth and urbanity signified to Contat that, at least culturally speaking, the master belonged to the bourgeoisie. In turn, consider the anonymous bourgeois’s attitude toward rich artisans like Contat’s master. He explicitly separates artisans from his own three-estate formulation and bemoans the fact that some wealthy artisans can afford the same silver table settings that he enjoys. The anonymous bourgeois takes things even further by rejecting the union of the bourgeoisie and the rest of the common people under a single estate heading. While the legal and political distinctions between the estates were very real and undeniable, the anonymous bourgeois’s lived experience within the social order suggests that the lifestyles of the nobility, the upper bourgeoisie, and the wealthiest artisans were not so different. Meanwhile, the lifestyle of a lower clergy member—despite existing in an estate that was collectively imbued with great political power—probably had more in common with that of an apprentice or day laborer. The author notes this in his reading of The Description, writing, “Thus wealth, status, and power did not join lock-step in a single social code. There were complexities and contradictions in the human comedy as it paraded in The Description” (121).

The social order’s fluidity is also seen in the experiences of France’s intellectual set. As no term yet existed for their class, intellectuals occupied a sort of societal no-man’s-land. In many cases, they were the sons and daughters of shopkeepers and artisans, they were read by the bourgeoisie, and they received their wages from protectors within the nobility. This lack of status is strongly reflected in d’Hémery’s tendency to characterize intellectuals as “boys” (173) even when they are well into their thirties and have wives and children.

In short, the surprisingly murky class distinctions in 18th-century France question any simple explanation of the French Revolution. Given the fluidity and unsteadiness of all these terms and classifications, the conception of the Revolution as a union between bourgeois and peasant propelled forward by Enlightenment intellectuals against the clergy and nobility becomes incredibly muddled.

The author’s inclusion of the fifth essay, a close reading of The Encyclopédie’s epistemological arguments, may strike some as out of place in a book about the experiences and attitudes of ordinary individuals living in 18th-century France. There is certainly nothing ordinary about Diderot or d’Alembert, and the extent to which their ideas were absorbed by ordinary Parisians was already explored in the previous essay on d’Hémery’s police files. Yet the fifth essay plays a crucial part in Darnton’s examination of the different roles occupied by works of philosophy and literature. For the pair of editors behind The Encyclopédie, philosophy was about more than answering deep questions of knowledge and existence and edifying readers. To them, philosophy was a full-blown strategy in a war of ideas. Diderot’s antipathy toward religion is calculatedly expressed in his deliberate subjugation of theology to philosophy in his tree of knowledge, especially when compared to Bacon’s earlier formulation of the same concepts. D’Alembert, meanwhile, is even more aggressive in his philosophical tactics, as he elevates himself and other members of his clan to the role of supreme protectors, policing the sphere of knowledge to keep out religious ideas.

Rousseau, meanwhile, stands in stark contrast to Diderot and d’Alembert. Though a contributor to The Encyclopédie, Rousseau formally broke with the pair and the rest of the Enlightenment set over the extent to which his colleagues’ self-aggrandizement and philosophical strategizing had turned philosophy into a fashionable trend among urban sophisticates. In Rousseau’s view, by elevating themselves and keeping philosophy out of reach of the common man, Enlightenment philosophers had deprived those who most stood to benefit from philosophical ideas. In response, Rousseau attempted to apply a different function to writing, one that was more in line with the egalitarian concepts undergirding Enlightenment thought. In Darnton’s telling, “[Rousseau] would invent another cultural form, an anti-literary literature, in which he could defend the cause of virtue by appealing directly to the unsophisticated” (231). Moreover, how readers consumed this literature was more in line with how the pious read the Bible, demanding a “a leap of faith” (233) from readers.

Finally, Darnton sees in Ranson’s habits a shift in how 18th-century readers consumed writing of all genres. Beyond serving as mere entertainment or distraction, books of pedagogy as well as Rousseau’s novels and treatises provided Ranson with an instructive framework for how to be a better husband and father. According to Darnton, “Ranson did not read in order to enjoy literature but to cope with life and especially family life, exactly as Rousseau intended” (241). This tendency is strongly echoed in French peasants’ approach to folktales, which served as coping mechanisms by depicting the harshness of everyday life and the strategies for navigating it.

In short, for Diderot, writing was a strategy; for Rousseau, writing was an emotional appeal and an act of faith; and for ordinary readers, writing offered avenues for living better lives or coping with their existing lives. Finally, in a dramatic reordering of Rousseau’s literary priorities, the Jacobin Club viewed his writings as justification for a bloody rebellion, reflecting the mutable nature of how individuals process texts.