The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History is a nonfiction essay collection published in 1984 by American historian Robert Darnton. Using folktales, oral histories, letters, and police reports, Darnton explores the attitudes and behaviors of 18th-century French men and women, from indigent peasants to the most celebrated minds of the Enlightenment. The book takes its title from a perplexing incident in the late 1730s, in which a group of Parisian printers’ apprentices spent a day indiscriminately slaughtering cats with riotous abandon.

This study guide refers to the 2009 edition published by Basic Books.

Plot Summary

In the Introduction, Darnton lays out the methodology he uses to explore the cultural history of 18th-century France. Rather than engage in “event history” (24)—wherein the scholar identifies major political and social upheavals and attempts to draw cultural conclusions from these events—Darnton sets out to reveal the attitudes and lived experiences of individuals who inhabited France in the years leading up to the French Revolution. To do so, he borrows various tactics from anthropologists, who in studying ancient and often illiterate cultures must rely on novel strategies to understand them.

Before arriving at the titular massacre, the author explores French folklore traditions in an essay titled “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose.” He identifies a number of shared qualities across the French versions of countless folktales that set them apart from their other European counterparts. For example, where German folk heroes tend to triumph over hardship through obedience and piety, the French heroes in corresponding tales rely primarily on cunning. While Darnton is careful not to make cultural generalizations based on these observations, he allows that the folktales reflect a strong strain of “Frenchness” (61) that expresses detached irony and trickery as defense mechanisms in a cruel world.

Next, the author explores the book’s titular incident in “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin.” In the late 1730s, the life of Nicholas Contat—like most printers’ apprentices in Paris—was exceedingly difficult. In a memoir, Contat explains that he and his friend Léveillé were fed rancid cat food and struggled to sleep at night amid the shrieks of howling alley cats. Meanwhile, their master and his wife kept cats as pets, feeding them roast fowl. As an act of revenge, Léveillé climbed outside the master’s bedroom window one night and mimicked a howling cat for many hours. The next day the master instructed Léveillé and Nicholas to kill the cats who lived in the adjacent alley. Joined by their colleagues, the pair of apprentices killed not only the alley cats but any cat they could find over the course of many hours, including the wife’s favorite pet. They even strung the dead cats up and held a mock trial to punish the animals for their crimes. To Contat, it was perhaps the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

To interpret why this horrific event was so funny to the apprentices, Darnton peels back the layers of the “joke.” On the surface it was a labor revolt against the master over the apprentices’ poor wages and living conditions. Going deeper, cats signify both sex and witchcraft, and Darnton reads the stringing up of cats outside the master’s domicile as a way of shaming both the master and his wife, whom Contat suspected of having an affair with her priest. Far from an act of senseless sadism, Darnton views the cat massacre as an incident rich with symbolism.

After exploring the attitudes of peasants and artisans, the author moves further up the social ladder to examine the mentality of the bourgeoisie. He does so with the help of an obscure 1768 manuscript titled The State and Description of the City of Montpellièr. Written by an anonymous bourgeois, the manuscript reflects his attitude toward the peasants below him and the nobility above him within the stratified social order of 18th-century France.

The anonymous bourgeois viewed himself and the rest of the bourgeoisie as part of their own Estate, defined primarily by its distance from the rest of the common folk. To Darnton, this reflects a conception of French society defined by wealth rather than noble birth and thus predicts the new social order that arose after the French Revolution in 1789.

In the following essay titled “A Police Inspector Sorts His Files: The Anatomy of the Republic of Letters,” the author turns his attention to Paris’s intellectual scene at mid-century. The primary document he uses to study these individuals is a dossier of police reports filed by Inspector Joseph d’Hémery on over 400 published writers living in Paris, including heavyweights like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and Voltaire. Some belonged to the clergy or the nobility, some were lawyers or other bourgeois professionals, and close to half earned wages as teachers, journalists, tutors, or in sinecures, positions given to writers by wealthy protectors that required very little work. Writers often sought out a protector by publishing scurrilous attacks on a nobleman’s rival. As a result, libel was as much a concern for d’Hémery as dangerous ideology.

Among the books deemed ideologically dangerous by authorities was The Encyclopédie, the subject of the author’s fifth essay: “Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of The Encyclopédie.” Darnton focuses on how The Encyclopédie’s editors Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, through diagrams and the book’s preface, elevate philosophers as the keepers of all knowledge, thus displacing the clergy and religion altogether.

In the final essay, “Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity,” the author argues that Jean-Jacques Rousseau helped spark a major shift in the relationship between reader and writer. Unlike Diderot and d’Alembert—whom Rousseau criticized for making philosophy fashionable and therefore of little use to the common people—Rousseau did not elevate himself over the reader. Using Rousseau’s 1761 epistolary novel La Nouvelle Héloïse as an example, Darnton showcases Rousseau’s ability to appeal directly to readers’ emotions and their love of virtue. Ironically, Rousseau’s refusal to elevate himself above readers led to the creation of a fan cult surrounding the author, paving the way of the age of the literary celebrity in the Romantic Era.